I had just finished reading Paul Tuns’s Jean Chretien: A Legacy of Scandal (a great book and a must-read for people who believe there’s justice out there somewhere) when my TV switched on of its own accord and there in full colour was St. Peter at the Golden Gate. Soon, I found myself in a large cavernous room. There were all kinds of people wearing long, white robes (no wings) and scurrying around madly. Then there was St. Peter, sitting at a desk on a raised dais, flicking over the pages of a big book. He looked up from the book and all was quiet. Someone, who appeared to be a prosecutor, spoke up: “You were asking, St. Peter, whether the picture of Jean Chretien, the former prime minister of Canada, choking a protester – using what was described as ‘the Shawinigan chokehold’ – was ever made into a stamp? No, I don’t think so, sir. Not a Canadian stamp, anyway.”

“I hope, St. Peter, that you’re not going to judge a person solely on a brief display of bad temper? Goodness me, there would hardly be anybody up here if we did.” This, obviously, was Chretien’s guardian angel coming to his defence.

“That’s a slighting comment to make about the people up here, Mr. G.A., but I’ll just ignore it. Is there anything favourable you can say about Mr. Chretien?”

“Yes,” piped up the G.A. “He could beat Bill Clinton at golf any day.”

“I hope that you can come up with a stronger argument for admitting him than that.”

“St. Peter,” interjected the prosecution, “if you would look at page 732 – this is where Chretien spent a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money on four second-hand submarines he bought from the British government and another half-billion more before they ended up permanently in the St. Lawrence River.”

“May I remind the worthy prosecutor that making a tremendous foulup is not a sin?” said St. Peter.

“St. Peter,” the prosecution continued, “I’m suggesting that you look at page 841, where you can see that Mr. Chretien approved a $67 million increase over a four-year period to a UN organization promoting a coercive one-child program in China. Thousands more forced abortions occurred. That’s a sin.”

“St. Peter, this was probably done without Mr. Chretien’s knowledge or concurrence,” said the Guardian Angel. “Or maybe he was taking a nap?”

“Oh, Mr. G.A., what about the time Chretien was running for re-election and made a joke about abortion – saying that his wife was too old to have an abortion?”

“St. Peter, telling corny jokes is not a sin. Maybe Chretien’s gag writer missed the bus.”

“What about Chretien describing abortion as irrelevant?”

“Well it was to him,” defended his angel.

“What about the time Chretien waved the Liberal Red Book around as if it was a Bible and swore he was going to implement every promise he made in it. What about eliminating the GST? What about that?”

“St. Peter, holding a politician to all of his promises is like asking Elizabeth Taylor to stop getting married.”

“Isn’t it true, Mr. G.A., that the Liberal political philosophy under Chretien was to pay friends and buy voters?”

“St. Peter! These are horrible accusations against a man who has won seven elections! These scandals are the norm for the political arena. Mr. Chretien was not running a monastery.”

“What about Chretien getting more money for his riding from Human Resources Development Canada than all of Alberta got?”

“I gather that his riding was closer to his heart than Alberta was.”

“Ah, Mr. G.A., isn’t that the mark of a small-minded man? A man who sought power in order to direct funds to friends, to individuals, to companies, for pork-barrelling purpose, to settle scores with a newspaper magnate whose newspapers revealed shocking Liberal scandals that embarrassed him?”

“Politics does not demand the ethics that professional golfers must exhibit.”

“Did not Chretien Liberal strategists in the 2000 election smear Stockwell Day and make him look ridiculous for being opposed to special rights for homosexuals, opposed to taxpayer funding of abortion and expressing concern about the content of books being taught in public schools, as well as expressing his strong belief that God had created the human race?”

“Mr. Chretien is not up for canonization.”

“Wait a minute!” St. Peter interrupted. “Why isn’t Mr. Chretien here speaking for himself?”

Perhaps he thinks it’s going to take an angel to get him into heaven.