The Sociopathology of Jacques Corriveau

They can smell it; they can see it coming. And Jacques Corriveau showed us yesterday the epitome of the sentiment now populating the top ranks of the crooked Liberals involved in AdScam. They are not ever going to be indicted; they are not ever going to be touched; they will never see the inside of a jail cell. Of these things, they are certain.

The half tentative Jacques Corriveau that we saw back in April, the man who was at least concerned enough to cook a story about his failing memory and his closeness to someone with Alzheimer’s, was not there yesterday.

Yesterday, Corriveau was arrogant and vain; he was defiant in subtle and not so subtle ways. The categorical manner with which he denied and dismissed all allegations against him, except for the ones for which there is a paper trail, exhibited an air of superiority about which we had only seen traces the last time he appeared before the Gomery Commission. They are all lying, he said, they are all wrong, even when admitting that none of those who said implicating things about him had any interests in seeing him hurt. It was as though the first appearance was a dressed rehearsal for yesterday’s performance.

Christie Blatchford picked up a great deal of Corriveau’s disposition in her Globe piece this morning. She found him to be “shameless” (subscription required), which only begins to describe the man. Corriveau described, in turn, his own doings as “noble” and himself as “proud” to be able to help a party in need. Corriveau represents the essence of the Liberal pathology. He places party above ethics and decency, above community and nation, above morality and the rule of law, without so much as a hint of internal conflict. He shows the legendary loyalty among thieves. He is the incarnation of a corrupt party that will impose on the country its own illegal racket as a moral norm, with pride.

“All Mr. Béliveau’s allegations with regard to me are totally false,” he said. Mr. Béliveau was “speaking falsely, totally.”

“I find it’s quite ridiculous and quite unbelievable,” he said of Mr. Béliveau’s evidence at one point. “This is some virtual universe of his own making.”

He didn’t seem at all perturbed, mind you, by any of the outrageous charges being levelled at him.

As, at Mr. Roy’s request, he followed along in the transcripts as the lawyer read aloud the testimony implicating him, Mr. Corriveau smiled; small, bemused smiles, for the most part. I had my little opera glasses on him throughout every bit of this. There was not a trace of tension in his body language, not a fidget, not a wince, not a single nervous lick of lip. His long, elegant fingers flipped the pages of the transcripts to which he was directed: he smiled, he waited for the questions.

Once, after the first long reading of one part of Mr. Béliveau’s evidence, and before Mr. Roy found in his notes the reference for the next chunk, there was a long pause.

Mr. Roy had not yet asked his first key question; he was laying the groundwork. No one knew what Mr. Corriveau was going to say, and the room held its collective breath; it was so still, why, you could have heard an envelope of cash slip onto the carpeted floor.

Mr. Corriveau sat with perfect calm, waiting, expectant but not in the least troubled, his unlined, creamy-skinned face placid.

He managed to display his boundless vanity.

When, speaking of how, although he and Mr. Dezainde were fellow Liberals, Mr. Dezainde had been a John Turner backer and then a Paul Martin backer, while he had always stuck with his friend Jean Chrétien, Mr. Corriveau allowed himself a shot.

“I think,” he said of Mr. Dezainde, “my political instinct was better than his.”

When he acknowledged putting a few of the party boys on the Pluri payroll, he said, “It was a noble gesture, and I was going to do it for the Liberal Party of Canada.”

“You were very magnanimous,” Mr. Roy remarked.

“Yes,” said Mr. Corriveau. “I was.”

After all, as he explained a few minutes later, “When you’ve been active in a political party for 40 years, as I was for the Liberals, you’re proud and you want to do things.”

Well, there it is.

When asked if he thought he was doing something wrong when he was doing it, Chuck Guite said that he now knew that it was wrong. A minimum of contrition requires an ability to contemplate the morally obvious in retrospect; it requires a fundamental connection with the common sense world that most of us inhabit; it demands an able conscience. Like a sociopath, Corriveau showed none of these yesterday. He feels nothing for he fears nothing. He knows that nothing will touch him; he knows that Canadians are asleep, or, at best, sleepwalking.

Note: Arthur Koestler illustrates the similar pathology of a party man turning away from reality in Darkness at Noon. Not quite light summer reading, but well worth it.

Cross posted from Civitatensis.