16 in Canada Face Graft Charges

The Canadian capital’s best-known gadfly has succeeded in forcing authorities to charge a sports minister and 15 prominent police officials and politicians from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s party with graft.

Former businessman Glen Kealey battled for three years to have his allegations of corruption in the Progressive Conservative government taken seriously. On Wednesday, after a 17-day hearing, a justice of the peace gave him permission to press charges.

The charges allege that Progressive Conservative politicians asked for kickbacks on government contracts.

Sports Minister Pierre Cadieux, Senate Speaker Guy Charbonneau and several former Cabinet ministers were charged Wednesday with conspiracy to defraud.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Norman Inkster, his deputy commissioner and a recently retired deputy were charged with conspiring to obstruct justice.

Kealey’s long battle started in 1988, when he began picketing Parliament Hill the day after Mulroney won a second term in office.

The former real estate developer alleged that a Cabinet minister--later identified as Roch LaSalle--asked him for a bribe of $5,000 (about U.S. $3,750 at the time) two years earlier in connection with a Quebec office building Kealey was planning to build.

After he refused to pay the bribe, Kealey says, he lost the contract. And his obsession with the corruption has cost him his wife, business and savings, he says.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigated but said there wasn’t enough evidence to press charges.