[0:01] thanks just for the this session is going to be on the city's website so it

[0:05] was useful to have this actually recorded so those people who couldn't be

[0:08] in attendance tonight would still have an opportunity of seeing what was going

[0:12] on so what a city can and can't do this is

[0:14] part one of a four-part series uh before we get going into earnest i know that

[0:19] counselor vasilakos is here and she was just going to provide a little bit of

[0:22] context to the sessions and to this one in particular tonight potentially

[0:27] counselor good evening everyone i'm just on the

[0:31] behalf of uh mayor mathison and all of city council i just want to welcome

[0:35] everyone to to these sessions and um

[0:39] and hope that they are actually useful and informative and engaging

[0:45] and i i think sort of some context for me would be when i first ran for council

[0:50] i ran for what i thought council did and i had

[0:53] some of it right and i had some of it wrong but what i really

[0:58] didn't understand is how much we couldn't do or couldn't control or

[1:01] wasn't within our purview and and the realization that the public also didn't

[1:07] have a really strong sense of that and so i i think i think this is a really

[1:11] great opportunity to have a review of that and and and understand what we do

[1:16] and i i just one little anecdote of my time on council it says who's driving

[1:21] the greater is ian's book and

[1:24] um i think it's really interesting because sometimes i'll get a phone call

[1:26] from someone in the public then they think that i am in the office every day

[1:30] running the public works department because i'm chair of infrastructure

[1:33] transportation and safety and little do they know that i'm allowed in the public

[1:37] works yard building once a year at christmas when they're having pizza

[1:42] and there's caution tape up and the counselors are not allowed anywhere near

[1:46] the graders and so uh you know sort of sort of this sort of conversation around

[1:52] who's driving the greater is i think a a really good one because not only is

[1:57] who's driving it who's paying for it who decide what kind of grader we want and

[2:01] what kind of work is the greater going to do for you are all the kinds of

[2:05] things that i hope that this session brings and um so thank you to ian and

[2:09] thank you to everyone who came tonight and i hope you have a really great

[2:13] session in the next sessions as well thanks counselor well i will get to the

[2:18] greater bit kind of a little bit in earnest my style is trying to is

[2:23] interactive so certainly we'll talk a little bit about

[2:26] this this of course as the counselor um mentioned is part one of a four-part

[2:32] series and kudos to the city of stratford for doing this the i haven't

[2:36] have run across an occurrence before of a city

[2:40] of a city that is willing to do this kind of information

[2:45] or education globally for the public sometimes this

[2:49] runs it concurrently to things like elections

[2:51] but sometimes it's just it's just almost uh run there's an

[2:57] assumption if you like that people know what cities do or what cities can't do

[3:00] and while i say cities i think we're going to use the term we may use the

[3:03] term cities but it's more general in terms of different types of local

[3:07] governments so when mayor mathis and i started

[3:10] having a conversation about this probably three four or five months ago

[3:15] and lauren mckinnon was part of that conversation as well through wise

[3:18] communities the idea came about

[3:21] frost for somebody who was independent from the city who has done some work in

[3:26] a lot of work in this sphere in canada to just provide a little bit of an

[3:30] overview respond to some questions if there are some

[3:33] and see where that gets us in terms of public education associated with local

[3:37] government in the canadian context in ontario specifically

[3:40] so we broke it down into four sessions the first one today is essentially just

[3:44] the role of local government in the lives of the people who live in the

[3:47] community the next one in a couple of weeks is

[3:50] role clarity so we'll speak specifically at that time to the role of council the

[3:56] role of individual members of council the role of the mayor administration and

[4:00] then management and service delivery as well

[4:02] kind of who's responsible for what so why it is that councillor vasilakos

[4:06] isn't allowed to drive the greater even if she really wants to

[4:09] the third session will be on local engagement uh communication and

[4:13] engagement we will touch on that a little bit today as well but how the

[4:17] municipality interacts with the people who live there is very important so we

[4:22] will spend a couple hours or one of our sessions talking about that

[4:26] and then finally the last session about a month and a half or two months from

[4:29] now a month and a half i guess we'll be dealing with public finance

[4:34] specifically the sources of revenue that are available to a municipality uh the

[4:38] kohl's notes version is there aren't very many if you compare it to other

[4:42] orders of government or even the united states uh local government united states

[4:46] the other end is where does how does money get spent in terms of budgeting

[4:51] we'll speak to that a little bit later on today again just to give you a bit of

[4:54] an overview so the there's a note here about

[4:58] questions and comments because this is on zoom first of all it's

[5:02] i'm not sure if it's sub-optimal it's the best plan b we've got other than

[5:06] gathering around the table and having a great conversation so please do put your

[5:11] hand up um i'm on a relatively small screen here so

[5:14] i may not see a whole lot if you just want to interrupt it somewhere dropping

[5:18] is not a great idea if you would like to interject at some point and just for

[5:21] make a comment or ask a question please by all means do that put your comments

[5:26] and questions in the chat it pops up here on my screen and maybe as we break

[5:29] from section to section we'll i'll stop at that

[5:33] i will also suggest that the slides here are available on the city's website so

[5:39] now or later if you haven't already got them you're welcome to have a copy of

[5:43] them some people often ask for that so they'll be available there or they are

[5:47] available there

[5:52] so with that in mind so because we are in the online environment we recognize

[5:56] it's not ideal so i often use the term of asking each other for a little bit of

[6:00] extra grace and patience as we work through all of this together

[6:05] the nice thing about local government perhaps of their orders of government

[6:08] and the way it interacts with their citizens is that we don't all think

[6:11] alike so there are different ideas and

[6:14] different opinions and that space in many ways is where value lies if

[6:20] we're looking to change things from the way they are to some ideal future state

[6:24] it's only by challenging the status quo looking for innovation and accepting

[6:28] risk that that actually happens and the same thing goes for tonight too so if

[6:31] there are a controversial ideas or contested ideas

[6:35] please bring them out however if i do put a caveat to that if

[6:40] there are inappropriate comments that come out i'll ask that person to refrain

[6:45] and if they don't refrain we i have the ability to remove people from the

[6:49] session so just note that up front and finally you all know i think that the

[6:53] session is being recorded and it'll be available on the city's website if you

[6:57] want to have a look at it a little bit later so this is your time i am here to

[7:01] provide a little bit of context some overview some information and perhaps

[7:06] answer some of your questions as well i will say though that while i know a

[7:10] little bit about stratford and its recent history and its long history as

[7:14] well for that matter i'm not an expert on that i'm an expert if you like on

[7:18] local government in canada i'd like this to be more of a seminar

[7:22] than a lecture so i'd like to know your thoughts as well i learn from these in

[7:27] the same way that other people do as well we use a term quite often called

[7:31] good governance or great governance and my take on that is if you're looking for

[7:35] the ideal future state for a local government in canada or how a council

[7:40] works or how a council interacts with the people who live in a place there are

[7:44] lots of ways to do that there's some ways to do it really badly but there are

[7:47] also quite a lot of ways to do it really well and so it's those roots up the

[7:50] mountain that we're looking at we know my as a bit of a pollyanna i

[7:55] think the people bring their best to local government and probably to other

[7:59] orders of government too you all have chosen to live in stratfor you've chosen

[8:03] to move there remain there there's got to be a reason for that you likely

[8:07] believe that that's the best place to live

[8:09] and you're right and you want each other to be successful in order for council to

[8:13] be successful the citizens the organizations the businesses who live in

[8:17] stratfor need to be successful too and the opposite is also true for them to be

[8:22] successful the council needs to be successful as well

[8:25] and the final comment kind of reiterates something i made a little while ago

[8:28] about let's have some interesting conversation this evening so if you want

[8:31] to disagree with opinions and interpretations please do

[8:35] a bit about me uh my as i mentioned my name's ian mccormick my contact

[8:39] information is at the bottom of every page and i've done that specifically and

[8:43] and generally so that if you have questions that come after the session

[8:47] you have every opportunity to write down my email address look up my website and

[8:51] phone number and if you want to give me a call tomorrow or next week have a

[8:54] question about something please do i really this is my area of passion and i

[8:59] love talking about it and speaking to people who are engaged around the

[9:03] country about it so please reach out after the fact if you like as well my

[9:07] company strategic steps has offices in alberta and saskatchewan we say we

[9:11] operate in that space between elected and appointed and so that's when we

[9:15] that's how we talk about governance so it's the interaction between the two as

[9:19] they try as they make their communities the best that they can be

[9:22] in terms of the specific things that we often do it oftentimes depends on

[9:26] election cycles so if we were to look at just a

[9:30] four-year election cycle we often do things like candidate workshops to as

[9:35] counselor vasilakko said help people understand what the role of counselor is

[9:39] before they hand in all their nomination forms and sign ups for sign up for the

[9:43] job potentially for the next four years we do a lot of orientations following

[9:48] the election so we did a bunch in saskatchewan last year because that was

[9:52] their election time we'll do a bunch in alberta this year because it's their

[9:55] election time so it's just cyclical we do a lot of strategic planning for

[9:58] municipalities we're off to prince george bc next week to work with

[10:03] them and prince albert saskatchewan i think the week after that so a lot of

[10:06] governance work there if we do we do reviews of organizations

[10:11] or municipalities that aren't working terribly well sometimes so a governance

[10:14] review or organizational review trying to get the animal pointed in the right

[10:18] direction and if sometimes if there are code of conduct reviews to be done

[10:22] across the country there are different ways of dealing with council code of

[10:26] conduct complaints some like you have specific people named to do that in

[10:32] other parts of the country they don't even require code of conduct

[10:35] legislation or bylaws so it kind of runs the full gamut

[10:38] i do quite a lot of speaking and writing for the saskatchewan urban

[10:41] municipalities association i write a column in all of their

[10:45] called governance voice i've done some writing for municipal world which is

[10:49] canada's national magazine the councillor referenced my book who's

[10:53] driving the greater which was published last fall and it speaks to the

[10:56] difference between governance and management or governance and

[10:59] administration it's that's actually the link that uh i

[11:03] got involved with stratford from with lorena and with the mayor having read it

[11:07] and then reaching out to me i also have another book coming out shortly on the

[11:10] aptitudes of the best mayors i've interviewed about a dozen mayors from

[11:14] across the country and actually one in australia as well looking at the

[11:18] principles of what makes a good mayor we're calling it the dna of great

[11:22] leaders at the moment so we're looking at mayors and probably a plot well it

[11:25] will apply to other leaders as well in terms of what i've seen is kind of the

[11:29] three ways that leadership works you need to come into the position with

[11:33] personal aptitudes that make it appropriate to you some people are good

[11:37] at this type of a role and for some people it's the last thing they would

[11:40] ever want to do so they have those personal attitudes coming in

[11:44] they're often community leaders from way back when they were on the library board

[11:48] or a recreation board or part of a church group or a cancer

[11:52] charity and have led the community for a long time so that's when that's where

[11:56] they come in and finally there are some technical pieces to this too to being a

[11:59] great leader and those are the skills that you can

[12:02] learn so you have those personal aptitudes you

[12:06] grow the community leadership and you can develop governance skills so that's

[12:09] what's coming up so we have nearly 40 people in here at

[12:13] the moment and i wondered about posing a few questions right off the bat just

[12:17] looking at this if there would be two or three people on each one of these who

[12:21] might be offer what you think the best thing that the city does or provides for

[12:25] you and your family what would you change potentially about how stratford

[12:28] works and i've given you my two cents worth

[12:31] about what i think greater good governance is and what does that mean to

[12:35] you and just a more general question over

[12:37] the course of the four series four recessions if you attend them all do you

[12:42] have some hopes that come out of that so if i can't just start at the top and

[12:46] i can't see very many of you on my screen is there anybody who would like

[12:50] to offer why what it is that makes stratfor so great

[13:00] somebody must think it's pretty good

[13:09] well this could be a shot please do lorena

[13:14] i mean for me i love the scale of the the city and the diversity of it i'd

[13:19] love the diversity of the people and the the businesses the enterprises

[13:24] that are here uh the physical the physicality of the city is very very

[13:29] beautiful and that goes back to the scale that you

[13:32] can really walk a lot of the city and it's very uh accessible that way so

[13:39] for me um i grew up in a small community in manitoba and this is this city

[13:44] actually reminds me of a lot of that that it's a it's an intimate but it's a

[13:47] diverse city thanks there's uh somebody in the chat

[13:52] who said that um the best service bar known as the stratford public library

[13:56] the only service without extra user fees so i i am a former library board chair

[14:02] and library trustee for 12 years myself so i was in a public library so i would

[14:06] i would certainly echo ken's comments there anybody else want to jump in here

[14:10] tori you're unmuted

[14:14] that's on purpose

[14:24] um i'm j marie and um i think that there's

[14:29] lots of um diversity and different interests and we

[14:34] have an awful lot of um groups

[14:37] no matter what your interest is there's going to be other people that have the

[14:40] same and um

[14:42] so we have lots of of groups and they do lots of things in the city

[14:47] thank you anybody else

[14:50] yeah this is david niece uh i

[14:54] i think most people would agree that the quality of life here

[14:59] is very very high because

[15:03] we have a small compact city surrounded by a very

[15:09] intensive and successful agricultural community

[15:15] and the city is very diverse in terms of its economic makeup

[15:19] and it offers a tremendous

[15:24] appeal to people who come from other larger communities where the urban

[15:28] density is much higher and uh

[15:32] where they feel that their uh their needs are may be met but they're

[15:38] mad here in stratford in a way that is a lot more accommodating

[15:43] and it's a very attractive place for people to settle particularly in their

[15:48] retirement period

[15:52] thank you well i am uh i'm an apprentice retiree myself i'm working hard towards

[15:57] getting there is the is there anything anybody else

[16:01] wants to add there i'll just move on to the next question

[16:04] jamie

[16:08] yes can you hear me i can hear you go ahead

[16:11] okay yes i think stratford is uh is a relatively very safe community for for

[16:17] people to live um it does have that industry arts

[16:24] and uh culture and the good mix of agriculture and with

[16:29] that and i think that gives it a very healthy

[16:31] diverse economy but also a very diverse culture and uh it does

[16:37] maintain somewhat of a small town feel i like to i like to bike it's very easy

[16:42] to access most corners of the city through uh through maine's other than a

