January 28, 2017
RCMP police HQ investigation doesn't preclude a public inquiry into Winnipeg scandals
Brian Bowman had only been Winnipeg's mayor for six weeks when the RCMP launched a criminal investigation into the city's police headquarters.
"We've inherited this nonsense," a shaken Bowman said in December 2014, after the Mounties raided the McGillivray Boulevard offices of police HQ contractor Caspian Construction.
Bowman ran for mayor that year on a platform of changing the culture of a city hall that was still reeling from two years of capital-procurement and real-estate scandals.
But the newly minted mayor's efforts to paint a picture of an open and transparent Winnipeg were undermined by two years of increasingly serious RCMP allegations about the police HQ project, approved two terms before he was elected.