End the secrecy
It’s bad enough that Toronto Hydro, the city’s publicly owned power provider, has been working for two years to suppress information on an abandoned push to privatize the company. The ratepayer-funded agency should, by default, be open and transparent.
But more troubling still are the repeated failures of our city’s political leadership even to encourage the company’s board to do the right thing.
Take the unfortunate fate of city Councillor Gord Perks’ motion, tabled last week, to force Toronto Hydro finally to release information about a behind-the-scenes privatization push in 2016, the subject of a longstanding Star freedom of information request, and about how much money the company has spent since then to oppose that request.
These are not insignificant details. The arm’s-length agency hired lobbyists, at some public expense, in its unsuccessful effort to encourage council to support a privatization plan. At what cost did it pursue this, without any public mandate? And how much has it spent since then on consultants, including blue chip Bay St. law firm Norton Rose Fulbright Canada, in fighting the Star’s push for transparency?
These are the questions Perks sought to answer with his motion, yet sadly it never got to a vote. Instead, council approved, 20 to 18, an alternative motion put forward by Councillor Stephen Holyday, who sits on Hydro Toronto’s board of directors, and with the active support of Mayor John Tory. That motion calls on the agency merely to consider the request for transparency. It does not even compel a response.
The stated reason for undermining Perks’ effort was that Holyday wanted to ensure the city did not compromise the independence of the arm’s length agency by big-footing its board into disclosing the information. “I take no position on whether the information should be released,” Holyday said. “I’m more interested in governance.”
There is some irony in citing good governance as a reason not to fight for transparency, a central tenet of good governance. But in any case, surely councillors could have at least used moral suasion to encourage the board to come clean. Surely they could have made their request harder to ignore.
The mayor, in particular, should tread carefully here, given his interests in this case. The Star revealed last year that some of Tory’s senior staff and advisers led the push toward a partial sale of the utility and that Toronto Hydro hired two former senior Tory advisers to lobby council to consider a sell-off.
The mayor’s office, invoking the governance issue, called Holyday’s motion the “reasonable and sensible option.” But Tory must also be aware of the appearance that he may have other reasons not to want this information to come to light.
If he feels it would be wrong, for governance reasons, to force the board to disclose the documents in question, he should at least use his position of moral leadership to explicitly encourage the company to come clean. It is in all of our interests that this information about the use of public funds be released so that we might consider whether they were truly used for the public good.