Cliche Commission

The Financial Post, March 15, 1975

• Mix of toughness, humor brings out the truth
• Construction problems known, solutions to come
• QFL has industry in stranglehold

 

Mix of toughness, humor brings out the truth

By Donald Rumball

MONTREAL – It was the best show in town.

The Cliche Royal Commission hearings, which ended last week, amused, titillated and shocked the province of Quebec with a flow of headline-grabbing revelations that has not stopped since public hearings began eight months ago.

In fact, it was even better than the U.S. Senate Watergate hearings – and may well be more significant in the long run. Mr. Justice Robert Cliche (pictured) vivisected a whole society and laid it out for all to see.

The Royal Commission was set up to investigate the causes of violence in the construction industry in Quebec, largely as a result of the near-riot at the construction site of the James Bay hydro-electric project. But the commission has managed to stretch its mandate to its limit as it followed the paths of corruption starting in the construction industry and leading all the way to several Quebec government departments and even into Premier Robert Bourassa’s office.

On its way, the Royal Commission has left the twisted wreckage or dozens of ruined careers and reputations. No one has been spared the lash of its phenomenal reach – “The employers are as bad as the unions,” says Mr. Justice Cliche. ”We have to be more careful with them because they can express themselves so much better.”

The judge acknowledges sincerely that he feels sorry some people have been smeared by the publicity surrounding the inquiry but feels equally strongly that it had to be done.

“We have tried to expose the system so that people can see how it operates. It would be futile investigating the dozens and dozens of other cases of corruption in the province – the pattern is always the same,” he told FP.

“I’m not a moralizer by nature – it makes me uncomfortable – but I have to do it in this commission. And we have to dramatize the proceedings to bring the message home.”

There’s no dispute, however, over the results of his inquiry – he has jolted the province perhaps as it has never been jolted before. To the wonderment of some, the premier did not disband the Royal Commission as he stopped the probe into organized crime in Quebec.

Cliche and fellow-commissioner Brian Mulroney (pictured) both deny they have been subjected to any political pressure, and Cliche adds: “If they tried that on me, I would resign, make a statement and that would be that.”

It may be that Bourassa is showing great political courage by allowing the extent of the corruption in his own administration to emerge so that he can better clean it up. Or it may be that Cliche’s immunity to pressure is a reflection on the way in which he moved quickly to establish for his Royal Commission an unparalleled prominence with a high profile in the media, making it even more politically risky to disband the commission than to let it run.

In any event, the Cliche Commission hearings were remarkably effective – far more so than any law courts could have been – owing in large part to two features of a Royal Commission that Cliche used to the full:

• Only the commission’s prosecutor could cross-examine witnesses. All witnesses had their own lawyers, of course, who had access to the judge if they felt their clients’ interests were not being treated fairly. But they were not allowed to cross-examine their own clients or other witnesses who accused their clients of wrongdoing. The awesome spectacle of the commissioners and the prosecutor hounding a witness may have excited some viewers, but it also explained the complaints of spokesmen for the Quebec Federation of Labor (whose members featured prominently among the targets of the Cliche commission). The QFL says that the methods of the Cliche inquiry leave something to be desired. But this view of the Royal Commission’s power – which has some merit – has not concerned most of the rest of the province which accepts the commission’s motives as justifying its methods.
• The Royal Commission could hold “in camera” hearings. Cliche used these secret hearings to great effect by cross-examining witnesses rigorously and verifying every aspect of their stories before allowing them on the witness stand in public.
  This meant that when a witness testified about the corruption he had seen, the commission knew exactly what he was going to say (indeed, it was sometimes hard to detect any “cross-examination” at all, as the prosecutor strung off a long list of facts, then asked the witness “ls that right?” – “Yes, exactly!” . . . ).

But for a witness hostile to the commission – for one of the men who pull the levers of corruption – it was a special kind of hell. He might know how much the man testifying against him knew, but he did not know how much he had revealed or how much of what he had revealed could be proved by the commission. Yet he probably testified in camera, too, so the commission had a fair idea of where his story was weak.

This was the most spectacular feature of the Cliche commission hearings – the ability to keep the witnesses off balance and winkle information out of them in a way no court could achieve.

The case of Roger Vezina is a marvellous illustration of the Royal Commission’s methods.

 

A case in hand

Vezina was asked to the stand for only one question – “Did you on the night of Jan. 18, 1973, take $500 from Mr. Lecourt?” Vehement denial and “Thank you. That’s all. You may sit down.”

Vezina has his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched and is patently shaking like a leaf – his pug-face a study in its frantic attempt to look calm. As he makes his denial, the audience, mostly journalists, titter.

