May. 25, 2011 - Issue #814: Love Song

Closed doors

City Council is making big decisions out of public view

Last week, city council voted to proceed with development of a downtown arena, but the proposed plan for the arena is not the only outcome of the decision. The vote raises a number of questions about the way our elected municipal officials operate. The vote, taken late in the evening after a lengthy private session, was made without any notice to the public and without any supporting documentation provided to members of city council. In comments to the Edmonton Journal, Councillor Linda Sloan described the process as manipulative, with councillors reduced to being "puppets, with Mr Katz, Mr Bettman and the mayor pulling the strings."

Sloan has been vocal in her opposition to the project from the start, but the manner in which the vote was taken had even those who are inclined to be supportive of the deal voting against it. Councillor Kerry Diotte says that the vote was too important to be rushed the way it was.
"I don't believe the public was well-served by the fact city council met behind closed doors to discuss the arena deal, then came out of the in-camera to vote on a motion that saw the deal take another giant step," says Diotte.

Battles about council secrecy have been waged for years. When the late Laurence Decore was mayor from 1983 to 1988, council met weekly in private. Dubbed "teapot sessions," the practice was quickly dispensed with by Jan Reimer when she took office in 1989, telling the Edmonton Journal it was not her style to do "backroom deals over rum and cokes."

Following Reimer's defeat, the practice crept up again. In 1998, Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason—then a member of council—raised issues about closed-door meetings, going so far as to formally request a legal opinion about the practice. His questions led to former mayor Bill Smith curbing the amount of private decision-making, but not ending it entirely. Mayor Mandel has re-established the practice in spades.

Two years ago, the Alberta Federation of Labour, the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 30 and the Civic Service Union 52 filed an action in the Court of Queen's Bench challenging Edmonton city council's decision to sell off EPCOR’s power generation business to the newly-formed Capital Power. Around the same time, Bill Pidruchney, a local lawyer and former head of the Alberta Securities Commission, attempted to get an injunction against the sale. Both applicants argued that council had violated the Municipal Government Act (MGA) by holding a "behind-closed-doors" shareholders' meeting to make the decision.

AFL president Gil McGowan explains that the unions believed council acted illegally.
"We argued that the process followed by council contravened important sections of the Municipal Government Act, in particular the sections requiring councils to make their decisions in public forums and the sections related to delegation," he says.

City lawyers argued that when it made its decisions about EPCOR, it wasn’t acting as a city council but as a "shareholder," and therefore the MGA did not apply. In the end, the court ruled against the unions.

Which brings us back to the arena decision made by council last week. At the time of the EPCOR decision, the judge was clear that his ruling was specific to the EPCOR situation. Darrell Lopushinsky, a lawyer with the city law branch, told See Magazine that the "natural person powers" the judge cited in that case were not an official excuse for council to do whatever it pleases. "It doesn't give them carte blanche to do whatever they want," he said.
Observers of last week's arena decision, on both sides of the debate, are left wondering if that isn't exactly the case. V

More stories in front »

vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus