The omerta is about to fall: the ministers Geneviève Guilbault and François Bonnardel will have to reveal to Commissioner Denis Gallant everything they knew about the Saaqclic fiasco, before and after its catastrophic launch.
The highly anticipated testimonies of ministers Guilbault and Bonnardel before the Public Inquiry on the Fiasco Saaqclic are scheduled to resume work next week in Montreal.
According to our information, this week will be devoted to the ministers of the Ministry of Transport and their political staff who were in office during the design and deployment of the project. She will start with former liberal ministers Laurent Lessard and André Fortin. Geneviève Guilbault is expected at the end of the week, but the order of testimonies could be modified according to the progress of the hearings.
The appearances of ministers before Commissioner Denis Gallant will be held in Montreal for security reasons, we learned.
Who knew what?
At the heart of the Saaqclic storm, fueled by numerous revelations of Journal one you DutyPrime Minister François Legault launched a commission of public inquiry on March 2. Since then, ministers have refused to answer questions from journalists concerning this fiasco, which cost taxpayers $ 1.1 billion, $ 500 million more than expected.
The same day in the start of the commission, our parliamentary office revealed that Minister Geneviève Guilbault had been informed of the state of the Saaqclic project in November 2022.
The deployment of the project has been repeatedly rejected due to delays, before being chaotically launched in February 2023.
In addition to Minister Guilbault, the Prime Minister François Legault’s office had been informed that end tests were not completed a few weeks before the launch, and that the room for maneuver to succeed in deployment was very limited.
The former Minister Éric Caire and the highest official of the government, Yves Ouellet, were supposed to guarantee the success of the project before its launch, according to Geneviève Guilbault.
Bonnardel’s defense
In addition, the ex-CEO of SAAQ, Denis Marsolais, said before the Gallant Commission, before the holidays, having alerted the office of Minister François Bonnardel that was hidden the explosion of costs.
On June 8, 2022, Marsolais and three vice-presidents met Alain Généreux, political attaché of the Minister of Transport of the time, to take stock.
A document would have been presented to him, saying that a “contractual strategy” would continue the work without exceeding the $ 682 million budget. The $ 458 million contract was also presented as intact. However, this information was wrong, according to Marsolais, which claims to have then corrected the private shot to the employee of Minister Bonnardel.
As early as 2020, when François Bonnardel was minister, the SAAQ knew that it had to reinject nearly $ 200 million into the project. A confidential agreement to reinject these sums had also been signed at the time between the SAP-LGS alliance and the SAAQ.
Minister Bonnardel, however, has always argued that he was “deceived”.
“We were lied to,” he said, adding that the SAAQ had never presented him with an excess cost of such magnitude. “There was none!” How do I protect myself against lies? “
On Tuesday, the SAAQ removed from its functions the owner of the IT of Saaqclic, Caroline Fold-Busque, one of the architects of the project. At the beginning of July, Geneviève Guilbault had also dismissed CEO Éric Ducharme, replacing him by Annie Lafond.
All these gestures were laid without delay the end of the work or the filing of the Gallant Commission report.
