Julie Couillard, l'ex de Maxime Bernier, a dit qu'elle devait parler aux médias pour rétablir sa "dignité". Cette même Julie Couillard a demandé au Toronto Star la somme de 50 000$ pour son témoignage. On sait maintenant le prix de la "dignité" de madame Couillard….

Pendant ce temps, on oublie que Maxime Bernier, en forçant le CRTC à libéraliser l'industrie des télécommunications, a probablement été le ministre le plus utile aux Canadiens depuis de nombreuses années.

Financial Post
Maxime Bernier: the 'yes' minister
By Richard Schultz, Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science, McGill University.

Over the past 40 years, telecommunications has largely been neglected by elected policy-makers. For the most part, the industry has been bureaucratically shaped while politicians have played only a supporting role for decisions made by others. This is true even for the 1993 Telecommunications Act which did not substantially affect the policy directions pursued by the CRTC ever since it gained jurisdiction over telecommunications in 1976.

This political-bureaucratic dynamic dramatically changed with the election of the Conservatives in 2006, particularly with the appointment of Maxime Bernier as minister of industry. Telecommunications was not one of the vaunted five priorities of the new government. But in one of his first appearances as minister, Bernier made it clear that he had his own agenda: “As many of you may know, our new government has five priorities, but I can assure you that telecommunications is at the top of my action list.”

Over the next year, Bernier succeeded in fundamentally changing two major decisions of the CRTC through the appeal process and imposing a policy direction on the CRTC, the first since Cabinet was authorized to do so under 1993 legislation. These initiatives represented the most profound policy changes to the regulatory regime since the introduction of competition in 1979. They also established, for the first time, that elected authorities, not appointed officials, were responsible for setting policy.

Bernier was able to overcome both Cabinet and PMO doubts and determined opposition from both his departmental officials and those in the Privy Council Office. For the first time in the past 40 years of federal regulation of telecommunications, a minister had made a policy difference.

The major direction Cabinet sent to the CRTC substantially re-interpreted the policy objectives of the Telecommunications Act. The regulator was ordered to give market forces primacy in its regulatory decisions which was a fundamental re-ordering of the objectives of telecommunications regulation. [...]

After the Cabinet order, the new CRTC chair said, “the message is clear: the government wants to move quickly toward more reliance on market forces in telecom services, less regulation and smarter regulation. I welcome the clarity and I welcome the variation order.”

Thus concluded the 12-month series of battles that had been fought following the appointment of Maxime Bernier as minister of industry, battles that the minister had clearly won.