Gomery to lift ban on reporting testimonies

GUITÉ CAN’T PREVIEW REPORT

MONTREAL • Justice John Gomery has lifted a publication ban on the testimony of three key witnesses, saying it would be unconstitutional to maintain a ban denying the public access to all the evidence submitted to his inquiry into the $250million government sponsorship scandal.

Judge Gomery, however, suspended the lifting of the ban until tomorrow at 5 p.m. He said he wants to give lawyers for witnesses Charles Guité and Jean Brault, both of whom face criminal charges stemming from the scandal, the opportunity to request a publication ban in Quebec Superior Court.

Lawyers for both men are scheduled to appear tomorrow before Superior Court Judge Fraser Martin to request he impose his own publication ban on the testimony. Judge Martin is the presiding judge in their criminal case.

Judge Gomery also refused yesterday to allow Mr. Guité, the senior public servant who ran the mismanaged sponsorship program, an advance copy of his final report, which is at the printers and is due to be made public on Nov. 1.

Mr. Guité had requested an opportunity to read the report before its publication to assess whether it could in whole or in part be prejudicial to his upcoming trial.

Judge Gomery said Mr. Guité’s request could lead to a publication ban on the entire report because “Guité’s name appears very often in the report.”

Judge Gomery asked Mr. Guité’s lawyer, Richard Auger, why his client’s “interests should be more important than the Prime Minister of Canada” when it came to access to the report.

Judge Gomery noted that the Prime Minister has promised to call an election after the Gomery report is released. Judge Gomery asked if it was right to “stop the entire machinery of government for a potential threat against Mr. Guité’s right to a fair trial.”

Mr. Auger did not deny that his client wants a sneak preview of the report in order to seek a publication ban on sections that could be prejudicial to his trial.

Judge Gomery originally imposed the ban last March because the criminal trials of Mr. Guité and Mr. Brault were scheduled to begin on May 4.

Such a close trial date, Judge Gomery claimed, might make it difficult to empanel a jury that would not be influenced by news accounts of testimony and evidence submitted to the sponsorship commission.

But the trial date has since been postponed until next March.

Judge Gomery accepted the arguments of lawyer Mark Bantey, who represents Montreal’s The Gazette, that with the trial more than seven months away any publicity about the testimony will have been “washed away in the tide of information.”

Mr. Bantey argued that by next May “most people will have forgotten the details of the case” against Guité and Brault.

The amount of banned testimony is in fact miniscule when set against the tens of thousands of pages of evidence received by the commission.

It amounts to only 62 pages of Mr. Brault’s evidence, 15 pages of Mr. Guité’s and three pages of ex- advertising executive Paul Coffin. Coffin pleaded guilty last month to 15 fraud charges and was given a conditional sentence of two years less a day to be served in the community.