NDP Leader Mulcair says cops wanted to talk to him about meeting with Vaillancourt

OTTAWA – Federal NDP Leader Tom Mulcair says he was contacted by police in 2011 because of an alleged bribe offered many years earlier by a now-controversial mayor.

Mulcair says he didn’t go to police after that 1994 meeting with Laval’s then-mayor Gilles Vaillancourt because there was no evidence.

Mulcair, who was then a political rookie seeking office for the first time, says he never actually had proof he was being offered cash by Vaillancourt.

He says Vaillancourt simply offered him an envelope.

He says he refused the envelope, cut short the meeting, and kept his distance from the powerful mayor of Laval.

Media have posted a statement given by Mulcair in July 2011 to police in which he says Vaillancourt repeatedly told him he wanted to help him, while holding up an envelope in his hand.

The statement quotes Mulcair as saying he discussed the meeting with fellow Liberal Vincent Auclair, whom Vaillancourt also allegedly offered an envelope.

Vaillancourt was arrested on May 9 and faces several corruption-related charges, including gangsterism. He has pleaded guilty to the charges and denied offering bribes to other politicians.

One of those alleged targets was Serge Menard, a former federal and provincial MP with the Bloc Quebecois and Parti Quebecois. Menard was allegedly offered $10,000 cash by the mayor in 1993.

Like Mulcair, he was a rookie provincial politician on the verge of winning his first election. And like Mulcair, he says he refused the money, then decided to remain publicly silent about the incident.

Menard, a lawyer, is quoted in a Montreal La Presse report saying that what happened two decades ago is not technically illegal — because corruption laws apply to civil servants, ministers and legislators.

He told the newspaper that the relevant Criminal Code articles don’t make any reference to exchanges that involve regular citizens running as candidates for office — which is what he and Mulcair were at the time of Vaillancourt’s alleged offer.