[16:47] car right so it's pedestrian it's relatively pedestrian bike friendly and

[16:52] it just it has a sense of scale that feels very human as opposed to some

[16:58] of the larger cities when i go there just the scale of it it seems to lose a

[17:02] little bit

[17:07] okay thanks very much

[17:10] uh let's move on are there things that you would change just a couple minutes

[17:13] on this i've got a note here just from ken again saying he would he would like

[17:18] fewer but full-time city councillors representation by the five hamlets

[17:22] rather than at large so word or division based

[17:25] and then ranked ballots it says quality of life is high for maybe half the city

[17:30] and some other pieces there about housing and wages

[17:33] torrey says combination we have in stratford from ranging from our festival

[17:37] to our numerous sporting opportunities gives us many amenities of a large city

[17:41] while living in the comforts of a small city makes it a place that offers the

[17:45] best of all worlds ken notes there's a high percentage of

[17:49] seniors many transferred their wealth here so they can do well mark says it's

[17:54] family friendly you guys should just write the vision

[17:56] statement for the city or the motto for the city

[18:00] what would you change if anything about the city

[18:06] anybody

[18:13] you can come back to that if you like so the last i'm going to skip over the good

[18:16] covenants just so we can keep going on this but what do you want to get from

[18:19] this series so when the city decided to organize where council decided to

[18:23] organize this series they were interested in providing

[18:27] information to the public but i suspect that there are people here in the public

[18:31] who would like to get something specific out of it

[18:34] so ken i think it said earlier too it's nice to have this sort of thing happen

[18:38] not during an election where was that it's a nice lead into budget discussions

[18:42] 2022. always been disappointed in how few

[18:46] citizens got involved in pre-budget and how so many more complain after the fact

[18:51] so with that in mind oops where are we now

[18:54] yeah what do you want to get from the series

[18:57] what can i uh help provide you provide you other than what i've already kind of

[19:00] told you about in outline anything specific

[19:09] well if nobody has anything that's an expectation i can meet

[19:14] i'm going to move on and we'll see where we end up if you have other things you

[19:18] want to say please do so the first piece we're going to talk

[19:21] about is kind of council's oversight role some of you have already referenced

[19:25] council and we're going to speak to them of course because they are the kind of

[19:29] the titular head of the organization if you like just a couple of notes here

[19:33] about what people want to see and those couple things show up in chat

[19:36] mandatory voting it's it is very rare for the mayor city council who has to

[19:41] have the support of constituencies constituents sorry

[19:44] often 10 to 20 support so how legitimate are the decisions that they make not

[19:48] sure if that's rhetorical or not somebody said i would like to city to

[19:52] take a proactive approach to interacting with citizens

[19:55] so that's tori nike we're starting that right now

[19:58] bill said i'd like to change i like i would change the relationship between

[20:02] city hall and the community the engagement

[20:05] moving from the occasional problem or issue prompted consultation to a steady

[20:09] regular engagement is an ongoing conversation

[20:13] somebody else said about the meetings how to most efficiently and effectively

[20:16] effect change that's very alliterative ken suggested i forgot to mention term

[20:22] limits for elected positions too many there for the past and can't see the

[20:26] future i'm gonna leave it at that and move on and if there are more we'll look

[20:30] at that at the next great next break in next tight type of break in the in our

[20:34] session here i will say too that term limits come up

[20:38] a lot and right across the country so it's not

[20:40] just you it's one of those things however we will

[20:44] deal with when we talk about which order of government actually has authority to

[20:48] do what and in actual fact local government has no authority to set term

[20:52] limits so a counselor could conceivably come into office on a platform that i'm

[20:55] going to stay here for two two terms or whatever and we're going to change it

[20:59] bylaw and mandate term limits but they can't do it

[21:03] it would contradict the canadian constitution and

[21:07] somebody would likely challenge it we'll get to that a little bit later

[21:11] so if we think about kind of why council is here

[21:15] if there was nobody who lived in the geographical area that is now stratfor

[21:18] there will be no need for an oversight body which is council and there'll be no

[21:22] need for a city manager in a rec department and occult and cultural

[21:25] groups because nobody be here but they are and you've all said why you like

[21:29] stratford and i suspect there are other reasons that other people would provide

[21:33] as well so if we think about that council is not

[21:36] looking after the day-to-day of the city because they've hired people to do that

[21:40] to pick up the garbage and put on community service programs and those

[21:44] sorts of things so council is there to steer the ship in the long term they're

[21:48] looking kind of maybe a generation into the

[21:51] future about what does stratford look like

[21:54] sometimes i say what does stratfor look like when it's grown up or when it's

[21:56] completely successful or when you can imagine far enough down the road that

[22:00] you're probably still living here but members of council have probably

[22:04] completely changed so that's the ideal future state and that's what they're

[22:07] working towards so when they look that far out they can look at this four-year

[22:11] term that they're there or the eight years or twelve years that they happen

[22:14] to serve or whatever it might be and say what am i going to do over this

[22:18] term to help us get from here to there so from that they set a vision for the

[22:22] community and a mission for the community and a set of values for the

[22:25] community and that sort of thing and they will work on designing that plan

[22:30] that gets us from here to a generation from now with fighting off the next four

[22:33] years and then we'll have a look at who

[22:36] benefits from that are we looking at collective benefit for everybody who

[22:40] lives in stratfor are we looking for the benefit of people in the small

[22:43] geographical area of stratford because there's a necessity there for example

[22:48] maybe all the water mains are made of wood in part of

[22:52] town and i have run across that so just part of town needs a lot of money spent

[22:56] in it so that takes away from things that could be elsewhere because there's

[22:59] still only a hundred percent of dollars to be spent uh municipal governments

[23:04] don't borrow and can't don't sorry don't borrow as much as other orders of

[23:07] government and has significant restrictions on their budgeting in terms

[23:10] of balanced budgets as well so different affordability

[23:15] we look at who's going to benefit so i just mentioned that the precedence of

[23:18] the individual or the collective i think we're seeing that too with canada's

[23:22] federal election at the moment about the parties who are running

[23:25] some of the parties further to the right of the conservatives for example are

[23:29] pushing uh individual freedom or responsibility that kind of thing but

[23:34] people live together in community and there's a cost to that so people if they

[23:37] wanted to have absolute freedom i suppose they could go live

[23:40] live in the bush someplace but we don't we live in community so we're looking at

[23:45] collective benefit and finally here in order for this to

[23:48] work and not not to go off madly off in all directions

[23:52] we i promote what i call cascading alignment

[23:56] so if you have an idea of what the city is successful

[23:59] the ultimate vision of success for the city is in a generation

[24:03] and we're working on it from now until then

[24:05] we can actually start thinking about what what adds value where are our

[24:09] priorities and so we can fund some things that are important to us

[24:12] recognizing that not everything is going to get funded

[24:15] not only that everything that gets added to a city is a political

[24:21] decision anything that gets changed is a political decision and everything that

[24:24] gets removed is a political decision an example of that we see and i would be

[24:28] surprised if you do too is the recent prominence of pickleball

[24:33] it's a small thing but a lot of people used to play tennis they don't play as

[24:36] much anymore and now there are more people who play pickleball so some

[24:40] municipalities have been converting tennis courts into pickleball courts as

[24:43] well as building some new ones but originally the decision about tennis

[24:47] was to build those courts and that was a political decision to met a client it

[24:51] met a need of citizens but now it's not so much necessary

[24:55] anymore so rather than building a bunch of new courts we're converting existing

[24:59] tennis into pickleball and that's a political decision too because there's

[25:03] still a group of people who like tennis anyway the point being there that there

[25:06] are scarce resources and you're trying to apply them the best way that you can

[25:11] when we i think i think about priorities as well so if you have 100 of resources

[25:16] to spend as a municipality and resources in this case can be people it can be

[25:20] time it can be money it can be political capital culture all those sorts of

[25:24] things and you're putting them to the best

[25:26] highest and best use in this case i look at priority as a

[25:31] matrix of timeliness and important so something that's neither timely nor

[25:35] important is really not a high priority something that is both timely and

[25:38] important is a high priority and these things will change over time they'll

[25:42] change over the course of a four-year term for example i suspect councillor

[25:46] vasilakos and her her colleagues never got elected expecting to have to deal

[25:50] with coving but all of a sudden they had to and then you end up moving into

[25:54] crisis management mode other things have happened to both other orders of

[25:58] government having downloading for example or

[26:01] federal government decisions that have an impact on local governments across

[26:04] the country that they have to deal with and so they have to start understanding

[26:09] or not start they have to understand as council the city but it can't be all

[26:13] things to all people what it is that makes stratford unique

[26:17] i guess just by default would mean that me here in melville saskatchewan isn't

[26:22] stratford because they choose a different slightly different boot up

[26:24] bill of great governance as with every other community in this country

[26:29] and because you've got limited funding you put it to what's important some

[26:32] municipality a lot of municipalities are using something called priority based

[26:36] fund priority budgeting or pvb now

[26:40] and it talks about let's identify all the services and programs the city

[26:44] offers and let's orderly rank them on an annual basis or a quadrennial basis and

[26:49] we'll put money to the highest order things and those things which nobody

[26:53] uses anymore kind of fall off the bottom example of this working in a small town

[26:58] in in rural alberta they had still have horse pitching posts on main street and

[27:02] they were still getting funded but nobody remembers the last time anybody

[27:06] actually hitched a horse to main street so that examined life well lived is

[27:10] something that they're after when i think about why people run for

[27:15] office i i

[27:17] might this is explained in more detail in my book and it talks about a

[27:20] continuum of service i believe that people are elected to office or run for

[27:25] office i guess whether they get elected is up to the up to the citizens of

[27:28] voters they run either because they're

[27:31] interested in public service or they're interested in self-service they either

[27:35] want to tell people what to do or they want to go out and listen to what people

[27:38] want and help them help them achieve that and i think that's part of those

[27:42] personal attributes that i mentioned a little while ago as well so i don't

[27:46] think there's anybody at complete ends of the spectrum there's no complete

[27:50] altruist who is there just for the public good and i don't think there are

[27:53] terribly many machiavellians at the other end who are just in there for

[27:57] their own their own benefit in the long term

[28:00] and when i think about the attributes that they bring to offices city council

[28:04] there's half a dozen of these attributes from motivation all the way down to

[28:07] results and

[28:10] through this continuum then the attributes have an impact i'm

[28:14] just going to meet

[28:24] okay so anyway there are these attributes here and if you want to have

[28:28] a look at the slides and have a longer greater discussion about them we

[28:31] absolutely can but if you look at people who are

[28:34] running for office or even people who are serving in office now whether it's

[28:37] in stratford or whether it's your local or national representatives or somewhere

[28:41] else as well where do you think the people you're

[28:44] dealing with actually sit on the scale and they're going to be somewhere

[28:47] between here and it's quite healthy for a council to have a mix of people you

[28:51] don't want the pure public service and you certainly don't want the pure

[28:53] self-service but you want a team that is kind of the highest

[28:57] has the highest level of attributes that you can get in these in these areas

[29:02] so that's the piece that i was just going to talk to you very briefly about

[29:05] council's oversight role if we get into what the city actually can't do a bunch

[29:09] of people put some stuff in the chat here i'm just going gonna have a quick

[29:11] look through it and see if there's anything

[29:13] we should have a look at

[29:19] from limits bringing so in some of the section market said

[29:22] bringing many different kinds of people to the table for healthy and respectful

[29:26] dialogue i think we just had a bit of a conversation about that we'll get into

[29:28] that a little bit more when we talk about engagement

[29:31] i would love to see an easy to use approach says tori to letting citizens

[29:35] know what's going on in our city and how they can get involved more engagement

[29:40] count ken says council is here frankly to simply approve what staff tells them

[29:44] to do they defer to staff in my opinion way too much

[29:48] in my experience about three foreign council listen to citizens and either

[29:51] bring up concerns at meetings or get answers to questions that leaves about

[29:55] seven who basically vote and shoot from the hip ken we'll get into that a little

[29:58] bit later too because sometimes one of the principles i find is where you stand

[30:02] depends on where you sit and things change between when you're

[30:06] elected and sorry between when you're running for office and when you're

[30:09] elected so i certainly don't dispute your comment in some cases but i think

[30:13] there are some there's some rationale to it too

[30:16] uh it uh i think it's alex says in ontario the municipal election act does

[30:20] allow a musical clerk to make a change if that change ie term limits is

[30:24] desirable or necessary i'll have to look into that

[30:28] someone said ken said representatives voted in should be there to represent

[30:32] the cumulative majority values of their constituents the long-term view improved

[30:36] quality of life so with this ken somewhere a little bit later i'd like to

[30:40] comment on this so what about the concept of short-term pain for long-term

[30:44] gain if you have a city council who realizes

[30:48] that in order for something good to happen five years from now something bad

[30:52] i mean that's kind of parochial has to happen now

[30:55] if we're always voting in the direct accumulative majority values you

[31:00] end up with a populist government and populists seem to be really good at

[31:04] short term and not very good at long term and certainly respond to that a

[31:07] little bit later someone suggested that city could hold

[31:11] referendums and change the election process which requires agreement at the

[31:14] provincial level fair enough smart clear referendums reasons why

[31:18] people run an election to be viewed as popular to hold higher status the

[31:23] part-time easy money to try and affect change advocate for a particular lobby

[31:27] group and to challenge themselves you might be right on some of those for

[31:31] sure that so what you have described in many ways i think of those people who

[31:35] are the self-service people rather than the community service or public service

[31:38] people and certainly would be interested in hearing from you a little bit more of

[31:41] that so those are some comments that i've just seen in the chat they're just

[31:45] on this council oversight piece and are about to move on into city role does

[31:49] anybody who's who's verbally on here want to have a

[31:52] comment or ask a question about the stuff that they've seen so far

[32:00] as a consultant i'm taught to give five seconds before i move on so

[32:04] please if anybody does have something they want to add in i'm i'm more than

[32:07] happy to respond as well so what the city can and can't do is the

[32:11] piece we're going to deal with right now you likely know this but we're going to

[32:15] start with a bit of the kohl's notes version

[32:17] about the four orders of government in canada

[32:20] federal government of course we're on the middle of an election they're

[32:23] looking after things which are pan canadian so coast to coast to coast

[32:27] areas of interest or in some cases they focus in a particular area if they see a

