Something indeed is rotten in the state of the SPVM.

Another bombshell rocked the Montreal police department this week over allegations that the force’s internal affairs department made up evidence to silence whistleblower officers. This comes after accusations that the force regularly spied on journalists and the police chief said he saw nothing wrong with that.

Now, Giovanni De Feo and his former partner Jimmy Cacchione have made allegations that could bring the force to its knees. They claim they were fired in 2013 after they attempted to expose corruption on the police force. They claim the internal affairs department fabricated evidence against officers, would listen to their phone calls and follow them around. It was not for any crime but because, for some reason or another, they fell out of favour.

“We know for a fact that some files were created only to ruin or to prevent people from telling the truth,” said Cacchione.

“When you bring the facts, you gotta bring the real facts because it’s based on credibility,” added De Feo.  “There’s many ways to play with the reports informants reports, surveillance reports, there’s so many ways to do it.”

 And by playing with the reports, legitimate hard working clean investigators were placed under suspicion

“We lived it,” said Cacchione. “It happened to us. It happened to us.”

The Quebec government obviously is concerned with the operations of Montreal police.

Troubling new allegations of more cases are emerging, and so an administrative inquiry will be undertaken to find out how deep the rot goes.

We need full accountability and transparency because it’s my guess that confidence in the Montreal police force right now is at all-time low.

Clown pants are the least of our worries.

Trudeau’s apology a good start

As far as apologies go, it was a pretty good one.

The Right Honourable Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was sorry for refusing to answer a question in English from an English-speaking Canadian in Sherbrooke last month.

The tone-deaf PM remarked that since he was in a French province, he would answer in French even though the question was not about the weather, but about access in English to health care, mental health care. This on a cross-country tour to reconnect with Canadians.

Sincere regrets are fine but really, why did it take so long? Because neither the PM nor his entourage realized at the time that he screwed up.

The mea culpa only came a month later and only after letters from the Quebec Community Groups Network, the Townshippers Association, constituents and Quebec’s English speaking media.  And that’s a problem.

See, that’s the thing. Unless we are the squeaky wheel, unless we constantly fight for our language and services in our language in Quebec, we can be ignored, seen but not heard.

I am happy that we got the letter.  And that the PM says minority language rights are important and that he will stand up for linguistic minorities.

In Sherbrooke, we were so disappointed because we expect so much more from him, and in the future we will accept nothing less.