JEAN CHAREST
Of Corruption, Élite Rule and the Winter of Representation
“The paternalism of power taught that we had to erase social differences and unite the great Québec family behind the single banner of the language. This sugary unreality devoid of all sense has been shattered to pieces.”1
— Patrick Tillard and Jasmin Miville-Allard, “Une clarté qui envahit” (my translation)
In recent years, Québec’s political narrative has been dominated by issues of corruption and abuse of power that have turned a floodlight on the unsavoury proximity between the state and moneyed élites. In seeking to grasp why Québec became a battleground in the global fight to restore collective and democratic rights, the government of Jean Charest is thus a fitting point of departure. A former leader of the centre-right Progressive Conservative party in Ottawa, Charest had arrived to power in 2003 on a pro-business platform that promised to “reinvent Québec” by slashing taxes and reducing the size of government.2 Much as elsewhere, the neoliberal discourse that had been gaining sway in prior decades became hegemonic over the nine years of Charest’s rule, as Québec’s social-democratic heritage, traditionally drawn on from both the left and right, was targeted by right-wing reformers for whom “modernization” meant dragging the province into line with “an imagined North American standard.”3 Québec in these years saw the emergence of neoliberal think tanks and university research centres, as well as the growing presence of neoliberal pundits and columnists in the corporate press.4
Who speaks for society?
Despite the overwhelming hold of neoliberal ideas over the élites, a profoundly rooted attachment remained to the communitarian conception of Québec society bestowed by the Quiet Revolution, echoes of which persisted in the political class. In Québec’s more neo-corporatist political culture — where society is viewed more as an agglomeration of interest groups than individuals — premiers generally sought out a degree of consensus among social partners before engaging significant reforms. High-profile summits, such as those surrounding the Bouchard government’s “déficit zéro,” were convened to rally civil society to collective efforts whenever possible, with each group (labour, business and the social economic, or “third,” sector) represented by their delegates gathered around a common table.5
Charest’s view of society broke sharply with this framework and embraced the neoliberal vision that recognized the individual’s as the sole legitimate political voice, to be expressed, in his view, through the ballot box alone.6 Charest thus abandoned the consensus-building summits of his predecessors and consistently rejected dialogue with labour unions, community organizations and other social groups who traditionally entertained cordial relations with the state.7 To talk with them would have been to acknowledge the representative legitimacy of social entities, which Charest was determined to discredit.8 Quebecers, he argued, had through the expression of the ballot box approved the entirety of his electoral program and chosen him over “corporatist interests.”9 The collectivities that had long been viewed as the building blocks of Québec society were thus reduced in one foul swipe to private interest groups to be bulldozed over and disdained. “There is no such thing as society,” said Margaret Thatcher famously. “There are individual men and women and there are families.” Following in the truest Thatcherite traditions then, Charest’s ultimate aim, cloaked in a vow to reengineer the state, was to break the back of social forces and whittle away the cultural currency of collectivism, entrenching in its stead the neoliberal (non)society populated by families and individuals alone. This rupture in the province’s political discourse was where the campaign would begin.
In its governance style, the Charest government thus broke significantly with the traditions of the province, yet only in a way that took to its logical extreme the province’s transformation of recent decades: Democracy too would be brought in line with the new Anglo-Saxon standard whereby each citizen speaks alone, and only once every few years. The neoliberal crusaders across North America and Britain had fought hard to reframe labour unions, environmental organizations and other citizen associations as obstacles to prosperity and illegitimate private forces who selfishly block the way to reforms “approved” by the electorate.10 Thatcher’s infamous quip was nothing if not tactically astute: The more these social groups are weakened, the stronger the leader’s hand in imposing her or his agenda on a divided collectivity, with the purely individualist and electoralist idea of democracy serving as the adequate legitimation. Within its historic context, Québec’s lurch toward autocracy thus appeared as the audacious next step on the decades-long road to the erosion of once-mighty social forces, and all to the benefit of an ever more powerful economic élite.
The “democracy” that breeds autocrats
This acceleration of the neoliberal revolution must also be viewed within the continuity of twentieth-century top-down structures of power, as Charest’s combative unilateralism was effectively the product of the fusion of the two. Even the neo-corporatist model, after all, is in practice a system anchored to the hierarchies within each group, where those at the top are the ones invited to the table. This elitist democratic culture has long been the rule in Québec, and in 2012 it found itself at the centre of the carrés rouges’ challenge to the establishment’s power. The province’s traditional penchant for social-group oriented approaches only softened this basic tendency toward authoritarian governance; it did little to alter its fundamental parameters. Make no mistake: All efforts at consensus-building aside, at the end of the day there has always been but one Chef.
In Québec’s modern history, premiers have exhibited little patience in having their authority challenged outside of elections: In 1972, Liberal Premier Robert Bourassa brought down the hammer of emergency back-to-work legislation only ten days into a general strike launched by the 210,000-strong Front commun intersyndical in response to failed labour contract negotiations between the government and public sector workers. The three national union leaders were jailed for a year for urging members to defy the injunction, inciting massive demonstrations across the province and launching a full-blown social crisis, which ultimately tipped in favour of labour.11 In 1982, PQ Premier René Lévesque, who is widely considered the most democratic premier the province has known, suppressed a fourth action in a decade by the Front commun in response to his government’s public sector pay cuts. Yet this time, the strike action was easily stifled, when the PQ passed emergency back-to-work legislation, decreed 20 percent salary cuts and levelled steep fines at labour leaders for inciting civil disobedience.12
Charest, in this light, fit the mould of a leader within Québec’s élite-representative framework: Confronted by a mass contestation in a province prone to shows of force from the street, he responded with autocratic muscle aimed at reasserting his government’s authority. In this old world, the legitimacy to wield power derives largely from the transaction of voting, with the complex and evolving realities of public opinion cast aside in favour of fixed “mandates” interpreted freely by the victors. The votes cast for the opposition parties, however, even when the majority, are often ignored. In short, the relation between the institution of voting and democratic decision-making is tenuous at best, a fact that is accepted for one reason: that our nineteenth- and twentieth-century system of representative democracy is based first and foremost on the maintenance of order, not consensus. That is why under our electoral system, electoral minorities are translated into parliamentary majorities as a matter of design, with the outcome in every case a perversion of the popular will, and even more so with abstention rates considered. But of course, all electoral systems become divorced from the popular will the second after the freeze-frame is captured, if indeed they ever channel it at all: Within the forced simplicity of partisan politics, the sacrosanct Ballot Box is a choice between sealed boxes, where voters can’t select elements from among different candidates and yet are disenfranchised for years after providing carte blanche to their choice.
In less delicate terms, this idea of democracy may be called the theory of the elected dictatorship. Such an adversarial dynamic is of course not unique to Québec but is especially endemic to Westminster parliamentary regimes where a first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system rewards minorities with power that is undivided and absolute. The winner-take-all Westminster model, which fails most spectacularly in multipartite environments, thus calls for high-minded leaders capable of exercising a good deal of decency and restraint. Such statesmanship is vital to respecting the fundamental tenet of the consent of the governed, which at a bare minimum demands engaging and working with opposition parties who almost invariably represent the majority of voters in FPTP systems. Yet in practice, the politicians bred by our structures of representative governance have been precisely the opposite and have not hesitated to wield the full weight of the power we entrust so naïvely in their hands.
Charest’s interpretation of representative legitimacy may well have been more autocratic than that of his predecessors, who rarely behaved in so consistently heavy-handed a manner. Yet the differences were ultimately of degree, with each authoritarian excess allowed and even encouraged by the laws and institutions in place. In a sense, Charest’s governance then at least had the benefit of crystallizing the essential juxtaposition between old and new ideas of democracy. Thus during the student crisis, the government’s intransigence belied a bunker mentality that saw Charest consistently reducing the struggle to a binary choice, with the order of “democracy” (read: the irrevocable authority of electoral rules) on one side and the chaos of “the street” (which challenged this authority) on the other. In the eyes of the Liberal premier, the hundreds of thousands of citizens in the streets embodied not the voice of the people, but the dangerous and destabilizing threat of mob rule.13 To him, the premier and her or his handpicked ministers were to be the sole defenders of Quebecers’ democratic rights and the lone bulwark that would protect them from themselves. La démocratie, c’est moi.
