There are few aspects of politics that infuriate me as much as this principle of paying for access to elected officials. Among my biggest angers as a columnist, there were all these nauseating stories under Jean Charest’s Liberals…
Places in private daycares (cash printing machines) disproportionately given to Party donors.
The appointment of the incapable Tomassi to the Council of Ministers.
The ministers who were transformed into beggars (dixit Pierre Paradis) by imposing on them funding objectives of $100,000 per year.
And if you want other examples of slippage in terms of political financing, you will read pages 692 and 693 of the Charbonneau commission report1…
Moral sin is in equivocation: Give to the party, you never know, it won’t hurt…
Since the start of the CAQ cocktailgate, a little before Christmas, everyone has tempered: “Yeah, it’s certain that asking $100 to access a cocktail where you can chat with a CAQ minister is not topbut it is not in the register of the Charbonneau commission…”
Even the opposition parties were tempered and measured on this.
Which does not mean that what the Caquistes did smells like roses.
I summarize the hubbub: small CAQ players, unknown deputies or political attachés, have done political financing on the back of ambiguity: Come to the fundraising cocktail, the minister will be there, it’s $100, you can talk to her, maybe it will help your file move forward…
One hundred dollars is the limit of the annual political donation since the Drainville reform under the PQ of Mme Marois. It’s $200 in election years.
Since the start of the cocktailgate, ministers have been defending their integrity: No one will ever buy me for $100!
PM Legault, exasperated to see his parliamentary return tainted by another distraction, another cocktail affair, decreed that his party renounced all popular political financing, i.e. the $100 paid by citizens. He invited, sorry, he challenged the other parties to do the same…
But cocktailgate is not a problem of popular party financing: it is a problem of peddlers caquists who considered it a good idea to use Geneviève Guilbault or Pierre Fitzgibbon as bait to attract fish ready to pay $100 to “advance an issue”.
I hope that the CAQ are not the liberals of the Charest era. But the problem, in the sentence Give to the party, you never know, it won’t hurt…, It’s not the amount requested, it’s the ambiguity that governs the transaction.
I felt very uneasy when I learned of the latest cocktailgate twist on Thursday2. Liberal MP Monsef Derraji questioned a bereaved couple as part of the parliamentary committee on the Minister of Transport’s road safety bill.
Elizabeth Rivera and Antoine Bittar lost their daughter Jessica in a tragedy caused by a repeat drunk driving offender. After picking up the pieces of their lives, they embarked on a crusade: that of convincing Quebec to fall in line with all the other Canadian provinces and to impose administrative sanctions as soon as a motorist is caught with more than 0 .05 mg of alcohol per 100 ml of blood.
By answering MP Derraji’s questions, the Rivera-Bittar couple dropped this bombshell: after meeting CAQ MP Marilyne Picard to raise her awareness of this cause, they were invited to a fundraising cocktail where the responsible minister would be present, Mme Guilbault!
I leave Mme Rivera recounts what a member of MP Picard’s office told them: “We were told: ‘You buy the tickets and you meet the minister, you have two minutes each.’ »
And this is how this couple of bereaved parents, activists of MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), resigned themselves to paying $200 to the CAQ for the “privilege” of “advancing the issue” of crack down on drunk driving as we do across Canada.
It is cheapYes.
But it seems that there was no bad pretext among the $100 CAQ fishermen to take advantage of citizens’ requests at that time. Apply for a beer permit, an export subsidy or give meaning to the absurd death of your child: the “files to move forward” were numerous enough for it to be a great source of funding for the peddlers of the CAQ.
A word on the denials of Geneviève Guilbault, who had this reaction Thursday to the exit of the Rivera-Bittar couple: “In no case does a person need to pay $100 to speak to me. […] There is nothing questionable or malicious that happened in this matter. »
First, the Rivera-Bittar couple had to pay to speak to the minister.
Secondly, exploiting the grief of parents who lost their daughter at the hands of a drunk for a few crumbs of attention from a minister in exchange for $200, it’s starting to creep into the suburbs of words like doubtful And malicious.
Until Thursday, I thought this $100 cocktail antics was just about peddlers without culture who had missed the big news of the late 2000s and early 2010s.
But since Thursday, my point of view has evolved. It is certain that you have to be a peddler to link a $100 donation to access to a minister, by playing on ambiguity, by dangling the progress of the file.
But what we see is that small CAQ players have engaged in these schemes throughout the province.
I am not so naive as to believe that they all had the same idea of using ministers as bait to attract fish ready to pay $100 to the CAQ.
There is a word to describe what the CAQ did: “system”. And the fact that it involves “just” $100 doesn’t change anything. Monetizing access to ministers is… monetizing access to ministers.
In short, who had the genius idea of using ministers as funding cocktail bait? Who pushed this rotten idea into constituency offices?
It is there question.