The gatekeepers of Canada’s prisons, borders and tax system are suspended and fired for misconduct and incompetence more than any other type of federal employee.

Their cases are among at least 2,000 firings and suspensions handed down by the federal government over the past decade.

A taxman in St. John’s used the Canada Revenue Agency computer system to embezzle nearly $700,000. A prison guard in B.C. viciously date-raped a 21-year-old woman. At least three border guards have been accused of using their influence to help smuggle cocaine into Canada.

A Toronto Star investigation has found that public servants in positions of power over others committed serious offences, some of them criminal.

More troubling, the Star found a number of cases in which those convicted of crimes were allowed to return to their government jobs.

The federal government does not want you to know who the offenders are or what they did. Secretive officials in Ottawa refused to provide details of misconduct firings, saying they must protect the privacy of those who abused their influence.

Using court records, police reports and other sources, the Star found many cases of misconduct along with a flawed employee grievance system that softens the punishments handed down by the wardens, border post supervisors and other government managers trying to protect the public from bad employees.

This same flawed system allows a repeat offender like Fort Erie border guard Terry MacArthur to victimize the public he is supposed to serve.

In 2008, MacArthur was demoted after he was convicted of seriously injuring a motorcyclist while driving drunk then fleeing the scene. MacArthur appealed his punishment and got his job back.

In April 2011, MacArthur was arrested again and charged with two drunk driving-related offences.

“How many second chances can he get?” said Henry Grau, the motorcyclist MacArthur hit and abandoned in the middle of a road with a shattered hip and two snapped bones protruding from his left leg.

The federal service is enormous, with 280,000 employees. Incomplete records released to the Star deal with 2,000-plus firings and suspensions in the past decade. What is shocking is the type of federal employee involved in these disciplinary actions, raising questions about how well the federal government is screening those it hires.

The worst offenders include Canada Revenue Agency with 171 firings, Correctional Service Canada with 107 and the Canada Border Services Agency with 46.

Human Resources and Skills Development Canada is also high on the list. An HRSDC official refused to provide details of employees the agency fired and suspended.

Meanwhile, most other federal departments had fewer than six terminations during the same time period.

Canada Revenue Agency also tops the list of suspensions, with 391 since 2008. Officials there will not say why, though a spokesperson for Gail Shea, the minister of national revenue, said Shea “takes the protection of taxpayers’ information very seriously, and her expectation is that the Agency strictly enforces their Code of Ethics and Conduct to ensure Canadians are well-served and protected.”

Kurt Fagan, the Canada Revenue Agency employee in St. John’s who used government computers to embezzle nearly $700,000, manipulated 87 taxpayers’ personal income tax accounts to trigger a refund in their names. He then changed their addresses to one of three postal boxes he set up in his name. Once the cheques had been mailed, Fagan went back into the computer system and corrected the taxpayers’ addresses.

Fagan reported none of this embezzled income and evaded taxes of $178,000. He was fired in 2008, pleaded guilty to fraud and to an income tax offence in 2010 and is serving a four-year prison sentence. He refused an interview request.

At sentencing, Fagan said he stole to support a gambling addiction. The court fined him $178,000 and ordered restitution paid to the CRA in the amount of $100,000, an amount equivalent to his share of a pension.

An internal investigation found border guard Ghyslain Laplante was involved in a 2004 plot with his brother to help smuggle 150 kilograms of cocaine across the Quebec border while he was on duty. The RCMP foiled the Quebec scheme with the help of a U.S. federal agent posing as a cocaine supplier, part of an international sting code-named Busted Manatee.

Laplante has always maintained his innocence and unsuccessfully appealed his firing. The criminal charges of attempting to import cocaine were withdrawn after Laplante pleaded to a lesser offence under the Customs Act. He was given a conditional sentence and served no jail time.

“They did not have proof,” he told the Star, adding that if not for the stress the case put on his family he would have tried to exonerate himself in court.