[32:31] particular area needs help whether it's crisis management

[32:35] disaster services that sort of thing whether it needs specific economic

[32:39] uplift or assistance or whether things have to change in a particular area so

[32:44] examples of things the feds do of course i've mentioned some of these pan

[32:47] canadian things like immigration like put the postal service

[32:51] national defense and i put health in here even though i think all four orders

[32:57] of government have a peace in health but national health policy the canada health

[33:02] act for example is under the authority of the feds

[33:05] if we look at the provinces and territories which are established via

[33:08] the constitution and then potentially changes the constitution a little bit

[33:13] these are obviously the geographically constrained areas so this part of the

[33:16] country now most of our i think anyway most of our state states most of our

[33:21] provinces is the same size as some a lot of the

[33:24] smaller uh states in the in the world so there's geographically anyway even if we

[33:29] don't have the population and areas that they typically look at

[33:33] there's a full list if you look at the list of ministries on the government of

[33:35] ontario or

[33:38] territory things like labor that labor labor policy they look at energy as do

[33:43] provinces in some ways the one that we're most interested in tonight is

[33:46] municipal affairs and and education is primarily a

[33:51] responsibility of the province or territory and finally we're going to

[33:55] look a lot more into the areas of local interest so local governments rural and

[34:00] urban local governments we're going to concentrate primarily on urban local

[34:03] governments and on stratford in particular

[34:06] and then the fourth order being indigenous government with the first

[34:10] nations many anyway all of which have an impact right across the country some of

[34:14] which are under under terror under sorry treaty a lot of a lot of geographical

[34:19] area which is not so we're seeing things like self-government and truth and

[34:23] reconciliation obviously now with things like residential schools

[34:27] over the last little while too the note to this is that all these

[34:30] orders of government have to work together if we're going to have a

[34:33] successful society so if we look at the nat about nashville

[34:38] here the national government had created the constitution in 1867

[34:42] with the constitution act was modified again in the 1980s when it was actually

[34:47] repatriated back to canada and under the constitution there's no mention of

[34:52] municipalities as specific order a specific order of government all the

[34:56] constitution says is that anything to do with local government belongs to the

[35:00] provinces and territories so the section 92 which is in here just talks about a

[35:05] list of things that the provinces can do or responsible for number eight on that

[35:09] list is municipal institutions and provinces and then territories so it's

[35:13] not even not even really recognized as an

[35:17] order of government for in

[35:20] in practicality what that means is every province and territory deals with local

[35:24] government in a slightly different way you have for example the municipal

[35:28] municipal act municipalities act other in other parts of country those

[35:33] things are called different things in saskatchewan for example they have the

[35:37] cities act in the northwest territories they have the hamlets act

[35:41] in alberta they have the municipal municipal government act

[35:46] they're all different across the country so the understanding of local government

[35:51] in one part of the country is not the same elsewhere as an example of that

[35:54] counties have different terminology in ontario than they would in alberta

[35:59] bc has something called a rural sorry a regional municipality

[36:03] manitoba saskatchewan has something called a rural municipality so there are

[36:07] different bits and pieces that make up local government around the country

[36:11] even though some of the principles end up fairly similar the actual way it's

[36:15] carried out is different so comparing a town or a city in ontario to a town or

[36:20] city somewhere else in the country is well it's not comparing apples and

[36:23] oranges it's kind of like comparing golden delicious apples to red delicious

[36:27] apples as an example of

[36:31] cities i have different numbers of people which

[36:35] are required in alberta to be a city you need 10 000 people minimum i'm in

[36:39] saskatchewan in the moment at the moment in the city of melville which has 4 500

[36:43] people so their rules are different too and within that of course there are

[36:47] other uh specific attributes that are provided to local government in some

[36:52] states or some provinces and territories that aren't the same right across the

[36:56] country so the my point here is if you were dealing with something like a

[36:59] federation of canadian municipalities it's not the same from coast to coast to

[37:03] coast but they're all governed by the constitution which essentially just says

[37:07] here provinces and territories you set up the rules for municipalities

[37:10] so here if we look at the relevant legislation you've got the constitution

[37:14] which is the same right across the coast in coast to coast to coast we've got the

[37:19] municipal act in ontario and all municipal acts will do the first thing

[37:23] here it will establish municipalities and within the idea of establishing

[37:28] municipalities it creates municipalities it could dissolve municipalities

[37:34] it deals with inter-municipal collaboration if you like in terms of

[37:38] annex or maybe it's not not collaboration but annexation or

[37:42] amalgamation potentially would be in those acts as well so municipal

[37:46] structures there was a case in not case there was

[37:49] in manitoba a few years ago five or six

[37:52] years ago where the loca the provincial government in manitoba thought there

[37:56] were too many municipal governments really small unsustainable ones

[38:00] and they said hey everybody every municipality go find a dance partner or

[38:04] two until you can get your population up to a thousand people

[38:07] and that's going to be your new municipal size and if you don't find

[38:09] your dance partner we'll do it for you so they have almost arbitrarily or

[38:14] artificially made their municipalities more sustainable by making them bigger

[38:18] and therefore by making fewer of them i mean as mentioned in saskatchewan at

[38:23] the moment they have i think 350 municipalities in saskatchewan with a

[38:27] population just over a million people so you can see that some of them are

[38:30] really really tiny different places to places

[38:34] your municipal act also talks about what higher and lower order municipalities

[38:38] can do higher just in terms of the the rules

[38:42] that they that they operate by the services they

[38:45] offer those sorts of things and it talks about councils

[38:49] every municipal act across the country's councils but it tends to provide just a

[38:54] skeleton of that about a default number if you like a number of people on a

[38:59] council whether council can change that number by themselves or not requiring

[39:03] meeting rules and decision-making authority things like the ability to

[39:06] create bylaws and policies and other pieces too some municipa some provincial

[39:11] governments say you must have a chief administrative officer or cao others are

[39:16] silent on that so they're different from place to place

[39:19] in a lot of places if you take all the municipal acts so if you went to places

[39:23] like the northwest territories which actually has three municipal acts two or

[39:27] three i think the yellowknife act city stand villages and hamlets

[39:32] if you went to those places you would find that these acts are typically one

[39:36] of the two or three largest acts in the province or territory and that's because

[39:40] of much of what's in those acts is technical in nature it's about municipal

[39:44] assessment or asset management or land use planning

[39:48] those sorts of things which show up in the acts but could conceivably i guess

[39:51] be their own acts as well and there's a whole lot more to it as well certainly

[39:55] these acts both well all these pieces of legislation are on provincial

[39:59] legislative provisions the municipal uh information sorry

[40:03] freedom of information and protection of privacy act you have the longest name of

[40:06] a information and privacy act i think in the country speaks specifically to the

[40:12] by release of information so there's two pieces of that

[40:15] by default information is free any citizen has access to any piece of

[40:20] information that any order of government has however it's the cabinet to it a

[40:25] restriction on it is protection of privacy

[40:27] so there are lots of reasons or exemptions to disclosure that are

[40:31] legitimate reasons for that we're going to talk a little bit more about that

[40:34] about later when they look at those exemptions some of them are mandatory

[40:37] and some of them are discretionary now when

[40:40] if some if there's something um solicitor client privilege for example

[40:46] there is a real and legitimate reason to keep some things

[40:50] in within uh behind closed doors without prejudicing the outcome of something

[40:56] this is one of those cases where what happens on the outside of local

[40:59] government and what happens on the inside of local government is a

[41:02] difference between what's perception and what's reality with various shades of

[41:05] gray in there too but some municipalities too will then look if

[41:09] they look at discretionary discretionary exemptions to disclosure

[41:13] we'll choose by and large to disclose some municipalities will choose by and

[41:17] large not to disclose and the the relevant

[41:21] section of legislation has to be noted about why that particular something is

[41:25] particularly gone uh in camera or is an exception to

[41:28] disclosure or not so these are the pieces of legislation that we typically

[41:32] look at if we were to look specifically at

[41:35] you in ontario this is the the

[41:38] the purpose of the municipality and this is pretty common that very early in

[41:44] municipal acts usually kind of right after the section on definitions

[41:48] it speaks to why we actually have what the what's the purpose of having local

[41:52] government wherever it happens to be so in this case

[41:55] now the the highlighting is added by me just to draw some attention to this it

[41:59] talks about local government being responsible and accountable so it is

[42:03] government elected by the people it's government for the people and it's

[42:07] accountable to the people and that happens at least once every four years

[42:11] if there's a usually four years in some places it's still three four years uh in

[42:16] terms of an election or less less free or more frequently than that if it's a

[42:20] by-election some of you have spoken about referenda

[42:23] and plebiscites and those typically aren't binding but they do certainly

[42:28] talk about responsible and accountable government

[42:32] and the other note i've noted the piece i've noted here about

[42:36] respect for matters within their jurisdiction

[42:39] so within the boundaries of the city of stratfor the city of stratford has

[42:43] control within certain exemptions that are or other under other jurisdictions

[42:47] like provincial jurisdiction or federal jurisdiction but the city can do within

[42:52] reason what the city wants to do within that within that space

[42:55] when it comes to inter-municipal so what happens on the boundaries between

[43:00] stratford and any of its neighbors then there's point of negotiation that

[43:04] has to happen and some provinces have actually pushed for that to say there

[43:07] has to be some sort of formal inter-municipal agreement between you

[43:10] and your neighbor and your neighbor and your neighbor and some have said it's

[43:13] just on various topics so for example just on recreation do you does your

[43:18] neighboring municipality charge different fees for people from stratfor

[43:22] than they do for their own that is it reciprocal or things like mutual aid

[43:26] agreements for emergency services will you help us put a fire out if we promise

[43:29] to help you put a fire out even if it's across a

[43:32] municipal jurisdictional line so those are some of the the purposes that are

[43:36] there if you look at how council operates they

[43:40] really only have three tools that they can use

[43:43] i call them the levers of governance if you like

[43:46] you've probably already heard about these you've probably seen them and some

[43:49] of you probably even read a few council's strongest tool is bylaws

[43:54] in this case you probably know that a bylaw requires three separate vo at

[43:59] least three separate votes of counsel to create or to modify or to remove

[44:04] any of these tools sorry whether it gets to by law and policy

[44:08] any changes made to a by-law or policy have to be made using the same tool so

[44:13] you can't use a policy to modify a by-law you can't you can't use a

[44:17] bilateral modifier policy for example but anyway council if it's something

[44:22] that's really important council will use a

[44:25] bylaw for that and things like fees and charges or land use and those kind of

[44:29] things will typically be bylaws things like council codes of conduct are often

[44:34] in bylaws too though not universally and it gives legislative authority which

[44:38] means it provides the city the authority to act something to make other people do

[44:42] to do something and to penalize people if they don't do it so this is where the

[44:46] ability of a municipality to levy fines for example would come from so things

[44:50] like fees and charges what it costs to go skating or

[44:55] to park downtown potentially would be set within a bylaw and those are all

[45:00] public they should be most the time larger municipality will post all their

[45:04] bylaws on their website sometimes the smaller ones don't just

[45:07] because of technical capabilities or capacity but they're there at their

[45:10] public documents and you can see them so i mentioned it takes three readings

[45:14] or three votes to do that it actually can take four if they want

[45:19] to do it all at once the idea behind the three votes is to say

[45:24] let's consider it today we'll take a couple of votes on this and see if we're

[45:28] we still want to do this and then we'll come back in a couple of

[45:31] weeks and we'll do the third vote on it to see if we really want to prove it's

[45:34] kind of that so time for sober second thought however if it's something that's

[45:38] just a slam dunk and they just want to do it and it just makes sense to

[45:40] everybody they can in fact do all three readings or votes at the same in the

[45:45] same meeting as long as there is typically unanimous consent to do that

[45:49] now i don't know that that's universal across the country but it's pretty

[45:52] difficult if if and so there are

[45:56] there are lots of bylaws there are even more policies and policy is divided into

[46:01] governance policy and administrative policy right now we're just talking

[46:06] governance so the stuff that council controls

[46:08] the city the city body itself has its own policies too but we're just going to

[46:12] ignore those for right now the reason you have policy or a city has

[46:16] policies there's a couple of reasons one is so that it's predictable

[46:20] so that people know how the city is going to act they know for example how

[46:24] long the grass is supposed to be before you cut it so those kind of things can

[46:27] be said in policy it also avoids repeated questions

[46:31] so council administrator administration is not supposed to think for itself and

[46:35] go freelance it's supposed to take direction from council

[46:38] so if if council doesn't say how long or how

[46:42] often the snow should be plowed for example or what depth of snow pack

[46:45] before we get out there and plow conceivably the parks person parks and

[46:49] sorry the public works person could come to council when it snows and say you

[46:52] want me to play the cloud of snow now it could come tomorrow and ask the same

[46:56] question and tomorrow and ask the same question but what policy does it says

[46:59] whenever we get 10 centimeters of packs no go go plow it don't come ask us again

[47:04] and it that will provide that predictability it avoids the repeated

[47:07] questions everybody knows that that's what's going to happen not that case

[47:11] policy only requires a single vote in order to enact to change or to repeal

[47:16] so and as policies and bylaws both remain on the books until they're

[47:21] repealed so it's conceivable in a municipality that you could have bylaws

[47:25] or policies which are 40 or 50 or 60 years old because nobody's looked at

[47:29] them and they're all in hard copy in a binder some place in a fault

[47:32] but they're still in force people may not

[47:35] people may not know they're there but they can still be used so i'm a

[47:39] proponent of making sure that councils have a go through on all their bylaws

[47:43] and policies kind of once a term if at all possible so those are the two

[47:47] kind of legislative if you like leavers they've got the third is around budget i

[47:51] already mentioned things like priority-based budgeting but you put

[47:55] your money where your mouth is or you put your money on things that are most

[47:57] important so even if the city doesn't explicitly say what its priorities are

[48:01] it is putting money someplace into those sorts of into a bunch of different

[48:05] probably millions of dollars of of expenses in various areas and it tells

[48:09] you or signals to you what the city or what city council

[48:13] thinks is important no bunch of the budget is just going to pay salaries or

[48:18] pay the insurance bill keep the street lights on those sorts of things but is

