Why didn't you step in sooner?

Councillor presses Ministry for their lack of action in 2018-2022.

“You come here and tell us what different wording to address…” “We paid the price for almost 2 years as a municipality and taxpayers.” - Councillor Fern Pellerin

Anyone following West Nipissing news over the last few years will be familiar with the chaos of the last term of council. The previous council was constantly in deadlock on many issues which resulted in many skipped meetings and significant delays in municipal business.

After Verner councillor Jeremy Seguin quit in 2021, council was unable to come to an agreement on how to fill his vacant seat. This resulted in a 4-4 tie on many issues.

But that was not the only reason for the chaos on council. To most people watching, they would have seen that there was also many issues related to the policies and procedures of council and the municipality.

Interpersonal conflicts between councillors and between councillors and staff appeared to often exaggerate disagreements on how meetings should proceed.

When the Ministry of Municipal Affairs finally stepped in (nearly two years after the deadlock started) to demand council end their turmoil and appoint a 9th person at the table, he also ordered a comprehensive review of the practices and procedures of the municipality. Last night, council received this report and its recommendations.

Today I will share what I believe were the 7 highlights of last night’s presentation and accompanying report.*

The entire report is over 30 pages long and provides a lot more analysis than what I can cover. It can be found here. The entire video of the special meeting held yesterday is at the bottom of this article.

Subscribed

1. What took so long?

The most important moment of the special meeting yesterday was not the many recommendations made by the Ministry. But the comments made by the only councillor who held the Ministry accountable.

When question period opened up, Councillor Fern Pellerin noted that the Municipal Act says the 2020 vacancy should had been filled within 60 days (so by the Fall of 2020).

“Why didn’t you step in sooner?" he pressed them. “You come here and tell us what different wording to address…” “We paid the price for almost 2 years as a municipality and taxpayers.” "Is there any suggestion that you can change the rules at your end so you can intercede sooner?”

Unfortunately they did not have a good answer, stating that legally they couldn’t step in but then acknowledged that they did in fact intercede legally in the Summer of 2022 (which leads to the obvious conclusion that they could have done so two years prior). Shortly after, Mayor Thorne-Rochon came to the defence of the ministry and repeatedly thanked them without holding them to any account for what happened over the last term.

2. Integrity Commissioner

The ministry recommended that council establish service standard guidelines with it’s integrity commissioner and offer more training to councillors on the code of conduct.

In their report, the ministry noted that “concerns were raised by some members of council and staff about the integrity commissioner’s interpretation of the codes of conduct and that the codes may not be consistently applied.”

3. Crackdown on Sharing Sensitive Documents and Closed Session Documents

Another common theme in this report was the sharing of sensitive documents. The ministry staff received calls from the public complaining about the release of documents that were considered by council in closed meetings or were provided to council or the municipality in confidence.

The reports state that “a review of media articles, including social media indicated that this had been a concern throughout this term of council.”

The ministry recommends that the municipality include a warning on all closed meeting minutes, documents and associated emails that they are confidential and not for public distribution.

In 2022, many people were concerned that some members of council had created a fake Facebook account under the name of John Smith in order to release sensitive documents to the public.

4. Committee Appointment Policy

The ministry indicated in their report that council lacked a clear Committee Appointment Policy. Last night in his presentation, the representative stressed that:

“There are no clear policy on how council appoints committee members. How you determine which council members are on committees… How you appoint them to committees…. How you remove them from committees…. It is suggested that you adopt an appropriate appointment policy which recognizes how it’s done.”

This issue has been of concern during this council term when earlier this year, Mayor Kathleen Thorne-Rochon kicked councillors Anne Tessier from the Au Chateau Board. The issue came up again last week when it was discovered that Councillor Restoule skipped 3 straight meetings of the Board of Health.

Council will likely have to adopt a consistent policy on how it deals with this to avoid the conflicts that have resulted to date.

5. Council Vacancy Policy

This will not come as a surprise to anyone. But the ministry has recommended that West Nipissing adopt a council vacancy policy which they have already done.

6. Update Procedural Bylaw

The report made a few recommendations regarding updating the procedural bylaws. Procedural issues were highly debated and led to many meetings lacking quorum. As I shared earlier this week, because councillors and staff disagreed on some procedures of how agendas should be adopted, some councillors refused to attend meetings. This frequently resulted in completely chaotic meetings such as this one:

7. Update the Municipal Complaints Policy

The last key item I identified in this report is a much needed complaints policy review which most of the public will welcome. The ministry noted that the current policies to deal with complaints from the public “do not include any specific commitment to contact the complainant to acknowledge the receipt of the complaint, nor to have any specific reporting timelines with respect to steps taken in response to the complaint, nor to clearly articulate who is responsible for handling the complaint.”