The pyromaniac premier
Charest’s decade-long tenure was marked by a seemingly unending string of provocations and a governance style that frequently met opposition with denial and derision. The Liberals had barely been elected in 2003 when he sparked the first crisis by loosening protections in the Labour Code pertaining to subcontractors. The move raised the ire of labour unions and incited a large province-wide mobilization that launched a phase of persistent hostilities with civil society. The premier’s very liberal understanding of the mandate conferred to him even angered many who had supported his party: Within nine months of Charest coming to office, the opposition PQ was already comfortably ahead in the polls, and dissatisfaction toward his government had soared to a record 72 percent by May 2004.14 These opinion polls, which remained fairly consistent through his whole time in office, never entered into the equation. Nor did the fact that 63 percent in one poll performed in his first year, including 28 percent of Liberals, felt that Charest was not respecting the mandate accorded him by voters.15 Duly elected, the premier soldiered onward.
Acrimonious protests were a regular feature of the landscape through the Liberals’ first term, with critics reproaching the “pyromaniac premier” of dogmatic manners that consistently stoked anger and social unrest.16 Whether the imposition of a natural gas plant outside the town of Beauharnois or the partial privatization of Mont-Orford National Park to build condos at its summit, vociferous opposition, both from locals and from within his own government (environment minister Tom Mulcair, now leader of the New Democratic Party, resigned over the Mont-Orford issue), too often failed to slow the Liberal bulldozer. In the face of overwhelming opposition on Mont-Orford, the government invoked parliamentary closure to force a bill through the Assemblée nationale in 2006, thereby paving the way for promoters by removing the area in question from the national park. The penalty for showing such contempt for his opposition was steep, however, as Quebecers showed little desire to go along with Charest’s designs: In the 2007 election, the Liberal government suffered a historic setback when it was reduced to minority status, the first in Québec since 1878.17
It took this stinging rebuke to push the government to halt the sale of lands in Mont-Orford and maintain their public character. (After years of delays, the Charest government finally reintegrated the 459 hectares into the park in 2010.) Yet such was the pattern under Charest, where retreats came rarely and only as a reluctant last resort. In the same vein, we’ll recall that it took the student movement over a year of protesting and a (then) historic record of seven weeks of striking in 2005 to force the government into partially reinstating $103 million a year that was cut from student grants (and only with the last-minute help of the federal government). The $500 per semester increase to fees that followed the Liberals’ re-election in 2007 did indeed keep with a campaign promise. Yet it was one that was endorsed, in the most generous interpretation, by a mere 33 percent of voters — the lowest ratio to support the party since the Canadian federation was born in 1867.18 With polls in fact showing more than 60 percent opposition to the measure, the hike came without so much as a debate in the Assemblée nationale and was imposed unilaterally through a modification to the Ministère de l’éducation’s internal budget regulations.19
Many other instances abounded in the same direction, namely from the top down. Time and again, Charest waged war against central actors of Québec society who presented a resistance to his agenda of commodifying the public good. And time and again, the unprecedented degree of popular opposition it stoked brought his government to the precipice of defeat, only to be re-elected by a public with a bitter lack of credible alternatives. Perhaps nothing was more emblematic of the Charest government’s autocratic culture than its cavalier abuse of closure, a parliamentary tactic that cuts off debate and circumvents the opposition parties by forcing legislation through the Assemblée nationale on the strength of the government’s artificial majority of seats. Charest passed no fewer than thirteen (often highly unpopular) bills in this way.20 Yet while Charest certainly pushed the envelope further than past premiers, it’s also important not to overstate the extent to which Charest departed from Québec’s democratic norms: Charest’s predecessors, after all, were far from shy in their invocation of the same tactics. Indeed, in the context of an electoral system that rewards minorities with absolute power, the very existence of so undemocratic a tool resounds as a stinging condemnation of our representative system. Its foundations, the vestiges of another time, were built first and foremost not to support democracy, but authority — its opposite. And in this light, Charest is far from an anomaly of our representative system. In truth, he was perhaps its purest creation.