[48:22] money going to uh programs and services that are still

[48:26] needed are are is

[48:29] are people who live in stratford comfortable with the way

[48:31] the budget is being spent are you within some sort of a spending

[48:36] limit most provinces if not all provinces will set a spending a

[48:39] borrowing limit for uh for budget for uh sorry for municipalities and they need

[48:44] to stay within that my final comment on this is around

[48:47] legislative paramedics and this is a concept which is quite

[48:50] useful because it talks about what you can kind of what you can and can't do if

[48:54] you like if for example the city was to pass a

[48:57] bylaw about national defense to say hey we think that um

[49:04] where i don't know i shouldn't i just made this up the top of my head but if

[49:08] council wants to create a bylaw about national defense it really wouldn't have

[49:11] no authority to do that because it's not within their

[49:15] jurisdiction and so any federal law that had to do

[49:18] with defense would supersede anything that the city wanted to do anyway and in

[49:22] that case that part becomes that the bylaw or the policy becomes null and

[49:26] void if however that by-law also made reference to something that was within

[49:31] the city's control like speed limits on

[49:33] urban roads i don't know why you do those together but whatever then this

[49:36] the piece about speed limits on urban roads would still remain in effect it's

[49:40] only that piece which is in convention that can't keep it can't keep going and

[49:45] so there's a requirement at that point then for city council to have a look at

[49:49] whatever that piece is the bylaw or the policy and change it so that it's no

[49:53] longer in conflict with the higher order legislation let us look at peace

[50:00] so i'm just going to take a bit of a break here and i see we've got some

[50:02] comments or questions in the chat box and then if anybody else wants to say

[50:06] anything i'm more than happy to listen to them

[50:10] where are we ken says federal government gives dollars to province to get a

[50:14] re-elected and b to do stuff so that's one of my favorite terms is to do stuff

[50:18] because that's what that's what government does

[50:21] provincial government banks or re-channels the money from feds to

[50:25] a get they'll get reelected to hoard money

[50:28] or to do stuff and d downloads work to cities without money so i do agree with

[50:33] you that there's a lot of downloading that happens and it only goes one way

[50:37] you can't push that string up a hill and

[50:40] you the download often downloads authority sorry responsibility without

[50:44] authority and often that includes the lack of resources as well

[50:49] so local government tries to make do with what they get from the province and

[50:52] applies to grants from anyone who gives them everything

[50:56] al says municipalities need to be recognized in the federal or provincial

[50:59] constitutions cities and towns need to be at the table

[51:02] when decisions are made by the feds in the provinces you'll get no argument

[51:05] from me but i suspect that change there's no

[51:08] there aren't any provincial constitutions

[51:11] and but it would have to be a change to the federal constitution to recognize

[51:14] municipalities as an order of government some there is something in the

[51:18] federation of canadian municipalities called the big cities caucus which is

[51:23] just the 20 or 25 largest cities in the country that often do get a seat at that

[51:27] table but they get it by the by the heft that they bring rather than by any sort

[51:32] of constitutional validity question here why is freedom of

[51:36] information information not free typically the requirement is if somebody

[51:41] makes freedom a valid freedom of information requests there is a cost to

[51:45] bringing that information together i can't comment specifically in stratford

[51:48] but that's often why there are fees associated with freedom of information

[51:52] however some of those fees can be onerous and you can look at whether

[51:55] those fees are legitimate or not as part of the fees and charges bylaw that the

[51:59] city would have to adopt and that is something that a candidate for office

[52:03] certainly could speak to if they wanted to

[52:06] there are frivolous and vexations spectatious freedom of information

[52:09] requests too and that might be part of reason why

[52:12] there's a cost associated ken says freedom of information cost is

[52:15] not the issue the issue is stratfor is an automatic no response followed by the

[52:20] maximum longest wait period all by city lawyers funding ways to say no i'm going

[52:24] to leave that the way it is you would know your situation more than

[52:27] i do oh the first reference to chinese shows up lack of transparency or

[52:31] accountability we're going to get to that later too in our well we'll have a

[52:35] whole session on that we'll talk about transparency and accountability today

[52:39] and some of the engagement piece about how cities and citizens

[52:43] connect uh in session number three why are bylaws not given much in the way of

[52:47] teeth or compliance so there's an interesting piece to that

[52:50] we're going to look at council code of conduct and

[52:54] council does have the ability to put teeth into bylaws if there is the will

[52:59] to do it and if they have the authority to do it

[53:02] oftentimes biologically identify what they what what what you want to have

[53:06] what city wants to have happen what constitutes a breach of whatever that

[53:10] by-law happens to be but oftentimes that's where it stops and sometimes

[53:15] things like sanctions whether they are teeth or compliance

[53:19] are are not as detailed as they can be can't comment specifically on on the one

[53:24] you may be talking about here uh stratfor operating budgets about 70

[53:29] million dollars a year says can roughly the same amount as festival spent in a

[53:33] normal year stratfor can go into debt about 100

[53:36] million dollars cities are expected to balance budgets that's true so

[53:39] oftentimes the uh the borrowing limit for

[53:43] municipalities is often about 1.5 times the operating budget now if anybody

[53:48] knows differently for ontario let me know but that's typically what i've seen

[53:52] so conceivably you could do that a lot of cities in particular will

[53:56] actually see the policy that they won't go that high so if they could borrow 1.5

[54:01] times they say we're going to cap our internal borrowing limit at one time or

[54:06] 0.8 times or 1.2 times but that that is okay because it still it doesn't

[54:11] contradict the provincial legislation if you were to say the city is going to

[54:16] go to two times our annual operating budget that would contradict

[54:21] a cap that may be in your provincial legislation and therefore a piece about

[54:24] legislative parameters would come into effect and it would be null that part of

[54:27] the of the pilot would be null and void again you would know your situation more

[54:31] than mine but cities are expected to balance budgets and i think

[54:36] unlike the province and the province of the federal government which aren't

[54:39] expected to balance budget and we do see long-term impact for that

[54:43] someone says don says how often should bylaws come up for review and

[54:47] public ask for review bylaws don't

[54:50] often have expiry dates on them some of them do like things like a fees and

[54:54] charges by law will often have to be reviewed every year or a property tax

[54:58] bylaw will have to be done every year but a lot of bylaws don't and those ones

[55:02] are the ones that tend to get and stay in those binders and nobody has a look

[55:06] at them i'm an advocate of having a look at

[55:09] every every bylaw at least once a term once every four years now cities the

[55:14] size of stratford that may be impossible just because of the number of bylaws

[55:18] that have that happened and the only other business that has to happen but if

[55:21] there's a regular cycle or review that takes a little longer than four years

[55:24] potentially so be it you're living starting to live that that examined life

[55:28] anyway and i think there's some validity to that you could say the same thing

[55:30] about policies as well and there are usually even more policies than there

[55:33] are bylaws sometimes a city will set up a bylaw or policy review committee or

[55:37] advisory committee to take that off the hands of city council itself however

[55:42] only city council can make the final decisions but they could take a an

[55:45] advice they could take advice from one of their advisory committees

[55:49] found the piece to this is can public ask for a review of certain bylaws yes

[55:52] you can well the city council is under no

[55:54] obligation to do it but you certainly can make that request and if it is done

[55:59] respectfully legitimately and with a good rationale

[56:03] a lot of times that will probably show up the very first

[56:07] calm quote on my presentation this evening was that margaret mead quote

[56:10] about a small group of involved people and if they're the ones who are paying

[56:13] attention they're likely the ones who are going to get hurt

[56:17] that's all the notes i have right now in the chat did

[56:21] anybody else want to say anything here about

[56:24] where we are at in terms of legislative paramouncy or orders of government

[56:28] responsibilities that kind of thing

[56:34] all right we'll keep going bylaws specifically so we've dealt with the

[56:38] framework of bylaw but if we look at bios just a neat thing about biology

[56:42] neat to me because i just love the governance stuff

[56:44] you use the term bylaw with a hyphen on it a lot of places don't it's just a

[56:48] single word means nothing no difference of course but it's just a little

[56:52] semantic semantic thing city i i reference city the how the city

[56:57] has bylaws on the website and they do so most if not all bylaws are in the on

[57:03] the website i just took a screen grab here and this one is biased about some

[57:06] bylaws associated with neighborhood bylaws and rather than just a list of

[57:10] bylaws from a to z i kind of like what stratford has done here about how you've

[57:14] grouped the bylaws into into places that it makes sense

[57:19] so it may be some just around governance about how council operates these ones

[57:22] are around neighborhoods and neighborhood well-being

[57:26] and others probably on recreation or public works i suspect as well

[57:30] and i kind of think it's a really interesting way of doing it because it

[57:32] increases accessibility for the citizens so you would be free to have a look at

[57:37] any one of these bylaws they will all say on them when they were

[57:41] created and you typically they will also talk say on them when they were

[57:46] revised or when a previous one was repealed so you can have a look at the

[57:50] chronology of them a little bit when it comes to policies which we're

[57:54] going to deal with in a minute or two they are a little different in that some

[57:57] of them a lot of templates will actually have expiry dates or review by expiry

[58:02] dates don't work but review by dates on policies so that they say

[58:07] there's a bit of an automatic trigger that says five years from now or ten

[58:10] years from now we should review this policy so those things are there so any

[58:14] citizen anybody who's got access to the internet i suppose could review the

[58:18] bylaws for the city and sometimes one of the interesting things to do is compare

[58:23] effort bylaws with bylaws in other similar sized cities

[58:26] across the country and just see if there are some neat ideas i'm a i'm a big fan

[58:31] of a term called wise practice a lot of people are talking about best practices

[58:35] but i kind of like the idea of wise and why is to me it's not just because of

[58:39] wise communities either lorena there you go

[58:41] um i like the idea of wise because it talks about taking a best practice from

[58:46] somewhere else and adapting it to local circumstances so for example if you file

[58:51] off from winnipeg which is five times your size

[58:55] you might see there's some neat principles in it which we could adapt to

[58:58] stratford but it won't work if we just slap the name stratford on it we need to

[59:02] take the kernel of the idea modify it for local use and to me that's a wise

[59:07] practice you take what works somewhere else adapt it for your local use so

[59:11] anyway these are available to you if we were to look at the municipal act

[59:16] the um what this talks about what bylaw what

[59:21] bylaws can do and it talks about any provide

[59:24] service or thing that the municipality considers necessary or desirable

[59:29] so as you can see it's a pretty broad range

[59:32] and the next slide speaks more specifically to this so this talks about

[59:35] what the city can do when they're saying some oaths of office

[59:40] or in some bylaws or some municipal purposes

[59:44] they will speak to in terms of what's benefit for the community about

[59:48] necessary or desirable whether that is necessary or desirable for the entire

[59:52] city or whether that is necessary or desirable for just part of the city now

[59:56] if city council is elected at large they all represent the same geographical area

[1:00:02] however if see if city council is elected by wards or divisions or

[1:00:06] whatever you want to call them then the each city councillor

[1:00:09] represents a different geographical area of the city and therefore may have some

[1:00:12] different interests in mind as well so an item which may be of benefit to my

[1:00:17] part of the city may actually be a net cost to your part of the city and we get

[1:00:21] we're both sitting on city council so that this the act says you need to be

[1:00:25] looking at things which are overall benefit to the

[1:00:28] city so on balance over time hopefully that all wears out but

[1:00:34] councillor vasilakos at the beginning talked about

[1:00:36] the greater lease in smaller rural municipalities across

[1:00:41] the country which are divided up into electoral divisions

[1:00:44] sometimes there's a way to pro quo that says if some work happened in division

[1:00:48] one there needs to be now some commencer some other work done in division two or

[1:00:53] division three you scratch my back i'll scratch yours

[1:00:57] and that's not the way it should work but that's the way sometimes that it

[1:01:00] does work and that's something for citizens to keep an eye on and for

[1:01:04] municipal managers to keep an eye on as well

[1:01:07] if we think specifically about what it is that the city can do in terms of

[1:01:10] bylaw these are the this is the list that comes out of the act as well so

[1:01:14] section 11 of the act and i again added the highlights to this because it says

[1:01:18] what the city can do in this case the corollary being that anything's not on

[1:01:23] this list is stuff that city can't do so it can set its own structure for the

[1:01:28] municipality and the boards or committees that it sets up

[1:01:31] accountability and transparency shows up specifically to this

[1:01:35] it doesn't say whether it should be or shouldn't be accountable and transparent

[1:01:38] but there are things i have learned like accessibility which overarch some of

[1:01:43] what the city can do but we still have to abide by provincial legislation on

[1:01:48] accessibility for example and accountability and transparency does

[1:01:51] show up the financial management money in money

[1:01:55] out how it gets spent how it gets allocated

[1:01:58] for the audit that sort of thing shows up

[1:02:00] municipal assets capital assets are one of the biggest line items in municipal

[1:02:05] budgets and in many times they are something that you don't often see i had

[1:02:10] a mayor joked to me once and it's really hard to cut a ribbon on a sewer system

[1:02:14] but they're really important if you try going without a water system or a sewer

[1:02:17] system the municipality's not going to do very well and asset management shows

[1:02:21] them to this too so it's not like building a recreation center a new

[1:02:24] performing arts center where you can look at it and have some sort of

[1:02:29] edifice complex if you like but it's really important to have it to make a

[1:02:33] commun complete community so economic social environmental

[1:02:38] well-being comes in too i've noticed a lot of the

[1:02:42] ontario legislation uses the term well-being and a lot of it speaks to the

[1:02:46] environment and i suspect that physical environment when cities look at

[1:02:50] environment my proposal to them is to look at the land

[1:02:53] and anything that happens on or under the land so in some ways if you're

[1:02:57] looking at environmental well-being things like that deep infrastructure has

[1:03:01] an impact because it's a disturbance on the environment if you're going to do

[1:03:04] something like that you've ran for instance climate change

[1:03:07] in here specifically too i have a colleague by the name of mark anielski

[1:03:12] who's written a couple of books on well-being

[1:03:14] an economy of well-being and the economy of the economics of happiness

[1:03:19] at which point he's starting to measure social and social well-being and how i

[1:03:24] use the phrase earlier on about why people move to stratford and what makes

[1:03:28] them stay there and my colleague mark has actually developed a process to

