Patrick Lagacé is a columnist with La Presse.

In March 2009, unbeknown to him, union man and Quebec Liberal Party member Eddy Brandone was being followed by the Sûreté du Québec. The SQ was tracking Mr. Brandone as part of a then-secret criminal investigation code-named Opération Diligence, that was peeking into the relationship between the Fédération des travailleurs du Québec and unnamed politicians.

That day, Mr. Brandone was seen at the restaurant of the W Hotel, then travelled to a non-descript building in Montreal's north end, where he met with a member of the Fonds de solidarité du Québec, the FTQ's $10-billion investment fund.

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Then, Mr. Brandone went to a hotel in Montreal's west end. There was a conference with Inuit leaders at the hotel. Attending the conference was Jean Charest, then Quebec's Premier. Mr. Brandone, according to Radio-Canada, who broke the story in the midst of the 2012 election campaign, went straight for Mr. Charest, shook his hand and had a chat with the Premier.

Then, a funny thing happened: The SQ immediately stopped following Mr. Brandone. In police parlance, that's called a "black out".

Four unnamed SQ officers then told Radio-Canada that the "black out" was called because the SQ brass panicked when it heard that Mr. Brandone, who has never been charged with a criminal offense, had met with Mr. Charest. One of them told Radio-Canada: "There is a principle of protection of the government [at the SQ]. A criminal investigation cannot come to close to the Premier." That is exactly what I, and other colleagues at La Presse have heard from multiple sources and written about, and why, since 2011, I've been calling the SQ a political police force.

That is exactly what I, and other colleagues at La Presse have heard from multiple sources and written about, and why, since 2011, I've been calling the SQ a political police force.

Not a Stasi-style police. The SQ doesn't break doors in the middle of the night to rouse political dissidents. But the SQ is the only police organization that can launch criminal investigations into allegations of political corruption. And, strangely enough, before media reports and public pressure led to the creation of a special anti-corruption squad in early 2011, it almost never did.

Media reports and the Charbonneau commission – the public inquiry reluctantly set up by Mr. Charest in late 2011 – has lifted the veil on all sorts of shenanigans involving public contracts going back decades, both municipal and provincial.

Knowing what we now know, and with knowledge of just how blatant some of these incidents were, it is mind boggling to think that the SQ was never able, in the decades leading to 2011, to mount any meaningful criminal investigations into these shady deals.

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Since the 1980s, for instance, the media has periodically reported on some troubling dealings in Laval, Quebec's second-largest city and Montreal's neighbour to the North. Through the years, Laval has had, because of its rapid post 1960's growth, a reputation akin to that of New Jersey – a land of "possibilities" for politicians on the take. Gilles Vaillancourt, Laval's former mayor, was actually running what prosecutors described as a crime ring, when he was arrested on gangsterism charges last year, along with 36 others persons.

Now that we know what we know about these allegations, to think that the SQ was never able to arrest anyone in Laval before 2013 is bewildering. Prosecutors allege Laval was an open-air landfill of dirty schemes involving politics, kickbacks and municipal contracts. Funnily enough, a lot of those arrested with Mr. Vaillancourt, among them scions of construction companies and engineering firms, were political donors to the Quebec Liberal Party and, in a more modest measure, to the Parti Québécois.

In 2012, Mr. Charest lambasted Radio-Canada's report about the Brandone story. "Never, never, never did I intervene," said the man who would a few weeks later narrowly lose the Premiership to Pauline Marois.

I believe him. Based on media reports, based on my own discussions with sources through the years, I am certain that the SQ never receives direct orders to ignore the political powers of the day. It does so organically, which explains why it responded the way it did when the target of a criminal investigation happened to have a public chat with then-premier Charest.

It is now known that Opération Diligence aborted because an unknown person at the SQ alerted the Charest government that the provincial police had some FTQ leaders' in their sights. As the Charbonneau Commission heard, the cops spying on the FTQ realized their targets actually knew they were being spied on. An unknown person in the Charest government had told the FTQ about the secret criminal investigation. Opération Diligence crumbled.

The SQ, of course, has launched an investigation about the whole debacle. However, that the investigation is not targeting the political leaks that torpedoed its criminal investigation, but the leaks that allowed Le Journal de Montréal to reveal how Opération Diligence was aborted.

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If the SQ had done its job, if it had firmly investigated crimes of political corruption in the decades leading to the 2000s, Quebec would never have needed the Charbonneau Commission.