Inside job? How not to pick a city auditor
It shouldn’t be ‘business as usual,’ argues Declan Hill.
There is an invisible barrier that stretches across the interprovincial bridge from Quebec into Ontario. This membrane stops all forms of corruption and financial malfeasance in municipal government. Mobsters, criminals and fraudsters are magically stopped halfway across the bridge.
At least, this seems to be the idea of some city of Ottawa politicians.
This is the point that a disinterested reader might get when reading the claims contained in a lawsuit against the city for alleged political bias in municipal appointments.
The lawsuit — which has not been tested in court — is from an unsuccessful candidate for the auditor general position at city hall. He alleges that he was disqualified in part because he was once a Conservative political candidate, while our current mayor, Jim Watson, was a high-profile Liberal politician. Watson and all others named in the lawsuit deny the claims.
However, it is not just the allegations of potential political bias that are disturbing. Rather, it is what this former city administrator claims is the normal process inside our city government that raises eyebrows for people concerned with effective governance.
The auditor general is one of the most important positions in government. These people bring accountability to an often thick, bureaucratic jungle. A proper auditor checks that the processes and financial dealings inside the billion-dollar city government are done in the right way.
The unsuccessful candidate claims that to decide who would get this important job, there was a meeting of the mayor, the two deputy mayors and two senior councillors.
According to him, the two leading candidates in front of the politicians were not chosen by an independent committee. They were selected by the then-incumbent city manager. The two selected candidates were not external lawyers or forensic accountants with experience in other institutions: rather, they were city bureaucrats who had worked inside the system for decades.
Every single person in this process had worked inside the City of Ottawa. More importantly, the people deciding who would be the next auditor were exactly the same people to whom the person appointed to be a watchdog over the city administration would report.
If this version is correct, then it is a conflict of interest: The people who an auditor might have to call out for corruption or collusion should not be the same people who hire and fire the auditor.
“In order to ensure independence and future objectivity it is essential that there be an independent committee involved in the selection process,” says Garry Clement, a former senior RCMP officer turned international expert in corruption, when reviewing the case. “The selected auditor has to be independent and not owing of the contract to individuals he/she is reporting to.”
This issue comes at a time when many City of Ottawa contracts are still sole-sourced, when our property taxes have risen for the entire span of Jim Watson’s mayoralty, and when many city governments in Quebec were shown to have had vast networks of collusion and corruption.
“We saw what happened in Quebec … I would have thought this would have been a wake-up call for municipal governments in Ontario,” Clement says.
This it is not to say that the City of Ottawa has been systematically corrupted or that any of the people involved in the process are in any way corrupt. But if the unsuccessful candidate’s version of events is correct, how can we know, if everyone in the hiring process of the city watchdog is an insider?
City politicians need to ensure that the selection for important positions is not only done impartially but also seen to be done impartially. Otherwise, the only protection the city has against the sort of corruption that has been found in some Quebec cities is a mythical barrier across the interprovincial bridge.
The people who an auditor might have to call out for corruption should not be the same people who hire and fire the auditor.