Yesterday, Josh asked for some context regarding the Canadian political scene. Here's what I came up with. I hope it helps.

First off, it's important to first understand the context in which our polity
found ourselves that year. And in order to understand that, you need a
crash course in Canuckistani (to paraphrase Pat Buchanan) political
history.

Secondly, always remember that our federal government
is a straight parliamentary system, almost identical to the British
House of Commons. Convention dictates that as long as the governing
party can marshall a majority of the votes in the legislative chamber,
it can run the show for up to five years. However, a government that
can't cobble together enough votes falls.

Since the nation was
officially founded in 1867, politics have been dominated by two
parties: the Liberals and the Conservatives. Actually, the Liberals
have done most of the dominating, governing for most of the 20th
century. The Libs were so dominant they are still perceived and often
referred to as the Natural Governing Party. You with me? Both the
Liberals and the Conservatives are big-tents, much in the manner of
your own Democrats and Republicans. The Libs dominated on their
ability to hold together a stronger coalition of voting blocs.

The
Conservatives occasionally cobbled together their coalition for a time,
but they always seem to have trouble holding it together. This most
recently (and most spectacularly) happened in the 80s when after nearly
two decades of Liberal rule under Prime Ministers Lester Pearson and
Pierre Trudeau, Conservative Brian Mulroney won two consecutive
majorities before tanking under a totally toxic cloud of scandals,
deficits, severe regional cleavages (it's a geographically big country
and many Candians identify strongly as Albertans, Quebecers,
Ontarians), opposition to the Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA'S ugly older
sibling), a recession, a hated new sales tax, massive deficits and so
on. Long story short-Mulroney's coalition of Westerners, Quebec
Nationalists, and assorted Atlantic and Ontario bluebloods and bagmen
collapsed spectacularly.

In the 1993 election, the Liberals
under Jean Chretien scored a massive victory. The Conservatives were
reduced to two seats, and a Quebec nationalist party--the Bloc
Quebecois (under the leadership of Mulroney's former Conservative
Quebec Lieutenant Lucien Bouchard) and a newly-formed right-wing
Western protest party called Reform had the second and third-most seats
in the Commons.

(And just so noone accuses me of ignoring
lefties, there's also a 'democratic socialist party called the NDP
which generally has about 20 seats in the Commons, but they're mostly
lame, and I'm a former NDP'er.)

Anyways, after many fits and
starts, Reform twisted and contorted itself into several
configurations, including for a brief period of time the party with the
Lamest. Acronym. Ever. May I present the Canadian Conservative Reform
Alliance Party--CCRAP. The initial efforts were pretty lame, and
Chretien's Liberals mostly ran roughshod over them. And despite the
usual sleaze that attends governments with mostly-ineffectual
oppositions, the Chretien era didn't suck. He got the deficit under
control (actually, his successor, then-finance minister Paul Martin did
the hard work), introduced vaguely progressive legislation, and IMHO
most importantly of all, kept us out of Iraq.

But as the
Chretien era wore on, the sleaze got sleazier, the government got
arrogant, as many governments past their sell date are prone to get and
Martin eventually became Prime Minister after a fair bit of intrigue
and a lot of ugliness near the end. Martin never recovered from the
perception he'd wanted to be Prime Minister just a little too much, and
then a shitstorm erupted just as an election was underway. Martin wound
up with a very tenuous minority government, and that is the context
under which the Cadman story really begins. Cadman was one of the early
members of the old Reform Party, and was a Reform, then Canadian
Alliance (that was the second incarnation of Reform. The current
incarnation is the third) MP until losing a nomination vote in his
constituency in 2004. He ran as an indepent in that election and won.
Martin's minority government was so shaky, the government could
literally fall on one person's vote--Chuck Cadman's, since he was the
only sitting Member of Parliament not affiliated with one of other
parties in the Commons.

It was known in 2004 that Cadman had
cancer, and not long after that, that he was terminal. The right had
more or less finally gotten its shit together under Stephen Harper, and
had cobbled together a pretty rickety coalition. The shitstorm scandal
(in many ways, it was the Chretien Era's final sandbagging of the
Martin Era) was fermenting and getting ready to blow, and the
Conservatives were spoiling for an election.

Mind you, there's a
long and ignominious history of Reform/Alliance/Conservatives trying to
cut deals with incumbents to vacate their seats or secure their votes.
For that matter, the Liberals are no pikers on that matter, either. But
the one that comes to mind off the top of my head was a sweetheart deal
cut between Jim Hart, former member of Okanagan-Coquihalla, and
just-elected leader of the Canadian Alliance Stockwell Day.

...Anyways,
I suppose there's an awful lot of material to digest there, but it sets
the stage for how l'affaire Cadman came to pass. Josh, I hope this
contextualizes things a little.

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