by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

One day the suits at Hydro Québec got so bored by their mind-numbing jobs that they started hiring a European homeopathic mystic to give them speeches on such themes as "the real meaning of work" and "self-fulfillment." Suddenly, the pencil-pushers were in a world where they were medieval knights on a sacred mission. This fantasy cost us electricity-paying suckers $170,000. Luc Jouret's Solar Temple cult, self-proclaimed heirs of the Knights Templar, were eventually asked to take their plastic swords elsewhere and, soon after, somebody - probably the cult - mysteriously bombed a couple of Hydro Québec transmission towers. The ridiculous charade ended a decade ago, when a couple of dozen of their followers were murdered or killed themselves to get to planet Sirius. The Hydro Québec people tell me that they no longer hire people to give speeches.

The lesson: be wary whenever somebody takes the podium. Speaking goes against the collected wisdom of our forefathers, who kept telling us stuff like "Silence is golden" and "He who knows doesn't speak, he who speaks doesn't know." In baseball, the ultimate tribute to a team-mate is, "He wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful."

But in our modern Babble-on-ia, even the top guys are available for a price when it comes to public elocution. Back during the days of the free trade debate, former PQ premier Landry, who was then teaching at UQÀM, gave several $5,000 speeches in favour of free trade. Eventually, he noticed that the demand was so great that he could get away with charging multinationals $20,000 for a yammerfest. He eventually made 150 speeches and socked away enough dough to buy a $255,000 condo on Saint-Paul as well as a $207,000 house in Verchères, according to the Vastel biography.

Premier Charest was also in some moral grey zone four years ago, when he took his family on a freebie to Mexico for the Canadian Construction Association's Hot! Hot! Hot! conference in Puerto Vallarta. Nobody would have noticed, but the then-Opposition leader was out of the country for a PQ medical funding scandal. He vowed to make changes to clarify the rules on MNAs giving speeches.

Federally, the rule is that you're allowed to give speeches unless you're a cabinet minister, in which case you raise money through fundraising dinners. Guys like Duff Conacher want the law changed to make for full disclosure. Even that wouldn't prevent such tax wastage as former Immigration Minister Denis Coderre's payment of $36,000 to U.S. lawyer Alan Dershowitz for trying to convince Canadians that we need mandatory IDs. It's an idea that nobody will ever warm up to. Maybe if they paid him a bit more he'd have tried to sell us on embedding identity chips under our skin as well.

Private companies hire speakers too, often to make us work harder. Bowser and Blue charge $5,000 to $10,000 to entertain the employees as a motivational thing I guess. But consider that for the same price, management could give 100 workers a $100-bill and tell them to take the afternoon off, which would probably be considerably more motivating, as would the even cheaper beachball-bikini Fridays.

A whole lot of those on the Canadian rubber chicken circuit are former hockey players, with such exceptions as Pamela Wallin, who charges up to 15 grand for a speech, double the fee of Dini Petty. Rhonda Finniss, prez of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers, tells me that some Canadian speakers make upwards of a million bucks a year, with specialists being in vogue these days.

In Quebec, stand-up comedians are said to be the hot commodity, but other celeb public appearance payoffs don't get reported, probably because celebs don't always report the income to the taxman. One who was said to have made good dough off personal appearance fees was the late Douglas "Coco" Leopold, who was said to charge $500 to drop by a club. He would then give the club a rave review on the radio the next day, making Leopold the poster boy for verbal payola.

So next time you're watching a speech, consider that the voice you're hearing could be that of moral compromise.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca