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It’s been a year since an expenses scandal rocked the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM), and the body’s new president told a council committee hearing Friday that it will be months before a code of ethics and 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 to public tender to enlist the help of an external company.

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Other priorities for 2025 include the drafting of a code of ethics for OCPM commissioners and a formal process for naming commissioners and renewing the mandates of existing commissioners.

However, Bourke, who started his post in Januarynoted several measures have been taken in the past year, including a legislative amendment making OCPM a department of the city, subject to the same budget guidelines and administrative rules as all city departments. Bourke has added controls, incl an end to “self-approval” of spending by OCPM top brass.

“Public confidence in the institution was shaken in its leadership,” he said of the scandal’s effect on public perception of the OCPM.

“This opened the door to questions about its relevance, and there are questions of trust there.”

OCPM’s city-funded 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 assigned to it, such as changes requested to the city’s urban plan for to accommodate development projects and issue recommendations to city elected officials based on public feedback.

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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 that successive OCPM chiefs had bought expensive equipment, trips and dinners to the city for years.

In June, Montreal Auditor General Andrée Cossette issued a series of recommendations to make amends one lack of governance rules at OCPM after its closure, the publicly funded Public Consultation Office lacked any formal management framework or oversight in its 20-year history.

OCPM’s new leadership provided a plan to correct each recommendation to the auditor general in September, Bourke said.

The Auditor General’s recommendations included adopting a governance framework, including an appropriate structure for the OCPM, a strategic plan with goals, objectives and indicators and transparent reporting to relevant stakeholders.

Bourke said he takes rebuilding public trust “very seriously”, adding “it is fundamental to work on trust in the rigor of our administrative leadership as much as trust in the relevance of our role and, I would say, in the influence of our work. “

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