Lessons from the Charbonneau Commission
We’ve heard everything from the recorded voice of a dead Mafia godfather to the spirited testimony of a former deputy premier. We’ve heard from construction company bosses and political party bagmen. Before that, we heard from a former mayor and city engineers.
During its most recent session, the Charbonneau Commission, which has been hearing testimony for more than two years now, grilled 70 witnesses to alleged collusion and corruption in the awarding of public contracts. As hearings wrap for the summer, the commission is also close to finishing an essential phase of its work: publicly exposing the systems at the heart of decades of dirty dealings in Quebec — at both the provincial and municipal levels.
When testimony resumes at the end of the summer, the inquiry will tie up loose ends with a few final guests. But then the commission will move on to soliciting recommendations from experts and the general public before sitting down to write the final report — which will surely be the definitive book on the genesis, history and nature of corruption in modern Quebec.
So this is a good time to reflect on what we’ve learned from testimony at the commission — as well as the importance of the cathartic exercise itself.
During painstaking questioning of often reluctant witnesses, a portrait of the system has started to come into focus. It’s more like an impressionist watercolour than a photograph, in that you must take several steps back for the picture to come into view.
What do we see? No one person is responsible for the symbiotic system that developed, one where business empires were built on getting close to and funding public officials, and political success was staked on keeping all these deep-pocketed, expectant contractors in one’s orbit.
Almost no one sets out to be corrupt, or to corrupt someone else. Most people didn’t seem to think they were doing anything particularly wrong — if they showed up at a fundraiser in their honour, if they reimbursed their employees for a campaign contribution, or accepted gifts from people doing business with the municipality.
That said, there were some who obviously sought to take advantage of the system. Testimony was heard about some municipal civil servants accepting all kinds of favours, or party financiers collecting a “commission” on certain municipal contracts. Apparently, it was all to feed the insatiable demands of party electoral coffers.
Of course we also did hear allegations of more orchestrated attempts to defraud the taxpayer related to the McGill University Health Centre superhospital contract. And we did gain insight into the Mafia’s involvement in Montreal’s real-estate market.
We know all this because of the Charbonneau Commission’s commitment to conducting its business openly. Its hearings were carried live on network television and covered exhaustively by the media. Proceedings were also live-streamed online and documentation promptly posted to the inquiry website. There were some occasions where the commission went behind closed doors, mostly when the fair-trial rights of an accused collided with the public’s right to know. These questions were vigorously debated and remedies found, but by and large the Charbonneau Commission sought to ensure the bulk of the evidence it gathered was aired publicly.
As Quebec seems to be taking steps toward an era of greater transparency in government and public institutions, the Charbonneau Commission has led by example in ensuring the public record is complete.
When it goes off the air permanently, not only its eventual findings but also the standard it has set for openness, are lessons that must not be forgotten.