[1:03:32] start measuring some of that health and safety is pretty common

[1:03:36] services and i love the word when things shows up in legislation too which the

[1:03:40] municipality is authorized to provide and finally

[1:03:43] protection of persons and property so emergency services shows up here and it

[1:03:49] shows up here too so those are the things the city can do

[1:03:53] they also so that's kind of the general piece more specifically then in a

[1:03:58] subsequent section of the act these are some of the things if you like that the

[1:04:02] city is authorized the places that the city is authorized to act the term

[1:04:06] highway shows up but highway just really needs roads from my reading of it as

[1:04:10] well this because it it's provincially it's sorry it specifically excludes

[1:04:14] provincial highways transportation systems so trails or

[1:04:18] dog paths or transit shows up here how you waste management

[1:04:23] which i in my eyes would include things like

[1:04:26] composting recycling all those kind of things too

[1:04:29] public the use of public utilities and we see that change throughout the

[1:04:32] country too particularly now with broadband internet

[1:04:36] some municipalities are starting to look at things like broadband as a public

[1:04:39] utility rather than just something that's for private consumption and there

[1:04:43] are some other pieces too in underserved communities where

[1:04:46] electric electric electricity or natural gas sometimes are

[1:04:51] public ut publicly owned utilities too parks rep culture and heritage shows up

[1:04:56] here and i think when i think of stratfor

[1:04:58] as some of you mentioned off the top this is what i and probably most

[1:05:01] canadians think about stratford as a city

[1:05:05] drainage and flood control accepting storm sewers and i must admit

[1:05:09] a little bit of ignorance to the storm sewer part

[1:05:11] about why that's not included but how you move water from where it's not

[1:05:15] supposed to be to where it is supposed to be without causing problems so flood

[1:05:19] avoidance structures buildings so building

[1:05:22] permitting uh it shows up here too

[1:05:26] uh parking except on those highways so parking lots and street parking

[1:05:30] animal control an animal licensing dev which probably is interest of

[1:05:35] interest to several of you what is it again that makes stratford unique and

[1:05:39] several of you who talked about economic diversification right off the top would

[1:05:42] come in here and then licensing of businesses

[1:05:45] uh cost of licensing and monitoring of those licensing

[1:05:49] so the next piece is about policies but i see a few people have put some

[1:05:53] comments in the chat so i'll just kind of respond to that

[1:05:58] oh how often could a vote of city council

[1:06:01] vacate than shinny non-disclosure agreement since the proposal is now

[1:06:04] defunct now you're getting into something here

[1:06:07] that is much more specific to stratfor than i can really answer so uh john i

[1:06:12] apologize i can't give you that um

[1:06:16] because there may re some of those exceptions to disclosure

[1:06:19] if they were legitimately used in things like negotiation with a third party or

[1:06:24] land use in terms of sale or purchase of land speculating because you don't want

[1:06:30] to give away what you what you're willing to pay some of those things will

[1:06:33] remain confidential even after the fact i can't comment on the specifics of that

[1:06:37] one but that's some of what i've seen with it

[1:06:39] are there jurisdictions that have sunset clauses and bylaws i haven't sorry

[1:06:43] that's not true i have seen some that some set causes in some by-laws some of

[1:06:48] them like i mentioned are annual like a property tax by-law or a fees and

[1:06:51] charges bylaw but other bylaws conceivably then could

[1:06:55] say this by-law will expire on january 1st 2025 unless it's renewed because

[1:07:00] those sorts of things do happen should an update of zoning bylaws be

[1:07:04] done before a review of the op official plan

[1:07:09] it's probably useful to do that i would suggest at least in conjunction with the

[1:07:12] official plan the effect the plan itself will over arch bylaws so plan will set

[1:07:18] what you want stratfor to look like over the next x number of years and the

[1:07:21] bylaws will be used to get to that place so if there are bylaws which are

[1:07:27] not useful in providing for something that is identified as a

[1:07:31] priority in the official plan then the bylaw whatever it happens to be zoning

[1:07:35] or otherwise probably ought to at least be reviewed

[1:07:38] there are some smart people who have created some of these bylaws and

[1:07:42] engineering companies and lawyers and whatnot that will have had to look at

[1:07:44] them too sometimes there can be unif unintended consequences to changes

[1:07:49] somebody notes that i'm cutting out at times i apologize for that i saw a

[1:07:52] little while ago my notes say the internet was unstable it could just be

[1:07:55] that hotel i'm in if it does cut out again thank you for letting me know mark

[1:07:59] but just yell at me at the time and i'll i don't know what i'll do but i'll

[1:08:03] wave back one biola that grinds my gears is the

[1:08:06] animal bylaw says ken 2014 it's still in effect even though

[1:08:11] council received the citizens provider committee recommendations three years

[1:08:14] ago city's been too busy to pass the new one

[1:08:18] so that's one of the interesting things about city council committees for the

[1:08:21] most part is they are purely advisory that city council can listen to their

[1:08:25] advice they can take their advice they can discount their advice or they can do

[1:08:28] something in between not doing anything is acting

[1:08:34] again i don't know the specifics of this but if it is something that grind your

[1:08:37] grinds your gears i would suspect and if they're if it's something that's

[1:08:39] grinding other people's gears too that's one of those things that small groups of

[1:08:43] citizens can really assist with more sound stratford owns its own hydro

[1:08:48] oh there we go so festival hydro is a power producer so that's one of those

[1:08:52] places that that you actually do do that how much control does

[1:08:56] city have over police budgets it depends on the other my answers say

[1:09:01] it depends i apologize for that it depends on the police act within

[1:09:05] ontario often times municipalities

[1:09:09] if they have their own police service that police service is

[1:09:14] still under the authority of a higher order

[1:09:17] government act so if there is a policing act in ontario i didn't even prep for

[1:09:22] this by looking at that sort of thing that oftentimes the police act would set

[1:09:25] up a police commission a commission is separate from city

[1:09:30] council and if a city councilor sits on a police

[1:09:34] commission they are usually wearing their commission hat not their city

[1:09:38] council hat they're supposed to act in the best best interest of the commission

[1:09:42] and the police service i guess indirectly rather than the city same

[1:09:45] sort of thing often happens with libraries as well with if there are a

[1:09:48] specific library that the library board member will be a

[1:09:52] board member not a city councilor while they're actually sitting around the

[1:09:55] board table it's a matter of semantics in a lot of cases however though making

[1:09:59] your comment about police so police oversight belongs to the

[1:10:02] commission police budget however is something that is a city council of

[1:10:06] responsibility and that could that is a budget line like fire services or like

[1:10:12] recreation or like social services in the budget and it's up to council then

[1:10:17] to weigh the requirements of that public safety

[1:10:21] initiative if you like to provide the dollars to

[1:10:24] if you have suggested to a police to the police department or police

[1:10:28] service at a level that they think is appropriate for what they got given that

[1:10:32] they also have other things they've got to fund as well

[1:10:35] we've seen some councils look we heard that what was it last year

[1:10:38] they um defund the police and those sorts of

[1:10:41] things that came up but some municipalities were saying we need to

[1:10:44] put more money into prevention and so we're actually increasing

[1:10:48] not necessarily police but increasing public safety budgets because they were

[1:10:52] leaving police similar to where they were but adding more preventative with

[1:10:56] the idea being that short-term pain for long-term gain some years from now if we

[1:11:00] can get ahead of the root causes of crime we're not going to need as much in

[1:11:04] terms of downstream policing that's a that's a debate for

[1:11:08] you as citizens of stratford and for city council to have as well i don't

[1:11:13] know what does that mean how am i okay i'll leave that

[1:11:17] police in the fire are big pieces of budget absolutely they are often times

[1:11:21] labor uh in general is the largest one

[1:11:25] in municipal government then infrastructure roads sewers that

[1:11:29] kind of thing is pretty high as well but in terms of services emergency service

[1:11:33] is often quite high and even if municipality has a contract with the

[1:11:36] rcfp donna asks how many years does stratfor

[1:11:40] prepare their budget in advance is it one to ten years in advance

[1:11:43] i can't answer that specifically municipal governments typically have

[1:11:47] one-year budgets but they'll often put an outlook on that a two-year three-year

[1:11:52] outlook on operating budgets we'll deal with budget a little later too

[1:11:56] on capital budgets however it's usually a lot longer because the ice plant at

[1:12:01] the arena is going to last a lot longer than a lawnmower is going to last

[1:12:05] so as in look in terms of asset management we look further afield so a

[1:12:09] capital plan if it looks at things like roads and sewers and heavy maintenance

[1:12:13] on arenas can be up to 25 years and it identifies needs when is expected

[1:12:19] to be when the money is expected to be needed and potentially what sources of

[1:12:23] revenue there are now you're limited of course it can come from property taxes

[1:12:28] it can come from some sort of a levy it could come from a matching grant but of

[1:12:32] course if you're relying on money from other orders of government it's kind of

[1:12:35] tough to be able to do that in any kind of a consistent way but prudent asset

[1:12:39] management looks a long way out ken says council is working on five-year

[1:12:44] budgets but still only one they vote on that's correct

[1:12:47] i've seen lethbridge alberta did a four-year budget

[1:12:50] over the course of a term at one point or two terms ago so at the beginning

[1:12:55] they had predictable property tax increases over the course of four years

[1:13:00] the problem was that they weren't able to anticipate some of the things that

[1:13:03] had happened it wasn't covered but something is no

[1:13:07] strategy survives first contact with reality so there's always something that

[1:13:10] gets in the way and has an impact so a one year budget is mandatory for the

[1:13:15] most part sometimes two or three with the second and third being a rolling

[1:13:19] budget so it would say once we're done with this year we'll just add another

[1:13:23] year on the end of it all and just roll in one year into the next into the next

[1:13:27] so you have a pretty good idea of what the budget is going to be even if

[1:13:31] you don't have the level of specificity of actually setting property tax rates

[1:13:35] into future years but you have a like a ballpark to go for

[1:13:39] so shorter term almost always as always you'll have shorter term budgeting for

[1:13:44] for uh operating and longer term budgeting per capita just because of

[1:13:48] just of the nature of the stuff you a municipality actually does

[1:13:53] i'm going to move on to policy if i can unless there was anybody who had a tech

[1:13:57] verbal question they wanted to ask

[1:14:02] seeing none we'll move on to policies so in so bylaws as you recall were those

[1:14:08] things that require three votes to enact to change or to repeal

[1:14:11] and where the mo are the legislative tool account that

[1:14:14] municipalities use that have the highest impact most important you also have

[1:14:19] policies on afterwards and that's that piece about certain morality is

[1:14:22] predictable and it can avoid repeated questions and i use this reference the

[1:14:27] other day and said if you look at statute municipalities

[1:14:31] act for example that kind of sets the skeleton of the municipal structures in

[1:14:36] ontario if you look at bylaws that starts to add

[1:14:39] some flesh to the bones if you look at policies now you're adding skin to that

[1:14:42] flesh and then if we look a little bit later into things like culture or

[1:14:46] principles it adds clothing to all of that so by the time you've done all four

[1:14:50] of those things stratford is unique there's no other place in the world

[1:14:53] quite like it so this now is we're into step three if

[1:14:57] you like so putting the skin on that that uh

[1:15:01] the bones and the muscle so here in terms of this is our series

[1:15:06] of policies and much like the bylaws that we referenced earlier a lot of the

[1:15:09] policies that have an impact on you as people who live and operate and run

[1:15:14] organizations in stratfor are listed on the city's website and

[1:15:17] they have a pretty darn good job of it actually

[1:15:20] and so they are there for you to have a look at to review

[1:15:24] a council like bylaws can look at these things and

[1:15:28] change them if they see fit they would respond to the needs as they as they

[1:15:32] arise and hopefully then review policies in the same sort of fashion that they

[1:15:35] review bylaws as well this one i happen to pick was around accountability and

[1:15:40] transparency because i figured some of you might be quite interested in how

[1:15:43] this actually works the music the at the policies at the bottom of the screenshot

[1:15:48] here are from the municipal act itself and it talks about where what sort of

[1:15:53] things that a municipality ought to have policy

[1:15:56] about and this is the sort of reference to the

[1:15:59] act itself so they can have policies around sale of land or disposition of

[1:16:04] land they can talk about hiring employees employee numbers employee

[1:16:08] status that kind of thing a relationship between council

[1:16:13] and its officers in reality the the only person

[1:16:18] who is responsible to council is the city manager everybody else in the

[1:16:21] municipal structure is a is a staff person of the city manager not of

[1:16:25] council so council can't direct staff other than the city manager and an

[1:16:30] individual member of city council can't direct the city manager either it needs

[1:16:34] to be through an act of counsel itself through a resolution or a mile or a

[1:16:38] policy procurement of goods and services

[1:16:41] shows up here we sometimes write policies or bylaws

[1:16:44] for municipalities and oftentimes procurement actually shows up in bylaw

[1:16:48] because it's finance rather than policy but here we are in the municipal act and

[1:16:52] it's showing up in policy one of the pieces we have seen in procurement just

[1:16:56] kind of need is a buy local provision and it is said and that we see this a

[1:17:01] lot in the north actually where goods and services are really expensive and

[1:17:04] quite scarce they have said if there's a local provider we will actually pay x

[1:17:08] percent more for local than we would to bring somebody in from external to kind

[1:17:13] of keep the dollars floating around the municipality and they've said we

[1:17:17] recognize that it's going to be tough it's a tough go of it sometimes and you

[1:17:20] as a local provider may have increased fees that others don't so

[1:17:25] if it's going to cost us 10 more to buy truck tires from you then from somebody

[1:17:30] else will still consider that equivalent and that's just kind of a neat way of

[1:17:33] doing it for local economic development notice to the public comes in here too

[1:17:39] so if there are things that are happening

[1:17:42] construction things or even notice of meetings

[1:17:45] uh biology statutory bylaw changes all those kind of things can be in here too

[1:17:51] as our accountability and transparency which is very

[1:17:56] it's a lot stronger i think in ontario than i've seen elsewhere across the

[1:17:59] country delegation of power and duties council

[1:18:03] often doesn't or can't delegate a whole lot of power and duties to anybody who's

[1:18:07] not counsel but it can do can set up things like advisory committees like

[1:18:11] some of the ones you referenced one of the places we often see this is in