Austerity overdrive:
The cultural revolution of the capitalist class
In the face of massive popular opposition during his first term, Charest was forced to moderate his ambitions of “reinventing” a society that showed little interest in being reinvented. Charest learned an important lesson, writes sociologist Éric Pineault: that in a society whose identity since the sixties has been shaped by “progressive nationalism and social-democratic exceptionalism,” it was “politically untenable” to impose “the complete commodification of public services” — without the legitimating factor of “a major fiscal shock or crisis.”21 That crisis arrived in 2008. In the wake of a new wave of austerity measures launched across the United States and Europe to respond to the “Great Recession,” the chance to press the government’s foot on the neoliberalizing accelerator was not one the Liberal leader would lightly pass up.22
Starting in 2008, government-commissioned reports began to take aim at what they termed Québec’s “free-lunch culture,”23 a deeply ideological bit of sloganeering that could only be read as a frontal assault on Québec’s social programs. Immediately, it became apparent that those expecting a sober and thoughtful analysis of Québec’s finances were looking to the wrong government. The Montmarquette task force formed in 2008 was to serve as a public relations tool, directed by its narrow mandate to elaborate a “new user fee policy” that the government was a priori determined to implement.24 The fact that the authors, including economist Claude Montmarquette and former PQ minister Joseph Facal, were high-profile members of the “Lucides” group, which advocates for the commodification of public services, only amplified the inevitability of its recommendations. This was no study at all, but a legitimation campaign, Phase One.
The second phase of the exercise would be launched less than two years later, when another government-commissioned report — in which Montmarquette again participated along with three other economists, almost all associated with the neoliberal think tank CIRANO headed by Montmarquette — reinforced the push toward flat fees on all public services.25 Yet even more notable than the renewed audacity of the austerity drive was the disingenuous and manipulative framing of the “problem”: the culture of the “free lunch”? No public service has ever been free, as the authors rightly point out in their guise.26 As a fundamental principle of social justice, rather — one common to all Western welfare states established after the Great Depression — services are funded through income taxes so as to account for each citizen’s ability to pay. It’s a fairly simple and widely nurtured principle, and yet there it was in black on white in the 2008 report: The “perception that a service provided by the government must be free of charge,” the task force wrote, is a “myth” that they were determined to deconstruct. Citizens, in their view, were “not informed about the real cost of the public services they use” and were therefore prone to engage in abuses.27
It’s hard to find flaw with their diagnosis of a civic knowledge deficit in contemporary democracies. Their prescription, on the other hand, instantly gave the game up. In line with the government’s ideological objectives, the task force’s mandate was not to reflect on the serious educational reform needed to rebuild the civic values that have been eroded by the consumerist “me” society — a long-overdue initiative if ever there were one. No, the authors were not hired by the minister of education but of finance, and with one aim: to legitimize a paternalistic policy that simply smacks citizens with enough fees until they get the message. The stepped up Liberal agenda post-2008 thereby announced a radical transformation. Yet politics obliging, the question was never phrased as a clear choice between progressive and regressive taxation, and no debate was ever had on the fair share that could be expected of corporations or the rich. The straightjacket of neoliberalism not only prevented any discussion of raising income or corporate taxes; it also shielded successive governments’ moves to shower the wealthiest segments of society with ever greater largesse. From 2000 to 2010, PQ and Liberal governments alike ceded $8.9 billion worth of revenues through consecutive cuts to income and corporate tax rates. So much that by 2013, the combined federal-provincial corporate rate had tumbled from 45.6 percent in 2000 to 26.9 percent — thirteen points lower than the average in the United States28 — with the provincial portion accounting for but 11.9 percent.29 Yet the Charest government’s “cultural revolution”30 announced in the 2010 budget imposed flat user fees totalling $3.5 billion, justified on the pretext that the state lacked the money to fund the essential services.31
