OOPS - oversight, no oversight

In February 2022, as the trucker convoy occupation dragged into its third week, city council voted to overhaul the Ottawa Police Services Board. 

The trigger was the board's sole-source hiring of Matt Torigian to replace outgoing chief Peter Sloly, done without consulting council — chair Diane Deans maintained the board alone had legal authority over that hiring under provincial legislation. Fallout was immediate: Torigian himself terminated his two-day-old contract rather than come to Ottawa, Deans was removed as chair, and councillors Rawlson King and Carol Anne Meehan, plus citizen board member Sandy Smallwood, all resigned in the same meeting. Eli El-Chantiry took over as chair the next day, uncontested.

King didn't go quietly. In his official resignation statement, he called the mayor's claim that the board hadn't been effective in its oversight function "highly disingenuous and insulting" to colleagues who, he said, had been working tirelessly within their scope of responsibility. He argued the board had exercised oversight in the strongest way available to it — public and in-camera meetings, pressing the chief to use every resource at his disposal.

That was King's claim: this board, as constituted, was doing its job.

Four years later, it's a claim worth testing against what actually happened to oversight at the Ottawa Police Service between then and now.

What the board didn't know

In 2022, OPS and its board jointly created an independent workplace investigations office — set up specifically to handle harassment and misconduct complaints outside the normal chain of command, a direct response to years of documented failures on gender-based misconduct. In 2023, that office was shut down. The board wasn't consulted. Members found out the day of their regular October meeting.

That gap shouldn't happen to a functional oversight body. A structural safeguard was quietly removed, and the body responsible for oversight learned about it after the fact.

What the audit found

In May 2026, the city's auditor general released findings on OPS project management: projects sometimes proceeding without proper budgets, and reporting to the board that in places contained flat-out inaccuracies — including outdated figures on the body-camera program in a December 2025 report. The auditor's word for the information reaching board members and OPS leadership was "vague," with risk not properly flagged.

An oversight board can only oversee what it's accurately told. This audit says, on the record, that it often wasn't.

We can only guess what might have happened had King and his colleagues chosen to stick things out rather than bail.