The next witness is Lecourt, who proceeds to tell the count exactly how his application for a permit to run a school for heavy machinery operators (the construction connection) was delayed repeatedly over several years, once even in defiance of the Minister of Education’s orders.

He goes on to describe how Vezina demanded $2,500 for a favorable recommendation – Vezina was the functionary responsible for signing permits for Quebec schools, and without his signature, a school could not operate. The payment of $500 – a down-payment for the full $2,500 – was followed by the remaining $2,000 three days later.

The prosecutor then asks the judge if he would be kind enough to give Vezina “one more chance to change his testimony.”

On his second visit to the witness box. Vezina is noticeably “skating” – yes, he received some money on that day, but he wasn’t the man f or whom it was intended – it was for Madame Guerin, his associate. No, he did not touch it, it appeared miraculously in his coat pocket. (Some confusion here because Lecourt said the money changed hands in the washroom – amidst much merriment in the court and a few sly jokes from the bench – “So that’s why Madame Guerin wanted you to collect the money for her!”)

Besides, says Vezina, the money was in payment for services rendered. It turns out that he and a colleague had set up a consulting firm that designed syllabuses for people who were thinking of starting up a school.

Slowly Vezina gains confidence on the stand as he pushes the version of his role as strictly a messenger boy. Then, abruptly, the prosecutor calls Lecourt to the stand again and asks him, “Is it true that on the night you paid Mr. Vezina $500, you had a tape recorder strapped to your body that recorded the entire conversation that night?”

“Yes.”

The court whistles, the commissioners keep stern faces, and Vezina sags, ashen-faced, gripping the rail of the witness box for support. The game is up.

The consummate skill of the Royal Commission hearings, the thoroughness of the destruction of Vezina’s web of lies were both masterful and a lesson for other witnesses who had to appear before the judge.

Part of the reason for these tactics was a trend which had started some months ago when witnesses began refusing to answer questions or just swearing blind ignorance, and the inquiry looked in danger of withering away.

So Cliche and the two other commissioners decided {o loosen up the witnesses by trapping them into perjury. Many were caught after their testimony by wiretaps that proved they had perjured themselves – all with the implication that if they came clean, the prosecution would look on them kindly.

This is why there were so few prosecutions in the numerous cases of perjury. (The rumour going around for a while was that Justice Minister Jérome Choquette dislikes Labor Minister Jean Cournoyer, so he was delaying the prosecutions to embarrass Cournoyer. But with Choquette’s sworn recollection of one matter diametrically opposed to Premier Bourassa’s recollection, the whole issue of prosecutions is wildly confused.)

The perjury game was unquestionably the most stunning aspect of the Cliche Commission’s hearings. Once they set the victim for the noose, they heaped ridicule on him, bullied him, lectured him – alternately joking and deadly serious, irrelevant and zeroing in on a vital question – “Answer the question, answer the question – you have already manifestly perjured yourself.”

All the commissioners say with feeling that they long to be finished with this job and Cliche adds, “l laugh and joke because, if I didn’t, it would kill me.”

When the final report is submitted – the target date is May 2 – the Royal Commission will have been sitting almost exactly one year and in that hectic year, these courageous and energetic men will have given their province a chance to cleanse some of its legendary corruption.

Mr. Justice Cliche is quick to remind people that corruption exists everywhere but he still retains his idealistic pursuit of improvement: “I think society can change corruption – although, much as I hate say this, I fear that it will take an economic depression to do it.”

He’s an intense man, quick to laugh, who gives his whole attention to whatever is occupying him, his lived-in face both comforting and powerful.

At the end of the day, an attendant brings his shoe rubbers, places them neatly on the floor for the judge to step into, then heaves on his overcoat f or him. Then he hands the judge his hat – a battered blue yachting cap (no braid, of course).

 

Construction problems known, solutions to come

By Donald Rumball

The past 12 months will surely be – in the best tradition of understatement – an unforgettable year for Quebec’s construction industry.

From the moment that workers decided a year ago to ransack the La Grande-2 site at James Bay, there has been a never-ending wave of jarring headlines that show the province’s $6,000 million-a-year construction industry to be grievously undone.

The findings of the Cliche Commission on union freedoms in the construction industry have shocked even blasé Quebec with its revelations of corruption, stretching from good old-fashioned graft to shylocking and murder. And widespread strikes, showdowns, and lockouts have brought Montreal’s Olympic program to the brink of abandonment and propelled cost overruns through the roof.

The violence has gone – for the moment – and productivity has bounced back to “50%-60% of 1968 levels,” according to Jean-Pierre Langlois, director of labor relations for the Montreal Construction Association. And a few heads have rolled – notably that of Robert Meloche, manager of Local 791 of the International Union of Operating Engineers (the “James Bay bandit”), and André Desjardins (pictured), formerly director oil the Provincial Council of Construction Trades in the Quebec Federation of Labor (QFL).

The QFL construction wing is now under the trusteeship of Fernand Daoust, formerly secretary of the QFL.

But not much else has changed. Two unique elements make any change in the construction industry even more difficult in Quebec than anywhere else in North America:

• The province has long held an unenviable reputation for flourishing corruption. Not that corruption doesn’t exist elsewhere – it’s just more blatant in Quebec.
• Three labor organizations compete for the allegiance of the workers – the QFL, the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU), and the Centrale des Syndicats Democratiques (CSD). The QFL is affiliated to the Canadian Labor Congress. The other two operate only in Quebec, independently of the CLC.

However, not all the blame can be laid at the door of the unions – the contractors and the government are just as much at fault. And the construction industry is fertile soil for the seeds these flaws have sown.

It is an extraordinarily fragmented industry. There are more than 16,000 contractors in Quebec alone, employing an average of seven people. Of these, 75% employ fewer than five people and another 10% employ six-10. About 125 employ more than 100 people.

In this jungle, the best way to survive is to have connections with the government, which is responsible for nearly one half of all construction in the province. This long tradition of “red contractors” and “blue contractors” has left the industry with a tradition of making a fast buck and getting out.

The competition is fierce and nearly one third of the contractors go out of business every year. But many of them come back again when the time is ripe – they are strong-willed and independent.

 

Workers’ picture worse

The picture for the workers is still worse. They suffer from chronic insecurity in the face of seasonal cycles superimposed on the exaggerated swings of the industry as the economy booms or busts.

The Construction Industry Commission (CIC) reported that, in 1973, nearly 55,000 of the 144,000 construction workers had been in the industry less than two years. About 8% of skilled workers and more than 25% of unskilled workers quit the industry every year.

And that turnover relates just to the industry. Few workers stay with one employer for even six months. Only half the workers are employed for more than six months a year. Employment in the peak fall months is 50% higher than in mid-winter.

Many of them work in appalling conditions, particularly in the isolated communities, and are exposed to horrendous risks. The safety regulations promulgated in the industry’s “decree” are widely flouted, and the accident rate runs at about 8%.

Small wonder there’s trouble. But these conditions apply in the construction industry in other provinces. It’s the inter-union rivalry that gives it a special twist in Quebec.

When Labor Minister Jean Cournoyer gave the industry his Bill 290, he effectively extended the QFL’ domination from the Montreal area to the whole province and removed the CNTU as a significant power in construction (see separate report below). This called for a massive effort on the part of the QFL to set up a province-wide organization because it provided almost no services outside Montreal.

The QFL’s Desjardins was equal to the task and recruited hundreds of shop stewards, many of them inexperienced. They all faced a special problem. The CNTU was not too happy at having its regional monopolies disturbed, so the stewards had to be adept at “persuading” the doubting Thomases that the time had come to challenge their union affiliation.

Many of them were parachuted into construction sites where they set to work with remarkable efficiency to boost the QFL share of construction workers to 72%. It wasn’t easy – they had to make “examples” of a few dissenters – but it worked.

This happy band of more than 2,000 stewards then realized they were sitting on a gold mine. The QFL, to which all the international unions of skilled workers are affiliated, controls the supply of skilled workers and the stewards were able to force the contractors to hire only QFL members. (The CNTU couldn’t supply them even if it wanted to.)

The contractors complied and the few skilled workers in the CNTU soon gave up because their equipment was damaged so often on QFL-controlled sites (the unionized security guards always seemed to just miss the vandals).

From that point, the system steamrollered quickly to the corruption that has made Quebec inordinately expensive for construction. Jurisdictional disputes are often solved by paying the full shot for the work to the members of both unions in dispute, even though half of them do nothing at all.

Then came the slowdowns and walkouts over real or imagined grievances. The contractors tried to buy peace with bribes to the stewards. But once a man knows that bribery will work, he is likely to squeeze his victim dry, so the price escalated steadily while the contractors, faced with the choice of a complete breakdown and another higher “gift”, naturally chose the latter.

The fact that they were contributing to the system of corruption mattered little to the contractors. The fast-busk mentality of many over-ruled any temptation to resist the erosion of their ability to run their own affairs.

The system worked both ways too. The contractors discovered that a bribe for the steward could also buy a blind eye to their cutting corners on safety regulations.

