A BREAK IN PROCEEDINGS
After some explosive testimony and big-name fallout, the show started to fizzle. Justice France Charbonneau’s commission into corruption is stepping back to catch its breath and dig into its mountain of tips and documents.
One, always open, is the door leading to the long, rectangular space where the journalists covering the Charbonneau Commission spend their days hunched over laptop computers and iPads, more or less oblivious to whatever might be going on in the outside world.
If a visitor were to walk toward that door and veer right, they would find themselves heading down a hallway toward the expansive hearing room where Superior Court Justice France Charbonneau presides over the inquiry bearing her name.
The other door, just to the left of the first, is always closed.
Locked, in fact, and equipped with an electronic card reader that permits only a select group of people to turn the knob and walk through. For good measure, a surveillance camera is mounted nearby; a sort of 21st-century peephole that can be activated to see who has come knocking.
Beyond this threshold, an ever-expanding team of lawyers, investigators, researchers, administrative staff and computer technicians carries out the part of the commission’s work that will never be seen by the public. It is within this inner sanctum that they sift through the tips received by phone and by mail, interview potential witnesses, pore over (and produce) mountains of documents and, yes, even eat their meals.
On Nov. 30, the 90 people employed by the Charbonneau Commission retreated behind the second door completely, cancelling 12 days of scheduled public hearings and entering a sort of self-imposed hibernation period that is expected to last seven weeks. Things have changed quickly behind the scenes, the public was told. The inquiry needs time to adjust.
“We must step back to move forward,” were the exact words Justice Charbonneau used to describe the overall strategy in a carefully worded address on Nov. 29.
To an outsider, it was rather like watching a runner slowly break stride and then finally come to a gasping halt halfway through a marathon, head bowed and hands on their knees. We just need a second to catch our breath, the judge seemed to suggest, then we’ll be fine. Then we’ll keep running.
The inquiry’s chief counsel, Sonia LeBel, echoed her boss’s sentiments, maintaining that when the commission re-emerges in 2013, the whole thing will unfold like a meticulously rehearsed ballet.
LeBel — like everyone behind that second door — has something to prove, because despite a string of fascinating witnesses and some major fallout, it has been a far-from-perfect performance. The trouble, one could argue, started in June.
Only a few weeks after the public hearings kicked off, the commission was chugging along at a respectable pace and decided it was time to call its first star witness to the stand. Anti-corruption crusader (and future MNA) Jacques Duchesneau was a big name with big baggage.
The former head of Quebec’s anti-collusion unit had co-authored the report that proved to be the tipping point for Jean Charest’s Liberal government, forcing it to create the Charbonneau Commission in fall 2011. Now, he would tell that commission everything he knew. The whole thing felt oddly cyclical.
Duchesneau assumed his new role as witness with gusto, claiming that illegal financing of political parties is rampant in Quebec. People are raking in the kickbacks, he testified. No one listens when you try to report the graft. Corruption is everywhere.
But for all of his bluster, Duchesneau didn’t provide much in the way of proof, something the lawyers cross-examining the 63-year-old former police chief took great pains to highlight.
Proof will come, Charbonneau promised an impatient public on June 21 before adjourning the hearings for a three-month summer break.
The fall session, much like the initial kickoff in the spring, opened with much fanfare. After a hotly contested provincial election, much had changed in Quebec by mid-September, and interest in the inquiry’s work seemed to be at an all-time high.
With renewed interest, however, came intense scrutiny, and within days, fresh cracks had started to form.
Commissioner Roderick A. MacDonald still hadn’t appeared in the flesh but, as always, was said to be monitoring the proceedings from home as he recovered from surgery. The inquiry’s then-chief counsel, Sylvain Lussier, was also mysteriously absent — a change that would be explained on Oct. 15 when, without warning, he handed Charbonneau his letter of resignation. Lussier cited the possible appearance of “conflicts of interest” linked to his past cases. Two weeks later, the legal team’s second-in-command, Claude Char- trand, left in a huff after the commissioners selected LeBel, and not him, to replace Lussier.
