NRC executive says ‘au revoir’ while on language training leave
Resigns after $90K spent over 16 months
Ian Potter, the vice-president of the National Research Council who has spent 16 months on language training at a cost of more than $90,000 plus salary, has resigned.
His email to employees went out Wednesday afternoon, effective immediately.
Potter says he will spend the summer with his family and then pursue other career opportunities. He didn’t leave a forwarding address, advising colleagues instead to go through his longtime assistant at NRC if they wish to contact him.
Potter, who is in his late fifties, has spent the past 16 months doing full-day individual French lessons in his hometown of Edmonton, at a cost of $455 a day. The total through March was about $90,000; the amount of April’s bill from the University of Alberta is not known yet.
He has remained on salary in the range of $168,500 to $202,300, while an acting vice-president has been appointed to replace him and has been doing his job in Ottawa.
He has been a vice-president of NRC since 2011, but at the beginning of January, 2017, he left Ottawa to begin language training.
His position is designated bilingual, but he had been filling the role until then despite understanding little French.
Before resigning, he was cleared to stay on language training until Aug. 31, a total of 20 months.
Potter was born and raised in England. He was hired at the NRC from Alberta seven years ago by former president John McDougall, another Albertan. The two men had been top executives together at Alberta’s research and technology agency.
McDougall, appointed under the Conservative government, left shortly after the Liberals took over.
Potter’s division, engineering, was the biggest portfolio among NRC vice-presidents. In addition, he was for some years head of Business Management Support (BMS), which dealt with matters of intellectual property, client management, and marketing.
The case shows a serious waste of taxpayers’ money, said Aaron Wudrick, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
“It is very poor value for money to spend this much money on language training (and) to have the guy leave,” he said.
He noted that Potter had been performing his duties for several years without this training.
“The government needs to think about putting some protocols in place to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. We can light our hair on fire about the waste, or we can look at how we can prevent it from happening again.
“It is not reasonable to spend that much money on a senior executive who can then just leave with no consequences whatsoever.
“We don’t know who decided to do this training. Was he told to do it? They need to rethink the rationale behind this sort of thing. It would be even more troubling to me if they didn’t even realize what was going on” with his resignation.
The resignation seems to have surprised NRC’s management. The agency had just published a revised organizational chart online Wednesday, still showing Potter on language training leave until Aug. 31, with the rank of vicepresident. He was gone later the same day. The chart was re-modified Thursday to remove his name.
“I will be taking the summer to relax with my family and decide on my next career adventure,” he wrote to NRC employees.
“It has been an honour to be Vice President of the Engineering Division (and a few years ago, BMS). I sincerely appreciate having had the opportunity to work with all of you — thank you for the support and friendship you have provided me during my time working with you. Even though I will miss my friends and colleagues and working at NRC, I am looking forward to the challenges and opportunities of the future and to starting a new phase of my career.”
The note was in English only, which is unusual for an NRC email to all employees of a division.
The one exception was a brief phrase in the subject line: “Goodbye/Au revoir.”