corruption

News

The Sûreté du Québec (SQ) will investigate allegations that the Montreal Police (SPVM) Internal Affairs division falsified evidence and reports in an effort to discredit officers who tried to blow the whistle on their corrupt peers. Neither the opposition parties nor the Montreal Police Brotherhood are satisfied with this solution.

Earlier this week, three ex-policemen came forward on TVA’s investigative journalism show J.E, accusing the SPVM of fabricating evidence against them after they tried to denounce malpractice and corruption within the service. The reporters uncovered evidence that the internal affairs investigations on ex-officers Roger Larivière, Giovanni Di Feo and Jimmy Cacchione were launched under false pretenses and based on fabricated evidence.

It is not the first scandal sparked by the SPVM’s endeavour to keep its dirty laundry from being aired in public. Only a few months ago we learned that they had no qualms about spying on journalists to uncover their confidential sources.

J.E’s findings were convincing enough that SPVM Director Paul Pichet claims he pressed the SQ to investigate them immediately after the show aired on Tuesday night. The SQ confirmed on Wednesday that a special team will be mandated to review the three cases, including past investigations and new elements.

Suspicious timing and non-existent godsons

In June 2013, Giovanni Di Feo and Jimmy Cacchione informed their superiors that they intended to write a letter to the Ministry and the media to denounce corruption and dishonest practices within the SPVM. Their long careers were brought to an abrupt end shortly after that, when an internal affair investigation turned up various charges against them, from complaints about their disrespect to superiors to suspicious connections with organized crime.

Both were two highly ranked officers of Italian origin who had served as double agents in the mafia and the Hells Angels. “For 28 years, we’ve been highly regarded for the quality of our sources, but then they became «suspicious connections»” says Cacchione.

In 2012, Di Feo and Cacchione had started pressing SPVM administration to address cases of “recurrent corruption that have lasted for several years.” Unbeknown to them, they were put under investigation instead.

The RCMP recorded multiple phone conversations that suggested suspicious friendliness between Di Feo and Luigi Coretti, a businessman accused of criminal fraud (charges were dropped due to exaggerated delays in procedures). Di Feo reportedly offered to pick up Coretti’s son from school several times. The SPVM even suggested that Di Feo might be the godfather of the child.

Coretti doesn’t even have children.

Di Feo and Cacchione’s case seems to be one of many. Ex SPVM inspector Roger Larivière told Radio-Canada on Wednesday: “the division of special investigations in SPVM are doing phony investigations. That is to say investigations that are directed by the headquarters, in order to target some individuals, like I’ve been targeted.”

In October 2014, Larivière tried to blow the whistle on internal affairs’ questionable practices. He wrote a letter to the SPVM then director Marc Parent and met with journalist Stéphane Berthomet. He was promptly investigated for leaking confidential information to the press. He was put under surveillance and his residence was searched – illegally, perhaps, as the Chief Inspector of Internal Affairs, Costa Labos was suspected of, although not charged with, lying to the judge in order to get the search warrant.

On Wednesday, a fourth ex-officer from Montreal brought a similar story to the Journal de Montréal. Ex-inspector Pietro Poletti claims that internal affairs destroyed his career with a falsified report.

SQ investigation raises controversy

SPVM Director Paul Pichet mandated the SQ to investigate. Premier Philippe Couillard and Minister of Security Martin Coîteux are both satisfied with this outcome, but the three opposition parties are rejecting the police-investigating-police route. They are unanimously calling for the Bureau des Enquêtes Indépendantes to handle the investigation.

In an interview with Radio-Canada, Pichet said that the situation was more aligned with the SQ’s mandate than with the BEI’s. “Honestly I think [the SQ] is well equipped and they have experienced investigators to do the job,” he claimed. He added that if, for whatever reason, the investigation was to be handled by the BEI or any other such institution, he would readily cooperate and do what he could “to shed some light on this.” Pichet insisted that it was important to preserve the trust of the people and of the 4600 SPVM officers in the Internal Affairs division.

For the Fraternité des Policiers et Policières de Montréal (the union representing SPVM officers), the director still has a very long way to go before they can talk about trust.  The reopening of three cases by the SQ will not suffice to correct the course, the union warned in a press release. They are calling for the immediate resignation of the Chief Inspector of Internal Affairs and for the Ministry of Security’s direct intervention to correct the practices of the division.

* Featured image by Cem Ertekin

NewsPolitics

“The government’s response to the recommendations of the commission is, thus far, unsatisfactory,” concluded the first report of the public monitoring committee on the Charbonneau Commission.

One year after the commission ended, only 15 of its 60 recommendations have been implemented “in a satisfying manner.” Nine have been partially followed and 36 have yet to be responded to. “The government must do better,” urged committee member Martine Valois in a press release.

The committee looks harshly upon Quebec’s approach to two of Charbonneau’s leading recommendations.