As that soap opera played out, paperwork apparently started piling up, and the grumbling from lawyers for parties that had been granted formal status at the commission got louder. They were not getting their hands on evidence and other documentation until the last minute, they claimed, leaving them no time to review it before it was made public. The cracks widened.
The final blow came in the last week of November, when LeBel announced that the inquiry’s winter break would be extended from four to seven weeks.
It was then, according to Marcel Danis, a lawyer and professor of political science at Concordia University, that the commission made its biggest mistake — trotting out commission investigator Érick Roy, having him run through a list of names of people who had attended meetings at a swanky private club in Old Montreal, and then promptly dismissing him.
“The terrible show they put on during the last day was absolutely awful,” Danis said, adding that, from his perspective, it would have made much more sense to call former Montreal mayor Gérald Tremblay — who had apparently been itching to testify for weeks — to the stand.
“I think it hurt the credibility of the commission. They had been doing quite well up to then … I don’t know what happened.”
At this stage, there is no proof that the politicians, construction bosses, fundraisers and bureaucrats who met at Club 357c did anything illegal or unethical. Being named that day, however, dealt a serious blow to their reputations, Danis explained, and it’s unclear if that damage can be repaired.
Mark Bantey, the lawyer representing The Gazette along with several other media outlets at the commission, agreed.
“Their names were floated and then nothing else was said,” Bantey noted. “So there’s this cloud of suspicion.”
Legal action against the commission is not out of the question, he said, but it’s unlikely. To successfully sue the inquiry for defamation, someone like former Liberal cabinet minister Line Beauchamp — alleged to have met with construction magnate Paolo Catania and representatives of engineering firms inside the club — would have to prove, among other things, that testimony before the commission lowered her reputation in the eyes of any “reasonable” person. That, according to Bantey, might be difficult to achieve at this stage, because all Roy did was present a list of meetings.
Carolle Simard, a politicalscience professor at Université du Québec à Montréal who served on the panel of experts consulted by Justice John Gomery during his high-profile 2004-05 inquiry into the federal sponsorship scandal, believes the arguably disastrous final days of the fall session were indicative of a much deeper problem; namely, that the commission is spinning its wheels.
“There’s no general modus operandi (for a public inquiry), but at the same time, these problems are important because people, myself included, are finding that the commission is in a rut,” Simard said. “On one hand, it may be in a rut partly because of a lack of organization. On the other hand, it could be because it is being limited by (external) police investigations. This public inquiry cannot put the evidence being gathered by the Sûreté du Québec in peril.”
To move forward, Simard added, Charbonneau and her team must avoid the temptation to call people to the stand solely to fill time when things stall behind the scenes.
“Did the last witnesses really provide anything new? Bottles of wine, golf tournaments, kickback systems, the hockey tickets … they all came in and gave almost the same speech.
“I admit that at a certain point, I stopped listening.” Despite the challenges of the spring and fall sessions, there remains a sense that this commission is more than just a flashy show for the cameras; that it might actually succeed (or at least make inroads) where other public inquiries in Quebec have failed.
A similar probe during the 1970s — presided over by Justice Robert Cliche — set out to examine the role of labour unions in the construction industry, and ended up tumbling down a rabbit hole into a world where bribery, sabotage and intimidation were the norm. The problem was gargantuan, but Cliche dutifully produced 134 recommendations. Some were enacted, others ignored, and corruption spread like an untamed weed.
Decades later, the Charbonneau Commission, born out of and shaped by intense public pressure to finally clean house in Quebec, has arguably already stimulated change — or chaos, depending on your perspective.
The mayors of Montreal, Laval and Mascouche have stepped down and quickly vanished from public view. Taxpayers have learned they were fleeced out of a little over $1.2 million by two retired public servants, leaving them to wonder how many millions more ended up stuffed down the socks of mobsters or crammed into envelopes and distributed in restrooms. Montreal’s city hall is still struggling to regain its footing, with councillors abandoning the former mayor’s party in droves and a new interim mayor attempting to build a still-shaky alliance amid the ruins.
