Canadian Lawyer

26 J U L Y 2 0 1 7 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m imon Tremblay has a great memory for important dates in his legal career. Take Jan. 25, 2012. That was the day Tremblay, then a lawyer in the civil litigation department of the Attorney General of Quebec's Montreal office, started teaching civil proceedings at the Barreau du Qué- bec's school and officially became the regulative body's treasurer. But then he got a phone call that changed everything. The caller was Quebec Superior Court Judge France Charbonneau. A few months earlier, she had been named by then-Quebec premier Jean Charest to lead a long-clamoured-for inquiry into corruption in the province's construction industry. "She was looking for a civil litigator with some criminal experi- ence and asked me to join her team," recalled Tremblay, then 32. He remembered Charbonneau well, he adds, because he had pleaded his first case before her just days after joining the attorney general's office on Jan. 21, 2008. "I must have made a good impression on her," Tremblay quips about the quirky case, which involved an appeal of a justice of the peace's decision to give serious jail time to an elderly man for unpaid parking tickets. "At least that's what she told me later." Granted an extended leave of absence by his government employer, Tremblay joined the commission's 135-member team of lawyers, investigators and assistants as fifth counsel, though he ended up as assistant chief counsel. Housed in a suite of offices over two floors of a highrise office building in downtown Montreal, team members rooted through reams of documents and interviewed and prepared witnesses in an effort to fulfil the commission's triple mandate, which was to examine the existence of collusion and corruption in the awarding of public contracts, the possible infiltration of organized crime in the construction industry and make recommendations on how to identify and stop such problems. "Unlike a normal commission of inquiry, we had no file or evi- dence to work from; we only had a mandate," says Tremblay. "We had to find evidence and build cases almost from scratch. That's why it took eight months for the hearings to begin." It was in the specially built hearing room next to the inquiry team's offices that the many colourful characters who helped to make the commission a daytime ratings hit in Quebec testified dur- ing 261 days of televised proceedings. One witness — Joe Borsellino, a construction entrepreneur in C R O S S E X A M I N E D ELIZABETH DELAGE S Tackling corruption Working on Quebec's Charbonneau Commission was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Simon Tremblay By Mark Cardwell

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