Will new transparency measures touted for Vaughan city hall increase transparency?

Yorkregion.com
May 13, 2015
By Adam Martin-Robbins

Mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua is pushing ahead with his pledge to regulate lobbyists at city hall. But it appears he might face opposition from some of his council colleagues.

“We have to provide citizens with the tool to satisfy them and their needs as citizens. What I mean by that is - they want open government, they want transparent government, they want to know what is going on at city hall,” Bevilacqua said at Tuesday’s committee of the whole meeting. “When you’re looking at a lobbyist registry, it provides yet another, I would say, truer, more transparent picture of the workings of government.”

The mayor’s comments came moments before he tabled a motion directing staff to prepare a report, before November, exploring a range of options for the “regulation of lobbying activities” with the aim of determining the best model for Vaughan.

The motion passed, but the matter is slated to come back to committee of the whole for further debate and discussion.

It’s not clear at this point whether there is enough support around the council table to implement a lobbyist registry.

Woodbridge West Councillor Tony Carella suggested it’s premature for council to be forging ahead with any new measures at this time.

“Would it not be more appropriate for us as a municipality, before we launch into some potentially expensive program - lobbyist registrar, ombudsman, etc. - to get a better feel of what is the issue, the problem we want to address?” he said during Tuesday’s meeting.

“Transparency and accountability is a wonderful thing. I’m not saying it’s anything but a wonderful thing. But instead of looking at what’s at the end of the march to the Promised Land, I want to know what the issue is that we’re trying to address here. And I want to get that issue out on the table.”

Thornhill Councillor Alan Shefman went even further.

“I think we have more than adequate legislation, bylaws, policies to address issues of accountability in the city,” he said. “That’s not the problem here. The statement of the rules are not the problem, it’s following those rules are what the problem is. ... I think we have a significant deficit in understanding, whether it’s members of council or management, about the scope of the policies that currently exist and the responsibilities that are bound for all of us.”

Public record

Lobbyist registries are designed to provide a public record of the people who meet with bureaucrats and councillors to influence decision-making and to document the issues or projects they’re meeting to talk about.

Municipalities can also set up a system that allows for sanctions to be imposed on those who break the rules.

In Ontario, only a few municipalities have lobbyist registries.

They each have different definitions of what constitutes a lobbyist or lobbying activity and different regulatory processes.

Toronto, for example, requires lobbyists to register with the municipality and outline what they want to discuss before talking to any public officials.

Then they must update the subject matter of the discussion after the discussions take place.

A lobbyist registrar oversees lobbying activities in that city.

In Ottawa, by contrast, lobbyists don’t have to register in advance; instead they must disclose lobbying activities within 15 business days of communicating with a public official.

Registry costs vary

Ottawa’s integrity commissioner oversees the process.

Hamilton is set to implement a similar registry this summer.

The cost of setting up and operating a lobbyist registry can vary widely depending on the model.

Toronto’s lobbyist registrar has eight staff and a budget of more than $1 million, while the estimated costs for Hamilton’s are about $100,000 to set up and $115,000 per year to administer.

Bevilacqua says the benefits are worth it, calling measures that increase transparency and accountability “extremely important investments”.

“It’s about the democratic right of people to understand what’s going on in their government,” he said. “This has been successful at the federal and provincial level. There are reasons why that happens.”

The mayor’s motion came following a presentation by City Clerk Jeffrey Abrams about measures for beefing up transparency and accountability in the municipality, especially given new provincial regulations that are poised to take effect.

New oversight powers

Dubbed Bill 8 Public Sector and MPP Accountability and Transparency Act, the new regulations will, among other things, expand the powers of Ontario’s ombudsman to review decisions, acts or omissions of municipalities, their boards and agencies, according to a city staff report.

In addition to a lobbyist registry, the city plans on approaching other municipalities about establishing a joint municipal ombudsman and creating a “structured complaints and compliments intake system” to be prominently displayed on the city’s website.

The creation of a joint municipal ombudsman would limit the provincial ombudsman to:

• investigating issues that the municipal ombudsman has refused to investigate;
• investigating complaints when the deadline for bringing it to the municipal ombudsman has passed and;
• investigating complaints once the municipal ombudsman’s probe of a specific complaint has finished.