Nothing now looms so large in this stressed-out capital as nothing.

Nothing is what Auditor-General Sheila Fraser found when looking for taxpayer value in Quebec sponsorship advertising. And nothing is what she too often finds trying to retrace the money trail furiously obscured by self-serving politicians and a few obsequious bureaucrats.

[. . . .] After all, files with nothing in them were at the centre of the Human Resources grants and loans boondoggle and nothing is what defrocked cabinet minister and diplomat Alfonso Gagliano will likely remember today when he testifies to his former peers.

[. . . .] Fearing that the 20-year-old Access to Information Act will expose them to unwanted scrutiny, politicians, mandarins and savvy contractors now treat paper as the enemy. Oral reports are better than written, hard to trace e-mails trump letters and easily crumpled post-it notes fill the blanks in files.

In the word of Deputy Information Commissioner Alan Leadbeater, those demonstrably unprofessional practices are now rampant. So rampant, he says, that Ottawa's oral culture threatens to destroy the records needed by decision makers, investigators and historians.

But, deliciously, that secrecy is now being hoisted on its own petard. Suddenly those who didn't keep records are vulnerable to those who did and government contractors are scrambling to prove they were only paid for an honest day's work.

Nothing quite captures that change as well as Allan Cutler's appearance before the parliamentary committee that will hear from Gagliano. Along with documenting deals auditors couldn't find, the quintessentially mild-mannered civil servant is waving red flags at the issue that may yet prove most troubling for Paul Martin.

Cutler is focusing attention on the relationship between the Prime Minister and Earnscliffe, the Ottawa communications firm that rose to prominence when Tories were last in power and then made a seamless transition to Martin.

In a 1995 memo delivered to the committee, Cutler expresses misgivings about an unusual, perhaps unique in government, $15,000 monthly finance department retainer for Earnscliffe.

Normally, governments issue contracts for specific services; they don't keep firms on standby with the meter running.

But David Herle, an Earnscliffe partner and Liberal election co-chair, says the arrangement was good for the department, good for taxpayers.

[. . . .] Only the very naïve will be shocked if the various inquiries and police investigations prove that, along with registered campaign contributions, at least some of the advertising firms played a clandestine role in advancing the Liberal cause.

Here in Ottawa, that happens in other ways that too often blur the lines separating ministers from mandarins.

Polling and consulting carry a concealed partisan component and bureaucrats who serve one master too long forget to say "no" when asked to design policy that best fits an election platform.

It happens, too, when partisans morph too easily into public servants. Just for example, Gagliano will surely be asked today to explain how top aide Pierre Tremblay replaced Chuck Guité as the point man on advertising contracts.

Those are all fault lines in a system that has conveniently forgotten that records are what make it possible to demonstrate to an understandably cynical electorate that work was done for money spent, that there is a buffer between policy and politics, that the civil service is not hopelessly politicized. But that's not Ottawa's system.

Unlike the U.S., no law requires bureaucrats here to document decisions.