On any given day, Chuck Guité could head up to the Prime Minister's Office for a sit-down with then chief of staff Jean Pelletier, or share a table at an Italian restaurant with then public works minister Alfonso Gagliano, or meet at his office with Jean Carle, another senior official in the PMO of Jean Chrétien.
Mr. Guité could also head to Montreal to have breakfast with then Via Rail president Marc LeFrançois or meet with the heads of advertising firms, sometimes alongside Jacques Corriveau, a close friend of Mr. Chrétien and long-time Liberal organizer.
On paper, Mr. Guité was a simple civil servant in charge of advertising at the Department of Public Works. Technically, he reported to another bureaucrat, deputy minister Ran Quail.
In post-referendum Quebec, however, the reality was entirely different. As two months of parliamentary hearings into the sponsorship program have shown, Mr. Guité was as far from the traditional definition of a bureaucrat as anyone could get.
From 1997 until he retired in 1999, Mr. Guité had full signing authority over the sponsorship program, a discretionary $50-million-a-year envelope designed to put up Canadian flags and banners across Quebec.
Mr. Guité did not decide by himself where the money went. As part of his weekly routine, he received input from the most senior political officials in the land on the events that deserved sponsorship funds, the inquiry has heard.
After largely staying out of the public eye through two years of controversy involving a total of $100-million in contracts to a handful of Liberal-friendly advertising firms, Mr. Guité is appearing before the parliamentary inquiry today and tomorrow.
In his long-awaited appearance, he will be able to shed some light on two questions at the heart of the matter: How much political direction did he receive from the PMO, Mr. Gagliano and the heads of Crown corporations in the daily management of the sponsorship program? Why did the Liberal government under Mr. Chrétien put so much faith in a civil servant who was known to bend the rules to direct advertising contracts to Conservative-friendly firms in the government of Brian Mulroney?
Mr. Guité grew up in francophone Canada, but now he seems slightly more at ease in English. His given names are officially Joseph Charles, but the sponsorship scandal has made him one of Canada's best-known Chucks.
His family's roots are in the eastern Quebec region of Gaspésie, where he was born, and in the francophone part of New Brunswick, where he grew up. After a stint in the Canadian Forces, he spent more than 30 years in Canada's public service. With his big hats, brash personality and penchant for good meals, he stood out in dull Ottawa.
He liked to move and shake, and to deal directly with the people in charge, especially ministers and PMO officials. Mr. Guité also enjoyed the company of people in the advertising industry, although he said it never affected his professional judgment as he dished out contracts.
"There's nothing wrong with wining and dining, certainly in that industry," he told The Globe and Mail in 2002.
"It's show biz. . . . That doesn't mean that because you buy me a steak and a half a bottle of wine at Hy's, it's going to influence my professional opinion. No way."
As the head of the government's advertising branch since the 1980s, Mr. Guité was appreciated for his military-like efficiency. Simply put, he got things done.
A former official remembers a specific campaign that was executed in about two weeks in Quebec with the help of Mr. Guité, who pasted key parts of the province with billboards and posters under the nose of the Parti Québécois government.
"Going through the normal government structures would have taken two months. But the reality is, against the separatists, we didn't always have two months' notice," the former federal official said.
In recently released testimony to a closed-door parliamentary hearing in 2002, Mr. Guité justified some of his most controversial sponsorship deals by saying that Canada was at "war" with the Quebec government.
That's why, Mr. Guité said, he approved six-figure deals with advertising firms for "verbal advice" and "bent" federal rules to buy $8-million in billboard space in Quebec before the 1995 referendum on sovereignty to promote federalism.
Mr. Guité could juggle dozens of files and millions of dollars all at once, with minimal paperwork. Some of the documents that were created ended up in a shredder.
"When you're at war, you drop the book and the rules and you don't give your plan to the opposition. You don't leave your plan of attack on your desk," he told the inquiry.
Mr. Guité's way of doing business has landed him in hot water with Auditor-General Sheila Fraser, who has accused him of "breaking just about every rule in the book" in the award of contracts to advertising firms that produced little or no work.
Mr. Guité has rejected the allegations, and seemed unfazed by the controversy when camera crews tracked him recently at his holiday hangout in Arizona. Now back in Ottawa, he is ready to defend himself.
So far, the parliamentary inquiry has heard two widely different answers to the question of political direction Mr. Guité received on the sponsorship file.
Liberal officials such as Mr. Pelletier and Mr. Gagliano have said that they provided only advice or suggestions to Mr. Guité, and that the management was entirely up to him.
"We did not make a final decision, and no one in the PMO, to my knowledge, intervened in the internal administration of the program. I want to make that very clear," Mr. Pelletier said.
Mr. Gagliano, who was minister of public works from 1997 to 2002, insisted he "didn't give any political direction" to Mr. Guité.
Bureaucrats, on the other hand, have told the inquiry that political bosses were running the program.
Huguette Tremblay, a friend and long-time office manager under Mr. Guité, said that bureaucrats had to follow "blindly" the directives that came from Mr. Gagliano.
"When [Mr. Guité]would come back from a meeting -- I'm not saying every single meeting, because he could have met with the minister on a different topic -- very often when he would come back from the minister's office, we were given directives as to which sponsorships had been approved," she said.
Despite the hours of testimony before the inquiry, however, no one has yet explained why Mr. Guité specifically was put in charge of the program.
He had been the head of the advertising branch under the Conservative government, which made no pretense of fair and open competitions between advertising firms. Instead, Mr. Guité made up short lists of companies for particular contracts and, along with a political official, selected the winner.
Regarding the massive advertising campaign for Canada's 125th birthday, Mr. Guité was quoted in the early 1990s as saying that Treasury Board rules were not binding.
"It's not a rule. We change the guidelines to fit the situation," Mr. Guité said.
Still, Mr. Guité remained in his position when the Chrétien Liberals took office in 1993 after promising, among other things, to clean up the advertising program.
These days, even Liberal MPs are wondering why he was given free rein with so much money in such a politically sensitive program.
"I'm sure most reasonable Canadians watching this entire process are saying, 'How is it if Mr. Guité was front and centre under the Tories . . . that there was no effort made to remove him from any authority of the advertising and public-opinion research sector when we came into power?' " Liberal MP Marlene Jennings said at the inquiry.
Questions for Guité
A 30-year veteran of the federal civil service, Chuck Guité managed the sponsorship program from its inception in 1997 until his retirement in 1999. Here are a few questions that could be put to him during his appearance today and tomorrow at the parliamentary inquiry into the scandal:
Who thought of creating the sponsorship program? Who decided to ask advertising firms to manage the program on the government's behalf? Who selected the advertising firms that worked on the program?
What was the exact role of Alfonso Gagliano, the minister of public works from 1997 to 2002, in the management of the sponsorship program? What was the role of the Prime Minister's Office? Did either or both provide "political direction?"
Who decided the amount of an individual sponsorship to a sporting or a cultural event?
Is it a coincidence that many of the biggest recipients of sponsorship funds were also donors to the Liberal Party of Canada?
Of the hundreds of events that shared a total of $150-million in sponsorship funds since 1997, why did one company -- Le Groupe Polygone Éditeurs Inc. -- receive almost $40-million of that amount for a variety of its projects?
Why did Groupaction Marketing Inc. receive $330,000 to prepare a communications strategy for the firearms registry, given that the Justice Department never asked for it and no documents are on file?
On advertising as a whole, was there more or less political interference under the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien than under the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney?