Mudslinging as political vigilantism at UPAC

Apparent acts of political vigilantism look like mudslinging, not whistle-blowing

Even in democracies where it’s too cold to grow bananas, police meddle in politics, even influencing elections.

What turned the 2006 Canadian federal election against the incumbent Liberals was an announcement by RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli of a criminal investigation into speculation that a taxation decision by then-finance minister Ralph Goodale had been leaked in advance.

The investigation was announced, in mid-campaign, to an opposition MP, even after an initial review had turned up no evidence of a leak. The RCMP exonerated Goodale and his staff, but not until a year after the Liberals lost the election.

There was enough concern over Zaccardelli’s actions for the chair of the RCMP’s public-complaints commission to initiate an investigation. (He could not determine whether Zaccardelli had intended to influence the election, since the RCMP commissioner and other senior officers refused to give statements.)

In Quebec, however, police apparently attempting to bring down a government, using media whose owner was until recently an opposition politician, seems to be accepted as normal.

This week, few people other than the governing Liberals objected to the latest leak out of UPAC, the anti-corruption unit, to the Quebecor media controlled by Pierre Karl Péladeau, who was leader of the Parti Québécois until last year, and still attends party events.

Apparently, whoever did the leaking was not deterred by UPAC commissioner Robert Lafrenière’s vow to track down the “bandit” responsible for previous leaks of information from the unit’s investigations.

But like some previous Quebecor “scoops” from within UPAC, this one simply added colourful new details to old news from the Charbonneau hearings or from other media about even older events.

“Big Liberal parties,” blared the cover of Wednesday’s Le Journal de Montréal. “Champagne, tuna steaks, cascades of fresh fruit, butlers in tuxedos and waitresses in kimonos for ministers and entrepreneurs.”

Wow, but readers may have been disappointed to learn inside that the events described took place at least 13 years ago, under Jean Charest’s former Liberal government, not Philippe Couillard’s present one (though Couillard and a few of his ministers attended them).

Gluttony may be a sin, but it’s not a crime. And what amounts to selling access to elected officials in return for large donations was then a common, legal practice among all the major parties (though the Liberals, as the party most often in power, were better at it). I first wrote about it in 1987, few other people seemed to care, and it wasn’t until recent years that political-financing reforms finally put a stop to it. Nor is there any evidence to contradict Couillard’s protestations that his party follows the new rules.

In this pre-election year, however, that didn’t stop the opposition parties from finding Couillard guilty by association with Marc Bibeau, Charest’s fundraiser who organized the events, who has not been charged with any crime, let alone convicted.

The UPAC commissioner has warned that the leaks could

jeopardize an investigation of Bibeau and Charest, and possible eventual prosecutions.

And there is a conspiracy theory that the leaks are intended to do just that, in order to help the Liberals.

What makes this theory farfetched is that the leaks are harming the Liberals by associating them with alleged “corruption.”

That leads to a simpler theory: a political vigilante in UPAC has taken it upon themselves to help bring down the government in next October’s general election. And they’re doing it by providing the opposition parties, through Quebecor, with a steady supply of ammunition.

If so, then the UPAC leaker doesn’t deserve the praise they’ve been receiving as a socalled whistleblower.

For what they’ve been “exposing” is not evidence of wrongdoing, but only of police suspicions.

And as the executive chair of the Montreal-based Institute for Governance, Yvan Allaire, wrote recently in La Presse, there’s a difference between a whistleblower and a mudslinger.