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A partial victory for the people's right to know; Local councils can now be held accountable if they conduct public business in private

A partial victory for the people's right to know; Local councils can now be held accountable if they conduct public business in private
Posted By McNichol, Phil
Updated 3 days ago

A change to the Ontario Municipal Act designed to make local government more "open and transparent" received little public attention when it became effective on Jan. 1.

That's not surprising. Municipal councils toward the end of 2007 didn't go out of their way to highlight what they were doing to comply with the legislation, and the news media, by and large, wasn't savvy enough to realize it was newsworthy.

I have to confess it went by me like it was mere housekeeping at one of the two local councils I cover on a regular basis. In retrospect that was a mistake. So in a way I guess I'm making amends here when I report that people for the first time now have the ability to make an official, legal complaint and get an investigation when they think their local governments are going behind closed doors for no good reason.

That is momentous, a huge milestone in the painfully long process of making local government more open and transparent.

Previously you had to launch a civil court suit - at great expense and without much hope of timely success - alleging a violation of the Ontario Municipal Act. Now there's a clear process to follow at little or no expense.

But what good is it if nobody knows, if you don't tell anyone, as Dr. Strangelove said. So I'm here to say if you think your council is meeting clandestinely or otherwise deliberately trying to avoid public scrutiny, you don't have to take it anymore. You have more options than grumbling about it down at the lunch counter or over the back fence. You have some power other than what money can buy. You can complain and somebody is supposed to investigate and file a report - a public report, no less.

Under Section 239.1 of the Municipal Act, municipalities are now authorized to appoint an investigator to look into citizens' complaints about a council's alleged failure to follow the regulations for closed meetings. That investigator is supposed to be independent, does not have to be a municipal employee and must file a public report about the results of his or her investigation.

It should have stopped there but, unfortunately, the province gave municipalities an out by offering them the option of delegating the responsibility to the already overworked Ontario Ombudsman's office. That's a mistake. Municipal councils that violate the spirit and letter of the law governing closed meetings should have to face the consequences of avoiding their responsibility not only to the law, but also to the public they were elected to serve.

Yes, I suppose it's possible that some municipalities will face extra costs and some of those costs may be the result of vexatious complaints. But by and large I think municipal councils would get what they deserve if the Ontario Ombudsman's office option had not been included.

I like what Bruce County council has done to comply with the new legislation. County council chose to contract out the services of an investigator, if required, to The Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) and its Local Authority Services (LAS), a firm made up of ex-municipal officials.

The county could have - but decided not to - charge people who complain an administration fee. County clerk Bettyanne Cobean said Bruce is trying hard to practice "open and transparent" government, seldom holds closed meetings and trains county officials to meet behind closed doors for the right reasons.

Owen Sound city council, Grey County council and Meaford also decided near the end of 2007 not to pass the closed meeting buck to the Ontario Ombudsman and hired LAS on a two-year contract basis.

I suggest if you want some more insight into your municipal council's attitude toward closed meetings, to gauge whether or not it is truly committed open government, you should try to find out if they've appointed an investigator or delegated responsibility to the provincial ombudsman.

South Bruce Peninsula council has chosen the latter approach and I think it reflects the attitude of a council that has become increasingly closed-door in its attitude despite promises in the last municipal election to be more open and accessible to the public.

Regular, formal evening council meetings have become rubber-stamping affairs, with little or no discussion of decisions reached at bi-weekly day-long committee of the whole meetings, where there's less opportunity for public participation and scrutiny and media coverage, for that matter.

In the earlier years of my career as a journalist covering local councils for this newspaper, I heard some whoppers about why elected members felt they needed to hold a lot of their meetings behind closed doors.

The unexpected appearance at a township council meeting of a reporter from "the Owen Sound paper" could be reason enough when an important and especially controversial issue was on the agenda. The fact The Sun Times was read by a lot of people in the many communities throughout Grey-Bruce didn't seem to matter, or simply wasn't realized.

I often had a better relationship with municipal staff who understood "public" information was just that, whether it was being sought by the press on behalf of the public or by residents directly. But occasionally I ran into surprisingly unprofessional attitudes from a few municipal clerks.

I'll never forget going to one small municipal office in pre-restructuring days to ask the clerk for a copy of a document. I was refused with the comment "You're just going to put it in the paper, aren't you?"

Well, yes, or maybe, or not. It remained to be seen. But so what?

Fortunately the local reeve knew better, called the office and told the clerk to give me what I'd asked for, but even then, under the law that shouldn't have been necessary.

Back then quite a few members of local councils, elected by the people in their community to represent and speak to their concerns about local affairs, were not very keen on doing their jobs in public where voters might see how well they discussed and dealt with the issues.

More than once when I asked why a certain meeting went in camera, I was told the members felt more comfortable speaking their minds in private. And they could if they wanted to because for a long time the decision to close a meeting to the public was at the discretion of council.

Finally, about 20 years ago if memory serves me right, the Ontario Municipal Act was changed and councils could only go in camera for the specific reasons listed at surprising length in the revised act. Now we have this latest change, giving concerned citizens the opportunity to help enforce the rules.

And that's a good thing, as far as it goes, because municipal politics is not a perfect world. Some things never change.