The Liberal alternative took the form of sharp increases in tuition fees, new health care premiums and per-visit fees, daycare charges, school taxes and increased sales tax and electricity rates, which all shot up under Charest’s watch. In the wake of the Liberals’ 2010 austerity budget, fifty thousand citizens poured into the streets as dissatisfaction with the government soared to 77 percent, yet the Liberals never flinched nor ever feigned to open a social dialogue.32 Instead, the 2011 budget pushed ahead with an emboldened agenda of austerity reforms, confirming and specifying the draconian scale of the tuition hike announced in the budget a year earlier. The opposition PQ galloped into a distant lead, yet the Liberals never once paused to acknowledge or address the scale of the opposition.33 That, after all, would have been to acknowledge the presence of alternatives and to undermine the auras of inevitability that shielded the offensive. Charest took his lessons from the Baroness well: There is no alternative. User-pay was simply decreed the new model of the Québec state by dishonest default and sold as a matter of sound financial managerialism neutral of all values or social choices.34
It was the classic self-engineered prophecy of the neoliberals’ designs. And quite naturally, as the tax burden has shifted from the top of the pyramid toward the bottom, wealth inequalities have soared. Low-income Quebecers with a child in daycare today devote more than 12 percent of their after-tax revenue on public services, while those earning more than $194,500 devote 1.08 percent for the same — and those earning more than $305,000, only 0.68 percent.35 This is the direct and deliberate effect of services that are charged at the same price for the rich and poor alike and the culmination of a trend initiated at the dawn of the neoliberal age: Between 1976 and 2006, the bottom half of income-earners in Québec saw their revenues decline, while the top 10 percent increased theirs by 24 percent, bringing the gap between rich and poor to its highest level in at least thirty years.36 And that, says social theorist David Harvey, Éric Pineault and others, is precisely the point. Broad-based economic growth has always been secondary to neoliberal economics, and austerity policies in stagnation-engulfed Europe have even been a “complete disaster” in the judgment of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. “Though facts keep staring them in the face,” pro-austerity European leaders “continue to deny reality,” he writes.37 That is because it is not reasoned policy, says Pineault, but a stubborn “ideology of legitimation” deployed to rationalize the restoration of “hegemonic class power by the economic elite.”38 Dogmas seldom like facts that don’t fall into line.
Few things could stand as an effective emblem of the new governance regime as well as the resource exploitation plan that was touted as Charest’s legacy project and that became cast centre stage in the student struggle of 2012. Much like the government’s full-throttle (and highly unpopular) backing of the shale gas industry in its final mandate, the equally controversial Plan Nord — which the Marois government largely maintained in rebranded form and the current Liberal government is set to “relaunch” — was (and is) the expression of a vision that replaces the broad notion of the public good with a narrow form of economic development skewed toward corporations. Charest’s twenty-five-year plan foresaw tens of billions of dollars in public funding to the near-exclusive benefit of foreign resource sector giants, yet bearing highly questionable financial and social returns for the province as a whole.39 Royalties limited to 16 percent were to be calculated based on each mine’s profits rather than the volumes extracted, and the public purse was (and is) responsible for post-mine restoration, which already amounted to over $1 billion as of 2012.40 All of this was unfolding in a context where a 2009 report by the auditor-general of Québec found that fourteen of the twenty-four mining companies then operating in the province had not paid a single cent of royalties for seven years.41 In sum, this is a mining regime that does more than merely allow the private plundering of non-renewable public resources: The government in this system is an active partner in the pillaging and an immoveable ally not of the people, but of the corporate plunderers.
The “democracy” that breeds corruption
Charest’s undemocratic governance style was only half the story explaining his unprecedented unpopularity in the province. Beneath the surface of the government’s heavy-handed manners and intimate proximity to the business milieu stewed suspicions of unsavoury practices running rampant in the backrooms of power.
The suspicions seldom lacked sources to nourish them. Story after story surfaced in the press portraying apparent instances of collusion between the Liberal Party and firms who paid their way, often illegally, into the government’s good books. It should come as little surprise, moreover, that the scandals were in many cases preceded by measures that weakened checks and balances and centralized power in the government’s hands. Immediately upon coming to office in 2003, the premier gave cabinet control over the nominations of judges, thereby politicizing a process that for decades had been kept relatively independent of such pressures.42 Separately, on three occasions, in 2003, 2007 and 2009, Charest loosened regulations governing conflicts of interest involving cabinet ministers and the companies they or their relatives own, including those receiving public contracts from their own ministry.43 These troubling moves were early signs of a culture of impunity deepening its roots within the Liberal Party, and in retrospect boded nothing well for the sequence of things to come.
