I don’t think I’ve seen Renfrew Town Council at its best. I don’t know if it has one.
So far as I’ve been able to determine from a first-hand point of view, there is no best to be had, unless they really crank it up behind closed doors, where they kick everyone out of the room so that they can talk about the real stuff, the stuff that people want answers to. I can only assume they’re talking about important things in there, but how would I know? As I said, I, and anyone else present, have been shown the door. Only the so-called primary actors remain, the inner circle, the sanctum, the privileged few. The ones who matter.
The foxes slamming the door of the henhouse once inside.
After close to three hours of the eyeball-bleeding, public-facing facade of “openness and transparency,” this council will often go into closed session. Top secret, hush-hush and all that.
I don’t know how many times Town Council has retreated into closed, or in-camera, sessions over the previous months or years. But in my brief period of sustained interest in this group and their affairs, I’ve seen it invoked regularly. As in a lot. In fact, the issue that got me so interested in the first place, the closing of a Community Network Centre, was handled in-camera, where it was decided to go ahead with that closing because it was determined that there wasn’t enough community support for it to remain. How they may have determined that, and who determined that, remains top-secret. The rest of us aren’t mature enough to handle that kind of information. Or, maybe it’s just a really cute and clever way to dispense with the need to openly discuss and deliberate a topic they may find to be awkward. And often, things are awkward to discuss because they might make people look bad, maybe even some people in that closed room. So their solution seems to involve making everyone in the room look bad. It’s the kind of small-beer logic that plague’s this small town’s municipal government. In a way, it’s a lot like consensus-building, which sounds awesome but in reality is just an exercise in group ass-covering.
So, when the going gets a little tough, or a little awkward, they sound the retreat and scurry back through the sally-port to the safety of the castle walls.
Now please don’t get me wrong here. There is a remedy. It’s not like the authors of openness and transparency in municipal government have left us without levers to pull. There are ways in which a concerned citizen or group of concerned citizens can seek redress, to pull the curtains back if you will, just to see what the hell they’re doing back there.
You can “appeal” such decisions and their reasons for going to a closed meeting. If you don’t like the idea that council has gone in-camera, or if you feel that the justification “exemption” — the list of exemptions is below — is a valid application of the Municipal Act, you can contact “THE INVESTIGATOR.”
My goodness, there’s an investigator. That sounds ominous enough, almost like the title of a really good Netflix show. I could just imagine the boot-shaking going on with a small-town council and their administrative masters at the mere prospect of The Investigator nosing around in their business. Shaking so much they’d think they were dancing.
Unless The Investigator belonged to them.
The plot twists in this thing are crazy, and they just keep coming.
That investigator? He’s appointed and compensated, or paid, by Town Council itself. In fact, the presence of a town-appointed investigator is the sole reason why such complaints don’t get elevated to the provincial Ombudsman. Isn’t that just a pretty ribbon wrapped around a little ball of cute?
I was at a meeting where Council was discussing the extension of the current arrangement with their current investigator, the law firm Cunningham Swan Carty Little & Bonham LLP, who is officially designated as Renfrew’s integrity commissioner, appointed by Renfrew itself. The contract is coming due and the Clerk recommends re-upping with the firm, backed by the CAO (Acting) and given the sign-off by the Treasurer who speaks that nebulous language I guess only Treasurers speak. None of my online translators had a setting for TREASURER – ENGLISH, but I think she’s saying the investigator is compensated on an hourly basis with travel expenses.
If there were to be a decision made to switch to a different investigator, the document — see below — assures us that an RFP process will be followed, or Request For Proposal. Which makes it a competitive process. Which means that it’s subject to human frailty and human folly.
All meetings of a council, a local board, or of a committee of either one of those, must be open to the public unless the subject matter fits within one of the 14 exceptions to the rule identified in s. 239 of the Municipal Act, 2001. The exceptions should be interpreted narrowly. That means they should be interpreted in such a way as to cause the most minimal, or the least amount of infringement upon the concept of open and transparent. In other words, if there’s any doubt whatsoever, you should have an open meeting.
Twelve of the exceptions are discretionary in nature, meaning that it’s not mandatory or necessary to close meetings that deal with these subjects. Closing a meeting using one of these exceptions is a matter of choice, not mandatory necessity. Again, if there’s any doubt, keep it open.
The question has to be, who makes the call as to whether a meeting is going to be open or closed, outside of the two listed mandatory exceptions? Is it the Clerk? The Mayor? The CAO-Acting?
Another question would be an obvious one. How the hell is anyone supposed to know if a closed meeting is legitimate if we don’t know the reason for the closure in the first place, other than the invocation of one of the discretionary exceptions?
A third question. How would one invoke the complaint process to unleash The Investigator? You know, the fellow hired by the town walking around with that giant conflict of interest hanging over his head?
Sorry, I should know this, my bad. It’s all available through that spiffy town website, the one that looks good but offers little in the way of coherent information. It’s almost like it was designed to frustrate users to the point of giving up, which would be kind of consistent when you think about it.
How many challenges to closed meetings do they receive? Or is that another top-secret, here’s the middle-finger and a smile, and go file a Freedom of Information request you peasant, kind of thing?
These people can seemingly motor along with absolute impunity, invoking exceptions here, there, and everywhere, and if nobody’s challenging those exceptions, they can pretty much run roughshod over openness and transparency. And if someone does object, and can successfully navigate themselves to the Investigator, well the investigator is a paid and appointed agent of the town.
My goodness, the brazenness of it all. The absolute brazenness.
I’m sure the Clerk would cry foul and point to the Municipal Act, or more precisely the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act as justification for the process involving the investigator.
Okay, saw that one coming.
Legislation is a human creation. It can be changed or modified on the whim of any government for any reason. It was created and written by people. It can be changed by people. And like the people who brought it forward, it can be flawed. So when a piece of legislation calling itself the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act actually creates a scenario where a conflict of interest is created and prescribed? That’s just an example of really bad legislation.
So that argument is akin to holding yourself up on a broken crutch.
Honestly, if there’s this much stuff going on that necessitates the closing of so many meetings to the public, might that be an indicator that something’s seriously unwell in our civic administration? Why would a town this size have such a need for that level of secrecy? I mean how much trouble can we really get into? And how is it being caused? And where does the accountability fall?
So many questions. Absolutely zero answers.
To be clear. I have absolutely no reason to criticize the work of the current investigator nor would I want to suggest any shortcomings, perceived or otherwise, in his work. It is the legislative system under which he operates, and not the individual or firm, that I criticize. The work of the investigator is an important part of the openness and transparency culture. It would just be a lot cleaner if that work was under the auspices of and compensated by someone other than the party being investigated.
The key observation here is the number of times this council invokes those discretionary exemptions to slam the door on that same culture. And how, if not challenged, those actions, and those exemptions, can be potentially abused.
As always, these are just observations, simply gleaned by sitting in chambers watching these folks, at least for the times they remain open to the public.
Before me and the camera guy get kicked out.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 