OTTAWA — Karlheinz Schreiber wasn't willing to provide the most revealing answers. But the questions put to him by MPs gave a glimpse of what a parliamentary committee can do. And what it can't.
What it can do is get a few answers and allow key witnesses to give their versions of events, fast. What it can't do is get to the bottom of things the way a public inquiry can.
In seven minutes, Liberal MP Robert Thibault asked why Mr. Schreiber introduced Brian Mulroney to the son of the premier of Bavaria, whether Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney were alone when they met in Zurich in 1998 and whether former cabinet minister Elmer Mackay arranged meetings about a military vehicle project.
Bloc MP Gérard Asselin asked - also in seven minutes - about the 1983 Conservative leadership race, whether Mr. Schreiber donated to the Reform Party and why he paid Mr. Mulroney $300,000.
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The hearing bounced around like a dozen ping-pong balls. And it wasn't just Mr. Schreiber's teaser responses.
The questions, sometimes good ones, seemed to come out of nowhere and slip back to the void.
As the committee examining the sponsorship scandal showed in 2004, parliamentary committees aren't structured for the kind of complete fact-finding mission that builds a narrative and takes it to a conclusion - to determine, in the words of Commons law clerk Rob Walsh, "who did what to whom, behind whose barn."
"People who sit on that committee - some of whom aren't lawyers - they don't know how to ask questions and they tend to make political speeches instead of asking questions. They haven't prepared themselves adequately for this," retired judge John Gomery of the sponsorship probe said recently. "... This is really going to be a pointless exercise."
Public inquiries, with vast resources and months of hearings, can build up background information, and the inquiry's lawyers can systematically advance lines of inquiry, testing one witness's version against another before a judge sums it all up.
In contrast, MPs at a Commons committee each get a few minutes of questions at a time.
Even when they're halfway to an important point, the next MP in line rarely picks up the same thread; often, it's forgotten.
Different parties have different political goals, and even different members of the same party press different lines of inquiry.
When former Canada Post chair André Ouellet told the committee examining the sponsorship scandal that the government told him to hire an advertising firm with Liberal ties, no MP asked who issued the order.
Commons committees don't have vast research staff or a single unbiased arbiter to weigh the credibility of witnesses.
But a committee can do some things. The sponsorship program hearings bopped from topic to topic amid partisan dispute without painting a complete picture.
Still, they brought out some substantial new information before an election, while Mr. Gomery's inquiry took six months to start running, and longer before it got to the money trail.
Mr. Schreiber could be extradited to Germany before that kind of time passes.
Even if he isn't, the parliamentary hearings will allow Mr. Schreiber and Mr. Mulroney an early opportunity to put on the record their version of events that have remained mysterious for years.
In 2004, when Mr. Walsh, the Commons law clerk, warned MPs not to try to emulate a public inquiry, he told them that bringing in key witnesses for an early public airing might be a unique service.
"It may be that there's a kind of public service provided by this committee that may look like it's a fact-finding search, but you're not pressing the points to see who did what to whom behind whose barn. What you're doing is saying, 'Let's hear your story. Let's hear your account.' "
