MONTREAL — The board members who have decided to shake up Rights and Democracy say their mission is to bring "accountability and transparency" to the organization, which receives about $11-million a year in federal funding.
Yet their commitment to the responsible spending of money intended for developing countries has resulted in more than $500,000 being paid to Montreal lawyers, auditors, private investigators and public-relations professionals in the first three months of this year. And the redaction of board minutes obtained by the National Post through an access-to-information request suggests their transparency has its limits.
Large blocks of text have been blanked out when the board's discussions entered sensitive territory. For what was arguably the most divisive board meeting in the organization's 20-year history, a Jan. 7 session that saw two board members quit in protest, Rights and Democracy says no minutes exist.
It was after that meeting in Toronto that the organization's embattled president, 66-year-old Rémy Beauregard, died suddenly of a heart attack.
Documents released by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs show that from the arrival of board vice-chairman Jacques Gauthier as acting president on Jan. 22 to the beginning of April, Rights and Democracy spent $275,000 in legal fees, $120,000 on an internal audit and $92,000 for an investigation of its staff by Sirco Solutions, which specializes in computer forensics. Another $14,000 was spent on outside media relations after Mr. Gauthier suspended, then fired, his director of communications.
Before being replaced by Gérard Latulippe on March 29, Mr. Gauthier was paid $56,700 for his nine weeks as interim president, receiving just over $1,000 per work day. Extended over a full year, his earnings would have amounted to a salary of about $314,000, well above the salary of a full-time president, which the government sets at between $159,700 and $187,900.
Mr. Gauthier said in an interview that the honorarium he received as acting president, set by a government order in council, represented a pay cut "for someone who has been a lawyer in Toronto for in excess of 30 years. If you know what hourly rates are in Toronto, it's not significant compensation for a law specialist."
During testimony in April before the House of Commons committee, he said his time as acting president had been divided between "the heavy duties of the presidency and those of my law practice." In the interview, he said he had "very substantially" reduced the amount of time he practised law. "The time I served as president was an extraordinary period that required an enormous amount of attention, and I had no choice but to spend the days and the hours to take care of the burning fires," he said.
He defended the large sums paid to lawyers, auditors and investigators as a necessary investment to correct longstanding problems. "Yes, it's been expensive, but if this organization is going to be around for another 20 years, then I think the taxpayers will be well-served by what we're doing," he said.
In a report issued last week, the House of Commons committee said it is "troubled" by the spending during Mr. Gauthier's time as interim president. It blamed the board of directors for the current crisis, recommending that the government replace the chairman of the board, Aurel Braun, and "reconstitute" the rest of the board to ensure non-partisan membership. (Conservative committee members, who are in the minority, dissented, saying Rights and Democracy enjoys their government's "unquestioning support" and the current board has their full confidence.)
During the committee hearings in April, questions were raised about Mr. Gauthier's hiring of a fellow board member, Marco Navarro-Genie, as a consultant. Mr. Navarro-Genie, an assistant political science professor in Calgary, spent a week in Montreal in February, collecting $2,925 in honoraria and incurring expenses of $2,591 for airfare, hotels and meals. Mr. Gauthier said part of Mr. Navarro-Genie's job was to try to get to the bottom of a burglary in January in which two computers went missing while staff were attending Mr. Beauregard's funeral in Ottawa. Montreal police have made no arrests.
Past inquiries by the National Post have yielded unedited minutes of Rights and Democracy board meetings, but a request in March for minutes of board meetings held last June, January and February resulted in key passages being censored. At a June 2009 meeting, when discussions turned to a disputed evaluation of Mr. Beauregard's performance, the minutes are blotted out for nearly two full pages. In January, the discussion surrounding Mr. Gauthier's appointment as interim president is similarly redacted. In February, the result of a vote to close Rights and Democracy's Geneva office is withheld.
Most striking is the absence of any record from the Jan. 7 meeting, at which tensions between Mr. Beauregard and the board majority reportedly came to a head. Sima Simar, a board member from Afghanistan, and Payam Akhavan, a McGill University law professor, quit during the meeting.
Scott Crosby, a consultant hired by Rights and Democracy to handle access requests, explained that the Jan. 7 session is not recorded because it was adjourned following Mr. Beauregard's death. Notes that had been prepared "were such a mess that they were not useable," he said. The meeting resumed on Jan. 22, but the minutes from that meeting contain no mention of the adjourned proceedings. He said that, in general, the reason passages were deleted from the minutes was to avoid "limiting the ability of these individuals to continue to have free and open discussions."
National Post
