No more excuses: call an inquiry

Opinion

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This article was published 12/07/2023 (790 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative government has run out of excuses to justify its refusal to call a public inquiry into the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS) headquarters scandal.

The province’s highest court last week rejected an appeal by the City of Winnipeg’s ex-chief administrative officer Phil Sheegl over a lower court’s finding that he took a bribe during the construction of the WPS’s downtown headquarters.

The Manitoba Court of Appeal confirmed in a unanimous decision that Sheegl accepted a bribe of $327,000 from Caspian Construction owner Armik Babakhaniansis. Justice Chris Mainella ruled that Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Glenn Joyal was right to order Mr. Sheegl to repay the bribe money with interest, return the $250,000 he received in severance pay from the city when he resigned (also with interest), and pay punitive damages of $100,000.

The appellate court ruling is widely believed to be the final chapter in a series of civil cases around the WPS headquarters scandal. Earlier this year, in a separate case, the City of Winnipeg approved a $21.5-million settlement in fraud and construction deficiency lawsuits around the project.

The provincial government has rejected repeated calls for a judicial inquiry into the matter, claiming such a probe would interfere with ongoing court cases. The Stefanson government continued to make that argument even after the settlement in March, clinging to the flimsy proposition that a commission of inquiry could not be called because of the pending appeal of Mr. Sheegl.

With that appeal now over, there are no reasons left not to proceed.

As much as the public has learned about the WPS headquarters scandal through the various civil cases, they are not substitutes for a wide-ranging examination of the facts under the Evidence Act, where witnesses can be compelled to testify and any relevant evidence collected and scrutinized.

The public deserves answers to the many questions that have arisen around the controversial real estate deal, including how a project that was supposed to cost taxpayers $135 million to renovate the former Canada Post building ballooned to $214 million, or why that option was chosen in the first place.

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In its ruling, the Court of Appeal named former Winnipeg mayor Sam Katz, referring to him as “the proverbial elephant in the courtroom.” Katz, who was mayor from 2004 to 2014 when the project was approved and funded, was not the subject of any of the civil cases, nor was any evidence adduced from him. As a result, he is “entitled in law to be presumed to have done nothing wrong,” the court wrote.

The court’s decision to name the former mayor was not without purpose. The implication is that there are many questions about Katz’s involvement in the deal and other aspects of the scandal that remain unanswered. “This case is also not a public inquiry into the project; this is an appeal on the record that was before the motion judge,” the court wrote.

That may be the closest the court could come to calling outright for an independent probe. Judicial decisions are nothing if not studies in careful language: that sentence about a public inquiry was hardly tossed in accidentally.

It is now up to the Stefanson government to exercise that authority. A commission of inquiry should be called to investigate all aspects of the headquarters scandal, not only to get to the bottom of what occurred, but also to recommend ways of preventing similar abuse of public funds in the future.

The alternative of leaving those questions unanswered, and the process unscrutinized, is not an option.