Numerous unanswered questions
Link between political contributions and awarding of contracts left unanswered
The Charbonneau Commission’s final report on corruption is 1,741 pages long, offers 60 recommendations, and leaves many questions unanswered.
Who’s to blame for corruption in Montreal?
Is Quebec’s construction industry saturated with organized crime?
Were Quebec Transport Department contracts rigged?
Did political contributions bring a return in public contracts from provincial departments?
Why did police turn a blind eye to political corruption?
“This investigation confirmed that there was a real problem in Quebec, and that it was much more widespread and deeply rooted than we could have thought,” Justice France Charbonneau, who presided over the commission, said in a speech as she made the report public on Tuesday.
Going forward, all Quebecers must accept responsibility to say no to corruption and collusion and to resist ethical deviations, she said.
What the public inquiry — which spent four years examining corruption and collusion in the awarding of public contracts and cost close to $45 million — does say in its report is that there was an “appearance” of corruption in Montreal and Laval, a “vulnerability” in contract-awarding by certain provincial departments, such as Transport Quebec, and that there were bodies, such as the Sûreté du Québec, that could have done something to address problems but did not.
As a result, the recommendations concerning provincial-level contract awarding stem not from evidence that was gathered demonstrating wrongdoing, but rather on what the report calls the vulnerabilities of the system.
The report also rejects the notion of a continuum of corruption in the province, concluding that while there may be a century-long history of corruption scandals and a dozen public inquiries in Quebec — and more specifically, in Montreal — with similar themes to those examined by the Charbonneau commission, they were all disconnected.
“History is never totally the same,” the report says, adding that the reason for that is “the individuals who try to get around the rules adapt their behaviour quickly to the new state measures, legislative or regulatory changes aiming to repress their behaviour.
“With corruption and collusion, creativity prevails and it would be therefore illusory to think these phenomena could be eradicated forever.”
Reaction to the report was limited, and what reaction there was seemed favourable to the commission’s recommendations, particularly its call for the Quebec government to legislate protection for whistleblowers.
But the devil is in the details, said Richard Perron, president of the province’s largest union of publicsector professionals, the Syndicat de professionnelles et professionnels du gouvernement du Québec.
“It’s nice to say we’ll protect whistleblowers,” Perron said. But it should be for employers to prove that employees who face sanctions after denouncing problems at their workplace were not subjected to reprisals, he said.
And whether the rest of the report, presenting the commission’s investigation results and its analysis of the problems in Quebec, is as strong as some of its recommendations will depend on a closer reading of the nearly 2,000-page report, Perron said.
The two surviving co-commissioners couldn’t even agree on whether there was a connection between political financing at the provincial level and the awarding of provincial contracts, Perron said.
Charbonneau’s co-commissioner, Renaud Lachance, the former provincial auditor-general, writes a dissenting opinion in the report from Charbonneau’s finding that there was a link between political financing and the awarding of public contracts. “The facts presented before the commission didn’t show a link, whether they be direct or indirect, between giving a political contribution at the provincial level and the awarding of a public contract,” Lachance wrote.
“I think (the divergence) of opinion is because they didn’t go deep enough on these things,” Perron said. “They spent an enormous amount of time on the unions, notably on one section of one union, and they spent an enormous amount of time wanting to put the unions on trial, that they spent too little time analyzing the influence of politicians.”
Perron said he was “shocked” to see former politicians, such as former deputy premier and municipal affairs minister Nathalie Normandeau treated delicately by Charbonneau, who told her she could relax when she took the stand at the commission hearings while former and current union leaders were treated like “pariahs,” he said.
“However, the report distinguishes between certain individuals and the unions themselves, and is careful not to put everyone (in the union world) in the same basket,” Perron noted.
The report was criticized by some observers for not offering much of an analysis about who or what is to blame for corruption in Montreal municipal contracts and political financing.
The section of the report pertaining to Montreal reproaches former mayor Gérald Tremblay for responding to problems of corruption only when there was a crisis, retired journalist André Cédilot, co-author of the 2010 book Mafia Inc., noted. The section is otherwise short on blame.
What’s more, the divergence of opinion between Charbonneau and Lachance over whether there’s a link between political financing and provincial contracts is “out of the ordinary,” he said. “It’s a bombshell.”
The impasse highlights the problem of having only two co-commissioners, Cédilot said. A third commissioner, Roderick Macdonald, was ill with cancer through most of the hearings, and died in June 2014.
But the report brings attention to other important areas, such as the role of the Mafia in the construction industry and how it damages the legitimate economy, he said.
On that front, the report’s recommendations to empower the Régie du bâtiment du Québec, which licenses construction companies, to sanction businesses that use people acting as fronts for organized crime groups as company directors and to call businesspeople with links to organized crime to testify and answer questions will deal a blow to the Mafia if the government acts on it, Cédilot said.
“I find it important that finally it’s recognized that using fronts is a problem in the construction industry,” he said. “The strength of the Mafia is its network of contacts.”
And through its recommendations, the Charbonneau commission has recognized that the Régie du bâtiment, which already possesses the power to call people to testify before it but hasn’t used it, hasn’t been doing its job, Cédilot said.
“All of the recommenda- tions make up for shortcomings in the rules that are already in place,” he said. “They’re reinforcing the powers of the surveillance and regulatory bodies that are already in place. That’s what it looks like it’s doing.”
It now falls to the Quebec government to act on the recommendations, Cédilot said, adding that the report should have recommended that the commission be reopened in a year to monitor how the government is progressing on enacting the recommendations.
The commission missed the boat on another recommendation, he said. It should have addressed the backlog of criminal cases involving corruption in Laval and Montreal by recommending that a special court division be created to hear fraud, corruption and large whitecollar crime cases, just as France did in 2014.
“It’s a farce,” he said. “UPAC (Quebec’s permanent anti-corruption unit) investigates and there are still cases in the hands of prosecutors and cases languishing in the courts.”