Quebec spends millions of dollars of your money every year on credit cards. Personal purchases with public funds, hidden contracts, interest charges for cards paid late, questionable expenses; our Bureau of Investigation discovered serious deficiencies in the management of these government cards.
Most Quebec government departments are reluctant to reveal their spending of public funds by credit card, and more than a third of them have even gone so far as to invoke national security to hide the information.
For more than a year, our Bureau of Investigation has had all the trouble in the world obtaining copies of credit card statements from the 23 provincial ministries.
However, the law requires these organizations to communicate these public documents.
No less than nine ministries, including those of Tourism, Labor and Culture and Communications, even invoked national security to hide their expenses made with government credit cards.
Some of these “secret” expenses amount to less than $10, including several for less than $1.
A department cited national security to redact $0.10 transactions.
Photo AGENCE QMI / LE JOURNAL DE MONTRÉAL
“Why restrict spending by 10 cents and apply state security to that? I have difficulty understanding, admits access to information expert Monique Dumont. […] It strikes the imagination.”
The ministries mention that these transactions are mainly linked to the travel and official vehicles of ministers, expenses incurred by bodyguards and the acquisition of goods or services from suppliers.
“The problem is that we do not define what state security is. So, that opens the door to a very broad definition that can be applied to requests for access to information. It becomes a catch-all item,” explains Mme Dumont, who worked for a long time as a researcher for the media.
A host of other reasons have been used to hide information, such as cardholder name, vendor name, amount or date of purchase.
“It’s disturbing not to have these names [des fournisseurs] and these amounts,” indicates Geneviève Tellier, public finance expert.
“I don’t see why the ministries refuse [de transmettre] the information. It’s the common sense of transparency,” continues the professor of public administration at the University of Ottawa.
In response to one of our requests, the Ministry of Finance went so far as to hide expenses that were already public on its website. He reversed his decision a few days after our calls.
Photo AGENCE QMI / LE JOURNAL DE MONTRÉAL
Access to Health and Justice
The largest ministry, that of Health, as well as that of Justice, flatly refused to answer us, initially, citing the workload that this would represent.
According to the Ministry of Health, processing our request “would risk seriously harming the activities of the ministry”.
Both ministries ended up sending us information for only one month.
“It can create distrust on the part of the public,” warns Geneviève Tellier. In the past, these practices [de refus] were perhaps more acceptable, but these days it is becoming more and more difficult to justify.”
As for the Ministry of Public Security, it took nearly three months of negotiations through lawyers before finally obtaining information.
Most ministries have denied lacking transparency. The information they ultimately provided allowed us, among other things, to discover that several of them had violated public contracting laws, and that taxpayers had paid thousands of dollars in interest charges on the cards. government credit (see other texts).
François Dauphin, president and CEO of the Institute on Governance (IGOPP), believes that the government should not hide this information from the public.
“It is one of the completely legitimate questions to understand the nature of certain transactions. This allows us to ask the right questions about the controls in place,” he believes.