Thursday, December 09, 2010

A Perfectly Conservative Integrity Commissioner

Until she packed up her tent and stole out of town in October, Christiane Ouimet had spent the past three years collecting the big bucks as the Harper government's integrity commissioner.  There's a reason she got out of Dodge in a hurry.  In fact there seems to be more than one.

According to Auditor General Sheila Fraser, Madam Integrity Commissioner was decidedly deficient in, well, integrity.

Auditor General Sheila Fraser released a damning report Thursday on Christiane Ouimet, who resigned as public sector integrity commissioner in October four years before her term was set to expire amid allegations of internal strife and that she wasn't doing her job, if she did anything at all.

During her three years as commissioner, Ouimet investigated only five of the more than 200 complaints her office received and never produced any recommendations or findings of wrongdoing or reprisals against whistleblowers.

Fraser also found Ouimet berated her staff, sometimes yelling and swearing at them in front of others, and amassed binders full of personal information — 375 pages in total — on a former employee she didn't trust, and circulated some of the information to government officials and prospective employers in the private sector.

" I find this obviously very troubling and I think very disappointing,"  Fraser said Thursday. " We've all heard of bad bosses, but I'm troubled by the fact that there were binders of material being assembled by personnel within that office on someone who had left that office six months previously.”

So, what's the problem?   Isn't this the way we've come to expect Conservatives to act?

No comments: