City, U of R struggle in accountability
Acouple of votes held in Regina this week should serve as good reminders to those with local governance responsibilities that they are accountable to taxpayers.
Some seem to have learned their lessons ... albeit just barely.
And it’s tough to see whether others have learned much at all.
The week’s news was dominated by the great Regina wastewater referendum vote — though calling this a great example of democracy in action might be overstating matters.
One big problem was the inability of Regina Mayor Michael Fougere, councillors and City Hall staff to differentiate their role as overseers of a democratic exercise from their beliefs as proponents of a particular viewpoint.
Certainly, city hall resources shouldn’t have been telling their ratepayers not only where to vote, but also how to vote — in the same breath.
That said, it’s hard to objectively suggest that city hall was really any more disingenuous than the Canadian Union of Public Employee (CUPE), with its behind-the-scenes support of Regina Water Watch, its unwillingness to reveal how much it was spending, its dubious claims of the project’s long-term financial cost — or its subliminal messaging that our drinking water would be threatened by this public-private partnership.
Those who would categorize this as a small union’s fight against big, bad city hall/big business/the federal Conservative government might care to examine how much money the CUPE national head office poured into this fight simply to prevent the establishment of a P3 beachhead.
It might even be somewhat argued that city hall — albeit, because of the restrictions of provincial municipal law or otherwise — was more than democratically generous. It did not reject a petition that failed, technically, to meet a bureaucratic requirement. It then agreed to run a referendum with the petitioners’ own wording, even though this wording seemed designed to deliberately confuse voters.
So to hear the sour grapes from Water Watch — that city hall/the chamber of commerce bought the referendum vote, that this was a bad day for democracy or the 43 per cent opposing P3s can’t be ignored — is rather ridiculous. What should a democratically elected council do after a referendum? Ignore the 57 per cent that voted in favour of a P3?
Whether the losing side likes it or not, the unanimous decision by council to accept the federal government’s $58.5-million enticement and go with the P3 model has been validated by a public vote of confidence. Notwithstanding the aforementioned democratic mistakes made by city hall, holding a referendum with the proponents’ very words means city hall passed the test of democratic accountability.
Meanwhile, University of Regina President Vianne Timmons had a test of her own Friday afternoon — one that she did pass, but not exactly with flying colours.
Timmons was under siege at a Friday afternoon special meeting of the University Council — largely consisting of faculty members with some administrators and students — at which she escaped, by a single vote, a motion for a nonconfidence vote in her presidency.
This outcome is hardly great news for the U of R president.
At issue were a plethora of matters ranging from cuts to English and other departments to tuition hikes.
In fairness to Timmons, universities have limited control over critical funding and resources. Moreover, many of Timmons’s funding choices (i.e., student residences) have been good ones and many of her problems were inherited ones.
However, faculty has also complained about Timmons’ lack of transparency. In that complaint, they are not alone.
For months, the U of R has been plagued with accountability issues ranging from conflict of interest and mismanagement at IPAC-CO2 to $1.3 million in overspending at the engineering faculty to the $380,000 paid in overtime to two employees who never worked those extra hours.
Again, not all these problems started under Timmons’ tenure, but each was accompanied by stonewalling that often required the provincial government to demand disclosure. In the matter of the unearned overtime, Advanced Education Minister Rob Norris believes this matter is serious enough to be reviewed by the Justice Ministry.
Yet Timmons told reporters Wednesday she could not promise she might necessarily inform the public of similar problems in the future?
Is accountability strictly an internal matter at the university?
This was not exactly stellar work in accountability 101.