The Canada Border Services Agency has fired employees for various acts of misconduct, including fraud, smuggling, misusing electronic networks and having criminal convictions, among other reasons. (The Border Service, unlike the CRA and the Correctional Service, provided such descriptions of misconduct leading to firings.)

“CBSA employees are held to a very high standard,” said Luc Labelle, a spokesperson for the agency, which oversees 15,000 employees. “Regrettably, no organization is completely immune to acts of misconduct. Actions of a very small minority of employees however are not a reflection of the professionalism, dedication and integrity of the balance of the workforce.”

The Star found the following cases in which federal staffers were fired:

• A CRA employee auditing a tanning salon grabbed a salon employee’s breasts and tried to kiss her.

• A CRA employee in Toronto tried to solicit bribes from three corporate taxpayers, an internal agency investigation found.

• A Quebec prison guard accepted a sponsorship to play in a Las Vegas poker tournament, the money coming from an individual known to police for having ties to the “criminal world.”

Though it is not known how many federal workers like border guard Terry MacArthur are allowed to return to work after a conviction, the Star did find several cases. One prison official suggested it is not uncommon.

In 2006, a senior manager of the Correctional Service testified that employees have been convicted of serious crimes — including a manager convicted of spousal assault — and still kept their jobs.

One reason is the federal Public Service Labour Relations Board, which hears grievances from government workers. The hearings, or tribunals, often pit the fired or suspended worker against his or her boss.

The board’s adjudicators are often former lawyers and experts at mediation. In several cases in which federal employees were criminally charged or convicted, the board ruled their bosses treated them too harshly and ordered the government to take them back.

In one case, a prison guard charged with sexual assault did not tell his boss he was being investigated and allegedly misled police. He was indefinitely suspended in 2006. The tribunal overturned the indefinite suspension.

The government appealed that decision to the Federal Court of Canada, where a judge ruled the adjudicator made a “serious” error and ordered a new tribunal hearing.

Amid the squabbling over his suspension, the guard, Balkar Basra, was found guilty of violently date-raping the 21-year-old victim. Though he was sentenced to a jail term of two years less a day, the legal fight over his suspension is ongoing. Attempts to reach Basra through his lawyers were unsuccessful.

The labour relations board said it would not discuss this or any specific cases; nor would it make adjudicators available to answer questions about their decisions.

In another case, psychologist Fred Tobin — a deputy warden at Kingston Penitentiary and a program director of the Female Behaviour Unit — was fired after he pleaded guilty to threatening conduct toward a woman with whom he had an affair. She was a volunteer at Kingston Penitentiary, supervised by Tobin, when the relationship began.

The initial six-count indictment included allegations of uttering death threats, unlawful confinement, intimidation on a highway, criminal harassment by watching and besetting and sexual assault.

As his job was to modify behaviour, “to get inmates to change and become better people,” Tobin was fired for discrediting the prison system and because employees in his position are supposed to serve as law-abiding role models for inmates.

A judge gave Tobin a suspended sentence and 18 months probation. Tobin appealed his firing.

The labour relations tribunal, which concluded Tobin’s crime was not serious and that there was no evidence it brought disrepute to the prison system, said his firing was too harsh a penalty. It reinstated Tobin without loss of pay or benefits and ordered any reference to his firing stricken from his record.

Contacted by the Star, Tobin, who no longer works in the prison system, declined to be interviewed, saying the incident involved “a great deal of shame and a great deal of dishonour that I have caused to many individuals.”

The Federal Court of Appeal ruled the decision to give Tobin his job back was flawed, in part because the adjudicator was wrong to characterize Tobin’s crime as not serious.

Does allowing those convicted of crimes to keep their jobs undermine the credibility of prisons, border posts and audit offices?

When asked that question, a prison guard in B.C. — who was fired after pleading guilty to assaulting his common-law wife, given a conditional discharge and then reinstated — told the Star: “That’s a good point.”

