Election night thrill followed by a long wait
New councillors can hire staff and plan, but can’t act officially until sworn in Dec. 3
Sunday morning, newly elected Ward 7 councillor Esther Pauls got a text message from the head of the Concession Street Business Improvement Area asking for help with a graffiti problem.
The trouble is, Pauls — who beat 10 other candidates to become councillor-elect last Monday night — can’t do anything about it for weeks.
The four newly elected councillors — including Pauls, Maureen Wilson in Ward 1, Nrinder Nann in Ward 3, and John-Paul Danko in Ward 8 — can’t act in any official capacity until they’re sworn in on Dec. 3.
Until then, councillors-elect will be tasked with hiring staff, winding down their current jobs, meeting with the mayor and other councillors, and making lists of the issues they’d like to tackle once they’re inaugurated.
The first official appearance for newly elected councillors are orientation meetings on Nov. 15 and 16.
Those meetings are led by the city clerk’s office and include briefings on the structure of the city’s committees, departments and procedures at council.
The rest of the job is learned in the public eye around the council horseshoe, said Aidan Johnson, the outgoing Ward 1 councillor.
“I felt grateful for my training
in law — because I was able to read the municipal act, which contains many of the most relevant rules, and understand what I was reading thoroughly,” said Johnson, who chose not to run for re-election and has taken on a new role as the executive director of the Niagara Community Legal Clinic.
While the new council will be sworn in at a special inauguration meeting on Monday, Dec. 3, the actual nitty-gritty work of committee meetings doesn’t start until Dec. 10.
For Pauls, her No. 1 priority in the first few weeks of the job will be public safety issues, such as the aforementioned graffiti issue and the opioid crisis. As one of her four sons is a police officer and another is a paramedic, she often hears about the safety issues Hamiltonians often face.
“I’m a people person. I love people, I love human interaction, so the concerns of what happens to people is my concern,” she said. “If we have healthy people, we’ll have a strong city.”
For Danko, the most pressing issue for the first several postinauguration weeks will be deciding whether council should allow private cannabis shops to remain open or ban them outright — an option the provincial government has afforded cities.
“It came up quite a bit in the campaign — it’s something that’s very important to me personally, having a young family,” said Danko. “I can see there being problems with zoning, bylaw and enforcement, so I want to find out what the recommendations from staff before I make a final decision.
“I want to make sure that the city and Ward 8 has the best solution that works for us.”