Charest lawsuit based on 'bits and pieces,' government lawyer says

A Quebec Superior Court judge heard closing arguments Wednesday in former premier Jean Charest’s lawsuit against the province’s attorney general. Charest is seeking $2 million over the leaking of information to the media from an anticorruption investigation.

Lawyer Michel Déom, representing the attorney general, argued before Justice Gregory Moore in the civil trial at the Montreal courthouse that began this week. The former Quebec Liberal Party leader has been attending the proceedings in person and testified on Monday.

“They are tossing out bits and pieces in an effort to convince you that a standard has been broken,” Déom told the judge. “But I have trouble finding which standard exactly was transgressed and by whom. Among the evidence, there is not a lot that came out toward that end.”

Charest filed the lawsuit in October 2020. It originally sought $1 million for the leaks in the Unité permanente anticorruption (UPAC) investigation that began in 2014 and ultimately produced no criminal charges against anyone.

The anticorruption squad probed Liberal Party fundraising while Charest was premier. The probe was based on allegations that surfaced during the Charbonneau Commission on the awarding of public contracts in the construction industry.

In February, UPAC announced it had closed the investigation. One month later, Charest increased the amount he was seeking in the lawsuit to $2 million. On Tuesday, his lawyer, Jacques Jeansonne, argued the attorney general acted in bad faith during the investigation, causing harm to Charest and his family that is still being felt today.

In his statement of claim, Charest notes the name of the investigation, Operation Mâchurer, uses a term defined as “to slander someone” or “speaking ill of someone in order to sully their reputation.”

Some who testified during the Charbonneau Commission alleged Charest’s friend Marc Bibeau offered the heads of construction and engineering firms favourable treatment on bids for government contracts if they donated generously to the party.

Déom argued much of what was reported came out of the Charbonneau Commission and that an article in Le Journal de Montréal central to Charest’s lawsuit did not reveal much about his private life.

The Journal article, published in April 2017, contained details about information UPAC investigators sought pertaining to Charest and Bibeau. For example, investigators asked the Canada Border Services Agency on how many times the two men crossed the Canadian border, and for details on Charest’s passport.

According to the newspaper, UPAC in 2016 tried to obtain warrants to listen in on the men’s conversations, four years after Charest stopped being premier.

“It was a shock to see that article,” Charest testified Monday. “It was an article that the Journal de Montréal and Quebecor made a lot of noise with on all of their platforms.

“It is eye-opening to wake up in the morning and see yourself presented as a criminal, because that is the inference. I had to go into work that morning and I had work colleagues (where he served as a consultant for a private company) who saw it, everyone had seen it. It was frustrating but it was also humiliating.

“The damage was done.”

He called the leaks coming out of UPAC “systemic.” He said he has had to continue reliving the allegations and feels like he is trapped in a circle whenever controversies involving UPAC arise.

“It weighs very heavily on me. I wake up in the morning and say ‘put your happy face on and go to work’,” he said. “It’s like being in a Ponzi scheme, where it’s one investigation on top of another investigation on top of another investigation.

“Every time they bring up an investigation they mention the investigation at the base of everything — the investigation into me.”

Charest said he didn’t want to file the lawsuit and asked instead for an apology from the provincial government. At first, he said, there were no replies to his request. Then, after the lawsuit was filed, the CAQ government approached him and asked Charest to recommend what could be done. But, he said, his name was dragged out again, by the provincial government, in October 2021.

While being asked questions about UPAC in the National Assembly, then deputy-premier Geneviève Guilbault rose to answer one of them while holding a copy of a book published by Quebecor called PLQ Inc. Charest’s face is on the cover of the book and Charest said it brought up all the allegations brought up by Operation Mâchurer in the past. Guilbault held up the book while saying the leaks out of UPAC started while the Charest Liberals were in power.

“It was really disrespectful,” Charest said of Guilbault’s gesture. “It is really scornful of the institutions and of someone’s private life, of the courts, the National Assembly. I have never seen anything like it. I had been a parliamentarian for 28 years. I had never seen something so odious as that.”

Charest said that, to this day, he still doesn’t know if his conversations were ever recorded.

On May 4, 2017, Robert Lafrenière, head of UPAC at the time, was called to testify before a committee at the National Assembly and conceded the leaks came from the anticorruption squad. He told the committee he had ordered an administrative investigation and said: “I ardently hope to reach a conclusion and that we find the bandit who did this.”

On Wednesday, Déom argued the people who manage UPAC investigations are Sûreté du Québec officers and “they are isolated” from government figures like the public security minister and the attorney general when it comes to information gathered in an investigation.

In his statement of claim, Charest notes the provincial government did not launch an investigation into the leaks until more than a year later, on Oct. 25, 2018. The investigation was handed to two people working under Lafrenière at UPAC; Charest argues it should have been handled by the Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes (BEI) or another police force.

Charest argues UPAC’s actions demonstrated a “flagrant absence of will to correct the situation and to take the necessary measures the law calls for” to protect personal information.

After Déom completed his arguments, the judge said he will deliberate on the matter before delivering his decision.

pcherry@postmedia.com