Then he ended the interview, saying he needed union permission before talking further.

In several tribunal hearings reviewed by the Star, the bosses who do the firing and suspending have repeatedly made it clear that their employees must appear unimpeachable. After firing the auditor who groped a tanning salon employee, the CRA manager told the tribunal that the tax system is based on voluntary compliance. Taxpayer trust, she said, is the key to the agency’s success.

The federal judge in the Tobin case put it another way. He said the conduct of employees such as prison guards is likely of greater public concern than that of government workers who “administer poultry marketing … because (prison) employees who work with inmates are in a dominant power position, and their personal conduct … must reflect adherence to the highest standards of responsibility.”

Spokespersons for unions representing corrections officers, border guards and Canada Revenue employees refused to discuss specific cases while they defended their battles with management over misconduct firings.

Jason Godin of the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers said unions are obligated to defend their members in labour grievances, regardless of what they have done.

“We’re completely obligated under the Public Service Labour Relations Act to represent our members,” Godin said. “Our goal is to make sure the rights of our members from a labour standpoint are represented. The union can’t judge. We don’t have a choice in such matters.”

He also notes that the total number of corrections firings and suspensions are not alarming given that there are thousands of departmental employees nationwide, the dangerous environment in which they work — “we’re constantly in the line of fire” — and management’s tendency to discipline before having all the facts.

Robert Tello was fired within months of becoming a prison guard. He wanted to be a police officer, and after trying out for the OPP and getting “really close,” he started a year-long, probationary contract at maximum-security Kingston Penitentiary in 2008.

A Correctional Service investigation found Tello, driving a silver sedan while off duty, flashed white-and-amber lights mounted behind his front window and pulled over a driver who turned out to be a plainclothes detective.

The cop got out of his vehicle to talk to Tello, his employer found, and the 43-year-old prison guard flashed his Correctional Service badge to “gain an advantage in the situation.”

Less than two months later, a Kingston Police investigation found, Tello had a confrontation with another motorist and allegedly flashed his badge and told the driver he was a federal agent.

Tello pleaded guilty to careless driving and paid a $325 ticket. He did not tell his supervisor at Kingston Penitentiary that he had been charged with the Highway Traffic Act offence.

Tello, a Mississauga native, appealed his firing and told a labour relations tribunal that both incidents were misunderstood and that he did no wrong.

Tello, who was a Kingston Police volunteer, said he thought his flashing lights were legal and that it was a female passenger who turned them on without him noticing. He said he did not show his shiny gold badge to intimidate the second driver. He said he paid the careless driving fine because he felt threatened by police.

While it found the prison’s investigation of Tello was “deeply flawed,” the tribunal said the Correctional Service nevertheless broke no rules by firing him and that his use of a badge “could be perceived by a member of the public as an abuse of power.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Tello told the Star. “What happened here *was unfair.”

And that’s in Rwanda, and a jail cell in Kigali.

We trust his accommodations are suitable.

Rwanda, in turn, has promised Canada that Mugesera would get a fair trial on charges that he incited the 1993-94 genocide of millions of the Tutsi minority by marauding Hutu militiamen.

Canada, in turn, should promise Canadians to speed up the system to that no alleged war criminal can ever again play the system like Leon Mugesera played it.

Eighteen years? Ridiculous.

Despite how it was spun in court as a last gasp, Rwanda’s judicial system has been vetted by the International Criminal Tribunal, and has been deemed suitable for trying perpetrators of the genocide.

And there is, in fact, no longer a death penalty in Rwanda. Nor is there the torture Mugesera alleged.

In the early ’90s, however, this was not the case.

Canadian Lt.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire was commander of the UN intervention in Rwanda, and a year later he flew home “broken, disillusioned and suicidal,” having witnessed the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in only 100 days.

His book, Shake Hands with the Devil, lays it bare.

According to Rwandan authorities, Mugesera was an architect of that genocide, and used his status as vice-president of the ruling Hutu party to ramp up the hostilities.