The first is the creation of an independent authority to regulate the management of public contracts. The Autorité des marches publics (AMP), as defined by bill 108, “will have neither the independence nor the powers and functions necessary to act effectively,” states the report.

The committee still supports the creation of the AMP. However, it denounced the limited scope of its functions and its lack of coercive powers. It further asserted that the method for selecting the director endangers the AMP’s independence.

The committee also criticised bill 87, sold to the public as significant protection for whistle-blowers. The bill already caused controversy by not covering municipal nor private sector employees and encouraging internal denunciation instead of transparency.  This bill and other measures intended to regulate the professional workplace “clearly do not go far enough,” the committee estimated.

The government’s best effort was in the area of cleaning up political financing. They fulfilled 8 out the 12 recommendations in that regard.

This is mainly a result of bills 83 and 101, adopted in June. Thanks to those, party chiefs and MNAs are increasingly forced to take responsibility for their team’s financing practices. Also, loans to politicians must now be under $5000 at the municipal level and under $25 000 at the provincial level.

The public monitoring committee for the Charbonneau Commission is a popular initiative. It has seven official members from various backgrounds, including Westmount Mayor Peter Trent and ex Liberal MNA Gilles Ouimet. Three professors, one ex-researcher of the Charbonneau Commission and the president of Transparency International Canada also sit with them. It will produce a second follow-up report on November 23rd 2017.

When ex-Minister Natalie Normandeau was arrested last March, the Couillard administration had declared its strong commitment to implementing Charbonneau’s recommendations. Members of the cabinet have not yet reacted to the follow-up report.

LawNewsPolitics

Corruption is something as intrinsic to the City of Montreal as the Jazz Festival, fine cuisine, and frivolous disputes over the language of commercial signage. The end of this month is an important date in the world of municipal corruption because it is the deadline for construction companies to pay the City of Montreal back for the overcharging revealed in the massive collusion investigation conducted by the Charbonneau Commission.

Collusion is a secret agreement between two or more people with the goal of causing harm to one or more of them or to reach an objective prohibited by law.

The investigation by the Charbonneau Commission led by Justice France Charbonneau and her fellow commissioner, former Auditor General of Quebec Renaud Lachance, was started in 2011 under former premier Jean Charest. Its goal was to investigate corruption between Quebec government bodies, construction and engineering firms, and in many cases the Montreal Mafia, since 1996.

The enquiry revealed construction and engineering firms billing of the City of Montreal for phony expenses, the rigging of bids for public works projects, and the mandatory paying of kickbacks to government officials and mobsters. Among those implicated in the investigation are the engineering firm Roche and the construction firm Les Grands Travaux Soter. Former Laval Mayor Gilles Vaillancourt was also implicated with reports indicating that entrepreneurs working on Laval projects were expected to give him a two point five percent cut of the value of each contract they got.

Gilles Vaillancourt has since stepped down as mayor after over 23 years in office and is now facing charges for conspiracy, fraud, breach of trust, and gangsterism.

The corruption allegations in Quebec and the ensuing Charbonneau Commission resulted in the adoption of the Quebec Anti-Corruption Act in 2011.

The purpose of the act is to prevent and fight corruption in contractual matters with the public sector. The law also has the goal of restoring the public’s faith in the private sector’s construction deals with the government. Among its provisions is the establishment of the Anti-Corruption Commissioner, who is appointed by the Quebec government to fight corruption.

The Anti-Corruption Act is excessive. The Canadian Criminal Code already has provisions against fraud, corruption, and bribery, all of which fall under the jurisdiction of the police and Attorney General who can conduct investigations and prosecute offenders.

What the law does in addition to creating the Anti-Corruption Commissioner is specify what bodies are considered part of the public sector and therefore under the Commissioner’s jurisdiction. This includes any public body or government agency, the Université du Québec and its constituent universities, research institutes and superior schools, and all schools and school boards established by law and/or eligible for government subsidies. ^Though logic dictates that any organization funded by or under the control of the government is part of the public sector.

With agents and organizations already in place to investigate corruption and criminal activity, the Anti-Corruption Commissioner appears to be a purely symbolic office created to show the federal government that Quebec can handle its own corruption problems without the intervention of federally appointed prosecutors and judges.

The reason it is important to discuss this now is because of Law 26, adopted unanimously by the Quebec National Assembly in March of 2015 as the Charbonneau Commission drew to a close.

Law 26, known in long form as an Act to ensure mainly the recovery of amounts obtained as a result of fraud or fraudulent tactics in connection with public contracts sets up a program by which companies implicated in fraud can pay back some of the money they cheated taxpayers of.

The City of Montreal sent out 380 letters last November to the construction and engineering firms who’ve dealt with the City since 1996. The letters demanded that construction companies pay back 20% of the value of the contracts they’ve had with the City for over two decades in cases where the company was involved in collusion.

Companies and individuals have until November first 2016 to announce their intention to participate. SNC Lavalin, Dessau, and Construction Frank Catania and Associates Inc. have all publicly declared their intention to take part.

