OCPM priorities for 2025 include ethics code, new nomination process
It has been a year since an expense scandal rocked the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM), and the body’s new president told a council committee hearing on Friday it will be months before an ethics code and a formal governance structure are in place.
“We’re not very advanced,” Philippe Bourke told the council’s finance and administration committee, which is holding public hearings on Montreal’s $7.28-billion 2025 municipal operating budget. He was referring to the development of a strategic plan for which the OCPM plans to go public tender to enlist the help of an outside firm.
Other priorities for 2025 include the drafting of an ethics code for OCPM commissioners and a formal process for naming commissioners and renewing the mandates of existing commissioners.
“Public confidence was shaken towards the institution in its management,” he said of the effect of the scandal on public perception of the OCPM.
“This opened the door to questions about its relevance, and there are issues of trust there.”
The OCPM’s city-financed annual budget for 2025 will be $3.095 million, the same as it was in 2024. Its mission as an independent and neutral body is to hold public consultations, mostly on mandates that are conferred on it, such as changes requested to the city’s urban plan to accommodate development projects, and issue recommendations to the city’s elected officials based on the public’s feedback.
Last year’s scandal led to the ouster of then-OCPM president Isabelle Beaulieu and, later, OCPM secretary-general Guy Grenier after it was revealed successive OCPM managers had been expensing costly equipment, trips and dinners to the city for years.
Bourke said he takes the rebuilding of public confidence “very seriously,” adding “it’s fundamental to work as much on confidence in the rigour of our administrative management as on confidence in the relevance of our role and, I would say, in the influence of our work.”