For the first time, the federal government's sponsorship scandal has been linked directly into the heart of former prime minister Jean Chrétien's office.
Jean Pelletier, Chrétien's former chief of staff and one of his closest confidants, made regular phone calls to the head of the sponsorship program, imposing political pressure on how millions of dollars should be handed out, says a staffer who worked in the office that administered the money.
Pelletier placed calls to Pierre Tremblay, the man in the public works department who held the purse strings for federal sponsorship money in the late 1990s, said the woman, who spoke with the Star on the condition of anonymity.
"Pelletier would call (Tremblay) on a regular basis to discuss sponsorships," she recalled.
[. . . .] It is highly unusual, government sources say, for a chief of staff in the Prime Minister's Office to call a mid-level bureaucrat in the public works department.
The woman is the third whistle-blower to talk to the Star in the past week about the involvement of civil servants and politicians in the sponsorship scandal. And she said yesterday she would be willing, although hesitant, to testify in public.
[. . . .] Senior politicians and bureaucrats including former public works minister Alfonso Gagliano; Don Boudria, government House leader at the time; Denis Coderre, then-secretary of state for amateur sport; and recently fired VIA Rail president Marc LeFrançois were all in frequent touch with Tremblay, she said.
And they were careful to ensure those conversations were clandestine, she said.
[. . . . Another said,] "I would like to speak, but I think for my job, I would think about it twice."
[. . . .] She said she is angry at high-ranking politicians, including Gagliano, who say they had nothing to do with the scandal.
"When they say, `No, we did not have discussions. No, we did not call them,' that's where I have an issue. Yes, they did call and it was about sponsorship."
Between 1997 and 2000, the government handed out hundreds of millions of dollars in federal sponsorship funds to community festivals, sporting events and other projects. The sponsorships were administered by a group of mainly Montreal-based advertising firms that collected as much as $100 million of the total $250 million in the program in the form of fees or commissions.
[. . . .] At one point, she said, one of Gagliano's assistants complained to Tremblay's staff that not enough sponsorship money was being directed to western provinces. "If he's saying that to us, obviously the minister's office was looking for money in specific ridings," she said.
Tremblay's meetings with his political bosses were deliberately absent from his official schedule on request from Tremblay or the minister's office, she said. And many of the phone calls Tremblay received from senior officials were transferred to a "secure" telephone line, the insider said.
She said staff in the office were told not to send e-mail messages related to the sponsorship issue and were instead instructed to make phone calls.
"When you're calling asking for secure lines, or calling and saying, `We can't talk on the phone, let's meet,' or you're not sending e-mails or you're meeting with Coderre and Boudria and don't want it in the agenda, you have to wonder."
While no one in the office was privy to the conversations between Tremblay and his political bosses, it was clear from his actions after meetings or phone calls what the discussions were about, she said.
"Immediately after talking to them, he'd call the president of an (advertising) agency or set up an appointment," she said. "He did express the fact that he was being pressured."
[. . . .] two other whistle-blowers . . . painted a picture of unrestrained waste, including millions of dollars handed out without even the most basic level of scrutiny or accountability.
[. . . .] The man, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said he likely won't testify before a government inquiry if asked because it's a "career-limiting move and I don't want to be associated with it. I don't even put that (period of work) on my resumé."
Another person. . . , an advertising consultant . . . said Tremblay's predecessor, Chuck Guité, would run down a list of proposed sponsorship events each week or so, arbitrarily assigning dollar figures without criteria, analysis or consideration for the level of visibility the government would receive for the money.
"He'd go through and say, `$5,000, $15,000, $8,000, $10,000, $5,000, $50,000,'" she said. "Nothing was in writing."
