It took a long time for Premier Jean Charest to come around to acknowledging the need to call a public inquiry into corruption in the province’s construction industry.
For too long he offered too little to deal with a festering situation that clearly could not be corrected through conventional means – “conventional means” being the normal law-enforcement process whereby criminal activity is investigated by the police, who charge suspects on the basis of evidence they have collected and bring them before a court to be tried by due process.
But even with the establishment of two specialized police units, the anti-corruption squad and the anti-collusion squad, not enough culprits were rousted to satisfy the general public, never mind the political opposition.
There was a widespread feeling that not enough was being done to punish the guilty and to cleanse the public-works contracting system of illicit practices.
Even the premier’s initial announcement of an inquiry was widely found wanting, in that the proposed commission was not granted subpoena power to force witnesses to appear for grilling.
The premier’s decision to take this approach was not entirely without merit, at least from a legal standpoint. Undoubtedly the government was advised by legal and police authorities that ongoing investigations and potential prosecutions could be jeopardized by a full-blown probe conducted according to the rules of the province’s public-inquiry act.
(According to those rules, people can be compelled to testify and cited for contempt if they refuse. On the other hand, their testimony cannot be used against them in any subsequent court proceeding. A summons to testify at a public inquiry is, in effect, the inverse of the standard Miranda warning that you have the right to remain silent and anything you say can be used against you. If people who admit to crimes at a public inquiry are prosecuted, the Crown must demonstrate that its evidence in the case was obtained separately from what they admitted to at the inquiry.)
After the Quebec Bar Association joined in the opposition chorus that the inquiry as initially proposed was a toothless contraption – one hopes for reasons other than the fact that public inquiries generate a bonanza of work for lawyers – Charest gave way and announced that inquiry head Justice France Charbonneau would be accorded what powers she deems necessary to do a thorough job, including the power to compel testimony.
It is an extraordinary power that she has been granted, fraught with the possibility that innocent people could be smeared by testimony that could later be revealed to be false, and that conflicts between one witness’s testimony and another’s will not clear the air as much as people expect.
However, given the extent of the corruption problem – as reported by the head of the anti-collusion squad, Jacques Duchesneau – and that deaths have been caused by shoddy infrastructure work, as with the de la Concorde overpass collapse in Laval, extraordinary measures are unavoidable.
That’s something the premier should perhaps have acknowledged before this late date.
The best guarantee that this extraordinary power will be wielded judiciously, as well as effectively, is Charbonneau’s stellar record on the bench and as a crown prosecutor.
She has now been guaranteed the powers necessary to conduct an inquiry that has the potential to get to the root of the problem, and to propose ways to fix the system to the satisfaction of a public that has lost faith in it.
Now is the time to let her get on with it, free from further political gamesmanship, either from the government or the opposition.