The member for Laviolette-Saint-Maurice, Marie-Louise Tardif, gets off lightly: she will not have to face charges of threats, but she is not yet guaranteed to rejoin the caucus of elected officials wine merchants.
In a statement sent on Tuesday, the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP) indicated that he was “not convinced of a reasonable prospect of conviction in view of the evidence gathered” against Ms. Tardif.
The Sûreté du Québec had indeed investigated threats that it would have made in the middle of the court room. She then allegedly targeted a witness who accredited the words of a former employee of the MP who was suing her for illegal dismissal, according to what the daily reported. Le Nouvelliste.
Following these allegations and the launch of this investigation, Ms. Tardif announced that she was retiring from the caucus of CAQ deputies.
In a press scrum on Tuesday in parliament, Mr. Legault made a point of stressing that the DPCP thus judged that Ms. Tardif’s remarks were not threats.
But he did not undertake to admit him back to his parliamentary group: the decision rests with the caucus, which should therefore discuss it soon.
“We will discuss it with the caucus,” he said. It’s not just a chief’s decision. […] We’ll discuss it there. But what I’m telling you is that since there’s no charge there, she’s probably going to be reinstated. »
It was not the first time that Ms. Tardif had been at the center of controversy.
In the middle of the election campaign last year, when she was seeking re-election under the banner of the CAQ, she told a local radio station that the party was “still quite restrictive and controlling” and that she did not did not have the same latitude as if she were independent.
In 2019, she was blamed by the Ethics Commissioner of the National Assembly for having donated furniture belonging to the Assembly to a community organization of which she was still employed.