He referred to Tutsis as “cockroaches,” and called on fellow Hutus to kill Tutsi rivals and dump their bodies into Rwanda’s rivers.

As the world found out, this was done and done well.

Mugesera fuelled the flames even more by telling his Hutu followers that “the person whose neck you do not cut is the one who will cut yours.” But Mugesera, and his lawyers, knew how to play the game, losing appeal after appeal until Quebec Superior Court Judge Michel Delorme finally ruled this week that his court could not override federal rulings declaring Mugesera inadmissible to Canada — all which led to his immediate deportation.

Welcome home to Kigali, Mr. Mugesera.

Eighteen years was too good of a run.

MONTREAL – “It’s over” was the final text message disgraced Montreal police Sgt.-Det. Ian Davidson sent his wife before slitting his throat in a hotel room on Wednesday.

Davidson, a retired database manager, had been under investigation for allegedly approaching the mafia to sell a list of 2,000 informants and undercover agents for $1 million. Sources tell QMI Agency that Davidson had been threatened by a mafia associate before he tried to flee the country last fall.

QMI has also learned that investigators seized a laptop, an iPod unit and one or more memory sticks this week from the hotel room where Davidson took his life.

Asked if the files contained information concerning ongoing investigations, a police source simply replied: “The whole shebang.”

Davidson had played with fire, sources say, by offering the names of informants to two rival mob clans last April, a few months after he retired following a distinguished 33-year career.

The revelation that the respected veteran officer was prepared to risk lives by peddling secret names on the black market sent shockwaves all the way to the provincial legislature. Montreal police say the list is no longer in the hands of gangsters and that their agents are safe.

Davidson had approached a major Mafia figure and handed him a few of the names from the stolen files. The mobster, suspecting a trap, gave the names to his lawyer who handed them back to police. Police began tracking Davidson and gathered wiretap evidence throughout the spring and summer of 2011.

As the walls closed in around Davidson, a mob associate contacted him and suggested that he “disappear.”

He tried to fly to Costa Rica out of Trudeau Airport in October but a SWAT team arrested him before he could board the flight. He was released and had not been charged as of this week, but sources say the pressure on Davidson had become unbearable by Tuesday.

Former colleagues had informed him that media outlets would publish his name on Wednesday, and he spent Tuesday evening with his wife and daughter at the Chateauneuf hotel in suburban Laval, near his home.

On Wednesday morning at 7:45 a.m., his wife left him at the hotel to drive her daughter to school. At 8:15 a.m., she received a short text from Davidson that read, “it’s over.”

She called 911 and officers descended on the hotel. They asked a staffer to unlock the door to Davidson’s room. They found his body in the bathroom, his throat slit. An autopsy conducted on Thursday confirmed that he had committed suicide.

Davidson is the third Quebecer to commit suicide this month to avoid justice.

On Jan 11, 53-year-old Kathrine Dufresne hanged herself inside the Hull Detention Centre as she awaited trial on a first-degree murder charge for the Oct. 22 strangulation of her daughter, Sophie Fitzpatrick, 7.

Two days earlier, former St-Liboire, Que., mayor Paul Laplante hanged himself in his Montreal prison cell. He had been charged with first-degree murder in the death of his wife, Diane Gregoire.

Police accuser denies his injuries were minimal (Peter Small Courts Bureau, The Star)

A former pot dealer who claims drug squad detectives “tortured” him over nine hours adamantly denies his injuries were minimal or occurred after he went berserk.

In a dramatic and combative exchange with defence lawyer John Rosen, star Crown witness Christopher Quigley angrily fended off suggestions he is exaggerating his injuries because he has an “agenda.”

“You have your agenda and I have mine,” Quigley said at a Toronto police corruption trial. “And that’s to tell the truth.”

Rosen went over hospital records and suggested they don’t back up Quigley’s claim that in the spring of 1998 he was viciously kicked, punched and choked in a police interview room to the point he thought he was going to die.

