Municipal candidates and advocacy groups are capitalizing on the upcoming election to lobby for the reversal of a two-year-old change to city hall’s advisory committees.
An all-candidates survey compiled by the environmental group Greenspace Alliance of Canada’s Capital shows widespread support for a proposition calling for improvements to the committee structure.
The proposition stated the 2012 change to the advisory committee structure “deprived the city of much goodwill and volunteer effort.”
The city reformed the advisory committee structure in 2012, reducing the number of committees to five from 15, removing their mandate to provide a forum for public feedback and ensuring that the actions of the committees “serve to complement” council’s priorities.
The city also created the built heritage sub-committee, comprised of citizens and councillors, in lieu of the former heritage advisory committee, and created a seniors’ roundtable.
“The framework that they have now . . . that is no solution whatsoever,” says Erwin Dreessen, co-chair of the Greenspace Alliance. “That is just useless.”
According to the city clerk’s report that suggested the change, public forums led the advisory committees to believe they were supposed to represent the concerns of citizens. The report said this role was the responsibility of council and recommended it be removed from the mandate of the advisory committees.
It stated training for the new advisory committee members will reinforce the point that the role is not to act as “advocates for particular mandates or groups.”
Dreessen says the committees have now been reduced to acting simply as a resource for city staff and councillors.
“The advisory committees
. . . were never given a chance to work properly – given virtually no resources, bureaucratized, with little commitment by councillors and almost no influence on council decisions,” Dreessen wrote in an open letter to Mayor Jim Watson, attempting to elicit a response to the survey.
“The old system just wasn’t working, plain and simple,” Watson said.
“The groups were acting as advocates as opposed to offering advice,” he says. “They were contradicting city policy, and it was just becoming more and more dysfunctional and costing taxpayers a lot of money.”
The city clerk’s report estimated the change would save $190,000.
The new system, which Watson says is working better, helped rectify the situation by making the committees work within the priorities of council, and not work against council.
“There is lots of opportunity for individuals to be advocates for their causes,” he says. “You can join a community association or a lobbying group or an advocacy group. But these are called advisory committees, they are to give advice to city council and staff.
We can’t have, on the one hand, duly elected men and women who have run on a platform, and (saying) ’this is what we are going to implement,’ and then simply have another group that are unelected an unaccountable, opposing that.”
Watson added that by creating the built heritage sub-committee and adding citizen voices to the transit commission and the Ottawa board of health, the city has ensured the public s is heard.
All Somerset candidates who responded to the Greenspace Alliance’s survey supported the proposition to improve the workings of the advisory committees. Seventeen community groups also signed on to support the Greenspace Alliance’s letter, which included other propositions on environmental questions.
Somerset Ward candidate Martin Canning was vice-chair of the environmental advisory committee when the changes were introduced. He says he was one of the few committee members to hand in a resignation letter in protest.
“The City of Ottawa watered down citizen engagement,” he says. “That was the primary result of the (so-called) reform.
“When you close the door on citizens, then you take over the powers of the decision-making process . . . It was essentially a reduction of power for citizens and an increase in power for councillors and city staff.”
However, not all respondents agreed, including College Ward candidate Guy Annable.
He said he supported the dissolving of the committees given his personal dealings with them.
“As a person who sat on the business advisory committee for three years with no work plan, not one councillor visiting our meetings and no feedback being taken from any of our reports, I endorsed Jim Watson’s dissolving of the BAC in (2012) along with other City of Ottawa committees as they accomplish little if nothing as the reports we submitted were not reviewed or even considered by council,” he wrote.