GLOSSING OVER THE PARKADE FIASCO

Rather than dwell on the cost of the downtown parkade, Mayor Lyn Hall and most of council would rather cheerfully look to a bright future, stressing the initiatives that they have enacted or are in the process of doing so to prevent such a fiasco from happening again. More policy.

More oversight.

Sounds great except that the external report clearly explains that the policies already in place were either partially or fully ignored, while the oversight was less than thorough. All the policy and oversight procedures in the world make no difference without willing partners – bureaucrats operating by the book and elected officials diving into the details.

One of the policies city council vows to work on and adopt is a whistleblower policy. Presumably that means city staff could go past their managers to complain directly to mayor and council about various city hall shenanigans.

Unfortunately, the history of whistleblowers is tragic. While the public might sing the praises of these brave acts, things rarely end well for the whisteblowers themselves. Whether it’s sexual misconduct in the RCMP or the Canadian military or doping scandals in sports, the people who step forward see their professional and even their personal lives destroyed more often than not.

Applied here, a city staffer making an end run around the bosses to mayor and council would have a permanent target on their back within the bureaucracy. With union protection, they might be able to weather the storm but without it, they’d be quietly managed out of a job and a whisper campaign blackballing that individual would hamper their efforts to land work in their field elsewhere.

Organizations that have transparency and integrity built into the workplace culture have no need for whistleblower policies because secrets and silos are kept to a minimum and the doors to the bosses’ offices are always open.

At the city, a whistleblower policy would only be as good as the willingness of a mayor and council to listen, investigate and act. Considering Mayor Hall referred to the external review of the parkade as a fact-finding exercise, not a fault-finding one, it’d be smarter for city employees to lie low and keep their mouths shut instead of risking their jobs and their careers to call out wrongdoing that will either be ignored or glossed over.

The City of Prince George doesn’t need a whistleblower policy, it needs an overhaul of its workplace culture.

Once a new, permanent city manager is in place, “city hall needs to be turned upside down,” Coun. Brian Skakun said.

That’s a lot of responsibility to put on one person and it needs the unanimous, enthusiastic and sustained backing of city council.

At this point, Ian Wells, the current deputy city manager, was an active participant in the parkade project from the very beginning. As for Walter Babicz, the current acting city manager, his previous job was to review purchases, contracts and institutional risk.

The external report makes clear that the usual due diligence where Babicz would have been involved wasn’t followed. But that begs the question of whether Babicz ever sounded the alarm about why the paperwork about the project happening just outside the front steps of city hall hadn’t crossed his desk for review.

Seen in that light, cultural change at city hall is a fantasy and business as usual will prevail.