Marc Bellemare's long sad journey is coming to an end. The National Assembly is resuming operations, focused on cooked-up issues. And still Jean Charest and his government refuse to give Quebecers what they want and need: a full-scale investigation into the reek coming from parts of the construction industry.




We don't want to prejudge the Bellemare business. But we believe that very few Quebecers now expect any genuine illumination to come from the Bastarache commission slapstick show. But if Premier Charest set up the inquiry to draw media and public attention away from the construction mess, as many suspect, it seems to have worked.
Now the reconvened National Assembly will be focused, we are told, on several bills important mainly as symbols: the face veil, a code of ethics for MNAs, and Bill 103. (That last one is a cheerless indicator of the Liberals' disdain for anglophones and English, but as we have noted it does not, in itself, affect many people.)
Measures like these might as well have been designed to steer Quebecers away from the construction swamp. But surveys suggest that Quebecers have kept their eye on the ball all summer: A new opinion poll shows that nearly four in five of us are still saying we want a formal inquiry into construction.
For months, the province has been swamped with allegations of graft, work-site intimidation, and collusion. Organized crime was said to be getting a cut of public-works contracts. Construction companies were accused of funnelling illegal donations to Quebec's political parties in the expectation of favourable treatment in the awarding of contracts.
Last year, even as the province unrolled its multi-billion-dollar infrastructure stimulus program, it insisted that there was no need for an inquiry. Instead, it set up a $26.8-million investigation unit -including police, prosecutors, and the federal Competition Bureau -to get to the bottom of the seemingly endless number of allegations. No inquiry, Charest insisted.
Serious allegations continue to surface, including last week when opposition party Quebec solidaire gave police fresh information about possibly illegal political donations by four Quebec engineering firms.
Is all this one reason private investment in the sector has dropped by as much as 11 per cent since last year, as the Quebec Construction Association noted last week? It admits that allegations of collusion, corruption, and over-billing have taken their toll on the $40-billion sector.
In British Columbia, the government has now finally yielded to sustained public pressure for a proper inquiry into how police bungled the Robert Pickton serial-killing investigation so badly for so long. The people of Quebec, in the same way, need to know what has really happened here, in our construction industry. Public trust is eroding dangerously. Call the inquiry, Premier.