All this activity kept the stewards so busy on their union jobs that they had no time to fill in with work for their employers who pay them their salaries (including overtime). The net result is that many of these stewards earn more than $50,000 a year without doing a minute’s work.

It’s hardly surprising the construction associations are crying for a cleanout of the stewards, but even the revelations of the Cliche Commission have had little effect.

A spokesman for Daoust told FP that the trustees are investigating all the cases they can find of this type of corruption, but they will take action only when they have positive proof of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, the QFL has put together an audio-visual training program for stewards to ensure they know what their duties are.

Even if the stewards do clean up their act, however, it will still leave unresolved the other major complaint of the employer associations: the abuse of the hiring halls.

The associations admit that conditions in the industry made hiring halls inevitable. The halls facilitate the hiring process for employers and ensure that the available work is shared equitably among workers. But the associations insist that, in practice, the unions use the system to blackmail contractors by withholding labor from them.

 

Hiring by government

The Montreal Construction Association proposes, instead, that hiring be conducted by the government manpower offices (dreamers?) or by a revamped CIC – but with absolutely no union control.

The QFL responds that it withholds labor only from employers who do not observe safety precautions or who are tardy in paying wages. And it suggests that the unions be given a total monopoly of the hiring halls.

Total union control would, of course, enable the QFL to limit the entry of new workers to the industry so that everyone would be employed more regularly. This would be anathema to the contractors who have long tried to keep as many people in construction as possible to increase their leverage against the unions.

The QFL claims, for example, that the spate of forged qualification cards for skilled workers was as much the employers’ fault as the forgers’ because the employers wanted to “create “skilled workers to fill available jobs.

Stalemate

What has Cournoyer done about this explosion of corruption as a result of his Bill 290?

The construction associations see him as a weakling who flagrantly disregards the laws he made himself. “Illegal stoppages by the unions are countenanced by him – and immediately he sends a conciliation official to settle the problem; he is telling the unions that they at least have a case,” says a Montreal Construction Association spokesman.

“He can solve anything – he just gives it all away.”

The QFL replies that Cournoyer is acting as the “shock absorber” between the associations and the unions, and that he may indeed be a bit too flexible – but he has to acknowledge that inflation has changed the validity of the last decree he signed in 1973.

Cournoyer himself prefers to call his approach “pragmatism” in an imperfect world. A spokesman for his office claims Cournoyer has the full support of Bourassa. The claim is disputed by some sources in Montreal, who say the job of Labor minister has already been offered to a number of specialists in labor relations but no one will touch it.

The minister’s modus operandi is certainly unorthodox. All construction problems, says one source, are handled by a small triumvirate consisting of Cournoyer, his executive assistant, Gilles Laporte (who is paid by the hour as a consultant), and his conciliation officer, Yvon Dansereau. The deputy minister has nothing to do with construction.

The triumvirate is not all that solid. Evidence before the Cliche Commission proved that the minister was “duped” by Dansereau who did not pass on to his boss vital information given to him by Desjardins about an incipient crisis.

There is no disagreement on one point, however: Cournoyer’s actions have resulted in the complete breakdown of the decree. His willingness to negotiate changes in the decree’s mid-term, not only to give the unions a cost-of-living increase, but also to negotiate improvements in working conditions and hours, had made the decree a worthless scrap of paper.

This, as much as anything, has spawned the labor unrest.

The Cliche Commission will heap, but it cannot force the changes to percolate through the whole organization. The contractors are convinced that this can never happen until the Provincial Council of Building Trades is put under the trusteeship of the government.

Can the government do the job? “It would have to clean itself up first,” says a QFL vice-president outside the construction wing.

Daoust may, indeed, be the only person who can do it. He’s moving slowly now and doesn’t expect to finish before tile end of this year – by which time he “will probably have forced several resignations,” according to a spokesman.

The root to any betterment in the industry lies in changing the system, and the unions and associations agree on at least three changes:

• Contractors should be licensed so that fly-by-night firms can be eliminated. (Cournoyer has already drafted a bill for this measure.)
• The grievance procedure for both union and contractor infringements of the decree should be drastically speeded up to stop stewards and entrepreneurs taking the law into their own hands
  The issuance of qualification cards for skilled workers should be tightened up. (Again, Cournoyer has drafted a bill that would require qualification cards to show a photograph of its holder.)

Other recommendations likely to be made in the Cliche Commission’s report include:

• The CIC should be strengthened and given more independence from both contractors and unions.
• Procedures for affiliation to the union organizations should be monitored by government inspectors.
• Governments should combine to iron out some of the peaks and valleys of the industry’s work load.

Most of all, however, the workers should be given a chance to demand higher standards from their representatives.

