City council’s modest move on transparency

Hamilton city council took a modest step on the road to more transparency this week. And so we feel compelled to comment.

Stoney Creek Coun. Brad Clark brought forward a motion calling for legal advice to council to be outlined separately from main staff reports, rather than blended in the same documents.

Under law governing municipalities, councils are permitted to go behind closed doors to discuss legal matters because they involve solicitor-client privilege.

Therefore any staff report that includes legal advice is automatically destined for closed doors.

You can’t fairly call this a big leap toward more transparency. But it’s something. So credit to Clark for proposing it and to council for supporting it.

But even this modest step comes with a loophole. If staff decide it’s too difficult to separate the legal advice from everything else, they can leave it mixed in the overall report, provided they give an explanation. That doesn’t sound promising in terms of a lot more transparency around public business.

An optimistic view is that this change might suggest councillors, overall, are serious about being more open in future.

A pessimistic view is that it is window dressing that won’t change the central reality — that council is all to happy to default toward secrecy as opposed to allow transparency to be the default position.

For now, we will choose to adopt the optimistic position and let events in the coming weeks and months prove us right or wrong. Citizens, still stinging from Sewergate, will be waiting and watching.