CITY HALL TRANSPARENCY
Open closed doors, councillor says
Just as the city’s priorities and planning committee was about to adjourn for a private session, Ward 2 Coun. Bob Hawkins objected.
Too much is being discussed behind closed doors he said, before making a motion to have the item scheduled for the private agenda moved to the public one.
“I’ve noticed over the last little while that we’ve had an increasing number of private agendas with an increasing number of items on (them) and I thought yesterday, and on other occasions, that some of the business that we were doing in private should be done in public,” Hawkins said during an interview on Thursday.
The motion was defeated with a tie, but a second recommendation to have the city clerk’s office develop a set of criteria to guide decision-making in the future was approved.
The criteria would theoretically lay out steps to follow when deciding what should be on the public agenda and what should be heard in the private one.
“My concern is that we only use private agendas where it’s absolutely necessary,” said Hawkins.
But the city clerk’s office says there is already legislation in place clearly outlining how those decisions should be made, and that city administration does everything it can to put as much on the public agenda as possible.
“I hope the public would understand, appreciate and feel comfortable that the decision-making structure that council is following is completely within the law and it is done for the appropriate and prudent reasons,” said city clerk Jim Nicol.
Decisions about whether something ends up on a private or public agenda are founded on The Cities Act as well as The Local Authority Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (LAFOIP).
The Cities Act mandates that any decision made by council is ultimately discussed and decided on in a public meeting, even if initial discussion begins in private session.
The same goes for decisions made at the committee level, said Nicol.
Items can be put on a private agenda for discussion if they qualify for the following exemptions under sections 16 and 17 of LAFOIP:
Section 16: The information contains advice or recommendations or policy options that are being developed for council or committee, like employee relations, and collective bargaining, contractual plans, instructions or negotiations that might be ongoing, a particular management plan that has not yet been implemented, or disclosure of a pending policy or budgetary decision.
If the information in question interferes with a contract or other negotiations that are underway or the information would somehow be seen to “prejudice the economic interest of the city,” it could be exempt under section 17.
“Some of this, in fairness to everybody, is a matter of interpretation,” said Nicol.
No one puts up a fight on certain issues like a collective bargaining agreement being discussed in private, but other issues have more grey areas and may spark disagreement among council and committee members about which agenda it belongs on, he said.
But The Cities Act still applies, stressed Nicol, and any final decisions are ultimately made in public.
Ken Rasmussen, director and professor at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, says the number of items on a private agenda should be as few as possible.
“That’s true for any democratic organization,” said Rasmussen. “City council, of course, should be as transparent and open and accountable as possible.”
But he said the tendency of all organizations is to try and “cloak themselves in secrecy.” The motivation behind that can vary, he added.
“There’s a sense that there may be some horse trading that’s going on between councillors and so on. ‘If you do this for me, I’ll do that for you’ — those kinds of things which they might not want to have in full public view,” he said.
To a certain extent, he believes administration likes things done in secret. For them, transparency and accountability in some cases means more inconvenience and delays in decision making, so any resistance may just be for the sake of efficiency, said Rasmussen.
But the ability to discuss some things in private can allow for a more fulsome discussion without worrying about words being taken out of context or being misunderstood by members of the media or the public, said Nicol.
He hasn’t given much thought yet to next steps in light of this motion, but is confident that the decision-making criteria already exists and is being applied in appropriate ways.
“Obviously the city solicitor and I need to sit down and see if we can’t come up with something that, perhaps in better lay terms, describes why we do these things,” said Nicol. “Most people, I find, once they understand the authority that we have to do it say, ‘OK well that makes sense now.’ So I want to make sure people understand that we don’t just do this arbitrarily. There are good reasons for it and legal reasons for it as well.”
He expects to have a report for the planning committee in early 2020.