The demands for an inquiry into Montreal-area infrastructure construction contracting are growing louder and more insistent. At the least, the Quebec government should now offer a better explanation for its reluctance to consider a full-scale inquiry, one with subpoena powers.
Where there's smoke it is always possible, remember, that there's only a smoke-generating machine. With elections two weeks away, overheated claims and sweeping accusations are not exactly a surprise. And government-funded construction work is a sector always prone to rumours and innuendo.
Still, the claims of wrongdoing just keep on coming, not only in Montreal but across our metropolitan area. Thursday night on a Radio-Canada news program, a masonry-company president asserted that 14 firms have colluded to keep minimum contract bids high. The program cited a 2008 Transport Canada study that showed that highway-construction costs are consistently much higher in Quebec than elsewhere in Canada. Cost overruns, sometimes large ones, have become the norm in Quebec public-sector construction work.
In the city, corruption convictions have been few in Gérald Tremblay's time as mayor: Two of his city councillors from St. Laurent, Irving Grundman and René Dussault, were found guilty in 2005 of demanding a kickback; the next year the top civil servant in the same borough was convicted of accepting favours from contractors.
In this year's scandals, nobody has so far even been charged with anything. Still, in some cases - such as Montreal's water-system contract - even the best-case scenario confirms that we have a culture of laxity about municipal conflict of interest.
The worst-case scenario ... well, the claims, though unproven, grow more alarming each week: a vast and long-running network of bid-rigging, payoffs to a prominent politician, mob involvement, intimidation ... all this on top of a police inquiry, started last spring, into alleged widespread sales-tax fraud and biker-gang involvement in construction firms.
Louise Harel and Richard Bergeron, who are challenging Tremblay for the mayor's job, have both called for a provincial-government inquiry into construction-contract practices. Tremblay agrees. The opposition Parti Québécois wants the same.
But the government so far just shrugs, saying the police should be left unhindered to investigate. We're not convinced. Police can and should investigate suspected individual crimes, but they are not equipped or trained to detect and reveal the outlines of a vast and pervasive problem such as we might well have here.
The Cliche Commission of 35 years ago found major corruption and violent practices in James Bay construction and elsewhere; the commission's work generated significant improvement. Now it's time for the Quebec government at least to consider something similar for the Montreal area.