Canada: Scandal in Ottawa

There is one other matter which I wish to announce,” Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson remarked to the Members of Parliament in Ottawa last week. “The Minister of Justice this morning submitted his resignation to me. After discussing the matter twice with him, I have no course but to accept it. I do so with deep regret.”

And deep embarrassment. For the resignation of Justice Minister Guy Favreau, 48, was triggered by the release of Canada’s long-awaited Dorion report, prepared by Chief Justice Frederic Dorion, accusing Favreau of failure to take action on a bribery case involving the Pearson government. It was only the latest development in a series of scandals that has shaken the country’s minority Liberal government, posing serious questions among Canadians as to the caliber of Mike Pearson’s leadership.

A $20,000 Offer. The Favreau incident has been festering since last summer when Montreal Lawyer Pierre Lamontagne, 30, went to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with a story that four highly placed Liberals—Raymond Denis, 32, then executive assistant to the Immigration Minister; Guy Rouleau, 42, Pearson’s own parliamentary secretary; Andre Letendre, 34, Favreau’s executive assistant; and Guy Lord, 26, a former special assistant to Favreau—were pressuring him to take it easy in an extradition case. Lamontagne was working for the U.S. Justice Department, which sought the extradition of one Lucien Rivard, a Montreal racketeer wanted on a narcotics-smuggling rap. Lamontagne claimed that Denis offered him $20,000 not to fight bail for Rivard; the other three, said Lamontagne, tried to apply political pressure. The Mounties notified Favreau, who informed Pearson, then ordered a routine investigation by the Mounties. Their report was inconclusive, and there the matter remained until last November, when the opposition Conservatives broke the story in Parliament.

Pearson seemed surprised by the fuss. Denis had already quietly resigned; Pearson now accepted Guy Rouleau’s resignation and appointed Chief Justice Dorion as a one-man commission of public inquiry. To make matters worse, in the midst of the investigation Racketeer Rivard escaped from Montreal’s Bordeaux Jail, has not been seen since.

In his 149-page report last week, Justice Dorion confirmed virtually all of Lawyer Lamontagne’s charges. Favreau, said Dorion, was derelict in his duty for not looking deeper into “the possible perpetration of a criminal offense by one or several of the persons involved.” If Favreau lacked facts, “he should have submitted the case to the legal advisers within his department with instructions to complete the search.” Justice Dorion said nothing about Prime Minister Pearson’s role.

Brave Attitude. To all this, Favreau lamely replied that it was a matter of opinion—a mere statement by Justice Dorion that, “had he been in my place, he would have exercised his discretion in a different fashion.” Favreau said he was resigning “not out of a feeling that I have done anything wrong, but because my usefulness as a Minister of Justice has been impaired.” Pearson backed him all the way. “My honorable friend,” Pearson told the House of Commons, “remains a man and a minister of unimpeachable integrity and unsullied honor.” Furthermore, Favreau would remain head of the Quebec Liberals and had been invited to consider “another post in the administration.”

Despite this brave tempest-in-a-tea-pot attitude, Pearson’s government has been sorely tried by more or less the same sort of affair throughout its two-year administration. In December 1963 Pearson’s Postmaster General resigned amid a parliamentary uproar over the appointment of defeated Liberal candidates as “consultants.” The next to go was a Minister Without Portfolio who resigned after two Montreal dailies reported that he took a $10,000 payoff to help some Quebec race-track promoters pick up a franchise. A Quebec royal commission last September accused a Liberal member of the Commons’ Banking and Commerce Committee of making an “unlawful and unconscionable profit” of $62,605 on a school land purchase in Montreal. He was acquitted in court, but only on legalistic grounds.

All this is priceless ammunition for the opposition Conservatives—and obscures the fact that Pearson’s government is doing a good job of managing Canada’s thriving economy, has improved federal-provincial relations, and tried to ease the dangerous split between English-and French-speaking Canadians. Favreau’s resignation could well impair these relations by creating doubt about Quebec’s Liberal leadership among provincial voters. The Conservatives would love to topple Pearson’s government and force new elections. But the party is in the midst of an intramural fight over the leadership of former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who at 69 is growing waspish and curmudgeonly, but refuses to step down. Until that battle is decided, no one wants elections.