Campion quits NPCA, calls on board to resign
Decades-old board appointment process has never been used, says a former CAO
Niagara Region’s out-going Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority representatives must resign, says Welland Mayor Frank Campion, who stepped down from the embattled agency Wednesday.
Campion said voters spoke loud and clear in Oct. 22 election, which saw most of NPCA’s regional representatives lose their elected seats.
“The voters made it very clear they no longer wanted this board, and I think you have to respect that,” said Campion, who was reelected.
On Wednesday morning he filed his resignation, effective Nov. 30, with outgoing NPCA chair and Fort Erie regional councillor Sandy Annunziata.
“I believe the mandate of the board should expire at the end of the regional council term,” Campion’s letter of resignation said.
“While this may not be legislatively required, I believe there is an ethical and moral responsibility to step down and would urge all other Niagara regional councillors who are NPCA board members to resign as well.”
Campion said his resignation is a response to a Nov. 23 missive from Annunziata to the Region saying the current NPCA board will not stand down until a new board is chosen through a 24year-old, never-before-used process.
That process — laid out in a 1994 Ontario government directive — would see Annunziata preside over a series of meetings that would approve the next board of directors.
That suggestion did not sit well with St. Catharines city councillors, who unanimously voted Monday night to ask regional council to select an interim NPCA board to govern the agency until municipal councils have finished selecting citizen appointees.
“I think it’s important that that board just go away,” said Mayor
Walter Sendzik told NPCA CAO Mark Brickell at Monday’s meeting.
In the past, regional council appointed NPCA board members, either from among regional councillors or approving citizen appointees chosen by local municipalities.
Annunziata’s letter references a 1994 order in council that carves up Niagara municipalities into three zones, each of which gets four NPCA board members. Each group can recommend board appointees, and the mayors from each group have to meet with the NPCA chair and vote on who the board members will be.
Annunziata has declined to speak about his letter or how much influence he would have over this process should it be used.
Brickell said the order was discovered by NPCA staff when investigating a request by the City of Hamilton to have more board members.
An NPCA lawyer said the directive supersedes the Conservation Authorities Act, the legislation governing NPCA.
According to former NPCA CAO Andy Burt — he served from 1984 to 2008 — the 1994 procedure has never been used.
He said in the 1980s the NPCA board had 32 members. The province and NPCA moved to reduce the size of the board, first cutting it down to 22 members and then to the current 15, with 12 of those members representing Niagara.
When the last change happened in 1994, the province issued the order in council which gerrymandered the selection process to ensure Niagara kept control of the agency over Hamilton.
The act says the regional government will select the members of the board, Burt said, and the number of board members a municipality receives is set against the size of a population.
A municipality with a population between 250,000 and 500,000 would get four board members. One with less than 250,000 would get four.
Niagara Region has a population of about 450,000. Under that formula, Hamilton — with more than 500,000 people but with only a small territory that falls under NPCA jurisdiction — would have six members.
Burt said to ensure Niagara controlled the NPCA board, it asked the province to set some rules. The resulting order created the three zones of Niagara municipalities, each with a population less than 250,000, resulting in four board members each, giving Niagara 12 in total.
However, the order in council’s selection process was never used.
Burt said Niagara regional council continued to directly appoint board members, whose service ended when the term of council concluded.
Although NPCA says the 1994 directive is in force, Brock University political science professor David Siegel said that might not be the case. He said orders in council do not exist in a vacuum, but are directly connected to a specific piece of legislation. When that legislation is changed, the order in council no longer applies.
The Conservation Authorities Act was last amended in 2017.
Siegel said if the 1994 directive is not valid and if the act doesn’t prescribe the current NPCA board composition, then past practice could decide the issue.