Formula E: Opposition blames civil servants

The municipal opposition refused to blame former mayor Denis Coderre on Tuesday for last year’s Formula E fiasco, instead suggesting that it should have been up to high-ranking civil servants to flag irregularities.

Ensemble Montréal Leader Lionel Perez said he and other members of the Coderre administration were kept in the dark about key decisions concerning Formula E and that city officials, including the city manager, should have been asking questions about the project.

“When you look at the two biggest contracts that were awarded, for the $1.75-million subsidy and the $10-million guarantee, in those cases specifically, the (city’s) legal services were aware of them and never expressed any reservations,” Perez said to journalists at city hall.

“There was a declaration by the city manager attesting that the decision-making process respected all the policies of the city of Montreal,” he added.

His remarks came after a stormy city council session where Mayor Valérie Plante heaped scorn on former members of the Coderre administration for turning a blind eye to problems with the Formula E at the time.

Earlier Tuesday, Montreal’s auditor general, Michele Galipeau, presented her 536-page annual report to councillors, including an audit of the electric car event held July 29-30.

It reveals that only 13,646 tickets were sold — a number that “was available and known” to the city immediately after the event — while nearly 35,000 were given away. Coderre initially refused to reveal the ticket sales, then said shortly before losing last November’s election that 25,000 tickets had been sold.

The city had projected $22.2 million in revenues for the race, including possible federal and provincial subsidies, but it ended up raising only $7 million.

Galipeau said the Coderre administration had “no business case” for the event, “including a description of the project, issues, risks and overall costs,” and that it did not respect Montreal’s guidelines for governance of major projects.

Speaking to reporters during a break, Plante said the opposition’s efforts to duck responsibility for Formula E presented a sorry spectacle. “To see the ex-mayor treating Montrealers’ money as if it was his own wallet and disregarding laws to achieve his goals is already problematic,” she said.

“But we see members of the former mayor’s executive committee saying basically that it was civil servants’ fault, when the leader of the opposition was part of the office responsible for major projects and a high-ranking member of the executive committee. At some point, there’s a limit to throwing the blame on civil servants,” Plante said.

But an emotional Perez said members of Coderre’s administration like him didn’t have enough information to know what was really going on.

“The creation of MCE (Montréal c’est électrique, the non-profit agency that ran the Formula E) never went before any body (of the city). The contract between MCE and Evenko (the private promoter that manages the Bell Centre and Osheaga music festival, which Coderre invited to get involved in the Formula E) never went before any body,” Perez said.

He denied that members of the Coderre administration looked the other way when organizers of the project disregarded the city’s guidelines for project management.

“At every single point that we had information, we did in fact ask questions to the services and they were responded,” he said.

Asked whether he was surprised to learn how few tickets were sold, Perez refused to answer.

“I’ll defer to the auditor general’s report on that,” he said.

He also refused to comment on Coderre’s handing of the affair.

“I will leave it up to the authorities to make the necessary verifications on that,” he said.