Though the law says the program is voluntary, companies that refuse to pay up can face stiff penalties, be sued by the City of Montreal, and be barred from bidding on future contracts with the City.

Former Chief Justice of the Superior Court, François Rolland, who is now Director of this Voluntary Reimbursement Program, has expressed his belief that this will be incentive enough for companies to come forward, but some believe the law lacks teeth.

Simon Seida, a Montreal lawyer with Blake, Cassels & Graydon, told the CBC on November third 2015 that a company that has received no indication that the government is looking into its practices with public contracts or that they’re going to get sued will have little inclination to participate and he is right.

No individual or company is going to pay the government money it does not feel it is legally bound to pay.

There are undoubtedly tons of construction companies in Quebec guilty of collusion but investigations, trials, and lawsuits are probably just as expensive for taxpayers as corruption itself. The Quebec government should go after the big companies involved in the bigger crimes and let the little fish go.

It is the big companies that need to be made an example of and held accountable, not the little ones who made mistakes in the hopes of competing with them. In the name of fiscal accountability, a little streamlining and cutting of government offices wouldn’t hurt either.

NewsPolitics

I think Montrealers owe Gerald Tremblay and even Jean Drapeau an apology. Sure, they may have been corrupt, but at least they had the basic decency to make their abuse of city funds look, on some level, beneficial.

Denis Coderre won’t even extend us the courtesy of trying to pull the wool over our eyes. He’s paying, or rather Montrealers are paying, $3.45 million for granite shaped as tree stumps on Mount Royal, supposedly in celebration of our city’s 375th anniversary.

Drapeau: Corruption in the Details

Drapeau’s administration was responsible for building the Olympic Stadium. Yes, there were trucks driving in and out, then around the block, then back in, counted twice and paid twice or multiple times (page 6).

Was it grossly over budget and behind schedule due to corruption? Yes. Is it occasionally functional at best and a bit of an eyesore? Absolutely. Was Drapeau able to make a good case for building the thing in the first place? Yes he was.

The idea of a city the size of Montreal having an Olympic stadium that also can double as a baseball, football and concert venue is a good one. Or, at very least, it’s an idea that you can logically argue is beneficial. The corruption and waste, in this case, was all in the details.

Tremblay and the Arts: A Different Opinion

The most glaring example of corruption in the Tremblay administration (and there are many to choose from) has got to be the Quartier de Spectacles project. We’re talking no-bid contracts given to connected developers who chose to ignore rather vocal input and opposition from the existing artistic community, local business owners and historical preservationists and move ahead with their unpopular and badly conceived projects.

It took a court case and media shitstorm to stop the expropriation of Café Cleopatre, but the rest of the project has already become reality, or most likely will.

Was this a case of politicians doing favours for their friends at Montrealers’ expense. No doubt. Could Tremblay realistically argue public benefit? Unfortunately, yes.

I don’t for a minute buy the argument that we need to push independent artists out of their venues and tear down historic buildings in order to accommodate corporate art backers and uber-mainstream culture in order to be an international arts city. In fact, I find that angle repugnant and an insult to the very core of what makes Montreal artistically unique.

However, I will grant Tremblay one thing. While I didn’t and still don’t see any benefit in his plan, he was completely justified to argue that there was. One of those things where time will tell, I guess.

Coderre: Lost in the Woods

At first glance, Coderre’s granite tree stumps look…like a fucking terrible idea. An eyesore, really. Who needs fake nature when you’re surrounded by real nature?

Then you hear the price tag. Then all you hear is the price tag. How could the city be paying so much? Clearly someone’s getting the proverbial brown envelope, probably a friend of the Mayor. At least I hope someone is. If this isn’t corruption, then it’s catastrophically bad urban planning, which is probably worse.

mordecai richler gazeebo

This isn’t just some overpriced project like the Mordecai Richler Gazeebo which will cost $724 000. Sure, that’s way too much. Sure, Coderre rejected an offer of a free gazeebo to go with this plan instead. But at the very least, despite being worth nowhere near what Montreal will pay for it, a restored Gazeebo on the mountain named after one of Montreal’s most celebrated authors is a good thing.

This also isn’t like the public tree-shaped benches costing in the thousands opposition party Projet Montreal, who voted against the granite stumps on the mountain, installed on streets in the Plateau. Overpriced? Sure. Unnecessary? Yeah. But at least a tree-like bench on a city street, it can be argued, serves a purpose.

A place to sit? A good thing. Fake nature on an urban street? Sure. Kinda cheesey, but sure. But fake nature in the middle of a beautiful space full of real nature. It’s not just an unnecessary waste, it’s unwanted.

If you want to sit down on something natural, sit on a rock or, wait for it, an actual tree stump. If you want to sit on something made by humans, use a bench. There are plenty of them around the mountain and they didn’t cost a fraction of what these granite stumps will.

