Quebec Liberal Leader Charles Milliard says there’s still time for PQ Leader Paul St. Pierre Plamondon to apologize, even after launching legal action against him.
Milliard wants the PQ leader to retract comments linking the Liberals to organized crime, and said Monday morning that he refuses to let the PQ leader smear his party.
“He’s making false association between organized crime (and) our party,” Millard said as he announced a new Liberal candidate in the Quebec City area.
It’s part of a fiery war of words between Milliard and Paul St. Pierre Plamondon which started at the National Assembly on Friday. As the different parties delivered end-of-session press conferences, St. Pierre Plamondon attacked the Liberals.
When pointing to the ongoing investigations into former leader Pablo Rodriguez’s leadership campaign, he wondered aloud if the party has links to organized crime, calling it “such an obvious question.”
Over the weekend, the Liberal Party sent Paul St. Pierre Plamondon a formal legal notice. They are demanding he publicly apologize and retract the statement within 72 hours, saying he has no evidence to back up his claim. The letter calls associating the Liberals with organized crime “unfounded” and “beneath the standards required in his role.”
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St. Pierre Plamondon announced on Sunday that after consulting with his lawyers, he does not “have any intention of retracting myself.” The PQ leader said he was just asking the question of whether or not the Liberals have links to organized crime.
Legal scholar Hilary Young says that’s not much of a defence.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’ve technically framed it in the form of a question or in the from of a statement. If you are implying something about corruption through a question, then that could absolutely be defamatory,” said Young, a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of New Bruswick.
“There’s certainly no defence of ‘I was just asking.’”
Young says litigation threats in politics are very popular, adding not doing it may have made the Liberals look bad.
“It’s so common to threaten litigation that a failure to do so might actually make people wonder if it’s true,” she said.
However, Young says it’s highly unlikely a case like this would ever go to trial.
Due to the slow wheels of justice, it would drag on until well after October’s election.
“I’m lending a hand if he wants just to retract,” Milliard said.
The deadline for St. Pierre Plamondon to apologize and retract is this Wednesday.
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