Guest Column

Quebec fallout on the Gomery Inquiry

by Jim Duff, Editor, The Suburban
Saturday, April 30, 2005

In a conference call with Liberal riding association executives Monday, Paul

Martin’s Quebec lieutenant Jean Lapierre offered an insight into why Gomery probe witnesses Jean Brault, Paul Coffin and Chuck Guité have suddenly been blessed with astounding powers of total recall. According to several people, who dialed into the conference call, Lapierre confirmed that all three men have cut a deal with prosecutors.

The blurt attributed to the federal transport minister and Outremont MP is disturbing for a number of reasons, beginning with how he knows. Judge John Gomery’s judicial inquiry into misspending and corruption within the Public Works ministry’s advertising sponsorship program is supposed to be at arm’s length from both the federal government and the Liberal Party of Canada, so if in fact Lapierre said what he is alleged to have said, it signals that the deal is common knowledge within the Martin government and the party.

Far more disturbing is the impression that the Martin Liberals felt they could stage-manage Gomery. Brault, Guité and Coffin were charged with various counts of fraud and conspiracy prior to the probe getting underway.

Under the terms of Gomery’s mandate, nobody can be prosecuted on the basis of testimony delivered at the inquiry, so if the RCMP decides to proceed

against anyone named in testimony, they have to start afresh--and if anybody knows whether the Gomery lawyers will give up their evidence to further the RCMP’s probe, they’re not saying. But according to one of our sources, a Liberal fundraiser named in recent testimony, told us the Gomery commission’s lawyers are upset at the narrowness of their mandate. He’s under the impression that Gomery’s legalists now propose to stretch their investigation far beyond the mandate that Paul Martin and Justice Minister Irwin Cotler had originally envisioned.

Ever hear of a runaway judicial inquiry?

This week, while Coffin and Guité were testifying against the backdrop of an on-again, off-again publication ban, Gomery lawyers were interviewing next week’s witness, former Liberal Party of Canada Quebec director-general Benoît Corbeil. It was inevitable; Corbeil has already given interviews to both Montreal’s La Presse and the Globe and Mail in which he’s said people in Martin’s government and with Quebec Premier Jean Charest’s Liberals received cash from Brault. This is the closest Gomery has come to recognizing that those tagged by Brault’s free-form flow of unsubstantiated testimony deserve the right to defend themselves.

No wonder Martin gave Canadians that Beaten-Man performance, followed up by an unprecedented spending spree in Ontario.

Corbeil, more than anyone else, knows the functioning of the Liberals’ interlocking fundraising cells, what one insider calls the three money rings. There’s the inner circle, the Liberal Party of Canada Quebec (LCPQ), once headed by Corbeil. In 2001, a typical year, it raised $600,000 or so. The second ring was Paul Martin’s leadership organization, which raised $3 million in 2001 for a total of $13 million, nine million of which they spent. Then there are the Laurier clubs. They raise two or three million a year, but none of that money stays in the ridings. Instead, it goes to the Federal Liberal Agency for Canada, to be spent on projects the national executive deems worthwhile.

"The Liberals had a $5 million debt in 1997, a $3 million debt in 1999, and a $3 million debt now," said another potential Gomery witness. "So whose bed got feathered? The money certainly never went to the front-line fight here in Quebec. It didn’t go offshore. You know how we know that? Because there hasn’t been a single tax-evasion prosecution as a result of Gomery. They’d prosecute the advertising guys to the hilt if they were found to have evaded taxes. No, they overbilled--but they paid taxes on everything they earned."

"Here’s the question Gomery will try to answer: Who told Guité (the former senior civvil servant who ran the sponsorship program under Public Works Minister Alfonso Gagliano) to authorize overbilling?"

Corbeil’s command of the file extends far beyond the cash. In his La Presse interviews, he’s already blown the whistle on how Liberal friends become judges, about how Liberals stole the 1995 Quebec referendum by swearing in thousands of new Canadians in mass citizenship ceremonies prior to referendum day here in Quebec.

Last weekend, I got a call from an old friend, a Liberal organizer on the South Shore. We got to talking about the inevitable federal election and how bad Martin's Liberals were going to get beaten. I asked him if Harper's Tories could break through anywhere in Quebec. Harper, he said, leaves Quebec cold. "Look," he said, "they [the local Conservative organization] asked me for advice last year. I told them to bring Belinda [Stronach] to Quebec, because they just eat her up here, French or no French. Harper doesn't have it."

He laid out a depressing scenario, fuelled by the millions in election financing that was one of Jean Chrétien's last gifts to the sovereignists. "They'll have the cash to fund an incredible pro-sovereignty campaign, but Duceppe doesn't want to lead it. They're going to bring back André Boisclair (the 38-year-old former Parti Québécois minister who just completed a year at Harvard)."

"So Charest's doomed?"

"Not necessarily. He'll call a referendum."

"Charest call a referendum on sovereignty? That's nuts!"

He explained that by calling a referendum, Charest short-circuits Duceppe and Boisclair. "He gets to ask the question he wants and he ensures that he controls the campaign, the Yes umbrella, financing, everything. What's the PQ do - campaign for the No?"

Former PQ leader Jacques Parizeau had a word for it--l’astuce, audacity. But in the hands of Paul Martin, Jean Charest and company, Quebeckers see it as just another shabby trick.

Meanwhile, Gomery is changing the entire political frame of reference in Quebec. Quebec’s municipalities all go to the polls this Nov. 6, including the major cities where political parties have the right to tap into election funding. Already, hard questions are being asked about the ability of Quebec’s director-general of elections, who oversees this process, to ensure that nobody spends more than the permissible amount and that only individuals make donations.

A year ago, it was accepted practice for law firms, engineering firms, contractors, developers and anybody else hoping to do business with various levels of government, to bypass the spending-limits laws by channelling donations through employees and individuals. The donors’ lists were public, but were seldom scrutinized. That is changing and even the local media are looking for patterns.

It’s one of those truisms of Canadian politics that the same people often work for all three levels of government. As Gomery unwinds, we’re struck by the way the same names keep coming up on the donors’ lists, often giving to political parties on both sides. It’s the cost of doing business in Canada.

Jim Duff, is the editor of The Suburban, Quebec's largest English newspaper.