City Olympic committee shuts out the public half the time
Embattled city Coun. Jeromy Farkas has released details on just how much time the city’s Olympic Assessment Committee spends discussing a potential bid away from the public eye.
Numbers from Farkas, who has repeatedly called for a reduction of council’s closed-door sessions, show the committee has spent 16 hours and 58 minutes behind closed doors since the committee’s formation on April 23 and Oct. 10.
That’s just two minutes shy of time spent working in public.
Farkas said he compiled information tallied by city clerks and shared the details with Postmedia.
On Monday, Farkas is filing a notice of motion that could see a number of drastic changes made to council’s in camera procedures.
If approved, some of those changes would include recording closed-door meetings “so that they can be later reviewed” and requiring a paper record of each confidential agenda item.
It would also establish a “sunset clause,” lifting confidentiality after an in camera matter is resolved “or after a certain period of time.”
“This is all about opening the doors at city hall, both figuratively and literally,” Farkas said, adding there are some parts of the Olympic file that should be kept confidential.
According to the city, council and committees go in camera to discuss issues that fall under the Municipal Government Act, including “labour negotiations, staff relations, legal opinions, land transactions and financial matters.”
“(Olympic facility) security arrangements, I think absolutely should be confidential,” he said. “Other things like the financial risks and the detailed financial analysis, I think that absolutely should be out in the open. Some of the things should be confidential, some definitely shouldn’t.”
Coun. Ray Jones, who sits on the Olympic Assessment Committee, said negotiations with the provincial and federal governments on a cost-sharing plan for the Games has kept the committee’s meetings out of council chambers.
“The reason we’re spending time behind closed doors is really, we don’t have anything to report,” Jones said. “We’re still waiting for the federal government to come forward, and the negotiations are confidential until such time that they do come forward.”
The province has also raised issues with the city’s transparency around a potential 2026 Olympic bid.
Finance Minister Joe Ceci said on Friday that the province’s $700 million committed to hosting the Games would hinge on the Calgary 2026 bid company becoming subject to provincial transparency and freedom of information laws, “or other equivalent rules.”
The provincial funding will only be made available if more than 50 per cent of votes cast in the upcoming Nov. 13 Olympic plebiscite are in favour of the Games bid.
Duff Conacher, co-founder of Democracy Watch and adjunct professor of law at the University of Ottawa, said the danger of closed-door meetings comes when councils “end up discussing things the public has a right to have held in the open.”
“The only justifiable reason to go in camera are if you’re talking about private information concerning staff, and there’s really no other justification,” Conacher said.
“If you’re going after public money, you lose some of your privacy rights as a corporation,” Conacher said. “It’s always a recipe for waste, abuse and corruption when you have that level of secrecy.”
A Manning Foundation report in August 2017 showed Calgary’s council at the time met behind closed doors 728 times in 120 meetings. By comparison, Toronto’s council met in private 18 times, Hamilton’s 13 times and Ottawa’s just once between 2014 and 2016.