If you really want the sitting on nature experience but would prefer not have to sit on the actual nature that is all around you and think the city should pay $3.45 million for you to be able to do just that, then, hopefully, most likely, you don’t exist. If you do, then Denis Coderre would really like you to speak up right now.

Sure, some of these fake granite (parts of) trees are scheduled to appear in other spots in the city, like the campus of Université de Montréal (which also has quite a bit of nature in it, if I remember correctly), but it’s the ones on the Mountain that are particularly galling.

Coderre is taking a public beating on this one, from all corners of the political spectrum. And rightly so. This isn’t just corruption. This isn’t just out-of-touch, overpriced decadence. It’s something people wouldn’t want, in most cases, even if the price tag was $5.

Denis Coderre forgot the first rule of corruption: try to make it look like you are doing a good thing. If you’re going to screw us, Mr. Mayor, at least let us think that we’re enjoying it.

News

On April 12, 25-year-old Freddie Gray “made eye contact” with a Baltimore police officer. Within minutes, Gray was brutalized, “twisted into a pretzel,“which caused his spinal cord to snap, and was subsequently tossed into the back of a police cage. Despite screaming in pain, the police denied Gray medical attention. He lapsed into a coma and died one week later on April 19.

Freddie Gray would’ve been just another statistic of one more Black male “criminal” that died a justifiable, though “tragic” and “unfortunate” death at the hands of hard working cops because he “resisted arrest,” “disobeyed the commands of law enforcement” or had “reached for the officer’s weapon.” However, in the Information Age of social media, a bystander filmed the event and, once again, the official story collapsed and the lies of the police were exposed.

Anger among the majority Black and working class population of Baltimore erupted over the past week culminating in mass protests over the weekend which led to rioting on Monday, April 27. What began as peaceful processions from West Baltimore where Freddie Gray lived and was killed, turned into conflict once the procession reached Downtown. At Camden Yards before the start of the Baltimore Orioles game on Sunday, fights erupted when Black protesters were provoked by petite-bourgeois whites from suburban Baltimore County, who jeered the mostly Black protesters with racial epithets. As the marchers made their way to Baltimore’s famed Inner Harbor, white hipsters and shoppers began to physically attack the the marchers. In the face of these provocations, Blacks reacted by throwing objects through the windows of restaurants and bars.

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“Drunk white people looking for a fight were part of the violence narrative last night. I have seen them jeer, spit, and throw things at protestors and try to hit them since wed when protest first went downtown.” – Brandon Soderberg

By Monday, the city’s Black high school students walked out of classes with the intention of having a festival of the oppressed. The police became the targets of reprisal. After decades of repression and brutality, the working class and poor youth of Baltimore decided that it was time to exact revenge. Pitched street battles took place in West Baltimore between rock and brick throwing youth and cops with tear gas, rubber bullets and riot shields. The entire city came to a standstill with reports of the police shutting down the city transit system. By nightfall, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency and deployed 5,000 National Guard troops to Baltimore. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a Black woman, announced the implementation of 10 P.M. to 5 A.M. curfew starting from Tuesday April 28, in effect for one week.

What’s surprising to this writer is how long it has taken for the rebellion to take place. This writer is fairly familiar with Baltimore, having visited the city three times during the 1980s and 90s. Baltimore is a very unique city. It’s a Southern American city with a Northern industrial economic and political structure. It’s one of the most beautiful cities in the country with its architecture and geography. Yet it is one of the most socially polarized cities in the world. It’s racial and class divisions reflect its Dixie-Yankee split personality.

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High school students walking out of class.

Most of the world knows Baltimore through the HBO series The Wire. The program is the most realistic portrayal of the economic, political, racial and social state of Baltimore. What makes The Wire unique is how the cops are presented as the villains and the drug dealers and gangsters presented as decent people forced by the decline of industrial capitalism into criminality.

The Wire is not the first time Hollywood has portrayed the brutality and corruption of the police and judicial system. …And Justice For All is a 1979 film with Al Pacino revealing the corruption of judges in Baltimore. For more than 35 years, Baltimore has been depicted as a cesspool of judicial and police corruption and violence.

The Baltimore riots are a belated and desperate response to decades of abuse of the Black working class and poor at the hands of the politicians, police and the courts. This isn’t about race. It’s about class. Baltimore a majority Black city with a Black mayor, police chief and mostly Black police force. This is about the death of American capitalism which offers no future to poor and working class youth of all races.

Der Kosmonaut is an international freelance journalist, poet, social commentator and political philosopher. A graduate of Radio News and Current Affairs from the National Broadcasting School in Brighton, UK, he has been a producer for CKUT News in Montreal, Radio Orange in Vienna. He was the political editor of The Age of Nepotism in Belgrade. As a poet Der Kosmonaut has been published in Vienna where was the winner of the Slam B Poetry Slam in June 2011. He maintains a blog der-kosmonaut.blogspot.com

Featured image by Patrick Semansky.

