Liberal ministers must be aware and worried about the growing impression in voter-land that a scent of possible patronage and mismanagement of public funds is emanating from the Charest government.
Even though this is a majority government with no general election in sight for another three years, this week's Léger Marketing/Le Devoir poll showed a striking 70-per-cent rate of dissatisfaction among voters, while Liberal Party support has shrunk to 25 per cent among francophones.
One explanation is this government's inaction on many controversial files, including the issue of religion-based reasonable accommodations. But another is the thorny issue of ethics.
Last year, the government failed to create an ethics code for elected representatives and the public service. Hoping the story would evaporate over the Christmas holidays, it also continued to refuse to set up an independent public commission of inquiry into mounting allegations of corruption, collusion, and cost overruns in the construction industry.
But the story didn't go away. In fact, 2010 began with the same demand for an inquiry that keeps coming from just about everyone in this province except the premier and the Quebec Federation of Labour.
Other ethics-related dossiers have also been turning into a political nightmare for Premier Jean Charest. One is about allegations made by opposition parties that some generous donors to the Liberal Party appear to have an easier time getting government permits and subsidies to open for-profit, private day care centres.
Dubbed the "Liberal daycare scandal" by the Parti Québécois, suspicion is also being fed by the fact that the Charest government changed the previous system of permit allocation.
Under the PQ administration, the Department of the Family based its decisions on who got permits on consensus recommendations from regional development councils, school commissions, and private and public daycare-centre representatives.
But under the Liberals, the department decides unilaterally who gets the permits and the hefty subsidies. So suspicion that patronage might be involved keeps growing. Which raises the classic question: Were generous donations to the Liberal Party by a number of private daycare owners made to get the permits or were they made in gratitude for getting them?
The government's case wasn't helped either by the three ministers who stated candidly that "companies" can donate money to political parties, which is forbidden by law, or by the news that all ministers are required to collect at least $100,000 a year in donations to the Liberal Party.
Then this week, a thunderbolt split the skies above the National Assembly. Former Liberal Justice Minister Marc Bellemare alleged the reason the premier refuses to create an inquiry commission is that the Liberal Party is under the influence of the QFL and gets generous donations from major construction entrepreneurs and engineering firms.
In a surrealistic exchange between the two men through the media, the premier said that Bellemare had never told him about any of this while Bellemare replied that this was "false."
Then the premier suggested that Bellemare tell his story to the director general of elections.
But Bellemare added another layer of drama. He said that he would testify only with the protection provided by a public inquiry. He also suggested that the yearly $75,000 salary top-up the premier has been getting from his party for more than 10 years is a "dangerous" thing.
Then yesterday, Québec solidaire MNA Amir Khadir opined that there's a growing impression out there "that there is a systematic and organized system of influence-peddling to get public contracts." That hurts.
On the same day, Quebec City's Le Soleil also had a striking front page featuring Charest on the left and Bellemare on the right with the question "Qui dit vrai?" in big, bold letters. When, rightly or wrongly, the word of a premier isn't taken at face value anymore, you know his government is in trouble.
That's why the premier's stubborn refusal to hold a public inquiry into the whole, growing mess risks costing him and his party that most precious of commodities in politics: the people's trust.
In fact, public demands for inquiries just keep mounting. Opposition parties want the director general of elections to look into the financing of the political parties and for the auditor-general to investigate what's going on in the private daycare industry.
Yesterday, Khadir put things in a nutshell when he said that only such initiatives could finally "clear the air and lift the air of suspicion" that surrounds the Quebec government and public institutions.
But Charest, it seems, prefers to deny the obvious.
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