CARE-Montréal/CAP Saint-Barnabé: homeless people could run out of food
CARE Montreal has a $1,700,000 contract for the supply of 900 meals a day with CAP Saint Barnabas.
The conflict between CARE-Montréal and CAP Saint-Barnabé (CSB), two organizations that provide services to homeless people on the island and whose merger recently failed, could have consequences for the supply of customers deprived of CARE.
Métro has learned that CAP Saint-Barnabé, by letter dated December 16, 2022, wishes to terminate the catering service agreement, among others, with the partner organization.
This is a $1,700,000 contract for the supply of 900 meals per day (morning, noon and evening) to around 300 beneficiaries. The former director of CARE, Catehryn Roy-Goyette, who resigned with a bang at the end of 2022 and who is a member of the CA of CAP Saint-Barnabé, confirms the intentions of the organization.
“There is an action plan to recover the services and ensure that the money is well managed, she said, it is difficult to continue this partnership, the food service, the administrative merger etc… »
For its part, CARE-Montréal, which says it is at least satisfied with the catering service with CSB, wishes to continue the agreement in this direction. On January 5, CARE's Board of Directors requested, by letter, a meeting to discuss these issues with its partner, a request that has remained unanswered to date, deplores CARE's lawyer, Mr. Pierre-Paul Bourdages. In an interview with Metro, the lawyer warns CSB about an apparent desire to harm the operations of his organization.
Me Pierre-Paul Bourdages,
It's clear, if CSB thinks in the slightest that we can't eat elsewhere, they risk have bad surprises.
Pierre-Paul Bourdages, lawyer and spokesperson for CARE-Montréal
“But we don't want to come to that. We want to continue the commercial relationship with them, we are satisfied, but it is not true that they will benefit from their commercial relationship and we will suffer from the consequences of the administrative merger,” adds the lawyer. who is speaking on behalf of CARE in this case.
Complaint to the police
Meanwhile, Catheryn Roy-Goyette who sits on the CA de CSB filed a complaint with the police against his former employer last December.
“The investigation has barely begun”, underlines Ms. Roy-Goyette to Métro who claims, moreover, to undertake this process at the request of an independent auditor who had gone through the accounts and bookkeeping of the organization. /p>
Catheryn Roy-Goyette
The audit, completed in November, showed that there are many transactions between related parties for a substantial amount. Some of these operations were known to the CA, which had asked to go to a call for tenders for certain contracts awarded to the company of Michel Monette, creator of CARE, a call for tenders that never took place.
Catheryn Roy-Goyette, former director of CARE and current board member of CSB
Pierre-Paul Bourdages questions Ms. Roy-Goyette's comments about the call for tenders. He says he checked, but found no trace of this request. “I asked for all the minutes to be handed over to me, which I got, and nowhere do I see a formal appeal from the Board,” he says.
He repeats that in some cases, these were billing errors related to the Monette family's housekeeping business and that these shortcomings were reported to CARE's Board of Directors. Me Bourdages adds, in an interview with the newspaper, that the amount of 5,000 dollars in question has been reimbursed in full.
The two organizations were to ensure a merger and for several months, the plans varied. In December 2022, when a public meeting of CARE Montreal members studied the possibility of dissolving the organization and transferring its assets to CAP St-Barnabé, which the majority of members accepted. But the Church of Michel Monette, which created the organization in 2017 and which holds a right of veto, refused at the last minute.
In the following days, Ms. Roy-Goyette resigned from her post .
