This week the three Cs - collusion, corruption and construction - continued to haunt the Charest government with troubling allegations of Mafia interference thrown into the cauldron.
It all came to a head Wednesday during question period. Yes, that was the same day Mafia patriarch Nicolo Rizzuto was gunned down in his home.
That was the same name brought up last June in Rome at a major money-laundering trial by an expert RCMP witness. As reported by Radio-Canada's Enquete, he alleged that the Rizzuto clan, through a collusion scheme, exercizes influence over which "Fabulous Fourteen" firms get construction contracts in return for a five-per-cent commission.
Then it was the turn of Denis Morin, Operation Marteau's head inspector: "Our information tends to show there's a certain collusion between certain large construction firms to share contracts among themselves." He added, "We think there might be links between these firms and the Mafia."
So on Wednesday, faced with a government that refuses to hold a public inquiry into the three Cs, a Parti Quebecois MNA accused it of being an accomplice to organized crime while Pauline Marois asked the premier: "How long will our taxes enrich the Mafia?"
That's when the government's new line of defence was revealed through well-scripted answers by the premier and the ministers of justice, public security and municipal affairs.
Putting a new twist on the position they've held since the spring of 2009, ( "This is a problem for the police, not parliament"), the new line was: "We don't want to put them on television. We want to put them in prison!"
Then they asked Quebecers to be "patient" while the police do their work, and made repeated references to Carcajou, the special police squad set up in 1995 to investigate criminal bikers, which took seven years to get results.
The problem, though, is that this argument doesn't work. Carcajou dealt with bikers, whereas the present allegations concern huge public contracts at a time when this province plans to spend more than $40 billion on infrastructure, road, and construction projects.
Quebec taxpayers literally cannot afford to sit back while police take years to gather evidence. Waiting to get rid of criminal bikers is one thing, but suspecting that millions and millions of public money might get funnelled into the wrong hands through collusion and overpricing schemes is another.
So before Quebecers can figure this out, the government went on the offence. Yesterday, Charest accused Marois of "destroying" and "undermining" the "institutions" of Quebec when the PQ accused the government, politically speaking, of being an accomplice to organized crime.
Municipal Affairs Minister Laurent Lessard then accused the PQ of wilfully sullying the reputations of municipal and provincial politicians.
But while the PQ's accusation might have been overstated, chances are the public will continue to think that what hurts their institutions most is the government's refusal to set up a public inquiry looking into the whole mess.
Quebecers even learned this week that the Municipal Affairs Commision hadn't launched a single investigation in more than 20 years. Then yesterday, knowing that companies owned by the family of Liberal fundraiser Franco Fava have received more than $780 million of contracts from Hydro-Quebec since 2002, the PQ went after Hydro for failing to answer a National Assembly motion demanding its list of contractors and the tendering process it used between 2000 to 2010.
The more time that passes, the more Quebecers are being painted a very disturbing portrait of how they're being governed.
As Bernard Genereux, president of the Quebec Federation of Municipalities, bluntly put it in an interview: "If the premier won't listen to the calls for a public inquiry, which we've subscribed to for months, and given the consensus around it, it's not only our reputations that will get hurt, but our capacity to govern."
On RDI, former judge Gerard Beaudry -known for his battle against corruption in Ville St. Michel during the 1960s -put it in a nutshell: "The danger is that the construction industry, which is so important in Quebec, may no longer be controlled, even by governments. I think that the Charest government is wrong, really wrong, not to verify if these possible infiltrations by the Mafia are true. It is essential for the future."
A clear enough message: Only an inquiry can unveil what's starting to look like a system of collusion that might have cost a lot of public money and could well continue to do so if left unchecked.
For some mysterious reason, the premier seems to have forgotten one very important thing: It is governments, not the police, that get elected to manage the public purse.