Keep meetings open, municipal councils told

KIRK MAKIN Friday's Globe and Mail June 22, 2007 Globe and Mail

The Supreme Court of Canada has issued a wake-up call for municipal councils across the country to conduct business in the open whenever possible. In a 7-0 ruling, the court said that the city council of London, Ont., was wrong to hold a meeting in camera and then hastily pass a vote that put a freeze on a controversial development project. Madam Justice Louise Charron said the whole point of holding municipal meetings in the open is "to imbue municipal governments with a robust democratic legitimacy." "The open meeting requirement reflects a clear legislative choice for increased transparency and accountability in the decision-making process of local governments," she said.

University of Western Ontario law professor Samuel Trosow said in an interview that it would be wrong to view the ruling as a victory for developers. What it really represents is an mportant endorsement of the public's right to openness in the political process. "I think that the reason the Supreme Court took this case was that they wanted to make a very strong statement to the public about the right to open meetings," Prof. Trosow said. "This is a case of interest to every city in Canada. I think that every city solicitor will be sending a memo to council today about it." The dispute began in early 2004, when London City Council and its planning committee held two closed meetings - without stating their purpose - to debate an interim control bylaw that would impose a one-year freeze on development of a portion of one of its main thoroughfares, Richmond Street.

The move came after one of the city's biggest developers, RJS Holdings Inc., had moved to create a highly contentious student-housing project. Within eight minutes of concluding its second closed meeting, the full city council immediately voted to impose the freeze. Defending its actions in court, the city argued that closed meetings should be allowed when the subject matter of a debate involves potential litigation and that interim control bylaws are important enough to require secrecy. However, the Supreme Court said that, while a council can justifiably hold a private meeting to deal with a wide range of topics, it cannot blithely dispense with the notion of at least giving advance notice or publicizing the nature of the meeting.