OTTAWA - Claims by the Harper government that it is neither aware of nor interested in the romantic entanglements of ministers came under renewed fire Tuesday amid reports of an old Mafia liaison.
The week-old resignation of foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier continues to turn up fresh skeletons, with Opposition MPs citing a newspaper report that Bernier's ex-girlfriend once dated an alleged mobster.
"I do not seek and I do not get security information on private Canadian citizens," Harper told the House of Commons.
Julie Couillard's past links to three different men who all had ties to the Hells Angels was already causing the security-conscious, law-and-order Tories a communications headache.
A Montreal newspaper cited sources Tuesday in a story claiming Couillard dated alleged Montreal mafioso Tony Volpato in the early 1990s, before her various associations with bikers.
"It's a question of state security," Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe said outside the House after raising the report in the Commons.
"Just imagine she had links in the past with people of al Qaida. The Tories would be jumping on their seats on the other side . . . ."
Instead, Harper's Conservatives are steadfastly maintaining that Couillard's past is not a security concern, that it was unknown to the government, and that Bernier's admitted carelessness in forgetting classified NATO briefing documents at her home is the only reason for his resignation.
A host of security experts have challenged the government perspective. And Opposition MPs charge that the newly alleged Mafia connection just makes government denials less credible.
Neither Couillard nor Volpato could be reached Tuesday for comment.
Liberal MP Denis Coderre told the House that Volpato was under RCMP electronic surveillance in the early 1990s so Couillard must have come to the attention of authorities. She was also later interviewed by a joint biker task force of the RCMP and Securite du Quebec, he said.
"She was well known to law enforcement, yet the prime minister is telling us that the RCMP and CSIS were asleep at the switch," Coderre told the Commons.
"How is it possible that they never informed him of any of this and of potential security risks?"
Outside the House, Coderre called the government denials "a lack of judgment, a cover-up, or both."
Bloc MP Serge Menard, a former public safety minister in Quebec, was equally scathing.
"It's not credible. It's as simple as that."
The newspaper report said Volpato was a close friend and confidant of Frank Cotroni, the chief of Montreal's Calabrian mafia who died in 2004.
Indeed, Volpato was cited in the Commons as a poster boy for lax Liberal attitudes to organized crime by former Reform and Conservative party stalwart John Reynolds in 1998.
"Anthony Volpato, described by the papers as one of the leading figures in the Montreal Mafia, was sentenced to six years for conspiracy to import 180 kilos of cocaine," Reynolds groused in the Commons at the time. "He was freed after only one year."
By Couillard's own self-proclaimed standards, the alleged Volpato entanglement takes her past to another security level.
In a Quebec magazine interview last week, she described herself as a former naif who didn't realize biker gangs were hardcore criminal organizations.
"The real criminals, that's the Mafia, that's the Italians," she told Sept Jours, a "People"-like human interest magazine.
The 38-year-old's ever growing list of suspect partners is raising uncomfortable questions about the Conservative government's security checks for cabinet ministers.
And those questions are casting a new light on Harper's public put-down of opposition leaders as "gossipy old busybodies."
The government has announced that Foreign Affairs officials will conduct an internal review of the document loss, but is signalling it will not co-operate with a parallel study by the Commons public safety committee.
Neither Harper nor any other cabinet member will agree to appear at the committee's "partisan circus" next week, a government source told The Canadian Press on Tuesday.
"There will not be any investigation into any 'Couillard affair,"' Tory House leader Peter Van Loan said in the Commons.
"There will be a review of the processes and the issues of the documents that were left in an unsecured location."
As for mafiosos and bikers, Van Loan later sniffed, "these ancient relationships may be of interest to some" - but not the Conservative government.
