Former prime minister Jean Chretien spent Monday hunkered down with his lawyers preparing to be questioned at the sponsorship inquiry Tuesday.

He gave journalists few clues as to what he'll say when he takes the stand.

"You're missing me, eh?'' he jokingly told two photographers angling for a shot near Parliament Hill.

On Sunday, CTV News reported that Chretien's team will try to push the following:

• Canada was in a precarious situation after the 1995 referendum that was barely won by the federalist side
• He created the sponsorship program but didn't manage it
• He didn't know about any illegal activity, but if laws were broken, the individuals involved should be prosecuted.

Chretien and former public works minister Alfonso Gagliano both signed a document in 1997 creating the program.

The program dispensed about $250 million in Quebec, with about $100 million of that ending up in the pockets of Liberal-friendly ad firms for work of little or no value, according to a Feb. 2004 report by Auditor General Sheila Fraser.

On Monday, Jean Pelletier, Chretien's former chief of staff, told the inquiry headed by Justice John Gomery that he never broke any rules.

When he met with former sponsorship head Chuck Guite, he only gave input and not orders as to which events to sponsor and which ad agencies should get work.

Brian Laghi, The Globe and Mail's Ottawa bureau chief, told CTV.ca he couldn't say how often top officials in the Prime Minister's Office would talk to a program manager like Guite.

However, "any time someone from the PMO ... even makes a suggestion in a situation like that, it's looked on by a bureaucrat as akin to an order."

With the sponsorship program, "it's doubly problematic because it's a program that was essentially created in Chretien's office," he says.

Pelletier was a courtly but stern man who didn't like having his authority questioned, Laghi says, adding the nature of his job probably required those qualities.

The opposition

NDP Leader Jack Layton had an idea of what he wanted Chretien to say in Tuesday's testimony.

"It would be just really refreshing to have the prime minister come in and say, 'You know what, I'm going to take responsibility for this. I was prime minister at the time. We should have done things differently,'" he told reporters.

Chretien is expected to spend two days on the stand.

"This is the first time in history we have two Prime Ministers forced to testify on corruption in their government and I don't think they should in any way downplay the seriousness of this whole proceeding," Conservative Leader Stephen Harper says.

Prime Minister Paul Martin will be a witness on Thursday to the inquiry he created. He also ordered the sponsorship program shut down in December 2003.

He will be the first sitting prime minister to testify at such an inquiry since John A. Macdonald.

In earlier statements, Martin, who was finance minister from 1993 to 2002, has tried to distance himself from the sponsorship file.

"I have trouble believing that the people at the top of the government had no idea what was going on," Harper says.

"(Martin) has said over and over and over again that he did not know about the day-to-day dealings of the sponsorship inquiry that he was really frozen out by the Prime Minister's Office because (he and Chretien) were always at odds over the leadership," says CTV's Rosemary Thompson.

With a report from CTV's Roger Smith and files from The Canadian Press