“There was nothing wrong with your head,” said Rosen, lawyer for former detective John Schertzer, head of Team 3 of Central Field Command drug squad.

“There was quite a bit wrong with my head,” Quigley shot back. “I had a huge gash that required stitches. I had a massive amount of injuries done to me while I was in that room, sir.”

Rosen suggested Quigley got the head cut when he “went berserk” upon learning detectives were going to open a safety deposit box where he stashed his cash, and that he had to be restrained after he attacked an officer.

“That is the biggest lie,” Quigley replied. “That never happened, and we both know it.”

Quigley is the first Crown witness to testify at the Ontario Superior Court trial of Schertzer, 54, Ned Maodus, 48, Steve Correia, 44, Joseph Miched, 53, and Raymond Pollard, 47.

The former Team 3 officers collectively face 29 charges, laid in January 2004, including attempt to obstruct justice, perjury, assault and extortion related to events between 1997 and 2002.

Quigley has testified he was covered in blood after the beating, and when he was taken to the cells a shocked uniformed officer screamed for an ambulance.

But Rosen pointed out that the ambulance didn’t arrive until 90 minutes later.

Rosen also noted Quigley was released from Sunnybrook hospital after some seven hours.

Dramatic pictures of his injuries that Quigley had his girlfriend take of him the following day are calculated to show him when his bruises looked their worst — several hours after being inflicted, Rosen suggested.

And there is no hospital record of a nasty arm puncture wound shown in one of Quigley’s home photos, proving it was not inflicted during police custody, Rosen said.

“Wrong, wrong,” Quigley said. “It’s an outrageous statement.”

Quigley’s cross-examination continues Friday.

A former pot dealer says he felt pressured, as part of a plea bargain, into signing a document agreeing not to sue two police officers who brutally beat him in custody.

Christopher Quigley testified at a cop corruption trial Tuesday that Toronto Central Field Command drug squad officers beat him so severely after they arrested him on April 30, 1998, that he thought he was going to die.

“I was terrified,” he told an Ontario Superior Court jury. “I was being pulverized.”

Quigley said he was kicked, punched and choked by drug squad officers Ned Maodus and Richard Benoit in a police interview room with the encouragement and participation of their boss, Det.-Sgt. John Schertzer.

They kept angrily demanding where he kept his drugs and money, he testified.

He was treated in hospital for his injuries, but the officers turned around and charged him with assault, as well as possessing marijuana and the proceeds of crime, he told an Ontario Superior Court jury Tuesday.

“I was never told who I assaulted because I didn’t assault anyone,” Quigley told prosecutor John Pearson.

But he agreed to a plea deal allowing him to plead guilty to simple marijuana possession and a $1,000 fine in return for the other charges being dropped, he told prosecutor John Pearson.

His lawyer at the time, Bruce Olmsted, made it very clear to him it was the best deal he could get, he said.

The lawyer told Quigley that police would not give back the possessions they had seized unless he took the deal, he said.

They had trashed his Eglinton Ave. W. apartment and taken his $400 boots, a briefcase containing an $8,000 sapphire and other items, as well as $54,000 of his cash from his mother’s bank safety deposit box, he said.

So before he pleaded guilty he signed a document releasing the Toronto police force and any of its officers, including Benoit and Maodus, for any injuries he sustained at the time of his arrest.

Schertzer, 54; Maodus, 48; Steve Correia, 44; Joseph Miched, 53; and Raymond Pollard, 47; collectively face 29 charges, laid in January 2004, including obstruction of justice, perjury, assault and extortion related to their work between 1997 and 2002.

During one of three separate beatings, Quigley said, his head was smashed against a wall and he lost consciousness.

“I was covered from head to toe in blood,” he testified.

“That’s when I started throwing up blood. I was breathing up blood. I was choking on my own blood.”