[1:18:15] council remuneration no counselor likes to vote on their own salary

[1:18:20] no counselor likes to give themselves a raise maybe you should say that

[1:18:23] so oftentimes a municipality will set up a committee to say we need to get advice

[1:18:27] on what council remuneration ought to be for the next three four five six years

[1:18:32] and ask people around citizens group or ask the chamber to be involved and

[1:18:36] provide a recommendation back to council however when that happens

[1:18:40] the final decision still rests with council

[1:18:44] but their salary is part of the budget so they have to approve salaries as part

[1:18:47] of the budget but they can at least say then we

[1:18:50] engaged broadly and did something about it this we when

[1:18:55] this happens things show up like if you're if you're in a unionized

[1:18:58] community the council will get the same raise that the union gets or they will

[1:19:03] say the council will only get cost of living allowances or something to that

[1:19:06] effect somebody mentioned earlier too about

[1:19:08] full-time versus part-time counselors that's where this would potentially show

[1:19:11] up to protect and enhance the tree company

[1:19:15] canopy story and natural vegetation if you remember some of the note around the

[1:19:19] purposes of municipalities and municipal acts spoke specifically to this and it's

[1:19:23] kind of neat to see it here in your municipal act as well

[1:19:26] as with pregnancy the even parental leave which those of us

[1:19:30] in alberta i'm not sure if you're very thrilled

[1:19:33] with us at the moment i'm not particularly thrilled with us at the

[1:19:34] moment we're a long way behind on a whole lot of this stuff

[1:19:38] but we are now starting to see things like i don't think they've called it

[1:19:42] pregnancy maybe parentally for sure has been has been a big thing for local

[1:19:46] government councils in this part of the world as well so those are some of the

[1:19:50] things that policies can deal with that are kind of a little bit more granular

[1:19:54] if you like than what bylaw deals with it's again the meat on the bones

[1:19:59] so a question here

[1:20:02] question i'm pretty sure this section i'm just going to look at the chat here

[1:20:06] um ken says unless you're a large city like

[1:20:10] toronto who record all votes of all motions cities like stratfor just have

[1:20:13] an informal yes no it's recorded whatever no accountability usually the

[1:20:17] way this is written is municipal acts most of the time the musical acts were

[1:20:21] done in days before a lot of digitization so it's not something

[1:20:25] thought of in fact and see a lot of these acts actually speak to

[1:20:28] notices have to being in newspapers it doesn't speak to electronic

[1:20:32] distribution of notices putting things on facebook or websites even though it's

[1:20:36] typically done the newspaper still still shows up in there

[1:20:39] so oftentimes the acts will say the thing that something is only have to be

[1:20:44] passed by a majority of the indicated majority of counselors however that

[1:20:47] happens to be historically of course that was just everybody's in the room

[1:20:50] you just put your hand up and that's how it works

[1:20:52] so it's just yes versus no and whoever whoever wins the day wins the vote

[1:20:57] however the act itself usually says if somebody wants to call for a recorded

[1:21:00] vote they can in which case the names of the people who voted yes and the names

[1:21:05] of the people who voted no were actually recorded in the meeting minutes rather

[1:21:08] than just saying it carried or failed it says so and so voted in favor so and so

[1:21:13] voted against in some places a meeting procedure bylaw

[1:21:17] will go a step further and we'll say we're just going to record all the votes

[1:21:21] and if that that certainly can be done in

[1:21:24] the age of technology now where meetings are webcast and recorded even if it

[1:21:29] isn't a recorded vote usually you can see who put up their hand and so if it's

[1:21:34] not recorded you can have a look it's very rare that it would be completely

[1:21:38] anonymous how people voted there's an interesting piece in here too

[1:21:42] about abstentions and that varies across the country in some places every

[1:21:46] councillor must vote unless there's a reason not to they can't vote like they

[1:21:51] have a conflict of interest or something called pecuniary interest

[1:21:54] and if they don't vote when they should they are disqualified from office and

[1:21:57] their seat is considered vacant they're hired to do a job and if they refuse to

[1:22:00] do their job then go find somebody else who can do it

[1:22:03] in other places you can do an abstention and it's just

[1:22:06] you vote just even counted in some other places if you abstain it's counted as a

[1:22:11] no vote so that all has an impact on how things

[1:22:14] will actually shake out at the end of at the end of

[1:22:18] the meeting so as for ken's comment around

[1:22:21] accountability you unless the recording unless the vote

[1:22:24] is a recorded vote or you have a literal recording of the vote you're right that

[1:22:30] you you don't see who voted for what uh donna asks is stratfor the cio the

[1:22:35] city manager yes the cao is chief administrative officer

[1:22:39] it could go by a variety of titles if it's if it's called city manager in

[1:22:43] stratford then yes it's your city

[1:22:48] what else do we have in here

[1:22:58] i should get to the top of the chat and i want to be at the bottom of the chat

[1:23:02] oh somebody else already answered the cao question

[1:23:06] uh procurement stratfor council has continuously and greatly increased the

[1:23:10] monetary limits staff can approve without having to go to council

[1:23:13] yeah so in a procurement bylaw or procurement policy whatever tool they

[1:23:17] use you don't want every dollar and cent having to come to council for approval

[1:23:22] so often times there are limits on what what's what can happen or can be spent

[1:23:28] and i don't know the limits within stratford but it would say like if

[1:23:31] you're a frontline person you can spend 25 without approval if you're a

[1:23:34] frontline manager you can spend a thousand dollars without approval you're

[1:23:39] a senior manager you can spend ten thousand dollars without approval and if

[1:23:42] your cio maybe it's higher than that and i say without approval but it's not

[1:23:46] usually exactly that way it's not without having to go to council for

[1:23:49] something that's not in the budget so there are procurement limits on if

[1:23:55] you want to spend over x amount of dollars there are different things that

[1:23:57] you have to do you have to get three bids you have to go to an open rfp you

[1:24:01] can sole source typically sole source is the lowest

[1:24:04] amount just give the contract or a purchase to somebody to go and buy paper

[1:24:09] and staples you don't want to get three bids for that

[1:24:11] if you're asking someone like me to come in and do a strategic plan for the city

[1:24:15] it's quite common that we'd find out we are one of three companies that get

[1:24:18] asked because it's a fairly limited market and if it's going to cost x

[1:24:22] amount of money it's useful to have a bit of a competitive bid if you're going

[1:24:25] to buy that metaphorical grader chances are that goes to a public tender in

[1:24:30] which case it's probably in the public works budget

[1:24:33] in terms of a not an exact amount but a range and

[1:24:37] somebody will bid on that on the open market and come in on that so it's

[1:24:43] what is this so those are the two pieces the there's sometimes a bit of a

[1:24:48] an exception to that in terms of emergency

[1:24:51] so if things if there's a flood for example

[1:24:54] and somebody has to go buy sandbags you don't want to have to wait for the next

[1:24:57] council meeting for that to happen so oftentimes the cao will have something

[1:25:02] in a procurement policy that's somewhere that says

[1:25:05] under 100 i mean i'm making the number up completely but under a hundred

[1:25:08] thousand dollars in an emergency situation cio just goes to do it but you

[1:25:12] have to report it to council at the next meeting

[1:25:14] and often times so that does happen sometimes and sometimes there will be a

[1:25:18] conversation that involves the mayor as the head of council in that too and the

[1:25:21] mayor then will will pass on information to other members of

[1:25:25] council as in due course if you like as part of that so there's regular regular

[1:25:30] purchasing and then emergency publishing emergency purchasing and by its nature

[1:25:35] emergency publishing publishing i don't know where that's coming from emergency

[1:25:38] purchasing is done um outside the budget because we don't

[1:25:43] budget for fires and floods and that sort of thing we're just

[1:25:47] happening a lot of that stuff ends up recouped by insurance anyway

[1:25:51] so anyhow uh 99.5

[1:25:55] of city council votes are not recorded i will have to take your word for that

[1:25:59] parts of the city reporting internet problems here plus a lot of people are

[1:26:02] off to see the local air show i came in second to the snowbirds i'm a

[1:26:07] private pilot i'm okay coming in second to the snowbirds

[1:26:12] and i think we're up to date hey does anybody hear anything

[1:26:15] i have a question i should go ahead yeah it's dave hartney um does it matter

[1:26:21] so the voting whether it's uh you know one by one voter or uh

[1:26:26] or many votes if it's a hundred it's a thousand dollar purchase and like an

[1:26:30] expenditure or if it's a forty million dollar expenditure

[1:26:34] is it still one vote one vote to uh like for instance if it's a six to five

[1:26:41] vote just spend the money it doesn't matter the amount right

[1:26:45] no it doesn't matter the amount okay

[1:26:48] and the the

[1:26:55] it is a democracy but it's a demar it's a rule of the majority rule

[1:26:59] not only that you may have heard the term too once a vote is done it's

[1:27:03] considered a council decision and members of all members of council are

[1:27:06] expected to support it now some will a lot of will gripe about it behind the

[1:27:10] scenes but in public they're supposed to say it's the will of council and here we

[1:27:14] go whether it's 40 or 40 million dollars now chances are there's a whole lot more

[1:27:18] rigor that has gone into the investigation about the 40 million

[1:27:22] dollars not only that people will say they need more information

[1:27:26] and one of the problems that counselors have is almost never all the information

[1:27:31] in order to be to make timely decisions sometimes they have to make they have to

[1:27:35] make those decisions based on the best information they have at the time

[1:27:38] and that usually works out but sometimes you can

[1:27:41] come and bite them as turned out to be a mistake at the end

[1:27:44] of it all too nobody tends to fret too much over the

[1:27:47] smaller ones nearly as much as they do about the larger ones and sometimes it's

[1:27:51] a it's an investment if you like or a budget that wasn't made it can cause

[1:27:55] just as much of the problem of the money that was

[1:27:58] spent i don't know if that answers your question well enough yeah yeah no for

[1:28:02] sure it does i have one more um um if uh

[1:28:06] you had that chart there we talked about why people might get into being a

[1:28:11] councilman right i think one was ego and blah blah blah i can't remember what

[1:28:14] they are but if you him yep go ahead

[1:28:19] yeah i just lost my turn [Laughter]

[1:28:22] if it shows up again is is uh what's the idea like in my in my world or maybe i'm

[1:28:28] naive i think that the counselors should represent the opinion

[1:28:33] of the their constituents not their own opinion or not their

[1:28:38] children's opinion or your neighbor's opinion it should be the

[1:28:41] opinion of of of this uh stratfor

[1:28:47] you will get this idea

[1:28:50] i don't know if the ideal is whatever works for you you have as much right to

[1:28:53] the vote that you choose to cast as anybody else does on this call or

[1:28:56] anywhere else around the country and you will base that on whatever you

[1:29:00] consider to be the important criteria and if you're electing at large so you

[1:29:04] get to elect a whole slate or suite of candidates you may choose different

[1:29:08] things you probably want your i shouldn't uh

[1:29:13] say this specifically about you but typically people want their city council

[1:29:17] to represent the depth and breadth of their community so you don't want 11 or

[1:29:22] 13 of the same person you want to have some difference there

[1:29:26] councils to me anyway one of the major things that councils have to do is think

[1:29:30] long term so if they are looking at the will of

[1:29:32] the majority in the short term sometimes that can prove problematic

[1:29:37] over the long term if they're not investing now for a successful and

[1:29:41] sustainable future it may be fine for the next four years or eight years but a

[1:29:45] generation from now maybe you painted yourself into a corner so

[1:29:49] counselors ought to be able and willing to take some of those risks recognizing

[1:29:53] that they're investing some of their own political capital when they do that

[1:29:59] okay thank you okay

[1:30:01] i'm going to keep going here that's this is something else i don't want to cut

[1:30:04] off your questions either all right

[1:30:08] i love this stuff you guys budget oh here we go

[1:30:12] so let's just a little bit on budget because we're going to have a full

[1:30:14] session on it a note that

[1:30:17] though the province and fed's fiscal year runs april 1st to march 31st

[1:30:23] the calendar year is the budget year for municipalities so when it comes to

[1:30:27] things like grants it can be a little bit peculiar because

[1:30:30] the if it's the province or the feds that are providing the grant oftentimes

[1:30:33] the reporting has to be done on their schedule not on the city's schedule

[1:30:38] somebody made a reference earlier too about budgeting needing to be balanced

[1:30:42] financial statements have to be audited so that you know there's nothing funny

[1:30:46] going on and the auditor can't be a member okay

[1:30:49] sorry can't be a staff person office of the city so the bookkeeper if you like

[1:30:54] there probably is an auditor on staff with the city or a series of people in

[1:30:58] the finance department who probably do really good work and provide all the

[1:31:01] documentation to the auditor but the auditor themselves is not an employee of

[1:31:05] the city not only that the auditor is responsible and hired directly by

[1:31:09] council not by the city itself so it's not the author is not responsible to the

[1:31:14] city manager or the finance director they're responsible to counsel

[1:31:17] now in in pract for practicality purposes the auditor will work with city

[1:31:24] administration significantly closely during the audit

[1:31:27] period what this means however is when the

[1:31:30] audit happens the report comes to counsel not specifically to

[1:31:34] administration and then administration reporting to council so council gets to

[1:31:38] see the finance the financial audit whether that's the numbers or whether

[1:31:41] it's a process audit and any notes that might be part of that audit

[1:31:45] it also means that if they want to council can meet with the auditor in

[1:31:49] camera behind closed doors if there are questions that they have about the audit

[1:31:54] and recommendations that the auditor may have said

[1:31:57] now the audit usually differential legislation will say that the auditor

[1:32:02] can you have to go to market with an audit

[1:32:06] for the auditing services every x number of years three four five years so that

[1:32:10] you don't have the same auditor for 40 years in a row

[1:32:14] not conceivably i guess you could but at least you're making that choice

[1:32:17] to do that you are as a municipality set on set and

[1:32:22] monitor budget the for for

[1:32:25] administration that means looking at things like accounts payable accounts

[1:32:28] receivable all the detail stuff check registers bank racks all that kind of

[1:32:31] stuff for council however council sets the budget at the beginning of the year

[1:32:35] that says this is how this is the amount of money we want to spend and this is in

[1:32:39] large buckets where we want to spend it so what council should be looking at is

