UPAC drops years-long investigation into Quebec Liberal Party financing

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Launched in April 2014, Projet Mâchurer was tasked with determining whether any criminal infractions had occurred during the Quebec Liberal Party’s financing activities between 2001 and 2012.

UPAC submitted the findings from its nearly eighty years of investigations to Quebec’s office of criminal prosecutions, which in turn submitted the file to a retired Quebec Appeals Court justice for review.

“Considering the legal opinion obtained and all of the rigor and resources invested in this investigation, (UPAC) feels there are no grounds for it to continue and so ends it,” said UPAC commissioner Frédérick Gaudreau.

In October 2020, former Quebec premier Jean Charest announced he had launched a lawsuit against the provincial government and UPAC over leaks to the media of “confidential information about my private life and that of my family.”
Charest, who led the Quebec Liberals from 1998 to 2012, specifically cited the Mâchurer investigation as the reason for the $1-million lawsuit. Charest noted that one definition of “mâchurer,” the name chosen by UPAC officials, is to “slander someone, to blacken their reputation.”


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