News

On the March 5, 2013 Paulo Portas, the vice prime-minister of Portugal, and leader of the Partido Popular (the right-wing neo-liberal member of the austerity governing coalition) visited India for a business trip. The objective of this short visit on behalf of the vice admiral of a sinking Portuguese vessel was to insure a safe route for the influx of foreign capital — in this case Indian capital — to reinvigorate the ailing Portuguese economy. There, in New Delhi, and in front of flashing cameras and journalists Paulo Portas gave out  the first ‘Golden Visa,’ which has become quite infamous in Portugal over the past weeks.

Now this ‘Golden Visa’ might seem like the Golden Ticket in the fable of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and that idea isn’t that far off. The system of Golden Visas was implemented, in the words of its promoters, to facilitate foreign investment in Portugal, and to boost the economy with innovative projects. Thus any foreign citizen with enough money and a project to invest in some section of the Portuguese economy a considerable amount of money was given access to the Via dei Fori Imperiali, a sort of express lane without tolls which would allow the rich and the affluent, in other words, the job creators of this world to come and spread their magical dust, and spread economical healthiness throughout the land of Lusitans. It was the magical solution to resolve of Portugal’s economic woes, insourcing entrepreneurship and the audacity of the foreign masters of capital.

golden-visa-eu

The only problem with the entire scheme is that things didn’t quite work out according to plan. Thus on November 13, a political earthquake shook Lisbon. Four public offices became the targets of special anti-corruption unit raids: Portuguese border services agency, the entity which was in charge of directly issuing the Visas; the Ministry of Justice and the Institute of Registries and Notaries, the equivalent of our Ministry of National Revenue; and the Ministry of Internal Administration, the equivalent of our Ministry of Public Works and Governmental Affairs.

The heads of all these institutions have been questioned by Portuguese police, and have been accused of, corruption, trafficking of influence and money laundering, among other things. Two companies Golden Visas Europe and JMF-Projects and Business Inc. offered services for foreign private investors looking to dry their money in the sun on some picturesque Portuguese beach.

A travel agency for capital, Marx would have been delighted!

Both of these companies had direct ties to the legal public authorities, who were quintessential in the issuing of the infamous Golden Visas. For example Miguel Macedo the Minister of Internal Administration had a direct stake in Golden Visas Europe; he had been the founding partner of the enterprise — even though he was already minister at the time — with a young lady by the name of Luísa Oliveira Figueiredo, who happened to the daughter of António Figueiredo, the head of the Institute of Registries and Notaries.

Miguel Macedo

It was all a coincidence obviously!

In the year 2013 alone, 110,000 Portuguese of all ages, and from all walks of life migrated and initiated ajourney whichwe call saudade, the longing for the return to the mother land. Austerity measures continue to hit Portugal hard, but at least some at the top of the Portuguese political ladder have understood the mechanisms that will allow them to profit from the suffering and the misery of the common Portuguese Joe or in this case João.

Some authors in the past spoke of monopoly capitalism when referring to the uber concentration of capital within the orbit of a few corporations, multinational enterprises, of wealth. For Paul Sweezy, capitalism under Pax Americana in the mid-1960s was far from being the rule of the ‘free-market’ that Adam Smith had theorized. Rather it was an oligarchy, a saturated orgy of the rich and powerful that always reproduced their power through new business ventures and “created” new markets when necessary.

The scandal of the ‘Golden Visas’ underlines the hypocrisy of the extreme right-wing rhetoric, which is in vogue throughout Europe, and is represented in Portugal by the Partido Nacional Renovador (PNR). Hundreds and thousands of poor and toiling African immigrants amass at ‘Fortress Europe’s’ borders; the “wretched of the earth” as Frantz Fanon said. Upon their arrival in Europe they join the ranks of the lowest of the lowest classes, yet form the invisible and voiceless backbone of an economy in shambles.

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We demonise them, tarnish their image. They are the incarnation of all the wrath that the laborious people of Portugal feel. In the meantime multi-millionaire gangsters have made a paradise, coached in the misery of both the Portuguese and the migrant working classes. The focus that the extreme right puts on immigrant populations is a diversion tactic, used as a veil to hide the real illegal immigrants that capitalize on the economic crisis: The ‘Golden’ immigrants, the avatars of the ‘free’ circulation of capital. Unfortunately for them, this inherent contradiction has been unveiled and the emperor is revealed to be naked.

The Golden Visas and the story of Portugal since 2011 is the perfect example of the rise of a new form of capitalism, which can be called ‘casino capitalism.’ It is a mix between libertarian paradise and state-capitalism à la Xiaoping. Its most brutal manifestation is this system of Golden Visas; a rigged lottery which only favours the ‘free’, and the automatization of capital servant of the markets and financial cartels pushed through by a neo-liberal state — the state after all isn’t that bad when it serves the interests of capital!

