Answers on WPS headquarters are overdue

Opinion

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This article was published 26/10/2023 (683 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It wasn’t the most high-profile of the promises made by the New Democratic Party on its way to forming Manitoba’s new government, but it’s a pledge whose fulfillment is both long overdue and plain old public-policy common sense.

Premier Wab Kinew, in an interview this week with the Free Press, announced his government intends to make good on the calls it issued while in opposition for a public inquiry into the messy and expensive debacle associated with the construction of the Winnipeg Police Service’s downtown headquarters.

The official probe, the premier stated, will include an investigation into why Manitoba Justice declined to lay charges against any of the high-ranking civic officials and contractors at the centre of the scandal.

To say it’s in the public interest to seek a full understanding of what happened in this distressing and disarrayed affair is an understatement proportional to the massive cost overruns involved and the deeply disturbing behaviours that created them.

The original budget for the transformation of the former Canada Post headquarters into a state-of-the-art home for the WPS was $135 million; by the time the work was completed, the cost had ballooned to $214 million. Even more troubling than the 60 per cent cost overrun was the fact RCMP criminal investigations uncovered evidence of possible widespread fraud that prompted a recommendation for Manitoba Justice to lay criminal charges.

In 2019, to the shock and exasperation of most observers of the convoluted case, Crown prosecutors declined to do so. A subsequent civil case ended with Court of King’s Bench Judge Glenn Joyal finding former city CAO Phil Sheegl guilty of breaches of both trust and loyalty for having accepted a $327,000 bribe from the project’s contractor and splitting the proceeds with erstwhile mayor Sam Katz (who was not a party in the lawsuit). Sheegl’s appeal of the ruling and $1.1 million in penalties was dismissed in July by another judge.

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Last March, city council voted 14-2 in favour of a $21.5-million out-of-court settlement that brought to an end a lawsuit against the principal contractor, an engineering consultant and numerous other defendants accused of construction deficiencies and fraudulent inflation of the project’s costs.

The settlement does not, however, shift this tawdry saga into water-under-the-bridge territory. The WPS headquarters controversy continues to be a financial drag on Winnipeggers, as evidenced by a report last week that the city has been unable to find tenants for the former Canada Post office tower that was purchased as part of the police-headquarters deal.

In an effort to mitigate annual losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the city is studying the feasibility of relocating hundreds of civic employees to the underutilized space — a move that would inevitably create costly vacancies in other downtown buildings.

The premier is correct in pledging to act on his earlier promise of a public inquiry; while it isn’t unusual for changes in government to generate formal reviews of what went before, what makes this move uncharacteristically non-political is that its target is not the actions or inaction of the previous administration — other than, perhaps, a tangential consideration of any involvement the Stefanson government might have had in Manitoba Justice’s decision not to pursue criminal charges.

An all-encompassing inquiry into the police headquarters calamity is the only practical means by which this sorry chapter can finally be concluded. It could also serve as a signal that long-fractured relations between the province and the city are finally on the mend. As such, it’s time for a fulsome public accounting of what occurred, and why.