In Quebec City, the provincial Liberal Party has had no choice but to watch in horror as allegations of improper fundraising practices and potential conflicts of interest continue to pile up at its feet. The Parti Québécois has remained strangely silent about the alleged shenanigans, likely keenly aware that the commission’s work is not over — and that it, too, was in government during the 15-year period covered by Charbonneau’s mandate.
The inquiry has undoubtedly altered the province’s political environment — at least temporarily — making it much more difficult to get away with anything even remotely questionable. Former environment minister Daniel Breton learned that the hard way when he was forced to resign from cabinet two weeks ago over a series of past blunders — in- cluding parking tickets and unpaid rent — that a year ago, might have prompted no more than a hastily mumbled public apology. Then, on Thursday, former PQ leader André Boisclair abruptly cut the strings on his golden parachute, renouncing permanent status in the public service after opposition parties complained that guaranteeing a political appointee’s salary for the rest of his life was “indecent.”
There have also been less obvious shifts. The brouhaha surrounding the commission and heightened public interest has, for instance, re- portedly provoked a reshuffling of police resources, with top investigators redeployed to investigate cases involving fraud, breach of trust, corruption and conspiracy.
In short, while Hur ricane Charbonneau may have temporarily fallen silent, the other storms around it rage on.
“I think it will (have an impact),” Danis said. “But I’m not convinced that we needed a commission to make the changes. Most of the things that they are going to recommend are things that already exist in (places) like Singapore, Hong Kong and France. It’s going to cost millions and millions to draft recommendations that I think could have been drafted without spending those millions.”
Simard is even less optimistic, saying it’s hard to imagine an inquiry with a two-year mandate could topple a corruption machine that, in some municipalities, appears to have been humming along quite efficiently for decades.
“Is the commission capable of putting an end to that kind of system? I have my doubts,” she said. “The president of (Montreal’s) executive committee became the interim member … and he was an important member of mayor Tremblay’s team. There’s no renewal of elites. There is only repetition. For me, that’s a big problem.”
Members of the public, while glued to their televisions as witnesses like former construction boss Lino Zambito calmly admitted to plundering the public purse, might be experiencing similar doubts. In a poll conducted by Léger Marketing for the Journal de Montréal in early November, only about half of respondents said they believe it is possible to eliminate the mob’s influence within the construction industry.
“I don’t think they’ve advanced very far,” Simard said. “They’ve caught some small fish at the city of Montreal. They don’t have the big fish. And organized crime in the construction industry? There have been a lot of allegations, a lot of statements made, but the big fish are still swimming.” Back on the 9th floor at 500 René Lévesque, the work continues — at least until Dec. 20, when everyone will head home for Christmas. There is no way to know precisely what the winter session will bring when hearings resume on Jan. 21, but it is expected to include more revelations about political financing at the provincial level and the testimony of reputed mobster Raynald Desjardins. There have also been whispers of a possible appearance by Vito Rizzuto himself, something that will certainly mean heightened security and possibly more delays as lawyers attempt to block subpoenas and argue over publication bans.
With all of the challenges already encountered and possibly more on the horizon, there is increasing speculation that Justice Charbonneau might be unable to meet her October 2013 deadline. LeBel refused to confirm in late November whether the inquiry is on schedule, arguing that it’s “too early” to start guessing how much, or how little, time may be required to get the job done.
But the commission’s resources are not limitless. An access to information request filed by the Huffington Post Quebec website in October revealed that as of Sept. 19, it had chewed through $5.6 million of its $14.6 million budget (the Gomery inquiry, in contrast, cost taxpayers a total of $32 million). It’s unclear how much more money was spent during the fall session, or how much may be left in the pot.
So will we still be hearing testimony when the snow begins to fall in late 2013?
Commission spokesperson Richard Bourdon offered no new hints or answers as members of the media packed up their computers and headed for the elevators on Nov 29.
“Happy holidays,” was all a smiling Bourdon would say.
And then the door shut behind him.