Charbonneau show malaise sets in
It is easy to feel jaded amid unsavoury cast
You are hundreds of kilometres from home and the mechanic changing your flat tire shakes his head in bewilderment.
“This isn’t normal wear,” he says, like a guy in a Stephen King novel, fingers running along the ridge of barbed-wire spikes sticking out of the inner curve of the punctured, and clearly unsalvageable, tire.
“I’ve only seen a tire that looks like this once before.”
Soon everyone else who works at the garage gathers to take a look at the strange B.F. Goodrich radial with the Godzilla fangs. Like ghoulish rubberneckers at a roadside accident, or dental students summoned to inspect a wisdom tooth popping out of an inflamed palette, they take turns sticking their heads under the chassis. They feel for unusual wear on the other tires — “that’s not good” — and tsk their diagnosis. “Can’t say for certain how bad it is until we get it up in the service bay, but my guess is you’ve got a major alignment problem.
“Any chance you were you rearended?” “I don’t think so,” you answer. That’s when you have your “a-ha” moment.
“I should probably tell you that the roads are very bad where I come from.”
As Judge France Charbonneau shuts down yet another season of hearings into wrongdoing in the awarding of public contracts, let’s confess it’s harder than it used to be to stay focused on the daily play-byplay from the rogues’ gallery.
Nearly two years into the corruption show, televised testimony still affords more juicy revelations than your average soap opera, especially now that the probe is zeroing in on blinkered cabinet ministers and other heavy hitters.
True, from a storytelling point of view, it would be hard to match the mind-blowing early stages of the hearings, when characters like Lino Zambito of the big hair, Mr. Sidewalk and Mr. Three Percent revealed the face of corruption and greed in pragmatic businessmen, jittery civil servants and wily political bagmen.
Yet beyond carefully controlled performances by former cabinet ministers, this session offered its own rewards. There was that jewellike cameo by a secretary who described how her boss kept “losing” incriminating cellphones or asking her to destroy them on his behalf. More details emerged about allegations of a multimillion dollar scam in the procurement of contracts for McGill University Health Centre, where the central figure is one Arthur Porter, international man of mystery now awaiting extradition in a Panamanian jail.
Autumn holds the promise that Tony Accurso, the construction magnate whose name has surfaced in countless tales of yachting junkets and police wiretaps, may run out of legal loopholes and be compelled to put in an appearance. No one can say it hasn’t been fascinating.
It’s just that so many political pirates, manipulative mobsters, and unsavory contractors who’ve learned how to work the system have now paraded through the courtroom and across our screens it’s easy to feel jaded.
So many thugs in expensive suits. Who can keep track? Who has the energy?
Does anyone believe the home of gangland firebombings and two daring prison escapes involving helicopters is ready to put a culture of graft behind it? And yet we must. By now, Quebecers have learned more than most of us ever expected to have to know about bribes and money-laundering, about gifts of hockey and concert tickets, golfing holidays and fancy kitchen appliances in exchange for political favours, about strawmen and shell companies and socks stuffed with cash, about ridiculously inflated water meter contracts and the difference between cement and concrete, and what really goes on at political fundraisers and who pays for all of it.
That would be us. In car repairs and badly-built bridges and highway overpasses that fall down and kill people. In sinkholes and potholed roads that never seem to get any better, no matter, how many times they have been repaved. And in basic maintenance that gets backlogged, allowing those systems to deteriorate, because of all the emergency patch-up work that needs to be done in a hurry.
When the corruption hearings finally draw to a close, the commissioners will retire to their chambers. They will review the evidence from nearly 200 witnesses and make recommendations about ways Quebec will try to thwart political, corporate and Mafia collusion in the granting of public contracts.
Quebecers need to know more will come out of this stupendously expensive soul-searching exercise than funny nicknames out of storybooks for bad kids and hard lessons in how the underworld operates.
Better roads. Safer bridges. No more socks stuffed with cash.