MONTREAL — Jean Charest was smacked with scathing reviews after he unveiled Quebec’s long-awaited inquiry into its construction corruption, with critics queuing up to assail his plan as pointless.
The premier announced a probe this week into allegations of widespread criminality stemming from the province’s multibillion-dollar construction industry.
The inquiry’s model has itself become a source of controversy in Quebec, as politicians, the public and legal experts debated Thursday just how effective it might be.
The commission cannot force people to testify. It has no power to offer potential witnesses legal immunity for their testimony. And it will be held largely behind closed doors.
Many political commentators charge that the probe, headed by well-regarded Superior Court Justice France Charbonneau, won’t dig deep enough.
Montreal’s newspapers carried unflattering front-page headlines like, A Made-to-Measure Commission; An Inquiry Without Teeth; An Emasculated Commission; and A First Step.
Some people are even refusing to call it an inquiry — and instead have come up with a variety of amusing, and difficult-to-translate, French-language nicknames for it.
“This morning there are people breathing a big sigh of relief,” Parti Quebecois Leader Pauline Marois told the legislature.
“But it isn’t the people of Quebec, who are demanding a public inquiry. The people celebrating are those who opposed one — those who had something to hide and who might have been compelled to testify.
“Now they don’t even need to destroy the evidence; Justice Charbonneau can’t even ask for it.
“They’re dying of laughter. But Quebecers aren’t fooled.”
After spending the last two years resisting calls for a probe, Charest finally created one Wednesday outside the legal guidelines set by the province’s law on public inquiries.
He says he’s gone that route in order to protect the integrity of police investigations.
Also Thursday, his government announced dozens of measures aimed at cleaning up public-works contracts following a slew of other reforms over the past two years.
The latest changes will see the Transport Department hire about 1,000 employees to replace the oversight expertise it lost during staff cutbacks in recent years.
The government — which was first elected in 2003 on a promise to “re-engineer” a leaner Quebec public service — now admits the cutbacks may, in some cases, have been a mistake.
The government also announced it will impose new fines on engineering firms experiencing problems with projects, including cost overruns.
It also plans to create a registry of businesspeople ineligible to win public-works contracts because of previous convictions for fraud, corruption or white-collar crimes.
Charest did win some support for his actions Thursday.
Some legal experts backed up his opinion on the inquiry, saying the lack of witness-protection guarantees will allow it to co-ordinate more closely with police investigations.
“Contrary to a lot of people, I think there will be positive results from this inquiry,” said Sylvain Lussier, a lawyer who represented the federal government during the Gomery Commission into the sponsorship scandal.
“I don’t think you get to organized crime through a commission of inquiry. You get to it through police investigations, wire taps, infiltrations — that kind of surveillance.”
Lawyer Simon Potter, a former president of the Canadian Bar Association, said people are rarely prosecuted based on what they tell commissions of inquiry anyway.
Enforcement agencies usually depend on gathering evidence from secondary sources, he said.
“I think the jury’s just still out as to whether the commission will get the kinds of witnesses that it needs and wants,” said Potter, an attorney with McCarthy Tetrault in Montreal.