Rockland Mayor Marcel Guibord, two councillors and his former business partner are expected to be charged Wednesday in an alleged criminal plot, the Citizen has learned.
The breach-of-trust charges follow a two-year investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police’s anti-rackets squad.
The probe targeted Guibord, councillors Guy Félio and Diane Choinière, and the mayor’s one-time business partner and Rockland lawyer, Stéphane Lalonde.
The OPP case against them is anchored in their own email exchanges. The emails date back to November 2010, and weeks before the freshly elected politicians were sworn into office.
The emails, reviewed by the Citizen, suggest that Lalonde was encouraging the mayor and councillors to oust the town manager, and went so far as to lay out a scheme to do so.
He encouraged them to file complaints about the town manager’s performance in their first week of office. “After he’s received five or six comprehensive notices, the door won’t be far!” Lalonde said in an email.
Daniel Gatien, the town manager at the time, was suing Lalonde for defamation and the previous council had agreed to pay their top civil servant’s legal expenses.
In emails to the mayor and councillors, Lalonde proposed that the new council revoke that arrangement, and force the town manager to foot his own legal fight against Lalonde, the defendant in the civil suit.
The council ended up paying out more than $372,000 in severance and fees to get rid of the manager, who was quickly hired as an executive at another municipality.
An odd twist in the case is that the mayor sparked the probe himself when he reported that someone had stolen emails from his home computer.
The investigation took a turn when detectives reviewed the contents of the emails, which they recovered after being anonymously dropped outside someone’s home in Rockland.
The Citizen asked the mayor about the contents in 2012. Guibord said the emails in question may not be authentic. Asked why he would report them stolen if they were fake, he declined to answer.
Lalonde, himself a one-time municipal councillor, has been interviewed by police and has told the Citizen he is “absolutely not worried” about the criminal investigation, confident the emails can’t be used against him as evidence because they are legally confidential under solicitor-client privilege. “So forget it. It ain’t going to happen. In your dreams,” he previously told the Citizen.
“What did I do? A lawyer provides advice and it’s supposed to be privileged,” Lalonde said.
But police are using the emails as evidence and the Citizen has learned that Clarence-Rockland’s municipal council never retained Lalonde for his services, nor did Lalonde ever bill for them.
Félio told the Citizen he didn’t answer any questions when police came calling, saying his lawyer advised him not to say a word.
Choinière has also told the Citizen she doesn’t want to talk about the case.
None of the allegations have been proven in court. The mayor and councillors are expected to be formally charged Wednesday.
