Bruce County council is implementing some recommendations from the Ontario Ombudsman to address concerns over several closed executive committee meetings it improperly held from 2017 to 2019.
All of the meetings in question were moved behind closed doors citing the Municipal Act, where meetings may be in whole or in part closed to the public, namely when discussing proposed or pending land acquisition, or when personal matters about an identifiable individual are the topic of discussion.
One of the recommendations that council will not be adopting from the Ombudsman was to make audio or video recordings of closed meetings.
While all council meetings that are open to the public are recorded as a standard practice, closed meetings will not be recorded.
The main reasons are to prevent duplicate records of meeting minutes and to prevent a violation of privacy.
Since one of the main reasons meetings get moved to closed status is because items deal with sensitive information, they also would want to prevent that information from being revealed.
Bruce County CAO Derrick Thompson says that the municipality has accepted and adopted a majority of the recommendations because they want to be as open and transparent as possible.
“We’ve really updated policies and procedures where our clerk reviews the closed meeting exceptions for all closed reports now… We want to be accountable and transparent all the time, so we’ve made some changes to our policies and our practices and take what the Ombudsman’s report said and put it into practice.”
Thompson also says that with the four meetings that were under investigation, it wasn’t because rules were broken intentionally, but rather because they were being cautious.
“We hold the public trust and transparency in very high regard in this organization. We’ve made the appropriate changes to our policies and procedures. We’ve trained staff and council on closed meeting protocol, so we have done some good work at moving it forward.”
Council has chosen to make the minutes and agenda for the meetings held on September 21, 2017, and September 6, 2018, open to the public with no redactions.
The meeting that was held on January 10, 2019, will have the minutes and agenda made public, with the exception of the discussion related to personal matters about an identifiable individual being redacted.
Lastly, the meeting on August 2, 2018, will not have its minutes and agenda released to the public.