Charest’s final term saw the storm clouds only darken as they massed relentlessly over the government’s head. A string of accusations and revelations by opposition parties, a former Liberal justice minister, journalists and the electoral watchdog all pointed to hundreds of thousands of dollars donated — much of it illegally — to both the Liberals and PQ over the years by engineering and construction firms who were awarded lucrative contracts by the state, often in the absence of a call for tenders.44 With the government submerged in a swamp of suspicions, another case of abuse was uncovered in December 2011 by the provincial auditor-general that placed the minister of families (and later of education), Michelle Courchesne, at the eye of another storm. After centralizing authority for allocating daycare permits in her office, the minister rejected 3,505 places recommended by civil servants in 2008 while granting 3,700 that they had refused, with a large number of the beneficiaries represented by private promoters who donated nearly $300,000 to the Liberal Party between 2003 and 2008.45
With each fresh allegation, Charest and his ministers reacted with vehement denials and at times threats of legal action to protect their sullied reputations.46 Yet the government’s fits of righteous indignation as they lashed out at critics invariably fell on deaf ears. Cynicism toward the Liberals was at an all-time high, and their behaviour in power invited little sympathy from the public. Over the years, three government ministers erroneously affirmed on separate occasions that businesses could legally donate to political parties in Québec, a practice that was banned by the Lévesque government back in 1977.47 Few things, perhaps, emblematized the government’s insouciance for ethics with such utter clarity.
With public trust in the government unravelling at the seams, the premier’s personal credibility underwent several onslaughts from which he would never recover. It wasn’t helped when in March 2010, former justice minister Marc Bellemare accused Charest of “lying like he breathes” when the premier denied knowing about illegal financing and trafficking of influence at the Liberal Party. Bellemare insisted he possessed evidence of having broached the subject with the premier numerous times while he was in government in 2003 and 2004.48 Nor was it improved in May of 2011, when Charest’s former environment minister, Tom Mulcair, told the press that Charest vetoed an environmental protection law because it would have angered Laval Mayor Gilles Vaillancourt by protecting valuable land from development. The Liberals needed Vaillancourt for the elections, Charest reportedly told Mulcair. This is the same mayor, often nicknamed the “king of Laval,” whose quasi-unchallenged twenty-three-year reign came crashing down in a spectacular heap when he became the first mayor in Canada to be arrested in office for “gangsterism.” The former mayor is accused of being at the head of criminal stratagems involving corruption and collusion dating back to 1996.49
Most damaging to the government’s credibility, however, was its tone-deaf response to the public outrage that rose in tandem with each new scandal. Faced with quasi-unanimous calls for a full public inquiry into the construction industry, Charest twice gambled on half-measures aimed at appeasing public opinion. In February 2010, the government named former Montréal police chief Jacques Duchesneau to head a new anti-collusion taskforce within the Ministère des transports (MTQ) that was initially provided with no mandate to produce a report, nor any police powers or devoted resources — not even a computer or a vehicle (months later, its resources and mandate were expanded).50 In the interim, however, calls for a full public inquiry only grew louder, including from Duchesneau himself, who upon his appointment insisted that the creation of the Unité anticollusion (UAC) did nothing to diminish the necessity of a full inquiry.51 So in February 2011, the government again deflected such calls by creating a new “super-unit” under the Ministère de la sécurité publique, which absorbed the UAC and drew from a wide array of ministries and existing structures. This time, the special unit was invested with broad powers of investigation and recommendation, as well as a permanent budget and a staff of nearly two hundred. In parallel, the ministries of justice and public security announced the joint creation of a special bureau of thirty prosecutors devoted to combatting corruption and malfeasance.52
The creation of the Unité permanente anticorruption (UPAC) would prove a major step in the fight against corruption, as their high-profile visits, searches, seizures and arrests regularly fuelled the headlines of media outlets across Québec. Yet far from neutralizing the issue politically, the troubles for Charest were only beginning. In September of 2011, an Earthquake shook the grounds beneath the political establishment when the report of the MTQ’s Unité anticollusion was leaked to Radio-Canada by Duchesneau himself, who after meeting with transportation minister Sam Hamad feared the government would shelve the report.53 The Duchesneau Report’s shockwaves rippled out to the furthest reaches of the province, offering a sinister portrait of corruption that had found a comfortable seat at the highest echelons of power.
