Random Access

In finding teacher Joanne Saundercook-Menard guilty of accepting a $30,000 bribe in a Brampton courtroom last Friday as part of the HRDC scandal, Madame Justice Bonnie Wein made some very telling comments.
She concluded that Saundercook-Menard was a highly-regarded teacher who was well-thought of by her supervisors and peers and was considered absolutely honest and above board.
“Nonetheless,” said the judge, “I find that she was knowingly drawn into the culture of dishonesty that had developed at the (Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School) Board.”
Now isn’t that a sentence to stop you dead in your tracks?
A culture of dishonesty is not exactly what you would choose as your vision statement, is it?
Three of the four people employed by Dufferin-Peel and charged with taking part in schemes where they profited from HRDC grants have now entered guilty please or been found guilty. The most senior of them, former Program Superintendent Bev Williams, who was fired by the board at the start of this process, awaits a verdict Feb. 19. on charges of fraud amounting to some $190,000.
In August, Joan Rowe, a former project manager at the HRDC office in Mississauga was sentenced to 28 months in prison after a guilty plea to charges she defrauded the federal government and accepted secret commissions. She was ordered to pay back nearly $500,000.
As for a culture of dishonesty, new Dufferin-Peel Chair Bruno Iannicca is having none of it. “I don’t believe it is a cultural issue,” he said today. “It’s not a program department problem, it was just a few bad apples. We have a lot of hard-working honest employees and you can’t paint everyone with the same brush.”
Perhaps so, but there has still been some disturbing testimony so far that seems to indicate due diligence was not exactly a byword at the board.
Williams testified that being paid for extra work outside her salary was common practice at the board and throughout the province. There were no policies prohibiting employees being paid through individual companies they set up, she said.
That testimony was contradicted by Director of Education Michael Bator, who testified that he was unaware that Williams was being paid separately for her HRDC project work. In fact, Bator was among a group of senior administrators who went to Scotland as part of the grant training project. He later repaid the money to pay for his and his wife’s portion of the trip.
Iannicca says the board has taken numerous steps to close the barn door since the problems surfaced. “We’ve tightened up the process of signing authority. Invoices are no longer paid without the required detail of the expenses they cover. We have adopted an employee code of conduct and we don’t do business with any employee-owned companies.
“We did have rules but a certain group decided not to follow the rules,” Iannicca said. He pointed out that it was a forensic audit by the Board that led to Williams’ firing and then the police investigation, which is still continuing.
The judge’s comment about a culture of dishonesty is just one person’s opinion, the Ward 7 trustee points out.
Yes, it is a single person’s opinion. However, it is the considered opinion of someone in a position of authority, delivered after careful review of days of sworn testimony.
Whether the board chooses to acknowledge it or not, Madame Justice Wein’s offhand comment about the culture at the board will continue to reverberate long after everyone has forgotten all the details of all of these cases.