Former Deputy Prime Minister Nathalie Normandeau knows how to capture our attention. From the first words of his work Standing in the face of injustice, it plunges us into the personal drama of an arrest at 6 a.m., the wait in the interrogation room, the discovery of 14 counts of fraud and conspiracy, the awareness of the collapse of a reputation. Going from government darling to accused number 1 in the great Quebec hunt against political corruption is enough to make you crack. And Normandeau tells us when, how and for how long she breaks down. We understand it. We suffer with it.
“When I went to the car dealership to rent a car, an endorser was required. Twice a company denied me life insurance because of my accusations. The manager of a branch of a financial institution did not deign to meet with me to discuss the possibility of obtaining a personal loan. A credit card company closed my account without notifying me. “
Normandeau convinces when she describes the ploy used by the Commissioner of the Permanent Anti-Corruption Unit (UPAC), Robert Lafrenière, to get him returned to his post. Philippe Couillard was preparing to replace him with Denis Gallant, then Inspector General of Montreal. But Lafrenière anticipates the arrest of Normandeau, the former Liberal Minister Marc-Yvan Côté and several co-accused, to make them coincide with the day of the tabling of the budget on March 17, 2016 and inflict maximum harm on the government in addition to bypass the impending designation of Gallant. The demonstration is based on the testimony of an investigator in the file at UPAC, Mathieu Venne, disconcerted by learning that the arrests were anticipated. If the Couillard government replaced the one who had the courage to arrest a Liberal deputy prime minister, it would appear to want to punish Eliot Ness and protect the fraudster.
There is no doubt that Nathalie Normandeau wanted to be able to prove her innocence at the bar of the tribunal, as she did before the Charbonneau commission. She considered the prosecution sufficiently weak to be exonerated at the time of the preliminary investigation. But prosecutors pulled the rug from under him, skipping this step. She wanted a separate trial from that of the other defendants, whose requests dragged things along. It was refused to him. It is therefore in desperation, after four years of waiting, that she obtains the charges for excessive delay withdrawn.
It was not a question of whether Mme Normandeau had committed ethical faults, but criminal faults. In the state of our knowledge of the evidence, this demonstration seemed difficult to make. This was also the opinion of an anonymous correspondent of Normandeau, presenting himself as a member of the team of the Director of Penal and Criminal Prosecutions (DPCP). He tells her in fascinating emails about the discord that reigns among prosecutors about the quality of evidence.
The scapegoat
The former minister claims to have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Neither criminally, nor politically, nor ethically. But one need only search for the word “Normandeau” in the Charbonneau commission report to draw another conclusion. There is the dark side and the light side of his thirty or so interventions to maximize the subsidies offered to towns in Gaspésie and Bas-Saint-Laurent. On the bright side, these regions need help and Normandeau used a clever channel of generosity. The dark side is called Roche, the engineering house where Marc-Yvan Côté worked, a major supplier of illegal donations of figureheads in fundraising cocktails organized – as is practical – by Normandeau’s chief of staff, Bernard Lortie. In these regions, almost all of the minister’s largesse benefited the projects assembled and delivered by Roche, which she knew.
“Yes, I was a scapegoat,” she wrote. […] I am outraged and shocked to be the one who paid for the PLQ. Who’s scapegoat? She does not want to accuse anyone, especially not Jean Charest, who seems to have been one of the few in the Liberal Party to have supported her in private after her arrest and who, she reveals, once offered to take over from her. the head of the party.
The Mâchurer investigation, still in progress concerning the treasurer Marc Bibeau and Charest, will one day end up giving us the key to the enigma? Affidavits published in January 2020 contain criminally incriminating testimony towards Bibeau (who denies everything and has always defended his integrity) and attest to: conscious and organized use of nominees, cash donations, influence peddling, possession of confidential information.
We are willing to believe that the former mayoress of Maria (Gaspésie) was drawn into an ethically unhealthy culture that she did not invent. She had the misfortune to be one of the most attractive figures in the cabinet and to have her hand on a large tap of grants. But we couldn’t be as lit as Nathalie Normandeau and not know that there was between Roche, the Liberal Party fund and the subsidies it was granting, not a return lift, but a real Ferris wheel, well. oiled. Innocent, Nathalie Normandeau? Criminally, of course. But she was the conscious and enthusiastic cog in a merry-go-round that reeked of patronage and political cronyism. “I’m not so innocent,” sang Britney Spears, whose release we welcome. The chorus also suits Mme Normandeau.
The fact remains that we will only be collectively satisfied when those for whom she was the scapegoat will in turn be in the box of the accused.
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