Champagne's brother faced 11 counts. A judge wrote the acquittal was negotiated.

On 26 November 2008 a regional organized-crime squad searched a house in Grand-Mère owned by Guillaume Champagne, during Project Carapace, one of the investigations in evidence in Operation SharQc, the Journal de Montréal reports. He had no prior record and held a vice-president's post at Bionest, the family firm. In the basement, the Journal reports, police seized methamphetamine pills, a pill press, hashish and cannabis, a prohibited weapon and cash. He did not live there, but police had seen him go there at least six times.

On 19 November 2009 he was charged with conspiring with Elliot Perry and Marcellin Morin, a member of the Hells in Trois-Rivières, to traffic drugs, and with producing methamphetamine. He faced 11 counts. Perry was released on 31 May 2011, for delay.

On 3 December 2013, in court at Shawinigan, the Crown said it had no more evidence to offer, and he was acquitted. Six months after the acquittal, the Journal reports, his brother, François-Philippe Champagne, was officially the Liberal candidate. He was first elected on 19 October 2015.

On 28 October 2016 the Crown dropped the charges against Morin. Both co-accused, the Journal reports, got a stay of proceedings in what it calls the judicial fiasco of Operation SharQc. The Journal's own words: "Ce laboratoire clandestin est donc resté impuni" (so this clandestine lab went unpunished).

At the end of 2016 Justice Chantal Lamarche of the Superior Court, ruling on the fees of his lawyer, Doré, in a civil dispute, wrote that the lawyer had negotiated the acquittal with the Crown prosecutor, with no preliminary inquiry and no trial. She noted some contradictory evidence in the investigation. She wrote that in 2013 François-Philippe Champagne was seriously studying the possibility of running for Parliament, and that for that reason Guillaume Champagne pressed his lawyer to have the file resolved. The lawyer's strategy, she wrote, was to rush nothing and show no aggressiveness in the file. In our read of the dates, she did not sit on the case: she was named to the Superior Court on 11 April 2014.

In 2017 the DPCP told the Journal that its reasons would not be made public. Asked that year, François-Philippe Champagne said he would make no comment about his brother except to call it a trying ordeal for the family.

His brother was charged on 19 November 2009 and acquitted on 3 December 2013; François-Philippe Champagne was first elected on 19 October 2015, and the fee ruling came at the end of 2016. In 2017 he said only that the case was "une épreuve éprouvante pour notre famille" (a trying ordeal for our family). The judge cited "certains éléments de preuve contradictoires" (some contradictory evidence), and the defence strategy she recorded was an ordinary one: let the file run, hoping to get the best outcome possible when the time came. Doré said the police investigation had "des faiblesses" (weaknesses), without saying which, and drew a parallel with Operation SharQc. The co-accused got a stay of proceedings in what the Journal calls "le fiasco judiciaire de l'opération SharQc" (the judicial fiasco of Operation SharQc). In his defence, court documents show, Guillaume Champagne said his acquittal had "toujours été l'objectif à atteindre" (always been the goal). The Journal itself read the Crown as unsure it could "prouver qu'il savait ce qui se tramait dans son sous-sol" (prove that he knew what was going on in his basement). Martin Francoeur, a Le Nouvelliste journalist, wrote in a column published by Le Soleil that "négocier un acquittement" (negotiating an acquittal) is "une expression quelque peu abusive pour un dossier qui n'a pas franchi l'étape du procès" (a somewhat excessive expression for a case that never reached trial), and that "selon toute vraisemblance, la couronne n'était pas en mesure d'établir la culpabilité de Guillaume Champagne" (in all likelihood, the Crown was not able to establish Guillaume Champagne's guilt). He read the brother's pressure as integrity: "Qu'un individu presse son avocat de «régler» son dossier afin de ne pas nuire à son frère qui souhaite se lancer en politique semble démontrer une certaine intégrité" (that a man presses his lawyer to "settle" his file so as not to harm his brother, who wants to enter politics, seems to show a certain integrity), and noted that at the time Guillaume Champagne could not presume how the file would be settled. He found that "rien dans cette décision ne permet de croire qu'il ait pu y avoir quelque forme d'ingérence politique que ce soit" (nothing in this decision suggests there was any form of political interference at all). The NDP MP Robert Aubin said "S'il n'y a pas procès, il n'y a pas d'acquittement à négocier" (if there is no trial, there is no acquittal to negotiate), and that if the prosecution drops its charges, it is because it judged it did not have enough to go on.

On Guillaume Champagne's case, the record shows no step by the minister, and we claim none. The best case for the Crown is a fair one: the judge cited contradictory evidence, both co-accused got stays in what the Journal calls the judicial fiasco of Operation SharQc, the Journal read the Crown as unsure it could prove he knew what was in his basement, and a columnist read it as a Crown unable to prove guilt. But the judge wrote that his lawyer "a réussi à négocier un acquittement avec le procureur de la Couronne" (succeeded in negotiating an acquittal with the Crown prosecutor). The Crown told the court it had no more evidence, and the DPCP says its reasons "ne seront pas rendus publics" (will not be made public). Why it had no more evidence is unexplained.