Indeed, to Québec’s viewers and readers sitting at home, the facts, as laid down in the report, proved more compelling, and far more unsettling, than fiction. The Duchesneau task force uncovered a system of an “unsuspected scale” that had seen organized crime massively infiltrate the industry, diverting public funds to line the pockets of criminals while producing an explosion in the costs of public infrastructure works.54 In this sordid state of business-as-usual, many construction companies and engineering consultancy firms maintained regular relations with organized crime. In certain domains, criminal organizations achieved a stranglehold, with one Hells Angels insider testifying that “everything asphalt in Montréal and around it, we have it all.”55 Shocking passages of that sort filled the pages of the Duchesneau Report, which drew from testimony from a wide range of actors in its rigorous outline of the clandestine system’s inner workings. “Everyone is scared,” confided one anonymous source in describing the climate of fear and intimidation that reigned. And with the mafia and biker gangs everywhere, said the witness, you’re wise “to mind your own business.”56 It was all enough to send an icy shiver down Québec’s collective spine.
Among the key findings, engineering consultancy firms were said to be deeply implicated in the organized deception, engaging in the routine inflation of cost estimates to make room for the inevitable kickbacks down the line, known as “extras” in the parlance of the milieu. The practice is so commonplace that many firms had taken to employing “specialists in extras” on their permanent staff, who took a 10 percent cut of the amount they wrested from the government.57 Even those construction companies without ties to organized crime were described by the report as functioning like cartels themselves, manoeuvring aggressively and colluding among themselves to eliminate the competition.58 With ten entrepreneurs responsible for 39 percent of road works in the province and 68 percent of all contracts for professional services being claimed by ten firms alone, the shadowy causes of the overwhelming concentration in the industry suddenly stepped into daylight.59
Most damaging for the government, however, was the report’s findings that targeted the political class, which was far from spared the shrapnel from the explosive revelations — quite the contrary. A former political advisor testified that the province’s political parties were massively funded by construction companies and engineering consultancy firms, who gained privileged access to decision-makers in return and royal treatment to match.60 The decades-old ban on political donations from businesses was thus frequently circumvented by the widespread stratagem known as “prête-noms” (name-lending), which had long been among the worst kept secrets in Québec political circles. The report’s findings fit perfectly with what police captain Éric Martin of the anti-corruption Escouade Marteau told La Presse in February 2011:
To advance construction projects or for them to be authorized, [the firms] have to finance political parties. They will ask collaborators or employees to commit fraud by deceit, falsehood or other means. They will fabricate false invoices or charge for services never rendered.61
According to the testimony garnered by the Unité anticorruption, political parties were far from victims in the game, nor even hesitant partners in the trafficking of influence: party bagmen routinely went knocking on the doors of engineering consultancy firms and construction companies, actively nourishing the rot at the core of our democratic structures.62 In 2013, La Presse even uncovered Charest’s agendas from his time as Liberal opposition leader in 2001, which depict a leader engaged first-hand in the door-knocking targeting firms and offices in Montréal. Charest’s spokesperson of course insisted all donations were legal, but the specific targeting of engineering and other firms leaves ample room to doubt that individuals were the ones whose wallets the Liberal leader had in his sights.63
Separate from political parties, the official government apparatus was far from impermeable. The employees at the Ministère des transports, along with those in the engineering consultancy firms, often leaked privileged information to select entrepreneurs so as to favour them in calls for tenders.64 The ministry’s lack of vigilance and expertise, which has been hollowed out by years of outsourcing to the private sector, effectively provided free rein to engineering consultancy firms to exploit and manipulate the MTQ and allowed for corruption to flourish right under its nose. Even when the MTQ would opt to challenge the claims of entrepreneurs, they bully the government by launching civil lawsuits, knowing that the ministry had the practice of reaching settlements out of court. In short, the government’s main point of contact with the industry had been gradually defanged and left at the mercy of criminal elements with far greater resources, skill and resolve.65
The depth and breadth of the systemic corruption shocked even the seasoned Duchesneau, and the ominous conclusions he drew seemed aimed at preempting any doubts as to the urgency of the situation. “If there were to be an intensification of influence-trafficking in the political sphere,” he warned, “then we would no longer be simply talking about criminal activities on a marginal or even a parallel scale: We could suspect instead an infiltration and even a takeover of certain functions of the state or municipalities [by organized crime].”66 As one may imagine, the wave of public indignation that rose up to meet the release of the report was matched only by the volume of the alarm it had raised.