He was finally taken to a cell in another part of the station, where another officer saw his bloodied state and immediately screamed for someone to call an ambulance.

A top union executive has jumped back into a $200,000-a-year job, 13 months after officials fired him for “deception” and “self-dealing,” as well as spending improprieties that included using workers’ money to fly his daughter to Disney World.

In a controversial comeback, trustees rehired John Mandarino last summer as the administrator for the training centre of the continent’s largest construction local, Toronto-based Labourers’ International Union of North America Local 183.

The centre’s board had unanimously dismissed him in June 2010 for breaching contract tendering rules, losing valuable government grants, regularly breaking cheque-signing policy and charging unauthorized personal expenses without proper accounting.

Some other union leaders said at the time his firing was the result of a political “witch hunt” and “exaggeration of facts.”

However, a different picture emerges in the hundreds of credit card statements, invoices and other documents obtained by the Star. They show a manager who played loosely with operating rules and liberally used training centre funds for business trip extras and at high-end restaurants for himself and associates.

In one case, he spent more than $8,600 on a seven-day trip to Florida for an industry convention and stay at Disney World that included the union paying for airline tickets for his daughter.

Although trustees had not made a request, Mandarino paid back the cost of that junket about 21 months later and some other personal expenses after he became aware of an internal probe of centre spending, the documents reveal.

He submitted some other receipts later but provided little information to support hundreds of other charges during the year, contrary to union policy.

The training centre’s 24 trustees unanimously fired him after receiving a legal opinion that concluded Mandarino’s dismissal with cause would be justified because his actions demonstrated “a repeated pattern of obfuscation, deception, blame-shifting and self-dealing.”

Mandarino’s conduct raised the issue of whether trustees could continue to have enough trust and confidence in him, Toronto employment lawyer Robert Colson added in his brief to the trustees.

But the board of trustees, including new union members and other officials representing contractors, voted for Mandarino’s rehiring last July and granted him “full power” to run the centre, a jewel among construction training operations on the continent. The centre — which has an annual budget of about $6.5 million — trains thousands of construction workers at locations in Vaughan, Cobourg, Toronto and Barrie.

The 41-year-old Mandarino, who had operated the centre from 2006 to 2010 before his firing, declined repeated requests for an interview.

Local 183 business manager and trustee Jack Oliveira told the Star the firing was “politically orchestrated,” primarily by several trustees who are no longer on the board.

Those trustees lost full-time Local 183 executive positions in close election votes last year and the new brass subsequently replaced them on the training centre board.

“Mr. Mandarino is widely regarded as one of the very best in the occupational health and training world, and the new executive board is very pleased that he accepted our offer to come back and work at the training centre,” Oliveira said in the statement.

Oliveira, who was among the trustees that ousted Mandarino, moved the motion to rehire him. He would not say why he changed his mind.

Trustees representing contractor associations who voted for Mandarino’s original firing also would not comment on their votes because they said board discussions are confidential.

However, minutes of the meeting to rehire Mandarino show trustees representing contractors wanted to defer the motion so absentee members could express their opinions.

They also wanted any rehiring to be conditional on the full board setting Mandarino’s terms of employment. But union trustees used their majority and rejected the requests at the meeting.

Durval Terceira, who lost his position as Local 183 business manager and board trustee in the bitter election last year, said the union’s 28,000 members should have some serious questions about the rehiring.

“Even though I am no longer involved with Local 183 and its training centre, I still care about its members a great deal. I was very surprised and shocked that the new board would even consider rehiring Mr. Mandarino,” he added. “I wonder what is happening now.”

In 2008, credit card statements showed Mandarino rang up charges of more than $17,000 or about $325 a week on food and beverages for himself and associates at numerous spots, primarily in the GTA. They included dining at high-end eateries such as Bill’s Pit North Steak and Seafood in Vaughan, Ferreira Café in Montreal, and Tholos Restaurant in Collingwood.

