2 mars 2004
MARGARET WENTE
Never trash-talk a crack shot.
If only Jean Pelletier had followed this advice, he'd still have his job. Instead, he called Myriam Bédard a neurotic, attention-seeking, lying single mother.
Wrong on all counts.
Wrong target, too. Ms. Bédard is not only an excellent shot, an Olympic gold medalist and a hero in Quebec. She's also quite capable of standing up for herself. Mr. Pelletier, on the other hand, is mixed up in the mother of all scandals as the public is howling for Crowned heads on pikes. What was he thinking? Was he off his meds?
There's only one explanation for Mr. Pelletier's bizarre remarks. He has pushed so many people around for so long that he thought nobody could ever push him back. For the past decade he was the PM's man, doing the PM's work. He had the habit of unchecked power, and old habits die hard.
Mr. Pelletier had to go for all sorts of reasons. For starters, any senior executive who talks as he did to a reporter is demonstrably too stupid to run a railroad.
But the real firing offence was how Via Rail tried to trash Ms. Bédard when she wouldn't play the game.
This was the way Chrétien's men dealt with those who were disloyal. If you crossed them, you were going to get roughed up. Mr. Chrétien, whose friendship with Mr. Pelletier goes back to law-school days, was not known as a street fighter for nothing.
The boss's men also roughed up François Beaudoin, the president of the Business Development Bank. Mr. Beaudoin had the bad grace to try to call a questionable loan the prime minister himself had lobbied for.
The PM's man at the bank -- chairman Michel Vennat, abetted by Jean Carle, the PM's surrogate son -- forced him out and launched a vendetta against him. He was accused of fraud and raided by the RCMP, and lost his pension. Meantime, the BDC, like Via Rail, was being used as a conduit to funnel money to Quebec ad firms.
Mr. Pelletier escaped suspension last week because he wasn't at Via Rail during the worst of the sponsorship abuses. But it's inconceivable that he was in the dark about them. As the prime minister's chief of staff, he was among the most powerful of all the prime minister's men.
He was also in charge of the Liberals' unity strategy. He met constantly with Alfonso Gagliano and Chuck Guité, the civil servant who ran the sponsorship program. His special job was getting rid of people who were no longer useful. That's how he got his nickname, the Silent Executioner.
After many years of loyal service, Mr. Pelletier was rewarded with the chairmanship of VIA Rail in 2001. When the sponsorship scandal broke last month, he denied that Via Rail was mixed up in it. At worst, there had been a certain "lack of rigour" in the paperwork.
Ms. Bédard believed otherwise. When she joined Via's marketing department two years ago, she saw a pattern of billing abuses.
In one instance, she says, the ad agency Groupaction billed $4,000 for removing a logo from some stationery. According to her, Via could have done the work in-house for free. But when she complained, she was branded as not a team player, and was forced out.
Mr. Pelletier wasn't the only powerful executive to badmouth Ms. Bédard. Marc LeFrançois, Via's now-suspended president, called her complaints "unbelievable." "Are these people dreaming?" he asked. "Do they take pills? I don't know."
But if anybody's delusional, he is. Perhaps he doesn't recall that it was he who took a call from Chuck Guité and loaned him $910,000 for a TV series about Rocket Richard. Via later issued a fictitious invoice to hide the transaction. The Auditor-General described it as an elaborate way of paying "for a highly irregular and questionable expenditure" and ensuring that a friendly ad agency got a fat commission.
The systematic corruption of Crown corporations isn't the worst part of the sponsorship affair. The worst part is the pain and suffering inflicted on honest men and women, some of whom, unlike Ms. Bédard, could not afford to quit. Allan Cutler is the civil servant who warned senior officials back in 1996 that his boss, Mr. Guité, was dishing out money to Liberal-friendly firms. His warnings led to a damning internal audit, which led to nothing, except for the dead-ending of Mr. Cutler's career. No doubt he'll have some interesting stories to tell. Meantime, Mr. Guité maintains his cone of silence. Now retired, he is on extended vacation at a horse farm in Arizona.
"I was thinking of all the single woman with children at home, and how they might feel," Ms. Bédard said yesterday in response to the sacking of Mr. Pelletier. "It was not appropriate that he would stay in power."
No, it wasn't. But his sexist slurs were the least of his offences. And ironically, it wasn't the medal-winning shooter who brought him down. Mr. Pelletier shot himself. And he got a bull's-eye.
page mise en ligne le 2 mars 2004 par SVP
