Center, right, left… No one should be exempt from being accountable to taxpayers for how their money is used. At the federal, provincial and municipal levels, serious cases of mismanagement abound, but a culture of I don’t care seems to have replaced a sense of duty.
Recent revelations from the Bureau of Investigation of diary concerning the waste of public funds by Valérie Plante within the office in charge of…consulting the public (what irony) are only the tip of the iceberg.
Yes, I wrote it for Valérie Plante. Neither by the City Council, nor by the “Plant administration”. But for Valérie Plante.
No, she wasn’t the one who got the hockey or opera tickets.
No, she wasn’t the one going to eat at the most expensive restaurants in town either. But she is the one who has to be responsible. She is “the boss”.
She is the one who is supposed to be in charge. However, it is she who now hides behind the incompetence and mismanagement of the chairman of her executive committee, Dominique Ollivier, who is somehow her first manager (!), whom she in turn guards (! !)
- Listen to Lisée-Mulcair’s meeting with Richard Martineau broadcast live every day at 8:50 am road Radio QUB:
basic principle
However, this is the basic principle of public administration: the person at the top of the pyramid is responsible. It is “attributable”, in the jargon of the public administration. Now, where has this meaning, this duty of responsibility and this obligation to account?
I heard Mayor Plante, at a press conference on Tuesday, say that the direction of Dominique Ollivier at the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM) was meaningless. well But who was the mayor at that time?
Valerie Plante.
And who holds Mme Ollivier in the position of principal director of the city?
Valerie Plante.
It was also Valérie Plante who demonstrated the total uselessness of this office within her administration. In fact, he threw out the results of the most important public consultation ever held, that of the Camillien-Houde route, which will soon stop giving access to Mont Royal if Plante succeeds in imposing his dictate.
The “ArriveCAN” application.
Meanwhile, in Ottawa, one of the worst public administration mistakes in recent years is the scandal related to the development of an app to facilitate (!) crossing the border during the pandemic.
Even a complex application rarely costs more than a few hundred thousand dollars. So how is it possible that the Trudeau administration managed to spend over $54 million on this stunning failure?
The RCMP investigates, officials are held accountable, and the public foots the bill for a series of dubious subcontracts and an unfortunate outcome.
Although Trudeau fired his transportation minister during the most recent row, he was the one who should have been held accountable.
The SAAQ and us
In Quebec, the “third link” is not the worst horror of the Legault administration. No, the height of their incompetence was manifested with the still unsolved disaster of the SAAQ computer system.
A story of incompetence unmatched in the annals of Quebec public administration, but rich in examples.
Legault kept (and still keeps) the “Minister of Cybersecurity and Digital Affairs”, Éric Caire. At least Trudeau had the decency to fire Omar Alghabra for his transportation fiasco.
Meanwhile, who pays? It’s you and me, sir and madam all.
