Plante to seek dismissal of public consultation office president amid spending scandal
Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante says she's taking steps to clean up the city's public consultation office, starting with getting rid of its president, Isabelle Beaulieu.
"We're going to clean house," Plante said Friday following a special finance commission meeting about the recent spending scandal.
The mayor addressed the controversy alongside the former head of the office, Dominique Ollivier, who stepped down on Monday as president of the city's executive committee over a recent Journal de Montreal investigation into extravagant spending while she was the president of the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM).
"I want to make it clear from the outset: the 77 outings to Alexandre's in one year, the $900 headphones, the $5,500 field hockey tickets did not take place under my presidency and are the work of the administration. I've always had too much respect for public funds to authorize this kind of spending," Ollivier said.
The newspaper reported that while she was head of the OCPM, Ollivier expensed several international trips, pricey meals, including a $347 oyster dinner in Paris and luxury office furniture. Ollivier admitted she did expense $20,000 worth of meals, but that was over a seven-year period.
"I also have on my corporate credit card, a bill for St-Hubert barbecue, that was delivered, that is $78. I’m not saying that was legitimate, what I'm saying is that if you look at the entire corpus it's different occasions of different things," she said.
Ollivier is angry she’s being accused of wasting public funds, and angry her management is being questioned.
But her successor did just that — Beaulieu said when she took over for Ollivier in early 2022, she found an organization that she said was poorly managed with little oversight, including some employees being paid 6 per cent vacation pay while getting paid vacation, and others logging full-time hours when many didn’t actually work full-time.
"It means that Montrealers are being fleeced out of their hard-earned money by people who are not just negligent but could even be unscrupulous," said Ensemble Montreal's Alan DeSousa Friday.
The mayor said it can't go on like this and will take steps next week to have Beaulieu fired and the office placed under trusteeship.
"There will be no more funding, no more money going to OCPM without us — the executive committee — looking into it," Plante said.
The opposition at City Hall says that doesn't go far enough and wants Ollivier kicked out of Projet Montreal's caucus.
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
Parents of infant who died in wrong-way crash on Ontario's Hwy. 401 were in same vehicle
Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit has released new details about a wrong-way collision in Whitby on Monday night that claimed the lives of four people.
Three Quebec men from same family father hundreds of children
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
B.C. mayor stripped of budget, barred from committees over Indigenous residential schools book
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
OPP's mandatory alcohol screening during traffic stops 'not acceptable': CCLA
A spike in impaired driving-related collisions has caused Ontario’s provincial police to begin enforcing mandatory alcohol screening (MAS) at all traffic stops in the Greater Toronto Area -- a move one civil rights group says is ‘not acceptable.’
Maple Leafs down Bruins 2-1 to force Game 7
William Nylander scored twice and Joseph Woll made 22 saves as the Toronto Maple Leafs downed the Boston Bruins 2-1 on Thursday to force Game 7 in their first-round series.
Jurors in Trump hush money trial hear recording of pivotal call on plan to buy affair story
Jurors in the hush money trial of Donald Trump heard a recording Thursday of him discussing with his then-lawyer and personal fixer a plan to purchase the silence of a Playboy model who has said she had an affair with the former president.
Southern Alberta store broken into by burly black bear
Staff at a small southern Alberta office supply store were shocked to find someone had broken into the business last week, but they were even more confused when they discovered the culprit was a bear.
Captain sentenced to 4 years for criminal negligence in fiery deaths of 34 aboard scuba boat
A federal judge on Thursday sentenced a scuba dive boat captain to four years in custody and three years supervised release for criminal negligence after 34 people died in a fire aboard the vessel.
New scam targets Canada Carbon Rebate recipients
Fake text message and email campaigns trying to get money and information out of unsuspecting Canadian taxpayers have started circulating, just months after the federal government rebranded the carbon tax rebate the Canada Carbon Rebate.