The National Assembly on Thursday unanimously asked the election commissioner to release all documents and testimonies heard behind closed doors as part of the investigation into the funding of the No camp during the 1995 referendum.

In 2006, Quebec Election Commissioner Marcel Blanchet hired retired Judge Bernard Grenier to investigate wrongdoings committed and uncovered by the No camp The Secrets of Option Canada that Robin Philpot and I published. Robin had just written The stolen referendum.

We had received all the accounting records from the Federal propaganda office. The Canadian auditor assumed they were destroyed shortly after the referendum.

A fishtail end

Judge Grenier held 52 days of hearings from September 2006 to April 2007. He heard 90 witnesses including Daniel Johnson, Jean Charest, Liza Frulla and Lucienne Robillard. Around 4,500 documents were submitted as evidence, including a report by a forensic accountant and nearly 2,000 pages of attachments. Some of their findings were severed: they lay outside the Commission’s constitutional jurisdiction.

The investigator nevertheless concluded that Sheila Copps’ federal heritage agency had illegally spent approximately $539,000 in Quebec during the month of the 1995 referendum.

This is just the tip of the “iceberg of illegalities” committed by the federal government and its accomplices to steal the referendum. The release of the documents will no doubt allow us to pave the way for even bigger scandals, particularly with regard to the involvement of business circles linked to the Liberal Party in the operation.

In fact, Judge Grenier couldn’t examine everything he found. Attorneys for the Witnesses and the Canadian government have raised constitutional questions about his mandate. Judge Grenier was forced to confine his inquiries to the activities of Option Canada and the Council for Canadian Unity that appeared in public documents. This implies that there were therefore other “illegal activities” that he was unable to investigate.

Among the leaders of the operation, Commissioner and Investigator Grenier identifies René Lemaire, General Manager of Option Canada, who he says has made several regulated expenditures without seeking No-camp approval. He also writes that Jocelyn Beaudoin, Director General of the Council for Canadian Unity (CUC), was involved in Option Canada decisions that resulted in unauthorized spending.

And the PLQ in all of this?

As to the role of leaders of the Quebec Liberal Party, Judge Grenier says only that authority figures have “lack of vigilance” over Option Canada’s and the CUC’s illegal activities. Why this honeyed euphemism? He adds that the evidence presented to him was insufficient to draw a negative conclusion against them. We will be able to judge by reading the secret documents.

In any case, the investigating commissioner takes good care of the liberals. He explains that he asked for an extension of his mandate because “he found it difficult to interview witnesses who were directly or indirectly involved in the election campaign”.

However, this group of political thieves knew they were protected by the system. The law prevented the DGE from initiating criminal proceedings against perpetrators because the facts of the case were more than five years old and the statute of limitations had expired.

What to do?

I expect that we will no doubt find disturbing things in the documents and testimonies that are released. But they will also open up new ways of getting to the bottom of things. A commission of the National Assembly should be dedicated to this task.