The final meeting of the 2014 to 2018 term of city council ended with applause for retiring councillors Andy Van Hellemond and Karl Wettstein, but it began with a certain amount of enmity as council discussed the findings of another investigation into closed meetings.
The fourth of the recently closed term, as Mayor Cam Guthrie reminded everyone.
The investigation had to do with a closed meeting of the Clair-Maltby Secondary Plan Technical Advisory Group (TAG) and Community Working Group (CWG), who are helping to guide consultations on a development plan for that big undeveloped area at the southern most end of the city.
The investigator for Amberley Gavel Ltd., Nigel Bellchamber. found that there was no violation of the procedural bylaw because there was no direct relationship between either group and council. No councillor serves on either TAG or CWG, they do not report to council, and it was not council that first called them together.
So the letter of the law wasn’t broken, but given the sensitivity of this entire development project is simply following the rules of what can and cannot be considered a closed meeting transparent enough?
It can’t.
Even though the mayor may have had a point that there are people in Guelph looking for any opening to criticize the work being done on Clair-Maltby, the way to assuage the fears that not everyone is being heard is to not wave the procedural bylaw in their face and say “See! See!”
Delegates remarked that key information about the groups in question, particularly minutes from the meetings, were unavailable to the public. Some members of council took exception and pointed out that you can find the meeting minutes on the city’s website.
At this point, I have to ask: Have you ever had to look for something on the City of Guelph website? And by that I mean, one specific report among the vast reams of information and data available.
I’m fond of a little-known crime dramedy called The Zero Effect, which is about an eccentric private eye played by Bill Pullman. In it, Pullman as detective Daryl Zero narrates his advice on looking for things:
“When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you're only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them.”
Well try looking for one thing on the City of Guelph website and see how it goes.
Now this is no particular person, or group of people’s, fault. Curation of all the data available to us from all the sites of the Internet is one of the biggest challenges of the digital age. Google helps, but it only helps if you know specifically what you’re looking for and have some kind of idea where you can find it.
I guess the idea here is that transparency is about more than reading the minutes, it’s about knowing where you can get the minutes without having to slog through various unrelated pages on the city’s website.
As for the meetings, the words of integrity commissioner Robert Swayze still resonate from the last time he was asked to look into a closed meeting of council.
He said that council should “always strive to err on the side of openness and transparency when determining whether to exercise its discretion to consider a matter in closed session.”
Despite the previous, ahem, controversies that Guelph Politico’s been involved in concerning disclosures from closed meetings, those meetings have actually been fairly tight. Like a drum. That speaks well to the interpersonal relationship of council, but there are members of the public that feel like they’re being left out of a part of the process.
And that’s not to say there aren’t legitimate reasons for closed meetings of council, but in an era where there’s so much doubt about the honesty and integrity of institutions, the words “closed meeting” is an invitation to distrust and concern that there’s something we’re not being told whether that’s unfounded or not.
As the next council readies itself for its first sitting on December 3, I hope there’s a robust discussion about closed meetings. Not about whether or not they should be a thing, but rather if there’s a way to expand transparency beyond the mayor starting the open session by saying what was talked about in the closed meeting, and that council made a decision or offered direction.
And on the controversial issues that council will be tackling, let’s put all information front and centre. Clair-Maltby, Baker Street Redevelopment, online voting, redistricting, and stuff we may not yet be aware of yet, will all have their critics over the next four years, and they’ll be looking for any appearance of a council not putting on its most transparent face.
Sadly, it’s not enough for us to take our government’s word for it.
