By Evan McMurtry
The City of Ottawa has decided to open a new front in its effort to redraw ward boundaries before the next municipal election.
The city committee responsible for legal issues voted last month to take the province to the Ontario Divisional Court.
This week, city lawyers are expected to argue that Municipal Affairs Minister Chris Hodgson acted illegally when he called off an Ontario Municipal Board hearing on redrawing ward boundaries in October.
City solicitor Jerry Bellomo said that the city’s lawyers will argue that the Municipal Act allows a minister to intervene only when there is an “application” before the board.
“What we have is not an application, but several ‘appeals’ to a bylaw,” said Bellomo.
The city’s first attempt to overturn the minister’s order was at the municipal board. Two members of the municipal board ruled on Nov. 12 that they have no jurisdiction to rule over whether the minister’s veto is legal.
If the board does not hold a pre-hearing and hearing by Dec. 31 the city will miss a statutory deadline to change boundaries before the upcoming municipal election in late 2003.
Rideau Coun. Glenn Brooks said in response to the city’s new court case, “Why would you want to continue to spend in excess of $100,000 of taxpayers money to go through a court exercise simply to determine that the minister erred in issuing the Ontario Municipal Board stay in Oct. 2002.”
The population imbalance in the city’s wards is such that Kanata Coun. Alex Munter has about 60,000 constituents and Rideau Coun. Glen Brooks has 14,000.
The Shortliffe Report, which in 1999 planned the merger of 11 municipalities into a new City of Ottawa, suggested that “the existing 18 regional wards, their names and boundaries be continued as the electoral wards of the new city.”
The province of Ontario, with the City of Ottawa Act that amalgamated the city in January. 2001, divided the rural wards into two and added Rideau to make five rural wards.
“With the changes taking place,” said Brooks, “the thinking in the Shortliffe Report was it’s going to take a whole three years for the rural population to adjust to the urban type of government.”
The ward boundary task force, struck by the city in July 2001, argued that ward boundaries should change because they did not take into account Ottawa’s surge in suburban population in the late ‘90s.
The task force planned to reduce surburban ward populations by adding communities on their fringes to rural West Carleton, Osgoode and Cumberland as well as merging rural Rideau and Goulbourn.
But since the task force’s mandate included keeping the number of wards at 21, parts of Kanata and Bell-South Nepean would be combined into a new ward.
Brooks said the city does have the authority to add more wards. He added that he has circulated a 22-ward alternative boundary plan behind the scenes that has the approval of 17 of 21 councillors.