[1:32:43] variance from budget not the budget itself so we expect it to spend a

[1:32:48] million dollars in this particular line but we've only spent eight hundred

[1:32:51] thousand dollars why is that or we spent 1.2 million why is that so just looking

[1:32:56] at variants if things are tracking the way they were budgeted it means that the

[1:33:00] budget is doing what it was supposed to do

[1:33:03] when the expenses or revenue for that matter start to deviate from budget it's

[1:33:08] useful at that point for city council to get involved so they don't you don't

[1:33:11] want city council looking at the day-to-day week-to-week month-to-month

[1:33:15] numbers you want them looking at the strategic or the governance perspective

[1:33:19] or what what happens with budget it's way easier however particularly for a

[1:33:24] new counselor if they're learning their role to look at a budget line item and

[1:33:28] say hey we're spending way too much on vehicles our public works trucks are

[1:33:33] costing too much uh and providing suggestions to that

[1:33:37] that's really not the role the role is for fleet services are we spending above

[1:33:42] or below where we thought we ought to now there's often times a really good

[1:33:45] explanation for that gas prices were really high this year

[1:33:48] for example so we're over on our fuel amount or

[1:33:52] we had fewer vehicles on the road so our insurance costs are lower

[1:33:55] so there are often really good reasons for it but it's that variance from

[1:33:58] budget is really important when i look at budgeting as a

[1:34:02] municipality there there are kind of dealt with a bit of this already

[1:34:06] and we're going to deal with this more detail a little bit later on too there

[1:34:09] are two main budgets budgets the operating budget and the capital budget

[1:34:13] the operating budget provides for things that are consumable on a

[1:34:18] day-to-day basis so salaries come in here those aforementioned paper clips

[1:34:22] come in here keeping the lights on comes in here and keeping insurance paid does

[1:34:26] too sort of the stuff that you spend on a

[1:34:28] regular basis as you go capital budgets are typically larger items larger in

[1:34:33] terms of dollar amounts so capital could be

[1:34:38] the greater it's going to be the filter in the pool

[1:34:43] it's going to be a pickup trucks or uh garbage trucks

[1:34:48] those sort of things which are are expensive

[1:34:51] and need to be replaced from time to time so you may know i'm sorry about

[1:34:54] pickup trucks a little while ago you may know that that pickup truck has to be

[1:34:58] replaced every five years so in your capital budget you've got every five

[1:35:02] years replace pickup truck so do we put a little bit of money aside every year

[1:35:06] so that by the time five years rolls around we have enough money to buy that

[1:35:08] truck maybe you do if you think about longer term things

[1:35:12] like sewer pipes maybe they have to be replaced once every 50 years and they're

[1:35:15] really expensive when you do that so do we need to be putting a little bit of

[1:35:18] money aside every year so we can afford to replace the sewer pipes

[1:35:23] that's where we start getting into the next piece here too so those things are

[1:35:26] capital expenses but you may be putting a little bit of money aside every year

[1:35:29] that's where reserves come in you could you will there are some

[1:35:32] mandatory reserves that you have to have and they are often things like

[1:35:37] a vacation allowance vacation reserve where

[1:35:40] staff are entitled to vacation and that vacation comes with a salary cost so if

[1:35:46] you're putting a little bit of money aside every time every month and then

[1:35:49] when the person takes vacation essentially you're paying them out of

[1:35:52] that reserve budget other things like that grader or the

[1:35:55] pickup truck they you or a really good example for large municipalities is a

[1:36:01] fire apparatus you need to buy a new ladder truck and it's going to cost you

[1:36:04] a million bucks well you probably don't have a million

[1:36:07] bucks lying around but once every 20 years you could be putting 50 000 aside

[1:36:12] or and by the time you need it the money's

[1:36:15] there and so

[1:36:16] it's the dedicated savings but there's also that optimum balance so you don't

[1:36:20] just keep putting money into that if you have a child and you've got an education

[1:36:24] savings plan and it's going to cost fifty thousand dollars to send that kid

[1:36:27] to university there's not much point putting sixty or

[1:36:30] seventy or eighty thousand dollars in there so you'll just leave it you'll max

[1:36:33] them out at that optimal balance and just not touch it

[1:36:36] and so that's the use of reserve so you've got those three pieces that you

[1:36:41] can use and there's a lot more to this as i mentioned in um

[1:36:45] in the next session next piece here is citizen involvement

[1:36:49] with some notes in the chat here um

[1:36:54] where are we here how does a council deal with conflict of

[1:36:59] interest

[1:37:02] um so

[1:37:04] i mean what i may have to do is actually to make put a little bit more effort

[1:37:08] into conflict of interest into the next session which is about roles and

[1:37:11] responsibility role clarity i wasn't going to do that but i've noticed a few

[1:37:15] questions show up around uh conflict of interest

[1:37:19] oftentimes conflict of interest is something called pecuniary interest

[1:37:22] which is conflict of interest associated with money so are there requirements for

[1:37:27] provincial or municipal legislation typically yes ontario does have a

[1:37:31] well here we go ken has actually responded to this one about municipal

[1:37:34] conflict of interest act but we will deal with that one a little bit later if

[1:37:37] that's okay peop counselors i'm gonna have to look

[1:37:41] at this a bit more but typically counselors are not allowed to vote on

[1:37:44] anything that would have a financial impact on them their families or their

[1:37:48] employers family is usually defined as the person

[1:37:53] obviously their spouse children and parents sometimes it goes a little bit

[1:37:57] beyond that but in other in some provinces and the benefit could be

[1:38:01] positive or conceivably it could be a negative benefit too and there's a bit

[1:38:05] of an interesting quirk to this because everybody plays property taxes and

[1:38:09] council votes on property taxes so are they not in conflict of interest

[1:38:13] when they vote to raise property taxes or decrease property taxes

[1:38:17] and the there's a little nugget in there that says the conflict of interest

[1:38:21] provisions only apply when there's a benefit to the to the smaller group

[1:38:25] if it's of benefit or cost to the community at large

[1:38:29] then there's no conflict of interest and we'll deal with that just a little bit

[1:38:32] later you mentioned your integrity

[1:38:35] commissioner is your lawyer so ontario require i think it requires a lawyer to

[1:38:39] be an integrity commissioner i'm not a lawyer i have been an integrity

[1:38:42] commissioner i was the integrity commissioner for the city of saint

[1:38:45] albert north of edmonton which is about 60 or 70 000 people

[1:38:51] someone says donna says i feel people who are running should take training

[1:38:55] before they put their names on the ballot yeah absolutely not only that i

[1:38:57] think it should be a test before you're given your ballot

[1:39:02] asset management program yeah is there anyone who can run for

[1:39:07] council so the beauty of counselors is the only difference between account i'm

[1:39:10] going to get this right away the only difference between you and me and a

[1:39:12] counselor is that they got more votes than we did they live in the community

[1:39:16] just like the rest of us do they pay their deposit just like any of the rest

[1:39:19] of us could they're a citizen of canada presumably they have to be and they they

[1:39:24] just chose to put their name on the ballot we didn't

[1:39:28] anything else before i move on to citizen involvement recognizing we're

[1:39:32] coming up to eight o'clock

[1:39:36] so this isn't really about what the city can and can't do but i

[1:39:40] think it's important to talk to some of these things too because it's about how

[1:39:43] we interact with the city oh here we go so the only fundamental

[1:39:47] difference between a council member and any other member

[1:39:51] is that they got more votes than we did that's that's just it they put their

[1:39:54] name on their balance so there is often no formal requirement for for

[1:40:01] council or orientation to actually attend an orientation unless the city

[1:40:06] decides that there is so this is the sort of thing that would show up in a

[1:40:09] code of conduct code of ethics by law that thou shalt show up

[1:40:13] the municipal legislation is often written such that and it may be in

[1:40:16] ontario it may not be wrong says that the municipality has to offer

[1:40:21] an orientation but it doesn't actually say anybody has to show up but that's so

[1:40:24] that's where the code of conduct comes in and says thou shalt show up

[1:40:28] there is no requirement for candidate training

[1:40:30] i we do a bunch of it but we talk about it

[1:40:34] the desire for that is either to confirm in those people who are running for the

[1:40:37] right reasons that they are running for the right reason to maybe dissuade those

[1:40:41] people who are running for the wrong reasons

[1:40:43] and to illuminate to people what the job actually is so when we do candidate

[1:40:47] training we usually ask an outgoing member of council who's declared that

[1:40:51] they're not running again to participate and actually speak to what the reality

[1:40:54] of the situation is something i would note here about uh

[1:40:59] just the vagaries of the year because january to december is the is the

[1:41:04] council year or the fiscal year that means the new budget and starts january

[1:41:08] 1st if you have fall elections you bring in

[1:41:12] brand new people who conceivably have no never worked in local government who may

[1:41:16] have never been elected to anything in their lives who all of a sudden have to

[1:41:20] vote on a multi-million dollar budget without any real knowledge of how to do

[1:41:23] it and to me that's one of the drawbacks of the way our local government system

[1:41:27] is set up in canada so this isn't anything that is specific to uh to

[1:41:31] ontario it is something that does that does show up however

[1:41:37] so government doesn't stop just because of the election cycle so there's a

[1:41:40] difference too between the head of that beast the council and everybody else who

[1:41:44] working from the city manager on down they just have to keep on going

[1:41:48] another principle here and one of mine anyway is if i look at a council

[1:41:53] and this is this is accountability and transparency does council keep

[1:41:57] everything public unless there's a reason not to or

[1:42:00] does council keep everything private unless they actually have to release it

[1:42:04] now you'd have to challenge individual members of council with that but it does

[1:42:08] become cultural as well because of the work that council members

[1:42:12] do in closed session or in camera they by default know more about what's

[1:42:17] going on stratfor than anybody else including their spouses hopefully

[1:42:21] because they are privy to the information that's happening that

[1:42:25] solicitor client privilege that negotiation on land sales

[1:42:28] all the the evaluation of the city manager all those things happen

[1:42:32] privately and so the members of council know more about it

[1:42:36] but my principle would be and i see this too differently on candidates than on

[1:42:41] counselors candidates are all big on transparency because they don't think

[1:42:45] we're having to see enough of what's going on in the city however once people

[1:42:50] get on the other side of that table and realize why things are the way they are

[1:42:54] they may not go all the way to say you know what we need to keep a whole lot

[1:42:57] more things quiet than i thought we did or private than i thought we did but

[1:43:01] they do start to understand why things are the way they are and one of the

[1:43:04] frustrations might be that because things are confidential you

[1:43:08] can't actually be told why they're confidential just that they're

[1:43:10] confidential another note here is about something

[1:43:14] when we do investigations into municipalities that aren't working well

[1:43:16] we have this saying about it's never about what it's about

[1:43:19] we're often addressing the symptoms of something rather than the cause of

[1:43:22] something and so if we we often do interviews as parts of these things but

[1:43:26] we often hear essentially the same circumstance

[1:43:29] described in different ways and

[1:43:33] things become self-evident facts anytime there's a facebook group

[1:43:37] involved i'm suspicious for example or anytime there's that group of

[1:43:42] you typically the old fellows who gather down at the amw for coffee on tuesday

[1:43:45] mornings talking about common sense they become self-evidently obvious

[1:43:50] because they're talking to themselves so

[1:43:54] my encouragement in all these sorts of things is get to know what how the other

[1:43:57] half lives or what the other side thinks and that we'll talk a lot more about

[1:44:01] that in this session on engagement and finally where you stand depends on

[1:44:05] where you sit and this is the piece about

[1:44:08] what you see as a candidate or perhaps as a citizen those of you who are here

[1:44:12] versus those who are council members and i don't think we have any council

[1:44:15] members left here today but those who are members of city council may see the

[1:44:20] same issue from a slightly different perspective because they're sitting on a

[1:44:23] different side of the table not better not worse just different and

[1:44:27] therefore able to perhaps some provide some rationale to why things are the way

[1:44:31] they are and then some of it becomes cultural too

[1:44:34] so if transparency if there's a municipality that doesn't really fall on

[1:44:37] the side of transparency or accountability at some point it's always

[1:44:40] been that way and that's where culture takes hold and it's really hard to

[1:44:43] change culture once it's ingrained first of all you have to realize it's there

[1:44:48] the only way you realize it's theirs by looking somewhere else to find out what

[1:44:51] the culture is there so those are some of the principles

[1:44:55] i kind of already dealt with a bunch of these as well but

[1:44:58] the if we talk about some of the concepts here about the tools that are

[1:45:01] available to you is accountability and transparency now that is something that

[1:45:04] is required of you not you specifically but of stratfor

[1:45:09] and you can't again probably beat this one

[1:45:12] to death already about uh transparency and accountability the use of in-camera

[1:45:16] sessions they're uh they're a legitimate tool in local government in fact all

[1:45:19] governments if you think about it local government is the only order of

[1:45:22] government in canada which does most of their business in public

[1:45:25] you think of a caucus caucus and cabinet solidarity at the

[1:45:28] provincial or federal orders of government and almost nothing happens in

[1:45:32] public if you watch what's going on in the legislature and house of commons a

[1:45:35] lot of that just seems to be for show it's question periods sound bites that

[1:45:39] sort of thing however local government has to do so

[1:45:42] much more in public than the other orders do

[1:45:45] sometimes that raises the ire of people too because the same discussions that

[1:45:49] would happen behind closed doors and nobody's watching are now happening in

[1:45:52] public and people are standing have to be accountable for some of the things

[1:45:55] that they say when it does come to closed session

[1:45:59] we use the term land labor and legal and that's really simplistic but there are

[1:46:04] there are very limited topics that can actually be discussed in a closed

[1:46:07] session and they do kind of generally deal with things like

[1:46:10] what we do with land purchasing or zoning or or

[1:46:15] selling land or labor uh union negotiations or the the city manager's

[1:46:20] annual performance review or legal if the city is being sued or wants to sue

[1:46:24] somebody else or advice from the lawyer those are the sorts of things that often

[1:46:27] happen in camera however only the discussion can happen

[1:46:31] in camera if there's a decision that has to be made that has to be made in public

[1:46:35] typically the only decision only emotion or resolution that can be provided in

[1:46:40] camera is to come out of in camera and so that's the only one that's

[1:46:43] actually recorded on in minutes of the meeting

[1:46:46] and some musicalities go further on this

[1:46:49] than others but the reason for going in camera has to be provided and that

