There was very little, if any, monitoring of the sponsorship program.  It was billed as a way of defeating Quebec separatists after the too-close-for-comfort 1995 referendum - and nobody wanted to look too closely at it.  Not the Liberals, not the Progressive Conservatives, not the Reform Party, not the NDP.  To be fair, federalist Canadians didn't want them to.

That kind of public hysteria - not necessarily too strong a word - doesn't usually lead to sound decision-making.  Remains to be seen whether that lesson has been learned.