Allegations of bid rigging between the City of Toronto and paving contractors is the focus of a current Ontario Provincial Police investigation, spurred on by the city’s financial watchdog.
“This has been peculating for a while,” Etobicoke Coun. Justin Di Ciano told the John Oakley show. “For those of us who were slowly learning what was happening, the news came as a very disturbing series of events.”
The OPP’s Criminal Investigation Branch is conducting the probe after the city’s Auditor General Beverly Romeo-Beehler notified the police service in March about potential discrepancies in some of the city’s contracts.
Romeo-Beehler looked over five years of paving contracts the city awarded to private companies between 2010 and 2015, after earlier checks hinted to potential rigging, which could be costing taxpayers millions, every year.
The alleged schemes being investigated have an eerily similar flavour to the province’s Auditor General report in November in which Bonnie Lysyk discovered shoddy work by contractors.
READ MORE: Poor oversight of Ontario road and transit contracts cause for concern: auditor general
Romeo-Beehler analyzed about half of the road work contracts from the past year which totalled an estimated $1 billion. She identified collusion in several cases, including at least one instance where a winning bidder subletted work to a company that appeared to have submitted an insufficient offer for the same contract in the original bidding process.
In another case, it’s alleged that some of the winners understated the amount of labour and materials that would be needed to complete a job. A practice which budget committee member Di Ciano says speaks to a culture at the city that “really needs an adjustment.”
Di Ciano says councillors have identified the problem, and admits that the problem is likely going to get worse before it gets better. He says, “all hands are on deck,” and a plan is in the works to get more money to assist the Auditor General in rectifying the bidding process.
The OPP is not revealing any of the companies involved in the probe, and have no estimated timeline for the completion of the investigation.
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