Police HQ questions remain, but inquiry may not answer what the city and public want to know
On the day Manitoba launched an inquiry into the construction of Winnipeg’s police headquarters, Justice Minister Matt Wiebe said there are many unanswered questions about the project.
When asked to name one of those questions, he drew a blank.
“What we’re very concerned about is the policies and procedures at the City of Winnipeg that potentially are still being in place,” Wiebe said Tuesday at a press conference.
“There are many questions. Manitobans have been asking these questions and the City of Winnipeg has been asking these questions.”
So what does the city still want to know about a project that’s been the subject of extensive media coverage over the past 17 years, plus two city-commissioned audits, two civil lawsuits and a five-year RCMP investigation?
Winnipeg’s mayor also drew a blank when he was asked to name an outstanding question.
“Not off the top of my head, right now,” Scott Gillingham said Tuesday at city hall.
This is not to suggest there are none. An encyclopedia of questions could be compiled about a police headquarters that was still being completed while the RCMP investigated allegations of fraud, forgery and the payment of secret commissions related to the project.
But the inability of the justice minister and the mayor to state what they still want to know about the police HQ only serves to highlight a disjunction between what the city asked the province to inquire about and what the NDP government has chosen to serve as the basis for the inquiry — not to mention what the public wants to know.
In short, city council asked the province in 2017 to use a commission of inquiry’s subpoena powers to shine a spotlight on a series of events that took place from 2008 to 2013, when Sam Katz served as Winnipeg’s mayor and Phil Sheegl served as a senior public servant.
Eight years later, the province responded with an inquiry that is more focused on the present and future than it is the past.
According to the provincial order that created the police HQ inquiry, commissioner Garth Smorang has been asked to “determine any measures that are necessary to restore public confidence in the ability of the city to implement large-scale, publicly-funded construction projects in a cost-effective, timely, efficient and ethical manner.”
This implies the city has not responded to the real estate, procurement and ethics scandals of the Katz-Sheegl era, which also included the construction of four new fire-paramedic stations, a pair of contentious land swaps and a back-and-forth exchange of shell companies between that mayor and public servant.
Confidence-building efforts
One of former mayor Brian Bowman’s obsessions was trying to restore public confidence in the city.
During his eight years in office, city council received regular reports about the city’s response to recommendations of the 2013 audit into the fire-paramedic station replacement program and a pair of 2014 audits of the police headquarters project and a series of major real-estate transactions.
Gillingham, meanwhile, pushed for the city to hire a chief construction officer in an effort to better oversee capital projects.
This is not due to mysteries surrounding the police headquarters. This is because of what’s already known, thanks to the extensive reporting, the city-commissioned audits, the RCMP investigation and the civil lawsuits.
Smorang acknowledged as much on Tuesday when he said his main job was to read and review all the existing documentation about the police HQ before he uses subpoena powers to compel witnesses to provide new evidence.
“I’m not going to call witnesses to sit up there and say things that we don’t need them to say or we’ve already established,” he said.
Nonetheless, his inquiry is focused on finding out which policies were not in place to control a capital project that ballooned from $17 million worth of limestone replacement work on the old Public Safety Building in 2006 to a $214-million purchase-and-renovation project eight years later.
According to the 2014 city audits, many policies were in place. They simply were not followed.
And thanks to a Court of King’s Bench Court decision in 2022 and a Court of Appeal decision one year later, we know Sheegl accepted a $327,000 bribe from police-HQ contractor Armik Babakhanians — and shared “precisely half the money” with former mayor Sam Katz, in the words of appeal court Justice Christopher Mainella.
It is fair for members of the public who remain interested in this saga to ask why no one ever faced criminal charges related to the police headquarters project.
Smorang, a labour lawyer, made it clear he does not intend to second-guess the Crown attorneys who declined to press charges.
“I don’t see that as helpful to me in terms of my mandate at this point,” he said.
His mandate already has a split focus. The labour lawyer has been asked to review the police headquarters project to “minimize construction cost increases and delays” in the future and to “prevent dishonest practices or the acceptance of inducements.”
It is fair to suggest an expert in procurement and construction could assist the province with the former task. It is also fair to note a municipal law expert could help the province improve the Municipal Council Conflict of Interest Act or broaden it to include senior public servants.
As for council’s eight-year-old request for the province to shine a spotlight on other unknowns from the Katz-Sheegl era, an inquiry won’t provide a venue for such a reckoning if it doesn’t examine other events during those five years.
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