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Description:
Local Government Bulletin No. 33, December 2002

The purpose of this bulletin is to focus debate on the need to increase the powers and authorities of local government in Canada and to ensure local communities achieve more autonomy. Our website is http://www.localgovernment.ca .

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In this issue:
1. Lessons from Two Public Inquiries
2. The cost of Local Restructuring
3. Cable Coverage of Municipal Issues
4. Subscribe to the Bulletin
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1. Lessons from Two Public Inquiries

Two judicial inquiries are now being held in Ontario into separate, but related, municipal problems. One is the hearing in the Toronto area around contracts with MFP Financial Services, a company that provided computer services to the City of Toronto. City Council thought it was getting into a contract valued at slightly over $40 million only to find the contract’s real value was closer to $100 million. The other inquiry is in the City of Waterloo and again involves MFP with similar questions about the actual costs paid by council, which far exceed what Council thought it had contracted for. Both inquiries are being held under the Municipal Act and are being conducted by judges.

Two lessons come from the inquiries. The first is something of a surprise. These inquiries might point the way to municipal councils providing a Hansard, that is, an accurate written record of committee and council debates, much as is now provided for Legislatures and Parliament (Hansard Reports).

Each inquiry has contracted with a Calgary based company, Tscript for the transcript of proceedings. This company provides a transcript of the day’s proceedings at about 7:00 p.m. each evening and posts it on its website so anyone can access it. Tscript’s principle, Wendy Warnock, says she has been in the legal transcription business for several decades and has been making use of new technology to provide this kind of service to public inquiries. (She also provided this service to the APEC Inquiry in British Columbia several years ago, and to the more recent Walkerton tainted water inquiry.) The hearing is taped and the tape is sent electronically to the Calgary offices of Tscript where it is transcribed and posted.

It means that anyone interested in what happened that day (or any day of the inquiry) simply goes to the inquiry web site – http://www.torontoinquiry.ca or http://waterlooinquiry.ca or the company’s website http://www.tscipt.com - and pulls up the relevant file. With the publicly posted transcript, the whole process is open and transparent.

Could this be applied to municipal council meetings? Ms. Warnock says she is not aware of any municipality in Canada that now provides a transcript of its meetings but she does not see any significant technical problem adapting the service provided to inquiries to the municipal situation. “Having a good sound system is part of the component,” she says. “Unlike legal hearings, Council meetings can be heated and sometimes in heated discussion it is difficult to tell who said what, so the transcript will contain more dashes and there will be more inaudible sections.”

But apart from that problem she thinks the service could be extended to municipalities. While reluctant to commit herself to a firm price without careful study, she thinks that transcribing and posting the proceedings of a council meeting lasting a day would cost something under $3,000, providing a tape of the proceedings was already being made.

Residents of many cities have often suggested they would like a transcript of council meetings. The existence of a transcript would probably restrain some councillors who realise their words might come back to bit them. At the same time the transcript would assist citizens who want to know what their representatives were really saying at the meeting.

The second lesson from the inquiries is somewhat more familiar to City Hall insiders – lobbyists have extraordinary access to mayors and councillors and they exert real pressures on them and on staff. Having this kind of detail clearly in the public realm – actually, on the front page of the daily newspaper - shows the messiness of Council’s business. In the case of Toronto, Mel Lastman is shown to have been far out of his depth in the mayor’s office. From his evidence it seems clear he rarely understood what was happening around him, he placed enormous faith in staff, and he has a quite limited memory. A review of the transcripts of both enquires, while occasionally entertaining, can be distressing in teaching this particular lesson.

The transcripts of both inquiries are listed at http://www.tcript.com, and click on the TCLI button for Toronto, and the RIM Park button for Waterloo.

2. The cost of Local Restructuring

A new study from Britain provides what most people instinctively know – the cost of municipal reorganization is usually far above the estimate and it is only partially offset by any savings that may be achieved.

