British Columbia’s Housing Minister says each contract up for renewal with Atira Women’s Resource will be scrutinized and may be given to other organizations after the agency refused to fire its chief executive over conflict-of-interest allegations.
It’s not clear what the impacts will be if BC Housing starts trying to shift services away from Atira, which houses about 3,000 people in dozens of buildings and received $72-million in government funding last year. Atira is the largest non-profit housing provider in the province.
“There are a lot of service providers that do excellent work and we will be looking at every contract and seeing where there’s opportunities for others to step in,” said Ravi Kahlon as he outlined next steps in what has become a high-profile power struggle.
“I would say it’s not going to be business as usual going forward.”
His statements come after Atira’s board flatly refused to fire CEO Janice Abbott at the request of BC Housing board chair Allan Seckel, who wrote to Atira board members last week urging them to make immediate changes in leadership.
Mr. Seckel’s letter was written as the result of a forensic investigation that found former CEO of BC Housing Shayne Ramsay breached conflict-of-interest rules when he gave the housing agency staff explicit directions to give contracts to Atira, which is run by his wife, Ms. Abbott. The investigation also noted what it said were multiple problems with financial reporting and property purchases by Atira.
The investigation found no evidence either Mr. Ramsay or Ms. Abbott benefited personally.
Mr. Kahlon said he could not put Atira into receivership, a threat former Liberal housing minister Rich Coleman made a decade ago with a different non-profit group that ran into trouble after a damning audit of its finances.
“I know that at the time Rich Coleman said that but he had no legal powers unless he pulled all the contracts” for PHS Community Services Society, Mr. Kahlon said.
The PHS audit in 2014 was more damning than the current ones involving Atira, since those found that PHS managers had spent money for personal expenses and on vacations, as well as having some similar problems with financial reporting and property purchases as Atira.
In spite of that difference, Mr. Kahlon said he and the public have lost confidence in Atira and that changes have to be made.
“The fact that Ms. Abbott constantly used BC Housing as a cash-flow bank to ensure that they could continue to make their payroll, I think is unacceptable,” he said. “Frankly, our confidence in them has really been shaken. … I certainly hope that the board comes to the realization that there needs to be changes. In the meantime, we will freeze all additional dollars that will be going to them and we will be looking at every single contract that we have with them.”
BC Housing’s communications staff said it could not say yet how many buildings and contracts might be affected, as the agency is waiting to inform tenants and staff about any changes. No one at Atira has had any official notice about contracts not being renewed.
The City of Vancouver says that Atira has about 10 building projects in the pipeline, some under way and others still at the inquiry stage. BC Housing confirmed two of the building projects, both transition houses for women, are going ahead.
The province is likely to be reluctant to take the organization down completely.
Mr. Coleman said Thursday that, even though he was handling a much more serious situation 10 years ago with PHS, then the Portland Hotel Society, he wanted to maintain some stability for an organization that was caring for a very needy group.
“The receivership thing was the hammer that might have been necessary. But the decision was to keep Portland because it handled some of the most vulnerable people that nobody else would touch. So they felt we could save it by changing the management direction and the fiscal management.”
Mr. Coleman said he is not familiar with all the details of the audit but his sense of Atira was that the organization “has done some pretty amazing work” and took on a lot of management of hotels during the pandemic that no one else wanted.
The Atira investigation report done by Ernst & Young, released Monday, has set off a cascade of concerns and reactions.
BC United Party politicians have hammered at the issue, saying it shows the NDP has done a bad job of managing non-profit housing in the province. People in the non-profit housing sector are worried about the impact of losing any strength in the sector, especially Atira, which has done pioneering work for 30 years in housing vulnerable women.
And Atira and NDP politicians continue to spar.
Mr. Kahlon has said repeatedly he is shocked that the board or Ms. Abbott didn’t even read the report or know what was in it before the organization sent off a letter saying it was refusing to fire the CEO.
But it’s clear, from dozens of pages submitted to the ministry from Atira’s lawyer, Alan McConchie, that at least some people from the organization went over the investigative report in detail in the weeks before the report was made public Monday.
In a lengthy series of submissions, Mr. McConchie and his colleagues detail numerous inaccuracies they say are in the report, including misrepresentations of how much more provincial money Atira was getting compared to other housing groups, what its administration costs were, how much it was spending per resident, and many details of building purchases and mortgages.
As well, a letter dated April 25 from Mr. McConchie starts off by saying Atira is concerned the name of the report’s author has been removed and that “there is reason to doubt that EY is sufficiently objective given EY’s long relationship with the provincial government.”
Frances Bula