OPP unit assessing D’Angelo hiring
The Ontario Provincial Police anti-racketeering unit is assessing whether it will pursue a criminal probe against the architects of the 2016 chief administrative officer hiring scandal at Niagara Region.
In an email published Wednesday evening by the local political advocacy group A Better Niagara, the OPP said it will inform Niagara Regional Police (NRP) — which forwarded a request to the OPP in December — if the unit intends to pursue a criminal investigation.
Police services will often conduct an assessment of allegations in a preliminary investigation to determine if a full probe is warranted.
In early December, regional council forwarded a report by Ontario Ombudsman Paul Dube about the hiring of Carmen D’Angelo to the lucrative CAO position to the NRP with a request for a criminal investigation.
Echoing nearly two years of reporting by The St. Catharines Standard, Dube’s report found D’Angelo’s hiring was an “inside job” orchestrated from the office of then-regional chair Alan Caslin.
Dube’s more than 450-day-long probe found Caslin’s policy director, Robert D’Amboise, and his communications director, Jason Tamming, supplied D’Angelo with confidential information before and during the hiring process, including interview questions and answers and confidential drafts of government reports. This information gave D’Angelo an unfair advantage in the hiring process, Dube found.
The Ombudsman report said regional councillors who served on the board of the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority (NPCA) — where D’Angelo worked at the time — were providing him with confidential information.
The report also pointed to a 2016 email by D’Angelo’s NPCA subordinate and then-Port Colborne regional councillor David Barrick to then-Region treasurer Jason Burgess, asking him to promote the idea of D’Angelo as the next CAO months before the hiring process began.
Barrick is now CAO for the City of Brampton and Tamming is that city’s director of communications. D’Angelo quit his Niagara post in February 2019 and launched a $1.15-million constructive dismissal lawsuit against the Region. Since the publication of Dube’s report, he has requested the Region settle for $500,000 but the offer was rejected by regional council.
The Region is suing Caslin, Tamming and D’Amboise for a combined $850,000.
After regional council sent their request to police, NRP Chief Bryan MacCulloch decided to forward the request to the OPP to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest because the local police service is primarily funded by the municipal government.
MacCulloch’s decision to forward the request to the OPP is the second time the NRP has done so in the past two years. In 2017, the service forwarded the Caslin-led council’s request for a police investigation into the Burgoyne Bridge audit to the provincial agency. That audit report made no allegations of wrongdoing and the OPP closed its investigation in September 2018 after it found nothing criminal in the project.