The new data comes from an article by Michael Chisholm of Cambridge University in the journal ‘Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy,’ Vol.20, p.251-262, and entitled, “The cost of local government structural reorganization in Great Britain during the 1990’s.”

Margaret Thatcher’s government passed the Local Government Act in 1991, establishing the Local Government Commission for England to reorganize local government. The Commission reorganized five counties by abolishing two tier local government and establishing unitary authorities, and in several other counties it modified the nature of the two tier structure. By 1998, 46 unitary councils had been established to provide local government for eight million residents.

In each case the National government allowed the new local governments to borrow money to meet reorganization costs, saying that the costs would be recouped with the savings that would be generated. Further revenues would come from existing local government reserves.

As it turned out, the cost estimates of reorganization that had been provided by those itinerant consultants Ernst and Young were far less than the actual cost of reorganization which was 82 pounds (about $180 CDN) per person. Chisholm concludes estimates were in “the order of one quarter to one third the actual cost.”

Comparable reorganizations took place in parts of Scotland and Wales, and again the costs exceeded estimates by 135 per cent and 96 per cent respectively. “Whether the expenditure incurred will be recouped by long term savings only time will tell,” writes Chisholm, “although in the early years after reorganization there has been no evidence to suggest that savings are being obtained and some evidence that costs have actually increased. If that finding is confirmed in the medium to long run, any justification for reorganization would have to rely on non-financial arguments.”

There is no reason for assuming that the data in Great Britain would not apply directly to Canada. Unfortunately, the article is not available in electronic format, but it may be available at some university libraries.

3. Cable Coverage of Municipal Issues

On October 10, the Canadian Radio and Television Commission released a new policy for community television which takes effect on January 6. The new policy states that 60 per cent of required community broadcasting by cable companies must be “local” in content, and between 30 and 50 per cent of local content must be “access”, that is, programming by groups or individuals in the community.

The broadcasting of a municipal council meeting or other government proceedings is not considered “access” by the CRTC. Paragraph 57 of the Order states “The Commission agrees … that live coverage of municipal council or other community government proceedings not be considered access programming. Such programming, if considered as access, could dominate the access portion of the schedule to the detriment of access programming that is more reflective of citizen self-expression. Nevertheless, the Commission considers that live coverage of municipal council meetings and other government proceedings is an important aspect of the community channel’s responsibility and will count as local community television programming.”
What this new ruling means is that cable companies must ensure that the broadcasting of municipal council meetings or other municipal matters, does not occupy so much time that it offends the quotas established by the CRTC. In some cases this can lead to a problem. In Toronto, the vice president of programming for Rogers Cable, Collette Watson, advised the Bulletin that one reason why Rogers was not able to broadcast the public inquiry into Toronto City Council contracts with MFP Financial Services Inquiry was that once the order takes effect on January 6, the amount of time involved would infringe upon the new CRTC policy.

It is still unclear what input municipal councils or their representatives had into the hearings that preceded this new policy by the CRTC. This might be one of those instances of unintended consequences where the new policy restricts rather than enhances the availability of information about local political matters to local residents.

A copy of this new policy can be found on the CRTC website at http://www.crtc.ca .
Click on `Decisions, Notices and Orders’, scroll down to `Public Notices’, click on `Public Notice, 2002 Broadcasting,’ and scroll to 2002-61. The key rulings and conclusions are found in paragraphs 40, 55, and 57.

4. Subscribe to the Bulletin

The bulletin is sent, at no cost, to about 1500 individuals involved directly or indirectly in local government in Canada. The next bulletin will be available in January 2003. Those who receive this Bulletin directly (not forwarded by a third party) are already part of the subscription list. Others who wish to subscribe should go to the web site http://www.localgovernment.ca and following the instructions. To unsubscribe, please send a message to info@localgovernment.ca indicating your wish to unsubscribe.

More information about the sponsors of the bulletin, a library of relevant and useful documents, and an archive of past bulletins, can be found on our web site. We appreciate your comments, your feedback (to j.sewell@on.aibn.com ), and items of interest that you wish to share with us and others who visit the web site.
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