In December of 2003, the Department of Justice, claiming that there was a lack of evidence, terminated the investigation before the RCMP had questioned the BBC, France Animation or Ravensburger, the companies that broadcast the television series. Cheryl Blackeney, Weinberg's former secretary—Weinberg was one of the main shareholders in Cinar, with his wife, Micheline Charest—received a call from the RCMP telling him that the investigation had been terminated without charges being laid. When asked why, the RCMP replied:
“It's not our call.”
Bertrand Gagnon, a former RCMP investigator, said this: “How is it that someone in Ottawa got involved in this and had access to our inquiry… that is unclear.”
I have skipped over a lot of paragraphs, which now brings me to this one:
One can only conclude that the comments of Justice Claude Auclair are, at the very least, incisive, extremely critical and harsh. He writes in his judgment that the way of conducting business of the accused—Ronald A. Weinberg and the late Micheline Charest, Christophe Izard and Christian Davin—was “based on cheating, lies and dishonesty.” He goes on to say that the latter “did not hesitate to tamper with contracts in order to inflate production costs with a view to receiving federal funding and to alter their equity percentage in order to qualify under the bilateral France-Quebec agreement.”
He goes on to say: “[…] the conduct of the defendants was abusive, premeditated and deliberate. Even during the trial, they continued to hide their wrongdoing.” He points out that they had no compunction about “making false statements as to Canadian content and Canadian authors”, adding in the same breath that “a clear message has to be sent to copyright violators that their greed will be punished and that they can expect to receive more than just a simple order to pay damages with no penalty, if they are found out.”
No action was taken in the wake of the ruling handed down by the judge, who was of the view that the damages awarded were inadequate. So, this is truly a matter of public interest.
He points out, once again, that the judgment and the award of punitive damages are intended to “prevent similar cases from occurring and to punish these white-collar criminals, in order to discourage them from concocting such schemes in the future, and to sanction their scandalous, despicable and immoral behaviour”.
I am still quoting from the judge's ruling. Here is a final quote:
The defendants should have known that their game would be exposed, and yet, they persisted in their deceit and did all they could to break the plaintiff, both morally and financially. Only the plaintiff's perseverance and the support he received from his counsel allowed him to remain firm and to stay with this legal saga to the bitter end.
Those are the reasons why we have tabled this motion. We clearly do not have the same tools as the RCMP. In any case, the latter would only be too happy to present the results of its investigation. The charge-laying process was interrupted. Why? We know who made the decision, but we do not know why. You must admit that, given the context that I have just described to you, this is an absolutely awful case. Here in Canada, we are shooting ourselves in the foot by not providing better protection of copyright. We are talking about millions of dollars of federal money obtained on the basis of misrepresentations. I can only support the views of the judge in this case. The damages awarded to the individual--