Within this new economic world everything becomes possible. While millions of young and talented Portuguese leave toiling to put an end to their precarity, the country is being stripped to pieces and sold to the highest bidder. Soon every aspect of Portuguese life will be liberated from the constraints of the state — no regulation whatsoever. In this brave new world modeled through the lense of Atlas Shrugged, everyone will be under the yoke of those that have enough influence and power to make and break the market, those that write the laws of an unfree market.

A luta continua!

NewsPolitics

Last week’s RCMP bombshell dump revealed a few things about the private e-mails of PMO staff and their counterparts in the Senate. For the dozen or so Harper administration staffers, lawyers and spin doctors, the documents give the Canadian public a rare glimpse of the way that the ultra-secretive Harper government operates in a major political crisis.

Though they do not vindicate the Prime Minister or corroborate his wildly implausible story of being completely unaware of what his chief of staff, Nigel Wright, was doing in his attempts to contain the damage being done to the Prime Minister’s brand by Senator and former Harper bagman Mike Duffy’s various acts of fraud. They do not provide the smoking gun type of evidence that would expose the Prime Minister as the mastermind behind botched efforts to put the corruption scandal to bed.

This doesn’t mean Harper’s out of the woods yet. On the contrary, the now infamous Wright quote that his boss was “good to go,” with respect to negotiations he was having involving both the PM’s lawyer Benjamin Perrin & Duffy’s lawyer Allison Payne on the conditions that would be acceptable to all parties concerned, would suggest that there is definitely some fire to go with all the smoke coming out of the Prime Minister’s office at the moment.

While it may still be true (though this would not excuse Harper’s ignorance of the situation) that the Prime Minister had no clue that his right hand man at the time was cutting a $90 000 personal cheque to silence an embarrassing Senator and in the process committing a crime under federal law, it seems that Harper at least knew about the first proposed solution Wright made to pay, out of Conservative Party funds, Duff-man 32K in order to reimburse him for the amount that was being demanded by the Senate Rules committee for illegally claimed expenses related to his secondary residence in PEI. This idea was eventually nixed by President of the party and Senator appointed by Harper in 2009, Irving Gerstein, forcing Wright to find an alternative to, in his words, “close out” an increasingly irksome problem and Senator (Duffy).

Duff-man may be proclaiming his innocence from the bully pulpit, but the documents released by the RCMP make it clear that he was not simply the victim of bad accounting and a vindictive Prime Minister more than happy to throw him and his other former Senate cronies under the bus. In fact, it’s almost hard not to sympathize with Wright who appears to have become rather impatient with the Senator and his lawyer’s constant haggling with the PMO over the terms of his bail out.

More to the point, Duff-man appears to have hatched a cover story involving taking out a line of credit from the bank with the intention of duping the media and public into believing that the this, rather than the cheque from Wright, would be used to repay the Senate. Incidentally, I love Duffy’s cynical insistence on inserting “PEI-isms” into the media lines he was given to deliver.

It’s not all bad news for the government. It appears that at least one staffer, Chris Montgomery, working for then Government leader in the Senate and Cabinet Minister Senator Marjory Lebreton (remember her infamous lashing out at the media over reporting on the scandal as “Liberal elites and their media lickspittles”) tried in vain to prevent the Prime Minister and his minions from imposing their will on the damning Senate Committee report that would have denounced Duffy and his colleagues for their financial recklessness with the tax payer’s money. For this display of integrity, Montgomery earned the scorn of Harper lackey Patrick Rogers who is quoted in the e-mail as saying “This is epic. Montgomery is the problem.”

Indeed, defending the independence of the Senate and democratic institutions against the meddling of the executive is regarded by Harper and his staff as an unforgivable sin.

NewsPoliticsSubcategoriesThe Soapbox

Forget The Sopranos, The Godfather even Goodfellas. Forget guns and sleeping with the fishes.

The Montreal mob has a new weapon in their arsenal. It’s not exciting, flashy or even remotely interesting.

Quite the opposite. They now know how to bore the general public to the point where we all lose interest.

It worked on me. Then, by chance, two people I respect brought up the same thing in the same night: the Charbonneau Commission.

Wait, that’s still going on? Yes, despite a large portion of the general public (and yours truly) loosing interest after the commission claimed the political careers of longstanding mayors Gerald Tremblay and Gilles Vaillancourt.

The sacrificial lambs were thrown to the slaughter…and by slaughter I mean a pretty comfortable retirement and no need to answer any more questions. Corruption problem solved!

But the commission continued, undeterred and unnoticed. Witnesses testified, mainstream media reported on it out of duty not interest.

Yeah, a few times the commission tried to get provocative like when they asked city employee Gilles Vezina if he ever accepted the services of a prostitute as a bribe. But alas, the answer was no, the wine and hockey tickets were enough for him, and he wasn’t high profile enough to warrant pursuing the matter further.

Now, it turns out that one of the witnesses, Martin Dumont, felt pressured and asked for his testimony to be stricken. His lawyer threatened to take the matter to Quebec Superior Court if the request is refused. From there, the Supreme Court of Canada becomes an option.

Following a case up the legal food chain is hard enough to do even when it’s salacious and sexy. This is anything but.

If only it was this easy (image: http://earthenergyreader.wordpress.com)

How do you make something already mired in public apathy less appealing? You bog it down in legal procedure, that’s how. Absolutely brilliant.

If it gets to the Supreme Court, everything could be thrown out. If it does, who will notice and moreover who will care? We’ve already got the big names, who cares about the rest?

But we should care. Those are our roads cracking and overpasses crumbling because of shoddy work done by those who got insider contracts and overbilled the taxpayer. Those are our elected officials and unelected bureaucrats taking bribes from the mob. Those are our streets turned into impromptu rivers that sweep McGill students away for a kayak-less ride down to Sherbrooke. This is our public inquiry that risks disappearing without anyone noticing.

What is supposed to be a battle between right and wrong, public good and corruption has turned into a fight to keep the ratings up. On one side, we have the Charbonneau Commission trying to remain relevant and sexy without any big name talent. On the other, the mob and corrupt officials are working their hardest to get this show cancelled midseason. No syndicated reruns, no DVD box sets, just done and gone.

While this analogy may have almost run its course, so has the Charbonneau Commission. Maybe we should make some sort of petition to keep this show going or at very least start paying attention.

It may seem boring, but when you think about it, bringing down the graft that has been institutionalized in Quebec since the 50s or maybe earlier is probably the sexiest most exciting story possible.

Uncategorized

*This article originally appeared on Rabble.ca.

So I guess now we know what former premier Jean Charest was so worried about. Speculation ran rampant this summer that the curious timing of Quebec’s provincial election was forced by the fear of what would come out as the Charbonneau commission resumed hearings into corruption in the construction industry in mid-September.

It turns out that pre-election bombshell revelations from the likes of Jacques Duscheneau, who alleged that over 70 per cent of political contributions in Quebec consisted of illegal ‘dark money’, were simply the tip of the iceberg.

Over the last several weeks former construction magnate Lino Zambito has blown the lid off of a system which is rotten to its very core. In testimony before the commission he has alleged that Montreal and surrounding municipalities are “closed markets”, where participation in a corrupt system of bid rigging and payoffs is required for anyone seeking municipal contracts.

According to his testimony, the Mafia worked hand in hand with Montreal mayor Gerald Tremblay’s Union Montreal party to defraud taxpayers and profit off of an elaborate system of fraud and bid rigging. The Mafia would take 2.5 per cent off the top of all public works contracts in exchange for operating the system which favoured a select group of contractors. For their part, Union Montreal would take another 3 per cent off the top of each contract.

Tremblay denies the allegations, but at this point is there anyone left in the city who believes a word he says?

To the surprise of few, the rot doesn’t stop at City Hall. Zambito alleged that the same type of collusion and corruption funds political parties at the provincial level, most notably the Quebec Liberal Party. He testified to personally having arranged hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal donations to the Liberals, as well as smaller amounts to the PQ and ADQ (the predecessor of the CAQ). He testified to handing over envelopes stuffed with cash, falsifying the source of supposedly legal donations, and organizing fundraisers that brazenly violated election financing law.

“I fixed contracts, I financed political parties, I corrupted officials,” Zambito testified. “But the system was constructed such that you had no choice … the system is sick and corrupted.”

As usual, the Montreal Gazette‘s Monique Muise is doing a tremendous job of covering all the sordid details in English, so I recommend her archive for blow by blow coverage of the commission’s work.

These new details, predictably enough, have Quebec’s political class in a tizzy. Everyone is shocked, they tell you, shocked and appalled by these terrible things of which they had absolutely no knowledge.

Liberals are huffing and puffing about their besmirched honour, while their provincial rivals seem to be adopting an attitude of, okay, so we did a little bit of this, but the Liberals did more so let’s not sweat (our) small stuff okay?

Meanwhile, Mayor Tremblay looks like he’s living through a nightmare of his own making as he pleads with the populace to ignore the overwhelming evidence that he is a corrupt sleazeball, and take him at his word when he flatly denies involvement in any type of corruption.

Everyone is promising to get to the bottom of things, and clean up the rotten system, but it couldn’t be more clear that all they want to do is slap a band-aid on the problem and sweep it right back under the rug.

At the municipal level, it’s hard to understand how Tremblay hasn’t resigned yet. If there was ever a question that he would stand for re-election in 2013, it has now been answered. As media and citizens alike howl for his head, he seems to be staying on in some vain quest to clear his name, a fool’s errand if ever there was one.

His party looks unlikely to recover from this scandal, and Liberal MP Denis Coderre seems to have delusions of himself as some white knight who will swoop in and be elected mayor. One assumes he’s banking on Quebeckers losing sight of the more distant federal Liberal sponsorship scandal in the haze of pervasive corruption at the municipal and provincial level. It should also be mentioned that Coderre was one of only two opposition MPs to vote with Harper’s Conservatives for a bill which would make it an offence punishable by up to ten years in prison to wear a mask at a protest. Something tells me that’ll come up in this city of civil society and protest.

