Taman: Inquiry findings on Ottawa's LRT are as bad as they sound

Commissioner William Hourigan, in his Final Report of the Light Rail Transit Public Inquiry, confirmed what anyone paying attention already knew: Jim Watson’s Ottawa suffered from a profound democratic deficit.

It’s no wonder the former mayor did not seek re-election: Hourigan’s conclusions are scathing, finding among other things that Watson and senior city staff “irreparably compromised the statutory oversight function of Council” by keeping councillors in the dark about critical issues and, at times, deliberately misleading them. Watson may not have given voters the opportunity to show him the door, but his legacy and reputation have been permanently tarnished.

Worse, Hourigan found that this pattern of dishonesty was not limited to the LRT project and that it continued throughout the LRT Inquiry. In one instance, he writes: “The evidence from Mayor Watson, (General Manager of OC Transpo John) Manconi, and (City Manager Steve) Kanellakos does not withstand scrutiny, and the Commissioner does not accept it as a truthful explanation of what motivated the failure to communicate with Council.”

Ouch. Constrained by a mandate that expressly prevents the commissioner from making findings of criminal or civil liability (lucky for Watson and his club), these findings are as bad as it gets.

Back in October of 2021, Watson was steadfastly opposed to a public inquiry, successfully marshalling a majority of councillors to support an audit by the city’s auditor general instead. Despite a herculean effort by former councillor Catherine McKenney to persuade their colleagues that nothing short of a full public inquiry would get to the bottom of how Stage 1 of the LRT went so wrong, Watson and his club of yea-sayers refused to get on board. Had it not been for the province stepping in and mandating an inquiry, we might never have known just how duplicitous the former mayor and senior staff were in the course of the largest and most bungled infrastructure project in Ottawa’s history.

Ironically, the council debates on whether to call an inquiry were tainted by the same “pattern of controlling and shaping information flow to Council and the public” that Hourigan identified in his report. When councillors requested information from staff regarding the process, procedure and potential costs associated with a judicial inquiry, what they got instead was a memo from the city solicitor effectively making the case against a judicial inquiry. And now we know why some in power wanted to avoid the spotlight of truth.

Steve Kanellakos’s resigned as city manager on Monday, Watson did not to seek re-election and Manconi “retired” from the city only to be appointed as a senior vice-president of STV (an infrastructure company that was involved in Ottawa’s LRT construction). Long-time transit commission chair Alan Hubley, on the other hand, was re-elected.

Leading the calls for Hubley’s resignation this week was former Citizen transit commissioner Sarah Wright-Gilbert, whom Hubley blamed for sowing public distrust in the LRT by tweeting about its many shortcomings. Perhaps if Hubley, Watson and senior staff had been guided by the public interest and provided councillors and residents with the “regular and honest communications from the government” to which Hourigan quite rightly found the public has the right, Wright-Gilbert and others would not have been compelled to the take to the Twittersphere.

The LRT inquiry was one of two public inquiries this year examining incidents in which residents of Ottawa were let down by public institutions (the other being the Public Order Emergency Commission inquiry whose work is ongoing). The freshly elected city council, and in particular Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, have a lot of work to do in rebuilding public trust. The culture of secrecy, spin and prioritizing political expediency over the public interest must be systemically dismantled.

It would be a mistake to think that with Watson, Kanellakos and Manconi gone, this culture will spontaneously evaporate. Hubley and six other councillors who backed Watson’s efforts to avoid the full scrutiny of a public inquiry are back at the council table. It will be a true test of Sutcliffe’s leadership if he can usher in a new era of transparency and accountability at city hall. We deserve nothing less.

Emilie Taman is a lawyer at the Otatwa law firm Champ & Associates.

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