It took seven long years of pressing the issue, but city hall has finally released documentation that The Gazette had been seeking on the financing of the FINA World Aquatics Championships that Montreal hosted in the summer of 2005.
The documentation, running to thousands of pages, shows at once why civic authorities struggled so mightily to keep it out of the newspaper’s hands – and thus away from the public eye – and why such information should, as a rule, be readily made available upon request.
FINA is the Fédération internationale de natation, the international governing body for aquatic sports, including swimming, diving and water polo. The body came close to scrubbing the Montreal event altogether when indications of financial irregularities came to light six months before it was scheduled to take place.
However, the mayor successfully lobbied the group to keep Montreal in the picture with a promise to absorb any deficit the event might incur. As it was, the event itself was a success, attracting 1,900 competitors from 145 countries. According to the mayor, it contributed $72 million into the province’s economy.
Nevertheless, when the last participant had towelled off and the last bill was toted up, Montreal taxpayers were left holding the bag for a $4.77-million deficit that the event’s organizers had rung up. It was indeed a tidy sum that would have filled in a lot of potholes and cleared away a lot of snow.
This despite the fact that three levels of government had pumped close to $40 million into the event. In light of this substantial outlay of tax dollars, The Gazette sought an accounting, only to be rebuffed with excuses ranging from claims of confidentiality to quibbling that city hall did not have legal ownership of the documentation requested, even though it concerned public funds.
The Gazette’s request was finally granted after extensive legal wrangling resulted in an order by the province’s access-to-information commission to turn over the files. Even at that, city hall is still insisting on a right to hold some of them back, a position the newspaper is contesting.
The reluctance to come clean is to some extent understandable in that the documents reveal incompetent management on the part of the organizing committee that was haphazard in paying its bills, letting late-payment notices pile up, frivolous expenditures on things like golf outings, first-class travel and embroidered polo shirts. This even though government representatives were on the committee’s board.
Most disturbing is the revelation that millions of dollars went for disbursements and even loans to firms associated with members of the organizing committee, as well as dubious commissions on contracts and sponsorships collected by the committee’s director-general.
The Gazette’s continuing quest for full documentation of the FINA financial debacle is part of the newspaper’s ongoing “Secret Society” project that has so far revealed that Quebec lags markedly behind other jurisdictions in this country and abroad in providing citizens with information as to how governments and their agencies make decisions and how they spend taxpayers’ money.
The premise of the exercise is that the people who pony up the money that governments spend should have a right to know just how it is spent.
It also stands to reason that if the people spending public money are aware that their actions will be made public and closely scrutinized they will be more scrupulous in seeing that proper value is obtained for those taxpayer dollars.
In the case of the FINA event, it is perhaps somewhat late to be assigning blame. But if the shedding of light on the FINA fiasco stands as an object lesson for organizers of such events in the future, taxpayers will be better served than they were then.
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The documentation, running to thousands of pages, shows at once why civic authorities struggled so mightily to keep it out of the newspaper’s hands – and thus away from the public eye – and why such information should, as a rule, be readily made available upon request.
FINA is the Fédération internationale de natation, the international governing body for aquatic sports, including swimming, diving and water polo. The body came close to scrubbing the Montreal event altogether when indications of financial irregularities came to light six months before it was scheduled to take place.
However, the mayor successfully lobbied the group to keep Montreal in the picture with a promise to absorb any deficit the event might incur. As it was, the event itself was a success, attracting 1,900 competitors from 145 countries. According to the mayor, it contributed $72 million into the province’s economy.
Nevertheless, when the last participant had towelled off and the last bill was toted up, Montreal taxpayers were left holding the bag for a $4.77-million deficit that the event’s organizers had rung up. It was indeed a tidy sum that would have filled in a lot of potholes and cleared away a lot of snow.
This despite the fact that three levels of government had pumped close to $40 million into the event. In light of this substantial outlay of tax dollars, The Gazette sought an accounting, only to be rebuffed with excuses ranging from claims of confidentiality to quibbling that city hall did not have legal ownership of the documentation requested, even though it concerned public funds.
The Gazette’s request was finally granted after extensive legal wrangling resulted in an order by the province’s access-to-information commission to turn over the files. Even at that, city hall is still insisting on a right to hold some of them back, a position the newspaper is contesting.
The reluctance to come clean is to some extent understandable in that the documents reveal incompetent management on the part of the organizing committee that was haphazard in paying its bills, letting late-payment notices pile up, frivolous expenditures on things like golf outings, first-class travel and embroidered polo shirts. This even though government representatives were on the committee’s board.
Most disturbing is the revelation that millions of dollars went for disbursements and even loans to firms associated with members of the organizing committee, as well as dubious commissions on contracts and sponsorships collected by the committee’s director-general.
The Gazette’s continuing quest for full documentation of the FINA financial debacle is part of the newspaper’s ongoing “Secret Society” project that has so far revealed that Quebec lags markedly behind other jurisdictions in this country and abroad in providing citizens with information as to how governments and their agencies make decisions and how they spend taxpayers’ money.
The premise of the exercise is that the people who pony up the money that governments spend should have a right to know just how it is spent.
It also stands to reason that if the people spending public money are aware that their actions will be made public and closely scrutinized they will be more scrupulous in seeing that proper value is obtained for those taxpayer dollars.
In the case of the FINA event, it is perhaps somewhat late to be assigning blame. But if the shedding of light on the FINA fiasco stands as an object lesson for organizers of such events in the future, taxpayers will be better served than they were then.
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