Political fundraising in Quebec: it’s a small world after all

Was the donation for $1,000, which was the official ticket price to the Quebec Liberal Party fundraising event in April 2009?

Or was it $2,995, which the party reported as the sum it received that year from the alleged “important member of the Mafia,” as he was described by La Presse on Tuesday, who attended the event?

Whatever it was, apparently all the alleged Mafioso got in return for his donation was breakfast.

La Presse reported that there were only “15 to 20 participants” at the event at a Laval restaurant named Piccolo Mondo – “small world” in Italian. They had an hour in which to meet the featured attraction for the event, cabinet minister Line Beauchamp.

Beauchamp says she doesn’t remember the alleged mobster, not even after he had written a cheque to her party for $1,000, or $2,995, or whatever it was, for the privilege of having breakfast with her.

But then it was a former cabinet colleague of Beauchamp, Nathalie Normandeau, who said recently that even though she had accepted expensive concert tickets from a contractor – “it was Céline Dion, after all” – she had “no special ties” to him.

Now, some might say this shows that Jean Charest’s cabinet ministers are ingrates.

But I think it shows that you can’t buy them. And to prove it, some of them will let you try. It’s sort of like Gandhi testing his celibate resolve by sharing his bed with young women.

So it was another amazing coincidence involving a Liberal contributor that a year after the breakfast with Beauchamp, according to La Presse, a soil-decontamination company “controlled” by the alleged Mafioso and his brother obtained a profitable authorization from the provincial government’s environment department. And that, throughout this period, Beauchamp was minister of the environment.

It is indeed a “piccolo mondo” after all.

Beau champ, who is now edu-- cation minister, assured the National Assembly on Tuesday that she had done nothing wrong – and that she wouldn’t do it again. She didn’t know the alleged Mafioso, she said, and had not intervened on behalf of his company. But from now on, fundraising events at which she appeared will have a policy of “no mobsters allowed.”

The story made it all the way to Taiwan, where it was reported on the website of the English-language daily China Post under the headline: “Quebec education minister took mob money: report.”

But wait, as they say in the infomercials – there’s more.

The fundraising breakfast, which brought $61,500 into Liberal Party coffers, was organized not by its sponsor, Beauchamp’s BourassaSauvé riding association, or by the Quebec Liberal Party, but by two executives of a Montreal-based consultinge ngineering firm, Genivar.

Québec solidaire, for one, isn’t surprised that executives of a consulting-engineering firm would help the riding association of a cabinet minister raise money. Coincidentally, the day La Presse broke the Beauchamp story, the left-wing opposition party published an investigative report on “sectoral financing (which) is a polite expression referring to the illegal financing of political parties by businesses.”

The report identified consulting-engineering firms as one of the economic “sectors” that make illegal corporate contributions, in particular to parties in power or about to take power, expecting payback in the form of lucra- tive government contracts. It cited law and accounting firms as other such sectors.

The donations are disguised as legal contributions from voters by laundering them through “fronts,” or false donors, but the parties receiving them know they really came from the firms, the report says.

Every party says there’s no connection between contracts and contributions – at least not the contributions it receives. But the Québec solidaire report says the practice has been going on for more than 30 years. If the companies are being played for suckers, it’s taking them a long time to figure it out.