Ouellette goes from officer to politician to UPAC suspect
MNA made his mark battling criminal biker gangs before joining Liberals
It’s entirely possible Guy Ouellette was the best known sergeant in the history of the Sûreté du Québec.
His notoriety was based on his expertise on the treacherous world of criminal biker gangs, an expertise that would see his testimony used in several landmark court cases against the gangs, allow him to co-found the Wolverine squad — Quebec’s reaction to the increasingly bloody gang war that wracked the province for almost a decade — and, in one case, see him and a police colleague run off the road by bikers concerned by their surveillance of a secret gang meeting.
But now, 16 years after a distinguished, three-decade career with the provincial police, the 65-yearold Ouellette is again under the spotlight, but for entirely different reasons. He was, until Thursday morning, a member of the caucus of the Quebec Liberal Party, an MNA who had represented the Laval riding of Chomedey since 2007. But Ouellette stepped away from the caucus after his arrest a day earlier by officers of Quebec’s anti-corruption unit, UPAC, in connection with an investigation into the leak of internal documents from their own squad to a media outlet.
When he left the SQ in 2001, Ouellette worried politics would trump prevention and the threat posed by criminal biker gangs would become a low priority for government.
However, six years later, the married father of four was running as a star candidate in Laval as part of Jean Charest’s slate of Liberals. Ouellette won the riding handily, did so again in the snap election called in 2008 and went on to win two more terms — the last with a Liberal Party led by Philippe Couillard.
While Ouellette’s name had been touted on several occasions as a possible public security minister in a Liberal government, he never made it into cabinet. And while Ouellette may have made headlines as the party’s labour critic while in opposition, his political career saw him under a spotlight decidedly much dimmer than that which shone during his years as a police officer.
When Ouellette did make headlines again, it was in the spring of 2017, as the Couillard government was being regularly battered by a series of leaks to Québecor media concerning a UPAC investigation into Liberal Party financing while Charest was at the helm.
On April 27, Ouellette told the TVA network he was “disgusted by the situation. Things need to be done. The situation is falling apart everywhere. I’m disgusted by all these leaks, I’m disgusted by the conflicts of interest.”
Ouellette made his statement the same week he alleged the Liberal party was trying to force him into retirement and open up his riding to another candidate, a claim the Liberals denied.