As I was going about my business today and taking in a bit more information about the sponsorship scandal, I thought it would be wise to post some additional thoughts to complement my earlier post.

Ipsos-Reid's Darrell Bricker talked about the June 28 federal election providing Canadians an opportunity to vent about the sponsorship boondoggle.

However, the latest revelations from the inquiry might be seen as a different kettle of (rotten, stinking) fish.

When the sponsorship scandal first broke in February 2004, I think people were angry about ad agencies ripping off a hapless federal government, or about politicians looking the other way as their Montreal ad buddies waxed fat off the public purse.

But this second phase is the Liberal Party's Quebec wing paying for its election expenses by hitting up ad and communications firms for donations and then shovelling lucrative federal sponsorship contracts their way.

(It still worked out pretty well for the ad firms. Jean Brault's Groupaction got $172 million in work for $1.2 million in donations. An excellent return on investment for Groupaction, I say! :) ).

The headline on John Ibbitson's column in The Globe and Mail on Friday was This is as bad as Watergate.

But as Ibbitson also noted, Watergate was more about the cover-up -- one in which disgraced U.S. President Richard M. Nixon actively participated -- than the break-in at the U.S. Democratic Party offices in the Watergate hotel.

PM PM has tried to be forceful on the sponsorship file. His first act was to shut the program down. He ordered the creation of the Gomery Inquiry and fired three Liberal heavyweights from Crown corp. jobs: Andre Ouellet (Canada Post), Jean Pelletier and Marc LeFrancois (Via Rail). In addition, he whacked Alfonso Gagliano, the former ambassador to Denmark who was public works minister during the crucial 1997-2002 period -- and a constant source of raw material for the opposition in question period in that time.

Very commendable, I say, and it leads to the following Watergate-era question: What did PM PM know, and when did he know it?

For a guy supposedly out of the loop, PM seemed to have good instincts that the sponsorship file was a ticking bomb.

Whatever the answer is to that question, it may well be irrelevant if the current revelations spark enough new anger amongst voters.  Paul Martin is the Liberal prime minister now, and the voters may decide to make him carry the can for the sins of the ancien regime.

In her Toronto Star column on Friday, Chantal Hebert looked at the Liberal claim that any corrupt acts were the work of a small group of "plumbers" (the Watergate code for the break-in operatives).

Benoît Corbeil was the director general of the Quebec wing of the federal Liberal party.

Jacques Corriveau is a confidant of the former prime minister.

Tony Mignacca was a close associate of Alfonso Gagliano, Chrétien's chief Quebec organizer.

Joe Morselli is a well-known figure in Liberal circles in Quebec. Former premier Robert Bourassa once rewarded him with a patronage appointment.

A published picture of Morselli and Mignacca features Jean Charest in the front row and Gagliano in the second one.

These are the people that Paul Martin's Quebec lieutenant Jean Lapierre described this week as a group of political plumbers, acting behind the back of an unsuspecting party.

If that is true, they were operating under the very nose of the leadership of the day, as was for that matter Chuck Guité, the civil servant in charge of the sponsorship program.

Unlike Lawrence Martin in Wednesday's Globe, Hebert and Ibbitson don't seem to think stories of similar behaviour by the Parti Quebecois and the provincial Quebec Liberals will do much to help the Liberals in Quebec.

But will the current revelations be enough to wipe the Grits out in those genetically Liberal ridings on the Island of Montreal?

And as I discussed yesterday (well, as everybody is discussing), the key is still Ontario.

If I had enough money in my pocket to commission my own polls, I'd do one for Ontario and one for Quebec, with a heavy oversample in Montreal.

(Addendum: Leger Marketing said in a poll released today, conducted prior to Brault's testimony, that the Bloc is polling about 49 per cent support and 24 per cent for the Liberals. The Grits captured 34 per cent of the vote in the last federal election while the Bloc got 49 per cent. The question I have is whether the Liberals lost significant support in Montreal, or did they lose support from Liberals who live in Bloc ridings?)

And if I had money left over, then I'd do a national poll.

If we look at the history of the national polling numbers, the Liberals were sitting at 48 per cent in December 2003.

They fell first by nine points to 39 per cent before bottoming out at 35 per cent in mid-February, about a week after the auditor-general's report was released. It was one of the most precipitous drops in popularity in the history of Canadian politics.

While the Grits returned to 40 per cent support just before the election, they ended up with about 37 per cent support in the June 28 vote.

In a late February poll, the Liberals were still at 37 per cent, although there were other positives since (the budget, missile defence).

If the Grits go through another major drop like they did when the sponsorship revelations first hit, they could fall to the high or even mid-20s -- about where the Conservatives are now.

Think of a shock like that as a heart attack. Quite often, people don't die of one massive heart attack; they are weakened by it and never quite return to their original health.

Then, if they suffer a second, similar attack, they succumb.

Now we wait and see if that medical analogy holds true in the realm of national politics.