26 mars 2004
Oh, how fired VIA Rail chairman Jean Pelletier must have wished he had bitten his tongue when he was asked last month to comment on Myriam Bédard's assertions that her inside knowledge of sponsorship wrongdoing had cost her position with his crown corporation a few years ago !
Had Pelletier kept his mouth shut and bided his time rather than summarily dismiss the Olympic gold medallist as a "pitiable single mother," he would have emerged on the winning end of her hair-raising appearance in front of the public accounts committee Wednesday afternoon.
Given the outlandish nature of some of her assertions, his credibility would have been more than a match for her own.
While Bédard raised legitimate questions as to whether VIA Rail was getting value for money from Groupaction, the agency in charge of its promotion, she had nothing to substantiate the notion that criminal forces were at play at the highest levels of either organization.
Nor did she bring forward any element of proof that Pelletier, in his capacity as chief-of-staff to Jean Chrétien or subsequently as chairman of VIA, ever directed illegal or improper activities.
If her revelations raised new pressing questions, those would have to do with the process at play on Parliament Hill rather than with whatever went on at VIA Rail.
The following were among her more surprising assertions :
That Canada decided to stay out of the American-led war on Iraq on the basis of advice given to Prime Minister Chrétien by her partner Nima Mazhari.
That ex-VIA Rail president Marc LeFrançois casually told her Groupaction was involved in drug trafficking — a revelation, she said, that later led her to resign from her VIA job rather than accept a transfer to a position within the agency.
That her then-agent Jean-Marc St.-Pierre revealed to her that race-car driver Jacques Villeneuve had secretly received a $12 million (U.S) payment to sport the Canadian logo on his uniform.
All of the above were denied, not only by those considered principals in the sponsorship affair but also by Villeneuve's agent Craig Pollock, as well as by St.-Pierre.
In the normal course of events, they are also the kind of allegations any parliamentary committee worth its salt would have wanted to strenuously challenge. But this is an election year and Bédard is a national hero.
And so, rather than try to fill some of the gaping holes in her testimony, MPs from all political persuasions fell over themselves to congratulate her for her courage in coming forward.
Up to a point, one can understand that many MPs lacked the stomach to pursue the inconsistencies in Bédard's testimony.
Last week, the few Liberals who dared ask mildly critical questions of the Auditor-General were lambasted for doing so.
Bédard's easy committee ride begs a few larger questions.
For one, if she is going to become the poster woman for whistle-blowers, then any public official who has ever had to make difficult choices should live in fear.
It is one thing to make it safe for those who feel they have witnessed some wrongdoing to come forward and another to send the message that anything anyone has to say will be taken at face value.
And then, twice over the course of less than a week, the public accounts committee has been shown to be more of a forum for political grandstanding than fact-seeking, with MPs often more interested in scoring cheap political points than in getting at the truth.
In its haste to stage a public hanging of former public works minister Alfonso Gagliano, the committee neglected to do the basic groundwork that could have led it to subject its star witness to more effective questioning.
As a result, it mostly came across as an episode of the Keystone Cops.
This, in turn, raises questions about the Prime Minister's recent commitment to make all top government appointments subject to a parliamentary review.
If committees are to function like kangaroo courts, their involvement in the appointment process will hardly improve the quality of the nominations.
That is especially true of Supreme Court nominees whose judicial independence will hardly be enhanced by a run through the ideological crossfire of a politically driven committee.
As for Pelletier, he is poised to sue for wrongful dismissal and, had he lost his position at VIA over Bédard's assertions about the sponsorship program, he would probably have a good case.
But he was fired for the kind of sexist remark that no government is likely to tolerate from one who serves at its pleasure and so it remains to be seen whether the courts will vindicate him.
A safe bet, though, is that Bédard is in for the tougher ride she deserves when the judicial inquiry that will look into the sponsorship matter finally calls her to the witness bar.
page mise en ligne le 26 mars 2004 par SVP
