Police should continue probe of ‘corruption,’ says Liberals’ Ouellette

It’s no surprise, perhaps, that Chomedey Liberal MNA Guy Ouellette agrees with his boss, Premier Jean Charest, that a public inquiry into allegations of corruption in Quebec’s construction industry still isn’t needed. This despite a rising chorus of protests from opposition politicians, a senior investigator appointed by the premier himself, even the beleaguered Charest’s own speechwriter.
Ouellette and virtually every other Liberal MNA stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their leader in the face of a report Jacques Duchesneau was set to present to the government, just before it was leaked last week to the media. The National Assembly’s public administration commission subsequently asked Duchesneau to appear before them to explain just what he was getting at.
Duchesneau, the head of an anti-collusion unit put into place by Charest about a year-and-a-half ago, has been working under the umbrella of the Permanent Anti-Corruption Unit (UPAC) headed by former Sûreté du Québec senior officer Robert Lafrenière. Lafrenière’s department has an overall mandate to investigate corruption alleged to have infiltrated the construction industry, which has many dealings with the municipal sector and the provincial government.

The heart of things
In the end, Duchesneau told the MNAs that, in his view, police investigations, like Lafrenière’s, are insufficient to get to the heart of the matter. What’s really needed, he insisted, is an in camera public inquiry – which was probably not what Charest wanted to hear. Reacting to the former Montreal police chief’s assertions, the premier said he would take Duchesneau’s recommendation under consideration. But, as Charest has done before, he dismissed a public inquiry for a number of reasons.
These include the arbitrary nature of the process, its potential to conflict with judicial proceedings, and the fact that those summoned to testify at public inquiries are usually shielded from ever being prosecuted based on the testimony they give.
“I think there’s some reflection to be made on the government’s side, because we always say as a government that we want to see the bad guys behind bars and we want police investigations to go on,” Ouellette said in an interview with the Laval News. But Ouellette, himself a former cop with the SQ, stood behind Charest’s insistence that an appropriate word for much of the information that was dug up by Duchesneau is “allegations,” when Duchesneau referred to it as “facts.”
“People think that what’s in his report will lead immediately to accusations or will help immediately to bring people in front of the court,” Ouellette said. “It’s good for administrative purposes, it’s good to give us an idea about a system, but it also needs to be proven through collaboration and confirmation to be able to send the file to the crown prosecutor to launch charges against any company or engineer or contractor who are in the report.”
If the Liberals argue that an ongoing police investigation automatically precludes a public inquiry, it cannot be overlooked that it was Charest himself – reacting as he was to growing political as well as public pressure – who launched the current police investigations. In addition to the two aforementioned inquiries is the SQ’s Operation Marteau, which was launched in 2009 also to look into construction industry corruption.
Charest and the Liberals don’t dismiss all the claims Duchesneau made. These include a seeming complicity between Quebec’s largest civil engineering firms, which have come to virtually dominate public works in the province. Successive governments decided decades ago to lower their costs by increasingly outsourcing projects to private contractors, rather than having them done in-house by a large state-employed workforce earning premium public sector wages.
As Duchesneau pointed out, the fallout from this has been a massive loss of expertise within some government departments. He maintains that fewer experts than ever within the civil service are now able to expertly assess the value of public works projects as presented on bid specification forms and itemized work sheets. The current state of the global economy is hardly conducive to reversing this trend with massive public sector rehiring, thus restoring the direct oversight the government once enjoyed.
“We have to make sure that we will regain that expertise in the ministry,” Ouellette said. “Now that the expertise is more outside, I think this can lead to some bad practices. We need to regain expertise and the transport minister is already working on that.” Having worked with the SQ on its Escadron Carcajou (Wolverinse Squadron) which effectively put the Hells Angels out of business in Quebec, Ouellette sees some similarities in what’s been happening more recently.
“It’s the same game with different actors,” he said, while adding that certain criminal elements appear to have evolved and “are now more like businessmen, but it’s the same organized crime.” While agreeing that some of them are at least trying to portray themselves as turning honest, he insisted, “it’s the same criminals.” Asked if organized criminals can ever go straight, he responded, “A criminal is a criminal. A criminal wants to make money rapidly while not working hard. It’s always the same.”