MONTREAL – With a little less than a year left in its mandate, the Charbonneau Commission has chewed through nearly two-thirds of its allotted budget.
The public inquiry, which has produced big headlines across Quebec since public hearings began in June 2012, has now spent a little over $8.7 million, according to documents obtained by The Gazette through Access to Information legislation.
That includes the salaries of the commission’s 90 permanent staff members, payment and other costs (travel, lodging) linked to expert witnesses, the rental and renovation of the inquiry’s offices on René Lévesque Blvd. and administrative expenses.
The total budget allotted to the Charbonneau Commission when it was created by the then-Liberal government in October 2012 was $14.6 million, meaning about 60 per cent of the global budget is now gone.
Budget Breakdown
Salaries: $3,355,688
Fees (expert witnesses, etc.): $2,534,360
Administrative costs: $2,878,860
TOTAL: $8,768,908
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With 10 months remaining before Justice France Charbonneau is scheduled to produce her final report, it’s unclear if the commission will end up in the black or in the red.
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The commission’s official spokesperson, Richard Bourdon, was not available for comment on Thursday morning.
The inquiry’s spending seems to have increased sharply during the fall session.
As of the end of September, according to a report by The Huffington Post website, the commission had spent $5.6 million (over approximately 11 months).
A subsequent Access to Information request by The Gazette showed that an additional $3.2 million was then doled out between Sept. 25 and Dec. 3, 2011 alone.
The surge may have been the result of the additional staff and resources required to broadcast the hearings on a daily basis over the Internet during that period.
Other inquiries – and how much these cost
Compared to other public inquiries held in recent years at the provincial level, the Charbonneau Commission’s budget is relatively large.
The 2010 Bastarache inquiry, which examined how judges are selected in Quebec, carried a price tag of just $6 million, while British Columbia’s 2009 inquiry into the use of tasers by police forces and the death of Polish traveller Robert Dziekanski cost $4.5 million.
The Gomery inquiry into the federal sponsorship scandal, in contrast, was far more expensive. Justice John Gomery and his team spent $32 million unravelling the misuse of public funds by former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s Liberals.
An additional $40 million was spent by government departments to pay lawyers, dig up millions of pages of documents requested by the Gomery inquiry, and to set up a team of bureaucrats in the Privy Council Office to respond to the scandal.
The Charbonneau Commission’s public hearings, currently in the middle of a seven-week hiatus, are scheduled to resume the morning of Monday, Jan. 21.
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