Cop blamed for leak of Coderre ticket

Here I need that cheesy rippling special effect (with harp arpeggios) as we go back in time… to 2012. Police officer Nancy Chagnon tickets Denis Coderre, who is not yet mayor and whom she doesn’t recognize, $444 for not having paid his licence fee. Two years later, the police brotherhood asks her for a copy of the ticket, which finds its way into the hands of Patrick Lagacé. 2022, the officer is reprimanded by the ethics committee for revealing this serious document to people who had no business seeing it.

The 2012 moment was, by the way, the moment when Coderre told the policewoman he was her future boss. This Le Devoir piece from 2017 says that two cops got unauthorized access to the ticket on some closed computer system, but doesn’t mention any names.

This may seem like a tempest in a teapot, but it led to the whole imbroglio between Lagacé and Coderre, showing how thin the onetime mayor’s regard was for journalistic freedom – a telling vignette from that era of city politics.