[1:46:53] usually that has to include a reference to exceptions or exemptions from

[1:46:57] disclosure in the freedom of information act

[1:46:59] some go further than that and actually say what the topic was in general

[1:47:03] without giving away too much and some of them will provide names of who actually

[1:47:07] was there the assumption being that members of city council were there

[1:47:11] but they're the only ones who you should assume that on

[1:47:14] city manager is often there some members of city manager may be there to provide

[1:47:19] advice there may be some external people for example i go i go into in camera if

[1:47:24] we're dealing with an organizational review for example and sometimes my name

[1:47:27] shows up on the minutes and sometimes it doesn't

[1:47:30] we're going to deal with engagement specifically in session three

[1:47:33] but recognizing that engagement is a two-way process it talks about how you

[1:47:39] deal with a city and how the city deals with you whereas communication is more

[1:47:43] of a one-way it's the city telling you what's going on there's something called

[1:47:47] an engaged continuum of engagement that's produced by the international

[1:47:51] association of public participation or iap2

[1:47:55] and it goes all the way from one end about informing people so if you think

[1:47:58] about what's on the city's website or a newsletter that you may get or something

[1:48:02] that shows up on a sign and it's just pushing information to you that's one

[1:48:05] way the other end of this full spectrum is actually empowering somebody else to

[1:48:10] make a decision so that's real engagement but because we work because

[1:48:14] local government is government and the final decision is councils it doesn't we

[1:48:18] don't go we don't go quite that far council can take advice from people or

[1:48:23] groups and that's about as far down the continuum we get i made a reference

[1:48:27] earlier to council and how they deal with their own remuneration

[1:48:31] and that's where i see as close to full-on engagement

[1:48:35] as you get the final decision of course still resting with council so those are

[1:48:39] the topics we're going to talk about next time

[1:48:42] if we think about engagement i started off this whole session but if

[1:48:46] nobody lived where you do there would be no need for stratfor there were no need

[1:48:49] for local government no need for staff no need for budgets and property taxes

[1:48:54] so if you think about ways that you can engage with your city these are some of

[1:48:57] the obvious ones perhaps some of the less obvious ones of course there's a

[1:49:02] huge referendum that happens every four years a little bit more if there's a

[1:49:06] by-election somebody made a reference earlier about

[1:49:09] whether these are popularity contests the larger the municipality the less

[1:49:12] it's a popularity contest in small villages it often is a popularity

[1:49:17] contest or it's completely the opposite i hate that guy so i'm not voting for

[1:49:20] them because i went to school with them we had a fight out by the bike racks in

[1:49:23] 1964 so something to that effect

[1:49:26] you can get involved in council committees council meetings and

[1:49:29] committees are by default open so we call them public meetings because

[1:49:34] the public can watch government being done not because the gov public can

[1:49:37] participate but it's just being able to watch it

[1:49:41] some of the council committees will have citizen reps on them

[1:49:45] oftentimes the advisory committee is an economic development advisory committee

[1:49:48] or a recreation advisory committee will have people on it

[1:49:52] you can actually go and speak to council as a registered delegation which often

[1:49:56] you would have to provide a presentation topic you want to talk about you'd be

[1:49:59] given x number of x number of minutes to provide your presentation and maybe some

[1:50:03] time for questions afterwards there's also public hearing statutory

[1:50:08] sometimes public hearings are required by statute

[1:50:11] so in order for a bylaw to happen between first and second reading or

[1:50:14] between second and third reading a camera which you actually have to have

[1:50:17] an open hearing in which case anybody who wants to have a say can

[1:50:22] some of these are non-statutory public hearings which means

[1:50:25] that the cities just decided that it'd be a good idea to hear from people and

[1:50:29] so the council has said yes for this even though we don't have to we're going

[1:50:32] to open this this issue to a public hearing

[1:50:36] sometimes there are open houses at which the same four people generally appear

[1:50:40] some fewer and fewer places are using those they can be virtual or they can be

[1:50:44] real they can have flip charts and notice boards about a particular topic

[1:50:48] neighborhood revitalization or something like that where you want to you want to

[1:50:51] meet and talk about something local and then of course these are your

[1:50:54] counselors you can contact them directly be nice to them and they'll uh get more

[1:51:00] flies with sugar than we do honey than you do with uh screwed that one up

[1:51:03] completely than you do with vinegar anyway

[1:51:05] so those are just ways that you can engage

[1:51:08] just before we get on with what's going on because we're coming to an end the

[1:51:12] end now there's a few more questions here i'll get to

[1:51:16] uh or comments some of these are actually comments uh

[1:51:20] conflict of interest acts says particularly pecuniary interest

[1:51:24] and how you deal with it so we will actually deal with that one of the

[1:51:28] interesting things about even peculiary interests where financial conflict of

[1:51:31] interest if for example i is a citizen who is also a city councilor own a piece

[1:51:36] of land and i want to say subdivide it put two two infill houses onto one

[1:51:41] as a member of city council i can't vote on that decision

[1:51:44] but as the land owner i still retain my rights as the landowner and as a citizen

[1:51:49] so i could actually get up from my council seat walk around sit down in on

[1:51:54] the in the council chamber and present to council on that topic and be present

[1:51:58] through that debate because i don't lose my rights as a citizen in the landlord

[1:52:03] so just a bit of a nuance to that where are we

[1:52:08] commonwealth women's parliamentarians of canada have good training materials

[1:52:11] called she should run they do the federation of canadian

[1:52:14] municipalities has good material on their website too

[1:52:17] and sometimes provincial municipal associations do as well

[1:52:22] they're looking for a lot more inclusivity and diversity on municipal

[1:52:26] councils so there's a lot of work and effort and

[1:52:29] money being put into promoting the role to those particular groups

[1:52:34] also note here from vicki about gray and bruce counties offering training to

[1:52:37] female candidates about what it means to be a municipal counselor

[1:52:41] elect her now dot ca somebody note from jay decisions in

[1:52:46] camera are secret and not transparent have happened what are the discipline

[1:52:50] measures if that is done that's where you would get your

[1:52:53] integrity commissioner involved most likely it's really difficult to prove

[1:52:57] however that that happens because the informal decision if you

[1:53:01] like a straw vote sometimes does happen but the formal decision has to be done

[1:53:05] publicly one of the things we have found whenever

[1:53:08] we do investigations the first place we start to look is what's got out of in

[1:53:11] camera that shouldn't have got out of in camera

[1:53:15] whether that's something verbal or something written you're not supposed to

[1:53:17] take notes you're not supposed to record meetings somebody invariably puts their

[1:53:22] iphone on the table and turns it on especially if we're in a virtual

[1:53:25] environment and nobody can really tell what else is going on so that's one of

[1:53:28] the first places we look at a dysfunctional municipality but what's

[1:53:30] come out of in camera that shouldn't so it's to me that's one of the primary

[1:53:35] good governance concepts is what needs to be what happens in camera

[1:53:40] needs to stay in camera someone said i think counselor henderson

[1:53:44] and ceo thompson are still online if so i'm not looking at very many people but

[1:53:48] that's fantastic if they are and a note about who is to organize

[1:53:52] training of city for upcoming counselors before the name goes on the ballot

[1:53:57] so this is one of those places again a member of a citizen who meets

[1:54:02] the criteria for being eligible for nomination can put their name on the

[1:54:05] ballot if they can come up with the signatures in the deposit they don't

[1:54:08] move out of town um

[1:54:11] anybody can do that and from then so some of these websites that people have

[1:54:14] suggested are places that you can get training

[1:54:17] sometimes municipalities will put on training for candidates

[1:54:21] we do a lot of that training for we do training typically

[1:54:24] before nomination date so they can choose whether to continue

[1:54:28] with nomination or choose not to by the time nomination day has passed and their

[1:54:32] name is on the ballot they bought signs they're kind of committed so

[1:54:36] we typically do it before that happens their ongoing professional development

[1:54:41] for council is important too because they will usually do an orientation

[1:54:45] right after the election within a few days of the election and it's the sort

[1:54:48] of stuff we're talking about today about a whole lot more and in a whole lot more

[1:54:51] detail and there's no way they can remember it

[1:54:54] all so some municipalities will do ongoing

[1:54:57] professional development and have a budget in the in the budget for training

[1:55:01] or counselors so they'll bring in a registered parliamentarian to talk about

[1:55:04] meeting procedure or they're bringing someone like me to talk about good

[1:55:07] governance or they'll bring in somebody who's got a local local bent to talk

[1:55:11] about local issues others will there are sometimes

[1:55:14] municipal associations offer elected official training programs there are

[1:55:18] provincial and national conferences as well that people can go to so there are

[1:55:21] all kinds of ways that the real public servant who wants to serve their

[1:55:25] community better can do it and most of them do it to some extent or another

[1:55:29] there are some caveats to that sometimes city

[1:55:32] councilors want to go and do a like a corporate directorship and have the city

[1:55:35] pay for that i'm a little iffy on whether that's a legitimate expense or

[1:55:38] an mba some of them will want to do a program

[1:55:42] of study and sometimes it's legitimate but that's ultimately up to council to

[1:55:45] decide and some of those things can be uh laid out in policy too

[1:55:49] a couple of notes here oversight mechanisms as watchdogs so you've got

[1:55:54] your integrity commissioner members of council are watchdogs on each other will

[1:55:58] you know when we deal with of interest it's the whole question on ethics

[1:56:02] actually i'm doing an ethics session in about an hour for a chamber of commerce

[1:56:06] board uh and so there's a lot more that can be

[1:56:09] dealt with that but the

[1:56:12] uh the city also retains final decision-making authority and so that

[1:56:16] oversight has to be there as does a relationship then between city council

[1:56:20] and city administration particularly the city manager does the city manager have

[1:56:24] that real or uh

[1:56:28] perceived ability to push back on members of city

[1:56:32] council to remind them of things to talk about things that perhaps are starting

[1:56:37] to go astray a lot of times they do they wouldn't happen in a council meeting

[1:56:40] usually it'll be quiet conversation maybe it's in camera maybe it's a

[1:56:44] one-on-one those sort of things that would happen

[1:56:48] so many notes here too about some sessions have been offered by sitting

[1:56:51] count city counselors collaboratively and they're a great source of

[1:56:55] information and i mentioned when we do candidate orientations we often bring in

[1:56:58] a a retired counselor to do that because nobody knows it like they do or

[1:57:04] do i do certainly agree with that somebody says bill says have to go at

[1:57:08] eight good night bill we're gonna leave oh

[1:57:11] it's eight o'clock right now i forgot i didn't actually realize what time it was

[1:57:13] just going through your questions here

[1:57:17] so if we if we look at that that's something leave the questions for there

[1:57:22] and next time we get together we're going to talk about role clarity so it's

[1:57:25] council talk start big and work down so we're going to talk about council is the

[1:57:29] collective we're going to talk about the office of the councillor the office of

[1:57:33] the mayor counselor and mayor are very closely related they're both counselors

[1:57:37] and then we're going to talk about the administration

[1:57:41] typically but potentially some others as well i

[1:57:44] might throw a little bit in there too to expand a little bit on conflict of

[1:57:47] interest but cuny your interest just because a bunch of you have brought it

[1:57:50] up tonight and it wasn't something that really fits in budget or into engagement

[1:57:55] so i'll see we can throw that a little bit of that into what i will say as i

[1:57:58] was planning these sessions is this is very similar to what we would do

[1:58:01] uh council orientation

[1:58:05] whole lot more details not to be quite circumspect on what it is we actually

[1:58:09] provide so with that in mind the last item on

[1:58:13] note here thanks for the answers ken thank you ken you and i should have

[1:58:17] another conversation we've got a ton of questions here i appreciate the input to

[1:58:20] this before we before we pass before we pass on that's the wrong way to say it

[1:58:24] before we leave this session are there things that have worked for

[1:58:28] you that now in terms of just the structure of

[1:58:31] this because i don't do this very often are there things in terms of structure

[1:58:34] that need to change i don't know if anybody has any thoughts on things

[1:58:37] they'd like to see done differently or exactly the same

[1:58:41] things you liked or didn't like you can put it in the chat or you just

[1:58:44] blurt it out and as we go that i'm just going to move

[1:58:48] to my last slide here which is sorry

[1:58:53] which is just my uh contact information if you want it

[1:58:58] the mural behind actually an interesting story here the mural behind this you

[1:59:02] can't really see very well actually it was on the wall of town office in hay

[1:59:05] river northwest territories because i get everywhere

[1:59:11] uh okay so some nice comments great comments in the chat there's any last

[1:59:16] comments before we wrap up

[1:59:21] all right i gave you all your five seconds you're all off ken you had your

[1:59:25] hand up thank you you're the first and only person thus far who's actually put

[1:59:27] his hand up go ahead you are muted though so

[1:59:31] oh is this oh that's just a clap you didn't actually want to say anything

[1:59:34] it's just applause oh thank you

[1:59:36] so really that's what i was after i was just pulling so that you actually have

[1:59:39] to say something so i feel good about myself

[1:59:42] so you've got my contact information here if there is something that comes up

[1:59:46] tonight as you're ruminating over this over the next few days and you want to

[1:59:50] ask me a question or things that ought to be on a future session let me know

[1:59:53] as i started the beginning i really applaud the city for

[1:59:57] uh going with this and doing something because this isn't controlled so you can

[2:00:02] ask whatever questions you want and talk about topics that you want to talk about

[2:00:05] because i'll talk about them all because i really like this sector

[2:00:08] so keep that in mind if you do have

[2:00:11] anything you want to talk about in the next little while please contact me if

[2:00:15] not it sounds like we'll see some or all of you in the next couple of weeks from

[2:00:18] now if you enjoyed this and sounds like some

[2:00:21] of you did at least and a lot of you are still here please let other people know

[2:00:24] the link and everything i think is on the city's website

[2:00:27] and have people come out we i'm quite happy

[2:00:31] to talk about the state of local government

[2:00:34] in ontario specifically but in canada more generally so

[2:00:37] if there's nothing else i will bid you all good night

[2:00:40] and stop the recording and we'll see where it all goes

[2:00:45] thanks so much thanks everybody have a good night

[2:00:49] everybody

Good Governance - Session 1

Transcript