Council on thin ice with secret sessions

The question of whether City council had a legal right to hold last weekend’s strategic planning meetings in secret is not, it would seem, an open and shut case.

There has been an assumption in City Hall in recent years that going behind closed doors for council planning purposes was perfectly OK, at least technically.

My views on the desirability of opening up those meetings to press and public have been recorded here more than once (as recently as week before last), so I won’t repeat.

But Monday, the Kamloops Voters Society took up the call, demanding “an end to closed retreats, shirt sleeve or strategic planning sessions by City and regional district politicians and staff.”

This is a sentiment with which I couldn’t agree more. The KVS went on to say, in a press release, “The law in British Columbia, the Community Charter, states that all meetings of City councils and regional district boards shall be open to the public – and of course to the press…. A meeting described as a retreat or strategic planning session is only a meeting by another name and falls under the provision of the act. There is substantial legal opinion to support this view and a host of good reasons.”

I was curious about that last sentence in particular, so asked the KVS’s Frank Dwyer about it. He referred me to an opinion published by Lidstone and Company, a notable Vancouver law firm with expertise on municipal law.

Appearing in December 2010, the article stated, in part, that “If a retreat, workshop, shirtsleeve session or a retreat by any other name walks, talks and looks like a meeting, it is a meeting. And if it is a meeting, all the normal rules of notices, agendas, public openness, and minute taking apply.”

The “normal rules” limit closed meetings to discussions of the so-called three L’s — land, labour and legal.

In locking the doors on its strat-plan huddles, City Hall relies on section 90.1.L of the Community Charter, which is the document that governs what City governments can and can’t do.

That section says council meetings “may or must be closed to public” if they involve “discussions with municipal officers and employees respecting municipal objectives, measures and progress reports for the purposes of preparing an annual report under section 98 (annual municipal report).”

Stay with me. You will note strategic planning sessions aren’t mentioned. But are these sessions held “for the purpose” of preparing the annual report all municipal governments must file to the public by June 30?

Arguing that they are is pretty thin, in my books, even though a statement of council’s goals and objectives is included in the annual report each year.

So, I checked with Rachel Forbes, the lawyer who wrote that opinion for Lidstone upon which the KVS bases its stand.

Forbes, who has since moved over to do legal work for West Coast Environmental Law, agrees the Charter is clear that “objectives” meetings must be for the direct purpose of preparing the annual report.

“It can’t just be any discussion. It has to be for the purpose of providing an annual report.”

She added, “I would feel disappointed as a citizen if my council was holding its strategic planning sessions entirely in camera.”

It would seem council would be well-advised, politically and legally, to rediscover the benefits of transparency.

mrothenburger@kamloopsnews.ca