Angry in the Great White North

On April 4, Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier visited the apartment of his girlfriend, Julie Couillard.

On May 26, Bernier was forced to resign from Stephen Harper's cabinet.

Apparently, Bernier had left sensitive files at Couillard's apartment.  In the interim, Couillard made no attempt to return the files or to inform Bernier, but instead gave the files to her lawyer.  Later she dropped the files off at Foreign Affairs, but not until arranging to spill the beans to the media.

Foreign Affairs initiated an investigation, retaining the services of an outside investigation from BCMI.

The results of the investigation have been released, and clearly there is more to this story than merely a forgetful minister.  Indeed, it would appear that Maxime Bernier didn't do anything wrong, and that the fault might lie elsewhere:

The report, drafted by the Foreign Affairs Department, which Mr. Bernier headed until May, concludes that there is no reason to disbelieve Mr. Bernier's statement that he never took the classified documents out of his unlocked briefcase during a visit April 4 and 5 to the apartment of girlfriend Julie Couillard.

"Ms. Couillard may have put herself in jeopardy of having contravened a provision of the Security of Information Act," the report adds.

The report doesn't say whether officials believe Ms. Couillard removed the classified documents from the briefcase - only that Mr. Bernier had them when he arrived, didn't take them out at any time during the visit, and left without them. Ms. Couillard did not agree to be interviewed by investigators.

Predictably, opposition MPs are dismissing the report:

"The fact that they didn't interview Ms. Couillard means that the report is frankly useless," said Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae.

He noted that the government released the report late on a Friday before a long weekend, arguing it was an attempt to manipulate media coverage.

Paul Dewar, the NDP foreign affairs critic, called the report a "complete whitewash."

"What they are seemingly trying to do here is to put the blame almost entirely on Mme. Couillard," he said.

Interestingly, other media reports on this new information are skipping this element altogether.  Bernier is still the person who "forgot" the documents, even though no mention is made of Bernier opening his briefcase:

After arriving at her residence, he left his luggage and an unlocked black briefcase containing NATO briefing documents marked SECRET in her front hall and retired to bed, according to the investigator's report.

He left Couillard's house at 7:30 a.m. the next morning with the briefcase but did not notice any missing documents.

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But even at this point, more than a month after Bernier left the documents at her house, Couillard had not said anything about the NATO documents she had, according to the investigator's report.

I would humbly suggest that the first step in forgetting a document on the table is to have placed the document on the table.

The problem with the Julie-did-it theory is that she lacks any obvious motivation for causing Maxime Bernier this sort of political pain.  The couple had not ended their relationship yet.  Her actions have actually caused her nothing but grief.  Her legal bills are likely quite high already.  This report implies that her legal trouble have barely begun.  No one has suggested that she is earning some otherwise unseen benefits as a result of these events, other than the notoriety that might or might not help launch her upcoming book.  The only real beneficiaries of Maxime Bernier's troubles have been the opposition parties looking to pin a scandal on the Conservative government.  And Julie Couillard is not in their employ.