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An auditor’s investigation has found “blatantly obvious” cases where management positions at OC Transpo were filled with candidates who didn’t meet minimum qualifications.
The investigation stemmed from allegations OC Transpo was bypassing formal hiring competitions and appointing hand-picked candidates.
Those allegations came to Ottawa’s Auditor General Nathalie Gougeon through the city’s fraud and waste hotline. She substantiated the allegations in a report presented to council’s audit committee on Tuesday.
Her report focused on the period between 2021 and 2025, and concerned management and professional exempt positions such as superintendents, program managers, managers and directors.
She found four cases where candidates were screened into a competition and selected to fill a position “without meeting the minimum requirements identified in the job description.” She said there was no documentation to explain why those decisions were made.
Gougeon also looked at how OC Transpo is filling management vacancies through appointment.
Policy states that any vacancy over 12 months should be posted for a competition, but she found 10 cases where a candidate was appointed directly, in contravention of that policy.
In seven of those cases, the employees chosen “did not meet the education or the experience requirement of the position as outlined in the job description.”
“Some of these were very blatantly obvious,” Gougeon told the committee.
Ottawa’s AG warns of unfair hiring at OC Transpo
The city’s Auditor General Nathalie Gougeon found cases where candidates were handpicked, without a competition. As Arthur White-Crummey reports, Gougeon found some candidates didn’t meet the minimum requirements for the job.Question of fairness
Troy Charter, who has just left his job as interim general manager of transit services but remains with OC Transpo, explained how that can happen.
“Sometimes these opportunities come up and you think they’re short-term in nature, and they end up being longer-term,” he said.
He said some of the staff were high performers who excelled at OC Transpo, even if they lacked the requisite education.
Troy Charter, who just left his job as OC Transpo’s interim general manager, remains with the organization. (Jean Delisle/CBC)
Gougeon said that practice can undermine fairness in the workplace.
“You may have had individuals even within OC Transpo that didn’t meet the original requirements of the role but did have perhaps as much if not more experience and education than people who were actually placed in those roles,” she said. “So it’s just really important that you’re transparent.”
Audit committee chair Cathy Curry worried about the signal it sends to other employees.
“If an organization becomes one where, well, it’s just who you know or they already know who they’re going to hire, so there’s no point in applying … that culture is terrible,” she said.
Gougeon made three recommendations: to periodically review job requirements, to properly document its hiring rationale and to ensure vacancies over 12 months are posted. OC Transpo accepted all of them.
Charter said the transit agency is updating its job descriptions and holding ongoing training sessions.
“What the audit really highlighted for us is we need to do a better job of documenting the decision making process … to make sure we are following that fair and transparent process,” he said.
He said there was “absolutely” no case where hiring candidates who didn’t meet requirements affected their performance on the job.
“I have the utmost confidence in the team that we have,” he said.
Gougeon said her investigation didn’t cover performance issues.