The Duchesneau task force was intended as a preventative tool and lacked the authority to publish names of companies and individuals in the report. To this day, no one has yet been convicted of any crime, though many big names in the construction and political worlds have been arrested and charged. Yet the court of public opinion had seen and heard quite enough: When Angus Reid asked Quebecers in February 2013 whether they suspected nine of the province’s post-Duplessis premiers of being involved in corruption, Charest sat alone in his unenviable corner with 76 percent answering in the affirmative. Robert Bourassa, Jacques Parizeau and Pauline Marois all hovered around fifty percent, while René Lévesque fared best at 33 percent.67 In matters of trust, it rarely gets worse for a government than this, and in the case of Charest, his behaviour did little to reassure. Faced with overwhelming public pressure and unanimous calls from the opposition to call a public inquiry into the construction industry, Charest, true to type, stonewalled inexplicably for two years. The government finally ceded to pressure one month later, but it was only after the first iteration was panned for lacking teeth that Charest reversed course days later and invested the new Charbonneau Commission with full powers of subpoena.68 The Commission adjourned in November 2014 and has until April 19, 2015, to submit its final report.
Servants of money: Power in a Potemkin democracy
With cynicism and voter abstention at all-time highs, it’s time the ritual head-shaking made way for hard and honest conclusions: Our élite-based structures have bred corruption in all its forms. For indeed when we understand the term most fully as the diversion of our public institutions and resources for private gain, the phenomenon emerges as a ubiquitous and even integral component of our democracies; its illegal expressions are then but one side of the ugly coin. This is not meant to evoke a caricature of shadowy élites guffawing as they gather around in their VIP lounges to plot against the people. That would be too easy. Yet it is an earnest suggestion: that humans possess an uncanny ability to rationalize that which benefits them and their friends, and even to convince themselves that their own objectives serve the good of the many.
In Québec, scandals alleging various forms of abuse flowed invariably from measures that concentrated power in the government’s hands. Yet while efforts to increase checks and balances and expand transparency may momentarily blunt the system’s natural tendencies, ultimately, they may always prove cosmetic and illusory, for they go against the grain of a model that is by nature hierarchical and closed to grassroots involvement — such is the meaning of the authority vested in our “representatives.” In 2012 the students of Québec, aided by the Indignados and Occupiers before them, gathered the plot. They no longer condemned corruption as a virus that’s infiltrated the political organism, no longer viewed it as an external impurity eating away at otherwise sound foundations. To the CLASSE and its backers, the widening chasm between the people and their democratic institutions had laid bare nothing less than the failures of a twentieth-century idea of democracy that owes more to élite paternalism than any true notion of citizen empowerment.
Whether one agrees with this mounting rejection of the representative paradigm is secondary to acknowledging the underlying reality it reveals: that a generation is fast losing hope that the broken democracy of their parents is reformable and that the chances of restoring its legitimacy grows dimmer with every year. This does not mean that their hope and civic engagement aren’t harboured elsewhere, however, and if anything, the historic events of recent years have forcefully laid such notions to rest. But more, they have painted a historic possibility: for on the centuries-long road to the democratization of Western societies, the present is doubtless a chapter more promising than the last — but may yet, with the dreams of this awakening generation, be remembered as a period darker than the one to come.