Beyond Charbonneau
Can revelations made at the Charbonneau Commission change city hall? Not without more transparency, a former president of the executive committee tells Linda Gyulai.
One era in Montreal municipal politics has avoided the searchlight that’s being shone these days on corruption in public construction contracts.
But the mandate that immediately preceded the administration of the now former Montreal mayor Gérald Tremblay holds its own secrets, questionable transactions and dirty doings, charges Jean Fortier, who was chairman of Montreal’s powerful city executive committee under Tremblay’s predecessor, Pierre Bourque, from 1998 to 2001.
In fact, a range of fields of municipal management, including computers, permits and zoning, appear to be outside the purview of the Charbonneau Commission examining corruption in Quebec’s corruption industry and the province’s permanent anti-corruption squad.
Fortier has stepped forward with allegations that several people attempted to bribe, blackmail and otherwise influence him in real estate files while he was the city’s top city councillor.
Part of his motivation for speaking, he said, is what happened to his father, who worked as a municipal permits inspector with the city’s urban-planning department in Montreal’s west end in the 1950s and early ’60s when Fortier was a child.
“It was clear there was already a climate of corruption at that time,” Fortier says, recalling the strain on his father as he resisted attempts to corrupt him. Inspectors were offered bribes to close their eyes to illegal bars and other illicit businesses, or pressured by their bosses who were on the take, he says.
He says he once overheard other city inspectors tell his father he’d ruin his health if he continued to “behave” the way he did. His father would accept a six-pack of CocaCola and a six-pack of 7Up at Christmas time but nothing more than that, his son says.
Léon Fortier died of a heart attack in front of his 11-yearold son in January 1963.
Fortier says he’s been troubled for the past decade about his own experiences. But, he adds, “the forensic problem, the political problem is not mine anymore. I don’t want to get involved in that. What’s of interest to me is what’s after the Charbonneau Commission. What do you have to do to put the city back on track?”
The starting point for any cleanup of government, from Fortier’s perspective, is greater transparency to expose the decision-making process to public scrutiny.
One simple measure would be for municipalities and the provincial government to make their organizational charts public, Fortier says. Without it, members of the civil service can continue to work in obscurity without accountability, he says.
Quebec’s decade-old lobbying registry requires those who lobby the government to identify themselves as well as the provincial or municipal department they plan to contact. However, the province’s lobbying law doesn’t require them to identify the civil servant or politician they lobby.
Fortier is also calling for municipalities to divulge their monthly financial results to their elected officials, with detailed breakdowns by department and by borough. Fortier contends the civil service in municipalities across the province have this data but conceal it from public officials. In fact, the civil service hid the existence of such results while he was execu- tive committee chairperson, he says.
Regular financial results would enable politicians, and the public, to track spending on projects, he says.
“It’s the basic principle of accounting,” Fortier says. “Who reports to who? And, on the other side, who spends what? You need those basic tools.”
Attempts to interview former city councillors, business people and former civil servants to corroborate Fortier’s allegations about being offered a bribe and other in- cidents he claims happened during his tenure at city hall elicited denials, finger-pointing or gaps in memory.
“It’s very obvious that they’ll deny,” Fortier says in response. “You can be sure that any of these things has been done one on one. There’s no witness, there’s no proof.”
Corruption investig ators should look to the past to unlock the secrets of the present, he says. Many of the same players — politicians, civil servants and business people — are still around, he says. Moreover, the systems that investigators are probing didn’t start yesterday, he says.
Still, at least one businessman said it’s better to leave the past buried and instead focus on cleanup for the future.
Michel Servant, who worked as a consultant to the city in its 2000 purchase of a building in Côte-des-Neiges to house a new municipal library, says municipal transactions “are greatly coveted” by business people because they expect to make money.
“It’s rare that the call for tenders process is clean,” he says, referring to service and supply contracts, such as construction. “Too often, the calls for tender are written so not many can qualify. It’s the same when the city sells assets as when it’s public works.”
Servant has worked with different municipal administrations, including with the borough of Côte-des-Neiges– Notre-Dame-de-Grâce while Montreal Mayor Michael Applebaum was borough mayor. His projects haven’t always panned out. Servant bought a property at Côte St. Luc Rd. and Décarie Blvd. through a numbered company in 2006 after residents blocked a zoning change for the owner’s plan to erect a commercial building to house a Pharmaprix.
Servant says he planned to build a seniors’ residence. But the borough’s urbanplanning committee set difficult conditions for him to meet, he maintains. So he gave up on his project and sold the property. The buyer wound up building a seniors’ residence.
Servant says it’s worse in other countries than in Quebec. He says he’s tried building a beachfront hotel on property he owns in Panama, but corruption and other factors have deterred him.
“I could build, but I’m so discouraged,” he says, adding he’s planning to sell the land. “I’m a small Quebecer who’s alone there.”
In Montreal, there were more questionable municipal transactions in the past than you’ll find today, Servant contends, because the city of Montreal had more disused land to sell for development in those days, he says.
“There are stories, but they’re too far back,” he says. “I’ll see if my conscience tells me if I should speak.”
He openly questions whether it’s worth dredging up the past.
“It’s good to be bringing things out now,” Servant says, referring to the corruption inquiries going on in Quebec. “But let’s not necessarily wake the dead.”
“Too often, the calls for tender are written so not many can qualify.” REAL- ESTATE DEVELOPER MICHEL SERVANT