{"id":16487,"date":"2016-04-04T14:39:38","date_gmt":"2016-04-04T18:39:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/?p=16487"},"modified":"2016-04-05T08:10:17","modified_gmt":"2016-04-05T12:10:17","slug":"collingwoods-broken-committee-system-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/collingwoods-broken-committee-system-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Collingwood\u2019s broken committee system, part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Coup<\/a>
Coup d’etat!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Back\u00a0in early 2015, I wrote that the experimental standing committee structure<\/a> adopted by council was broken<\/strong>. Well, wouldn’t you know it, a year later, council finally agreed. And they replaced it with… you guessed it: another standing committee system. But it’s potentially a much more dangerous threat to our community.<\/p>\n

The former system had committees of\u00a0three council members, which\u00a0met away from the prying cameras that broadcast full council meetings, some of the\u00a0committees skulking\u00a0on the top floor of the library to further avoid public scrutiny.<\/p>\n

Because a group of three councillors was not a quorum, committees could only\u00a0recommend a course of action to council. Delegations and presentations had to be repeated in front of the whole council: a pointless\u00a0redundancy for staff and the public.<\/p>\n

In early 2016,\u00a0old committees\u00a0were replaced with two, new five-person committees which meet away from the prying TV cameras, in the top floor of the library where few of the pesky public ever go.<\/p>\n

Here’s where the danger to democracy gets exposed. Aside from the continued reluctance of council to do public business in the open, that is.<\/p>\n

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Five is a quorum of council<\/strong>. Under the Municipal Act, a\u00a0quorum has all the legal authority of a full council. A quorum can legally pass bylaws, decide policies, set tax rates, user fees, approve purchases and conduct the business of\u00a0the town. So you elected nine people, but now just five can decide the course of Collingwood.<\/p>\n

But wait, what’s a majority of five? Right: three<\/strong>. That means only THREE members of council need to\u00a0vote together to\u00a0legally pass bylaws, taxes, policies, create advisory committees<\/a>, task forces, direct staff, give themselves a raise, and so on.<\/p>\n

So you’ve gone from a democracy of nine to a potential dictatorship of three. And coincidentally, there’s an ideological Block poised to take advantage of the new system.<\/p>\n

At least three members of the Block sit on each committee. This is\u00a0the committee equivalent\u00a0of gerrymandering<\/a>: rigging the system so\u00a0a small minority can\u00a0control council’s – and the town’s – business.<\/p>\n

Worse: the mayor is\u00a0“ex officio” on each committee but not the chair: she may attend, but does not have voting privileges\u00a0if the full complement of five is present. So the\u00a0Block can easily shut her out. They have essentially sidelined the mayor while they control the government.<\/p>\n

This, you may recall, is the group that promised the electorate\u00a0openness, and transparency. April Fool’s! Instead, they have hijacked the system to further\u00a0their own personal agendas and vendettas.<\/p>\n

It would\u00a0be open and democratic – and efficient – to hold televised committee of the whole meetings on Monday nights as in the past, with all nine members of council. But that doesn’t sit\u00a0well with the private agendas at play here.\u00a0Democracy? We don’t need no steenkin’ democracy…<\/p>\n

This is\u00a0nothing less than a coup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Back\u00a0in early 2015, I wrote that the experimental standing committee structure adopted by council was broken. Well, wouldn’t you know it, a year later, council finally agreed. And they replaced it with… you guessed it: another standing committee system. But it’s potentially a much more dangerous threat to our community. The former system had committees of\u00a0three council members, which\u00a0met away from the prying cameras that broadcast full council meetings, some of the\u00a0committees skulking\u00a0on the top floor of the library to further avoid public scrutiny. Because a group of three councillors was not a quorum, committees could only\u00a0recommend a course of \u2026…… click below for more \u2193<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,537,546,425],"tags":[618,140,130,39],"class_list":["post-16487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collingwood","category-council","category-ethics-and-behaviour","category-planning","tag-collingwood","tag-council","tag-ethics","tag-municipal-politics-2"],"a3_pvc":{"activated":true,"total_views":5028,"today_views":0},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16487"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16502,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16487\/revisions\/16502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}