Ontario Provincial Police Anti-Racket Branch Investigating Alleged Misuse of Money And Services At Niagara Parks Commission

By Doug Draper

At the request of the Niagara Parks Police – a branch of the Niagara Parks Commission – the Ontario Provincial Police has been called in to investigate the possible misuse of money and services by individuals who have worked inside this time-honoured body.

Maid of the Mist contract helped fuel Parks Commission controversy

OPP Inspector David Ross,  a communications officer for the provincial police force, confirmed media reports yesterday that the force’s anti-rackets squad has been called in toinvestigate “some irregularities in the procurement of goods and services within the Niagara Parks Commission.”

The OPP began the investigation about a month ago, Ross said, and has already begun interviewing present and former staff of the commission. The investigation, he said, “is in its formative stage” and it may take a period of time that can not now be estimated due to the need to search through large volumes of paper work to get the job done.

The Niagara Parks Commission – a more-than-a-century-old provincial body charged with the responsibility of protecting and preserving what is left of the natural corridor and heritage sites along the Ontario side of the Niagara River – has come under more intense public scrutiny over the past decade, beginning with a highly controversial plan to build a gondola-like amusement park ride that would take people from the Table Rock area at the brink of the Horseshoe Falls and down into the gorge and back.

That plan was scuttled in the wake of public protest but then there were questions over plans to renew a contract for the Maid of the Mist operator without going to tender for other parties that might offer that famed ride through the rapids below the falls for a lower cost. Other allegations, many of them reported over the past year in The Globe and Mail, which went out of its way to use freedom of information legislation to file for internal commission documentation, include possible misuse of funds for travel, meas and hospitality expenses, including reports that one senior employee at the commission received a $3,970 discount for using a the NPC’s Queenston Heights restaurent for a wedding banquet.

Within the past year, the provincial government has brought in Fay Booker, now the commission’s general manager, to help restore public confidence in the NPC. Other senior managers have either left or been dismissed.

Booker and those working with her now have been striving to focus back on enhancing and promoting natural sites like the Niagara Glen, and heritage sites like the Laura Secord homestead property in Queenston. It will be important to see how much alleged past conduct at the commission will compromise their efforts.

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