Years of media leaks from Quebec anti-corruption squad came from its director, watchdog concludes

A steady drip of media leaks that derailed a high-profile corruption trial came from the very investigator looking into the corruption, according to Quebec’s police watchdog.

He did it, they believed, to further his own career at the head of the province’s high-profile anti-corruption police squad, called UPAC.

“The theory… is that Robert Lafrenière orchestrated a system of controlled leaks concerning ongoing investigations at UPAC with the aim of his renewal as UPAC commissioner and the creation of UPAC as a specialized police force,” said a court ruling unveiled Monday, describing testimony from the BEI, the agency that investigates police wrongdoing in Quebec.

Lafrenière has denied all of it.

The BEI’s conclusion was shared by others, including the Crown prosecutors’ office, wrote Justice Andre Perreault in his ruling.

In 2018, Quebec’s public safety ministry also “put forward the thesis of a group of individuals organized in a chain: a corrupt UPAC officer who obtains… confidential information and who transmits it to one or more acolytes who, in turn, make sure to find the best route to make it public," Perreault wrote.

The theory has also been publicly floated before, but it’s never been laid out in such detail or from such a credible source as the BEI detective, Michel Doyon, who was tasked with digging into the long saga of the leaks.

In testimony under oath, he said that his team had been able to trace certain leaks to certain people who it believed had been acting in concert with their chief, Lafrenière -- who the BEI concluded was personally tied to six leaks.

One of Lafrenière’s deputies at UPAC was tied to eight, another to three leaks, and a third person to two.

Doyon also testified that the leaks seemed to sync up with big political moments in Quebec City, when they went back over their timing.

"Mr. Doyon stated that his investigation reveals that certain leaks or investigative strategies of UPAC are synchronized with pivotal dates in the political agenda of the National Assembly," the ruling said.

CTV News has not been able to reach Lafrenière for comment, but the former cop told La Presse on Monday that he finds the allegations “absurd” and that they were "sullying his reputation," arguing that the leaks hurt some of his key cases.

That is true -- if accurate, the theory means that the very man charged with cracking down during a pivotal moment in Quebec’s effort to clean up its public works and politics was responsible for undermining the pivotal parts of that project.

UPAC is the unit that investigated Jean Charest as well as some other high-profile Liberal politicians, including former deputy premier Nathalie Normandeau, who faced serious charges over an alleged public-works scheme north of Montreal, at a water treatment plant in Boisbriand.

Normandeau was first arrested in 2016, but by fall 2020, all her charges had been dropped or stayed -- the remaining ones stayed simply because the process had taken so long, complicated by the media leaks around the case.

The ruling revealed Monday was, in fact, the same ruling from 2020 that stayed Normandeau’s charges, but its full contents weren’t made public until now.

In the last year and a half, a coalition of Quebec media outlets, including Bell Media, intervened in an attempt to make the full ruling public, a request they were ultimately granted.

The leaks ended up changing the course of Normandeau’s trial, but there were other leaks involving other investigations, including the one into Charest.

Lafrenière told La Presse that the leaks notably hurt the Charest investigation.

A one-time Surete du Quebec officer, Lafrenière went on to spend two years at Quebec’s public security ministry before being appointed as head of the brand-new UPAC, then not a permanent unit, in 2011.

In 2016 -- about four years into the ongoing leaks about the unit’s work -- he was appointed to a second five-year term. But after serving only half of it, he suddenly stepped down in 2018 and has kept a low profile ever since.

He complained to La Presse that he was never asked by the BEI to give his side or to explain why he would tank his own investigations in the way they alleged in court.

"My family suffers, my friends suffer. I had a great reputation, and now, because I did my job, I'm being singled out," he told the outlet.

In the newly released ruling, Justice Perreault dedicates special attention to tracing the various investigations that tried to get to the bottom of who was doing the leaking, writing that some of these appeared to be doomed from the start.

For example, UPAC carried out its own internal investigation into the leaks, but it “was initiated while Mr. Lafreniere knew that it was UPAC management that was responsible for it,” the BEI testified.

Perreault ruled that the leaks did make it necessary to stay the proceedings against Normandeau and that while it wasn’t his job to determine beyond a reasonable doubt who exactly was responsible, any police officer should have known better.

In particular, he pointed out the absurdity of the idea that a false internal investigation would be carried out by UPAC, into leaks from UPAC, and would be undermined by people at the head of UPAC -- knowing full well that another, independent investigation would later need to be held, delaying things even more.

It should have been obvious that that kind of delay would ultimately compromise the trial itself, the judge wrote.

LISTEN ON CJAD 800 RADIO: TOM MULCAIR: DUMB MOVE BY THE LIBERALS ON UPAC