Quebec attorney general can’t find record of threats to Pauline Marois

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Quebec’s attorney general cannot find a documented record of six threats made toward Pauline Marois as people were voting in the 2012 election and she was about to become the province’s first female premier.

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The six threats have been referred to often in the current trial at the Montreal courthouse where four people working as technicians at the Metropolis club on Sept. 4, 2012 are suing the attorney general and the City of Montreal.

They are collectively seeking $600,000 in their claim that insufficient security was in place when Richard Henry Bain arrived and fired a single shot toward a group of technicians on break while Marois was delivering her victory speech inside.

The bullet killed technician Denis Blanchette and wounded another, Dave Courage.

The technicians who filed the lawsuit — Guillaume Parisien, Jonathan Dubé, Audrey Dulong-Bérubé and Gaël Ghiringhelli — say they were left traumatized from witnessing the shooting and, later, the realization that their lives were spared because Bain’s rifle jammed.

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Witnesses have told Superior Court Justice Philippe Bélanger that the Sûreté du Québec investigated six threats made toward Marois in the span of four hours, just before the Parti Québécois won a minority government.

Retired SQ officers said the threats turned out to be unfounded and had no connection to Bain. But a report on the SQ’s internal review of what happened that night was critical of how the bodyguards assigned to protect Marois were not informed of the threats.

Last week, Bélanger said he was stunned that none of the nine SQ officers who testified in the civil trial were able to say what was behind the threats. As the lawyers in the trial were set to make their closing arguments, Bélanger said he considered the evidence to be incomplete, and ordered the attorney general to produce some record of the threats.

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The judge wanted three questions addressed: What were the six threats in question? Who investigated them? Who was informed of them?

On Monday, Julien Bernard, a lawyer representing the attorney general, informed the judge “we have, unfortunately, not traced a document that can answer, in a systematic way, all of your questions.”

“We have to talk to several people who could have been involved in order to get as much information as possible. There are some who could testify that we could communicate with. But some, several members of the Sûreté du Québec, are now retired.”

Bernard told the court that finding the investigators who looked into the threats made a decade ago will take time and asked for an extension to answer the judge’s questions.

“I am stunned that there is no document that records” the six threats, said Virginie Dufresne-Lemire, the lawyer representing the four technicians. But she agreed with Bernard’s request for a two-week delay to find answers.

The trial is to resume on May 9.

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