Transport Quebec ‘didn’t forget’ staffing study

QUEBEC — Transport Quebec did not deem it necessary to order a full report on possible problems arising from the squeeze on its diminished staff, at a time when the Charest government had ordered a $12-billion renewal of the province’s crumbling highway infrastructure.

A May 2008 report by Thomas Gagnon, an internal auditor in the transport department, concluded the shrinking expertise of the department to supervise construction projects created ethical and governance problems, as well as opportunities for fraud and conflict of interest.

“It was a working document, a preliminary study to determine whether there was a need for an investigation,” a Transport Quebec spokeswoman, Marie-Claude Côté, said on Wednesday, explaining the decision not to do a followup report.

“You can’t say there was no followup,” Côté added, noting that the department reacted in 2009 when Quebec’s auditor general, Renaud Lachance, questioned the practice of hiring private engineering companies to supervise their own construction work and again after the Duchesneau report in 2011, which found that Transport Quebec was outsourcing work to the private firms that lured away the department’s engineers with higher pay.

“It isn’t a document that was forgotten,” Côté said of the Gagnon report.

After the Duchesneau report, the government announced in October 2011 plans to add 970 Transport Quebec jobs.

The Gazette reported Tuesday that 14 full-time and 84 casual employees were added in the first year.

Côté said a further 85 employees have been added since — 26 engineers, 31 public-works technicians and 28 other employees.

And the department is actively recruiting at job fairs, on campus, using the Internet and social media, she added.

But Richard Perron, president of the Syndicat de professionnelles et professionnels du gouvernement du Québec, a union representing government engineers and other professionals, said Transport Quebec can’t keep its engineers because its salaries are significantly lower than the private sector and below federal and municipal salaries, calling for a pay review.

“Once they get some experience, they go elsewhere,” Perron said of Transport Quebec engineers.

And to fill the void, government managers hire “consultants” from private firms, often at twice the cost to taxpayers.

“We see things,” Perron said of his members, calling for a “whistleblower” law to protect civil servants who point out flaws in government management.

“We want to denounce them, but now we pay the price,” he said.

“If Duchesneau had not leaked his own report, the government would have done nothing,” Perron added.

Perron said it is the private engineering and construction firms that the Charbonneau Commission has been probing that benefited from the Charest government’s cuts in public sector jobs and the exodus of expertise aggravated by low pay scales.