Now that the election is over, the Charbonneau Commission resumed its hearings Tuesday morning.
The inquiry is now focusing its attention on the ties between the construction industry and political parties.
In his testimony, inquiry researcher Martin Comeau revealed that engineering and construction firms were just as closely linked with the provincial government as they were with the municipal governments.
In the late 1990s, it became clear Quebec was long overdue for major road repairs and that billions would have to be spent to fix those roads.
In fact, $18.5 billion was spent between 1998 and 2011 on contractors alone.
However, the same firms that won the contracts donated millions in donations to both the Liberals and Parti Quebecois.
The Liberal Party received most money, $8.3 million, but the PQ received almost as much, $5.3 million, when it sat in the opposition.
The firms that received the most contracts from the Transport Ministry are, in order, Dessau, SNC-Lavalin and Genivar and CIMA+.
There were 2,822 different donors.
Comeau said that number was the “minimum,” because he has only added up the donations that are officially recorded.
It was explained to the commission that the life span of an asphalt road is between nine and 14 years, while a concrete road can last for 30 years.
Most of Quebec’s roads were built during the 1960s and 1970s, and it was obvious in the late 1990s that some major infrastructure spending was due.
Then, in 2006, the Concorde overpass collapsed in Laval and the government knew that it had to spend even more.
More spending means more people wanting a share of the contracts, and money, up for grabs, and that is when the correlation between donations to political parties, both liberals and PQ, and who got the contracts became apparent.
Last year, the commission revealed how engineering firms were able to get contracts in exchange for political donations in Montreal, Laval and other smaller cities. Now, it will try to see if the same system worked at the Transport Ministry.
But the same engineering firms testified they never cheated the system at the provincial level. The commission is expected to now reveal if they were telling the truth.
Normand Bedard, the ex-president of Sintra, took the stand late in the afternoon.
Bedard said the company held 22 or 23 per cent market share of companies in the paving, landscaping and purification business when he quit in 2012.
He will resume his testimony Wednesday.
-- with files from The Canadian Press
