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| Scandal tied to PMO - Tuesday, March 16, 2004 at 15:52 |
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PUBLICATION: Toronto Star ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Conversations clandestine: Insider For the first time, the federal government's sponsorship scandal has been linked directly into the heart of former prime minister Jean Chretien's office. Jean Pelletier, Chretien's former chief of staff and one of his closest confidants, made regular phone calls to the head of the sponsorship program, imposing political pressure on how millions of dollars should be handed out, says a staffer who worked in the office that administered the money. Pelletier placed calls to Pierre Tremblay, the man in the public works department who held the purse strings for federal sponsorship money in the late 1990s, said the woman, who spoke with the Star on the condition of anonymity. "Pelletier would call (Tremblay) on a regular basis to discuss sponsorships," she recalled. "I would say every month or so. ... When the (former) prime minister says, 'I had nothing to do with it,' how is that possible if his chief of staff was calling?" It is highly unusual, government sources say, for a chief of staff in the Prime Minister's Office to call a mid-level bureaucrat in the public works department. The woman is the third whistle-blower to talk to the Star in the past week about the involvement of civil servants and politicians in the sponsorship scandal. And she said yesterday she would be willing, although hesitant, to testify in public. Prime Minister Paul Martin ordered a public inquiry, and the Commons public accounts committee is also investigating after Auditor-General Sheila Fraser reported last month about money that went missing in the government's $250 million sponsorship program. Pelletier could not be reached for comment yesterday. Pelletier wasn't the only senior federal official to call or visit Tremblay's office with unusual regularity, the staffer said. Senior politicians and bureaucrats including former public works minister Alfonso Gagliano; Don Boudria, government House leader at the time; Denis Coderre, then-secretary of state for amateur sport; and recently fired VIA Rail president Marc LeFrancois were all in frequent touch with Tremblay, she said. And they were careful to ensure those conversations were clandestine, she said. "They requested specifically that (meetings) not be put in the official agenda. And they asked for a secure (telephone) line. They couldn't talk over the phone." The insider said staff were aware that Tremblay felt "pressure" from above. "When you've got politicians calling and putting pressure on you, they have ways of getting rid of you if you don't agree or comply," she said. She said that, if asked, she would like to testify before the government inquiry investigating the scandal. "I believe in doing the right thing and I believe things were done unfairly," she said. "I would like to speak, but I think for my job, I would think about it twice." Pelletier was fired as VIA Rail chairman on March 1 by Transport Minister Tony Valeri, after making disparaging remarks about former Olympian Myriam Bedard who had complained about the way VIA officials conducted business that dealt with the sponsorship fund. In an interview with the Montreal Gazette last week, Gagliano denied allegations he intervened to direct money to ad firms with Liberal connections. Tremblay was Gagliano's chief of staff before moving to the public works department in 1997. Boudria offered no comment on the allegations in response to calls to his office yesterday. Mark Dunn, spokesperson for Coderre who is now Privy Council president, said the minister says he "absolutely" did not make routine calls to Tremblay on the sponsorship program. LeFrancois' lawyer Gerald Tremblay told the Star yesterday that his client did not have frequent contact with Pierre Tremblay. LeFrancois contacted Tremblay about one specific file in which VIA Rail was owed funds, but otherwise left such contact to the company's marketing department. While most senior bureaucrats and politicians have denied any knowledge of improprieties in the sponsorship scandal, the insider said there are at least some who were clearly informed- and had a hand in- what was going on. She said she is angry at high-ranking politicians, including Gagliano, who say they had nothing to do with the scandal. "When they say, 'No, we did not have discussions. No, we did not call them,' that's where I have an issue. Yes, they did call and it was about sponsorship." Between 1997 and 2000, the government handed out hundreds of millions of dollars in federal sponsorship funds to community festivals, sporting events and other projects. The sponsorships were administered by a group of mainly Montreal-based advertising firms that collected as much as $100 million of the total $250 million in the program in the form of fees or commissions. The sponsorship funds were dispensed by the public works department's Communications Coordination Services Branch (CCSB), which Tremblay headed between 1999 and 2001. Tremblay was the first public servant to face discipline after Fraser's Feb. 10 report. The government served notice that he would be removed from his job as vice-president at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. But Tremblay was already on sick leave because of diabetes. reported last month that he might be too ill to testify at any inquiry. Calls to Tremblay from then public works minister Gagliano were uncharacteristically routine, the staffer said. "In government, when the minister's office calls, it's a big deal. It's not every day it happens. When they do, you answer. ... And (Gagliano) would call directly to Mr. Tremblay. It was regular, perhaps every couple of weeks or every month or so. I had never seen a minister directly calling assistant deputy ministers before. If you're calling the office without going through the deputy minister, you tell me what that means." At one point, she said, one of Gagliano's assistants complained to Tremblay's staff that not enough sponsorship money was being directed to western provinces. "If he's saying that to us, obviously the minister's office was looking for money in specific ridings," she said. Tremblay's meetings with his political bosses were deliberately absent from his official schedule on request from Tremblay or the minister's office, she said. And many of the phone calls Tremblay received from senior officials were transferred to a "secure" telephone line, the insider said. She said staff in the office were told not to send e-mail messages related to the sponsorship issue and were instead instructed to make phone calls. "When you're calling asking for secure lines, or calling and saying, 'We can't talk on the phone, let's meet,' or you're not sending e-mails or you're meeting with Coderre and Boudria and don't want it in the agenda, you have to wonder." While no one in the office was privy to the conversations between Tremblay and his political bosses, it was clear from his actions after meetings or phone calls what the discussions were about, she said. "Immediately after talking to them, he'd call the president of an The insider said Tremblay met routinely with the advertising firm executives handling the sponsorship files, often on the golf course. "He was a big golfer. There were golf games between Mr. Tremblay and the advertising executives. I can't say how often. And there were meetings at the office with them. ... As a Canadian, I can say there should have been distance." Earlier this week, the Star reported the observations of two other whistle-blowers close to the inner workings of the sponsorship program. They painted a picture of unrestrained waste, including millions of dollars handed out without even the most basic level of scrutiny or accountability. A former consultant in the department spoke of an "endless flow of money and there was no established process to determine who got what." The man, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said he likely won't testify before a government inquiry if asked because it's a "career-limiting move and I don't want to be associated with it. I don't even put that (period of work) on my resume." Another person with an insider's view of the scandal, an advertising consultant who worked at one of the Quebec-based firms that handled the sponsorship contracts, said Tremblay's predecessor, Chuck Guite, would run down a list of proposed sponsorship events each week or so, arbitrarily assigning dollar figures without criteria, analysis or consideration for the level of visibility the government would receive for the money. "He'd go through and say, '$5,000, $15,000, $8,000, $10,000, $5,000, $50,000,'" she said. "Nothing was in writing." Looking back on the sponsorship program, the woman who worked under Tremblay at the Communications Coordination Services Branch says he inherited many of the most significant problems with the program from Guite. Fraser pointed to Guite as a central figure in the sponsorship scandal. He is reportedly living in Arizona. He has refused to be interviewed and has not returned calls from the Star. |