 

QFL has industry in stranglehold

By Donald Rumball

MONTREAL – The avalanche of strife that has smothered Quebec’s construction industry can be blamed to a large degree on Bill 290, the law that decreed province-wide bargaining in the industry.

Yet this unique legislation could still hold the key to lasting labor peace. According to a spokesman in Labor Minister Jean Cournoyer’s office, several governments in North America have been visiting the minister to learn first-hand about the system’s potential and problems.

In essence, the idea is simple. The province-wide bargaining forces both sides at the table to combine in the course of negotiations. Instead of many small, independent employers fighting warring unions, two powerful organizations are pitted against each other in an equal fight.

To police the decree, Cournoyer invented the Construction Industry Commission (CIC), which is intended to keep records of all workers in the industry and how many hours they put in – plus take responsibility for certain grievance procedures. The CIC board has 12 members, six from the construction associations and six from the unions.

Lastly, Cournoyer had a quick solution to the vicious inter-union raiding (the French word is better – “maraudage”). He simply banned it except for an open period of two or three weeks at the end of the three-year contract.

Unfortunately, it has not worked out this way.

The union rivalry has been exacerbated because the system effectively gives the Quebec Federation of Labor (QFL) an enormously strong monopoly of union power, and the construction associations have failed miserably to co-operate in any meaningful sense.

The result has been a lop-sided disaster. Before Bill 290 was passed into law in 1968, the fighting in the construction unions was widespread, but there was an even balance between the QFL and the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU).

The QFL controlled the construction workers in the Montreal area and the CNTU controlled the 13 regions in the rest of the province.

The differences ran deeper than that, however. The QFL affiliates in its Provincial Council of Building Trades consisted mainly of the international skilled trades unions that supply most of the skilled labor in Canada. The CNTU therefore has to make do with slim pickings among the skills and has built its power on laborers.

But the QFL has laborers, too. So, effectively, any construction site can be staffed 100% by QFL members, while no site can rely on CNTU members alone.

The QFL was not slow in making the connection with these facts of life and the opportunities presented by the province-wide bargaining decreed by Bill 290. The skilled workers represent more than 30% of construction workers and André Desjardins, who was leader of the QFL’s Provincial Council of Building Trades, lost no time in building a strong network of control through the skilled trades.

And once a union has gained a reasonable majority in a region, the way is open for a quick expansion to something approaching a monopoly. The CNTU used this phenomenon with great effect against the QFL before Bill 290, and the QFL wasted no time in returning the favor.

Within a couple of years, the QFL has gained a stranglehold on the industry with 72% of the workers.

This had two immediate results:

• At the bargaining table, the associations did not bother to negotiate with the CNTU or the Centrale des Syndicats Democratiques (CSD), a breakaway wing of the CNTU that represents only 5% of the workers and has little influence. They settled with the QFL, and the rest had to accept it because the QFL is the majority.
• Representation on the CIC board is also proportional to membership. The QFL, therefore, has 72% of the voting power on the union side, vs. 23% for the CNTU and 5% for the CSD. On the employer side of the table, no construction association has more than 26% of the voting power.

The procedures of the CIC provide that a motion is passed by the board if there is a simple majority on both sides of the table. If there is no agreement, the CIC’s president makes the decision.

So, in effect, the QFL is the only party in the CIC that has a veto power over the board. And just to make sure nothing could go wrong, the man appointed president of the CIC was Roger Perrault, who earlier was head of the QFL’s Provincial Council of Building Trades.

To make matters worse, the CIC president surrounded himself with uncles and nephews and the body became almost totally useless. The QFL could do wat it liked.

Cournoyer’s attempts at cleaning up the “maraudage”  were equally ineffectual. A major problem is that the turnover of construction labor is very high. The industry absorbs 8% new skilled workers a year and 25% new unskilled workers, and the new arrivals have to affiliate with one or other of the QFL, CNTU or CSD. So, maraudage cannot be stopped completely in the course of a decree and it doesn’t take long for maraudage of new workers to slip into maraudage of workers who already have an affiliation.

It is not uncommon for a man to be paying dues to both the QFL and the CNTU.

So Bill 290 has increased inter-union squabbles at the same time as it has given the QFL such control over the workers that it has been enabled to extend that control to the contractors. Quite apart from the corruption that blossomed, thee QFL has been known, for instance, to tell a general contractor who will receive his subcontracts.

Yet, no-one seems to have given up hope on the concept of province-wide bargaining – in fact, Ontario is talking about adopting the same measure. But there can be no reconciliation between the QFL and the CNTU, so the system will have to be strengthened at a number of vital points if it is to survive.