On paper, a nearly five-hour series about the Charbonneau Commission doesn’t seem like the most entertaining thing in the world to watch. Mistake. Corruption: the shocking revelations of the Charbonneau commission sums up this breathtaking legal drama with a lot of bite.
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
Crave subscribers have been enjoying it for months now. It is now the turn of those of Canal D to be able to relive the most significant moments of the Charbonneau commission, held from 2012 to shed light on collusion in the awarding of public contracts in Montreal and Laval, l infiltration of organized crime in the field of construction and the hidden financing of political parties.
A decade ago, the Commission’s work made headlines almost every day. This was the case when the witnesses, like Lino Zambito, sat down to table and went there with sensational revelations. This was also the case when they offered more or less passive resistance, like Nicolo Milioto, suspected of being an intermediary between construction contractors and the Rizzuto clan, who claimed not to know what the mafia was…
We can still see the repercussions of the Charbonneau commission in recent news. In June, entrepreneur Tony Accurso launched a final appeal process to avoid prison. Last week, former Prime Minister Jean Charest defended his reputation, tainted according to him by leaks from UPAC, an anti-corruption unit which notably investigated the illegal financing of political parties, including the Liberal Party.
An enlightening cutout
The series directed by Sébastien Trahan has five one-hour episodes and benefits from a breakdown intended to properly guide the viewer. The credit goes to the screenplay written by Alain Roy and André Noël, a former journalist at The Press became an investigator for the Charbonneau commission, which also appears on the screen.
PHOTO FROM THE DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Judge France Charbonneau returns to the work of the commission of inquiry in the series.
Each episode dwells on a well-targeted theme: the presence of the Mafia within the construction industry, the sharing of contracts set up in Montreal, behind-the-scenes games and cronyism at the FTQ-Construction, the system of corruption in the City of Laval and the illegal financing of provincial political parties. The key players in these different ecosystems are exposed, and rarely spared.
The series is based on interviews with the central figures of the Charbonneau commission (in particular judge France Charbonneau as well as prosecutors Sonia LeBel and Denis Gallant), several of its investigators, journalists who dug into the case and, of course , tons of visual archives of the commission’s work.
The stowage of all this material is lively and eloquent: you never feel lost in the threads of these systems that are both independent and parallel, even if a few people seemed involved in more than one scam at a time.
The other great quality of the series is its tight editing, which underlines with great bite the dynamics that set in with the more difficult witnesses and the absurdity of certain responses. Many do not grow out of it. And the sometimes scathing reactions of prosecutor Sonia LeBel (who has since gone into politics with the CAQ) and judge Charbonneau very often turn out to be tasty.
The fact that some of the speakers are always subject to a duty of reserve is never a problem. The images, here, are worth their weight in words and the artisans of the series do not hesitate to make them speak. On paper, this series might not have been a compelling idea, but on screen, it’s a hard-hitting soap opera.
Friday, 9 p.m., at Canal D