Forget the contracting slush funds and the fancy jets. Margaret Wente's column today in G and M. Devastating.
Forget the hundreds of millions in public money thrown down the drain. If you want to get to the rotten moral heart of the Chrétien government, consider the story of François Beaudoin, the man the former PM's men did their best to destroy.
Mr. Beaudoin, a respected banker, was once president of the Business Development Bank, a Crown corporation that lends money to small businesses. It's a huge operation that has always been something of a patronage shop, with directorships and plum jobs handed out to friends of the party in power. Mr. Beaudoin's sin was that he refused to play the game.
In 1996, Jean Chrétien began personally pressuring Mr. Beaudoin to extend a loan to a constituent, Yvon Duhaime. Mr. Duhaime wanted $1.6-million to prop up his now infamous hotel, L'Auberge Grand-Mère, which Mr. Chrétien had sold to him. Mr. Beaudoin listened politely, and ignored him. More pressure ensued. Eventually the bank approved a loan for $615,000.
When the situation began attracting unwelcome media attention, Mr. Chrétien parachuted in his most trusted enforcer - Jean Carle, the man who once lived in Mr. Chrétien's basement and who was treated like a son by the former prime minister. Despite his conspicuous lack of financial background, Mr. Carle became executive vice-president of the BDC in 1998. Patrick Lavelle, BDC's chairman at the time, told Globe columnist Lawrence Martin that the appointment was all but made over his dead body.
Mr. Carle felt that one of his roles at the bank was to look after the party's interests. He didn't get along with Mr. Beaudoin, to say the least. Mr. Chrétien added another personal friend to the bank: Michel Vennat, who became the new chairman of the board. (Mr. Vennat is now president and CEO.)
Despite the loan, plus other government largesse, the hotel was a bust. In May of 1999, Mr. Beaudoin wrote a memo to one of his vice-presidents suggesting that the loan be called. That was the end of his career at the BDC. Soon after, he was fired. It was believed he would leave quietly in exchange for a settlement. But instead, the bank launched a lawsuit against him.
The bank alleged that he had misappropriated money, and sued to get it back. The RCMP, after a direct complaint from Mr. Vennat to the commissioner of the force, raided Mr. Beaudoin's home, his cottage, his office and even his golf club. The Crown was urged (but declined) to lay criminal charges against him.
As his former employer dragged him through the muck, Mr. Beaudoin's reputation and career were ruined. He has spent the past four years trying to get them back. The personal and financial toll on him and his family has been excruciating.
Mr. Chrétien, who was awaiting payment for his stake in a golf club near the hotel, has been accused of trying to protect his own financial interests. But it wasn't money that motivated his supporters. (With his Desmarais connections, he'll never have to worry about that.) It was power. That's the only currency his supporters thought he really cared about. He used it to reward his friends and hurt his enemies. It's that simple. Mr. Beaudoin crossed him, so the prime minister's supporters believed he deserved to be hurt.
The malice, the vindictiveness of it are unfathomable. But those same values drove the massive abuse of power in Quebec, which obliterated any remaining barriers between the government and the party, and corrupted the civil service. The prime minister's underlying motive was to annihilate the separatists and reward the loyalists. And the prime minister's affection for the malicious Mr. Carle is of a piece with his affection for his old friend Alfonso Gagliano, the former accountant from Montreal whose clients included convicted mobsters. Both men made their fame and fortune fixing things for the boss. Perhaps they didn't even have to ask him what to do. They just knew.
The BDC spent millions in taxpayers' money trying to damage Mr. Beaudoin, but in the end it failed. On Friday, he won his long-fought countersuit to get his severance and his pension back. Seldom has a judgment been so scathing. The bank's conduct was "abusive," wrote Quebec Superior Court Justice André Denis. He reserved his harshest words for Mr. Carle, whose smears of Mr. Beaudoin were "a series of false and malicious accusations." He said that Mr. Carle (who left the bank in 2001) had acted as if the prime minister owned the bank himself.
"The court considers that Mr. Beaudoin suffered an unspeakable injustice as a result of this matter," he concluded. "If one had wanted to break him and ruin his career, one would not have acted differently."
This, then, is Mr. Chrétien's enduring legacy to his party: the arrogance, the sense of entitlement, his supporters' astonishing abuse of power. The fish rots from the head. And even though the old head is gone, the fish still stinks to high heaven.
mwente@globeandmail.ca |