Vision Montreal leader Louise Harel has taken to the hustings to denounce the scandalous behaviour of her colleagues in Union Montreal, but her denunciations ring a little hollow given that Vision has a track record of corruption almost as sordid. Her former deputy leader Benoit Labonte admitted to taking a $100,000 bribe from crook-extraordinaire Tony Accurso in 2008. After his downfall he alleged that 80 per cent of city hall was controlled by the Mafia, and alleged widespread corruption in his party as well as that of the Mayor.

The one party as yet unbesmirched by corruption allegations is Projet Montreal. Running against corruption and with a bill of ethical health from Justice John Gomery in 2009, they went from one seat to ten and picked up several borough mayoralties. Since that election they have welcomed a number of defectors from Vision Montreal, and now look to be the prime challenger to Coderre’s ascenscion to the mayor’s post.

At the provincial level, I have little confidence in the PQ to clean up this mess, and less still in the Liberals or CAQ. The truth is, without constant pressure and agitation from the population this whole mess will get a new coat of paint and be allowed to continue draining the public purse.

So don’t let this slip your mind. Keep the pressure on the PQ government to do whatever it takes to rebuild trust in our political insitutions. For my money, that starts with a total overhaul of political financing, preferably along a public funding model where all expenses run through the office of the Chief Electoral Officer.

At the municipal level, Tremblay must resign. What does it say about us if we allow a demonstrably corrupt fraudster who has been robbing us blind to continue claiming to represent us?

Write letters to the papers. Call the radio stations. Howl your outrage to the skies. Don’t let him slink off into the sunset, force him out now. Together, we have the power to do just that.

And when it comes time to vote next year, shake up the old patterns. There’s no excuse to vote for Union, and little more to do so for Vision. Our political leaders cannot and will not clean up this mess. Only sustained public pressure will make a dent in this sick and corrupted system.

News

When the Charbonneau commission opens this week dozens of witnesses will testify and be cross examined by representatives from groups as diverse as Hydro Québec to hard core provincial lefties Québec Solidaire. The only oddity with the proceedings will be the conspicuous absence of a single representative from Liberal Party of Quebec. This is rather like having the O.J. Simpson trial without ‘The Juice’ (as he’s sometimes called), testifying before the court. After all, the whole purpose of this inquiry is to establish whether there is any connection between the awarding of juicy pork barrel government construction contracts (corruption never tasted so good!) and the financing of political parties in Quebec.

Yet, the PLQ had no qualms about participating fully in the hearings of Judge Bastarache with regards to the allegations of Charest interfering with the independence of the judiciary by appointing cronies to the bench with the help of former Provincial Justice Minister Bellemare. Ditto, the federal liberal’s at their own inquiry led by Justice Gomery into the Adscam political patronage scheme. So is this a case of LPQ shirking its democratic duty to be accountable to the citizenry then?

Let’s examine the case against them and others, in greater detail. In a report that got leaked by an unknown source, within the governments anti-corruption unit (UPAC) formerly headed by Québec’s answer to Eliott Ness (Jacques Ducheasnau), until he sang like a canary to a parliamentary committee and was promptly given his marching papers. In his report (available online), which does not single out the LPQ, he details the unholy menage a trois between Transport Ministry employees, contractors construction business and engineering firms who get government contracts, then make hefty profits of the deal, ultimately returning the favour by donating to political parties. In the process, biker gangs, organized crime and mafiosos, all take their cuts.

Government cuts to inspectors and engineers exacerbates the situation by putting the government in the difficult position of assessing bids without sufficient expertise to evaluate the costs involved in proposed projects. And like the days of Al Capone’s infamous criminal empire that flourished in Chicago back in the prohibition era of the 1930’s, some of the engineering firms are such cash cows for political fundraising purposes, that they basically become, in the words of an anonymous former political aide, ‘untouchable.’

Naturally, the current Liberal Minister of Transport Pierre Moreau dismissed the problem with his department as being ‘a few bad apples.’

In other related news, the head of the Securité Québec’s escouade Marteau (The hammer squad!) commenting on the recent bust of several high profile ‘business men’ with extensive political connections, namely Paolo Catanio, Frank Zampino and Bernard Trépanier, said that a massive fraud that the men had perpetrated, also involved an unspecified political organization in Québec.

Charest certainly has his hands full these days, what with the city of Montreal rebelling against his authoritarian bill 78, on a nightly basis, and the student strike threatening to spoil the summer tourist season. One can’t help but wonder how all of this might be distracting people from an issue that once was on everyone’s lips, but now seems to be getting a lot less attention. That, of course, doesn’t excuse Charest and his government for their shameful absence from the inquiry that they supposedly committed themselves to.