An internal review of centre expenditures found Mandarino — who collected about $170,000 in salary and $30,000 in benefits annually — didn’t submit receipts for most dining charges or provide reasons for them.

“There were a number of expenses charged by Mr. Mandarino to the (training centre) fund that were personal in nature and which were entirely unrelated to the objectives of the fund,” said Colson in his legal opinion for the board.

In his week-long trustee authorized trip from Toronto to Florida in February 2008, Air Canada charged Mandarino $969.40 for return tickets. But his young daughter also accompanied him at the same price, according to copies of receipts.

He attended the four-day North American Home Builders Show but stayed longer at the nearby Disney World Dolphin Resort in an upgraded room with balcony. Other Local 183 officials slept in less expensive $320-a-night rooms for the industry event.

Although Mandarino received a $200-a-day per diem from the union training centre for meals, daily transportation and other expenses, he claimed more than $1,300 in additional miscellaneous hotel charges and another $847.76 for renting a vehicle. A parking spot for Mandarino’s own vehicle at Pearson International Airport cost the centre $158.

Sources say his wife and son were on the trip, but there is no indication the training centre or union paid for any of their expenses.

One training centre insider noted Mandarino travelled to some other conventions without board authorization for the trips or their accompanying costs.

Deloitte & Touche LLP, a major accounting and financial advisory firm, found in its review of 2008 centre spending that Mandarino wrote cheques to himself to cover personal expenses without the proper signature of a trustee.

“Included were expenditures made by Mr. Mandarino personally without any signature from an authorized trustee in the case of cheques and, because in many cases the cheques were written to cover credit card expenses without review by an authorized trustee, thereby depriving the (centre) fund of the opportunity to approve of the expenditure,” noted Colson in his opinion.

The Deloitte review discovered Mandarino signed more than 200 cheques in 2008 for $3,000 or less. Any greater amount would have required a trustee’s signature under centre policy.

Some of the cheques went to the same vendor on the same day to pay higher amounts under contracts.

Mandarino indicated that trustees weren’t available for signing bigger cheques, but the review found that they were indeed at the centre on many of those occasions.

“Irrespective of the rationale that Mandarino put forward which appears, in any event, to be suspect if not clearly untrue, it is clear that he intentionally breached the cheque-writing policy and his authority on numerous occasions without disclosing those breaches to the board or seeking changes to the policy,” said Colson in his opinion.

The review also found Mandarino did not tender several contracts for training centre work or request quotes from multiple vendors, in contravention of operating policy. Mandarino told Deloitte he selected some vendors because of their history with the union and the need to expedite work.

Trustees received information that the centre lost more than $350,000 in government grants for a tunnel rescue program from 2007 to 2009 because Mandarino missed annual application deadlines.

Mandarino was unwilling to accept responsibility and lacked “the necessary degree of frankness and candour,” Colson said in his opinion.

Colson pointed to an incident where Mandarino fired an employee without authority or sufficient evidence, which cost the training centre fund a “significant” amount in compensation. Mandarino, who received a reprimand over the employee’s firing, also misrepresented legal advice and opinions to the centre’s board in that case, Colson noted.

Mandarino received about $80,000 in severance pay, but trustees rejected his lawyer’s request to remove any board references that the firing was “with cause.”

After his dismissal, Mandarini still had support from higher levels of the union for his “impeccable” reputation as a training director.

“I believe that John Mandarino has in fact elevated the professionalism and standards of training in the training centre,” Joseph Mancinelli, the Labourers’ International vice-president for central and eastern Canada, said in a letter to trustees.

“The despicable attacks upon John Mandarino can only be categorized as a ‘witch hunt,’ a contrived exaggeration of facts in order to satisfy the wishes of a few trustees with a political agenda.”

In a responding letter at that time, Terceira, the then Local 183 business manager, said Mancinelli’s views were based on misinformation and noted the former administrator’s union supporters on the board had also voted for the dismissal.

he is a close “personal” friend of the York Regional Police.