Council backs down on delegation limits in the most convoluted way possible.

City Hall | Paul Dechene | Dec. 16, 2021

The council calendar report is a routine item that comes up at the end of every year. Traditionally, all it does is set the schedule of council and committee meetings for the upcoming session. That’s it.

But this is 2021. Nothing is routine or traditional. Not even the council calendar.

Oh, things started ordinarily enough. The city clerk presented a calendar proposal at Executive Committee on Nov. 3. A few amendments were made. One introduced mandatory bathroom breaks every 90 minutes. Another, laudably, removed all he/him and she/her pronouns in the procedure bylaw and replaced them with they/them.

Then, on Nov 24, this amended report was brought to the council floor.

Except that when it came time to approve the council calendar, that amended report was not what council voted on.

Instead, ward one councillor and deputy mayor[1] Cheryl Stadnichuk introduced a three-page motion that dramatically amended council procedure and that bore little resemblance to the council calendar report that was in the agenda package.

If you were watching the council meeting live, understanding what exactly was in this motion was challenging. Stadnichuk offered to read the whole motion into the record but the clerk said it would be acceptable to summarize it “quite quickly” while Mayor Sandra Masters instructed her to “just give the high points.”

I’ll do the same. This three-page motion would result in the following:

  • The Community Wellness Committee and the Operations and Community Services Committee would be discontinued and their responsibilities folded into Executive Committee.
  • Delegations would no longer present at city council meetings. Instead, delegations would present and take questions from councillors only at Executive Committee meetings.
  • Bathroom breaks were retained. Phew!
  • Did you catch that delegations would no longer present at city council meetings? Yeah, that was kind of big.

None of this was discussed or debated by council.

Turns out, council didn’t need to discuss those proposed changes because they had everything pre-discussed. Apparently, they had met in between public meetings, in private, with the city clerk, out of the public eye, and had hashed out the details of the three-page motion. On the down-low.

As for us chumps watching from home, we wouldn’t even get a look at the three-page motion until the following morning.

In other words, the public was not informed that these procedure changes were coming and they were therefore unable to share their thoughts on those changes at council.

This was highly irregular.[2]

The main argument in favour of ending in-person delegations at council meetings was that there have been many controversial items coming to council and attracting a lot of delegations.

As these delegations may present at both council and Executive Committee, there has been a doubling of the time council is spending listening to the public. It was felt that limiting delegations to Executive — where there’s no requirement to submit a presentation in advance and where rules of order are more relaxed — is the best way for council to hear from the public.[3]

The conversion therapy ban debate was cited as an example of a situation where delegations had bogged down the decision-making process.

Which is ironic because the conversion therapy ban debate is also an excellent example of how council is an architect of its own woes.

Yes, there were a lot of delegations speaking on the ban. But many of those delegations were given the opportunity to extend their speaking time dramatically through endless lines of questioning from councillors Bresciani, Findura, Mohl and Shaw. Those four councillors were just as responsible for making the conversion therapy meetings grueling slogs as any delegation was.

In fact, by focusing on when delegations can speak as a solution to the problem of over-long meetings, council conveniently skipped over all the many ways they themselves add to their workload. Such as debating tabling motions (something that’s prohibited under the procedure bylaw but they do anyway). Such as, moving surprise motions during meetings necessitating hours of second guessing when things go awry, as was the case with the oil-and-gas sponsorship motion — and with these changes to the procedure bylaw.

In the end, the move to discontinue delegations at council was defeated at the Dec. 4 council meeting. Before an amended bylaw is officially passed[4], the public is allowed one last chance to speak to it. Eight delegations came out to speak against the changes to the procedure bylaw. Council finally debated their three-page motion in public. And they voted it down.

That put council back to square one.

The clerk’s office has had to draft a new meeting calendar and a tweaked set of procedure bylaw changes. Delegations will be able to speak at Executive Committee, council or both. Wellness and Operations are gone. Potty breaks are on. As of this writing, council hasn’t decided what to do with these new recommendations as the calendar report has been tacked onto the end of the special Regina Police Service budget meeting.

As if that wasn’t already packed full enough.

So far, council’s proposed changes to the procedure bylaw have eaten up two hours and 35 minutes of their time. And 1,059 words in Prairie Dog (footnotes included).

Funny, some might call that a waste of time. 

[1] The position of deputy mayor rotates through council, with each councillor taking a two-month turn.

[2] But it was technically in order. I spoke with city clerk Jim Nichol and he explained that councillors can at any time bring forward a motion on the floor of council and have it voted on in that meeting.

That said, when I spoke with Councillor Bob Hawkins after the Nov. 24 council meeting, he was convinced that the three-page motion to discontinue delegations at council was included in the Nov. 24 council agenda package and that anyone who had bothered to read through its 708 pages would have known it was there. I had to screen share the document with him and go page by page through the relevant sections to show him that it had not been included.

[3] For the record, Executive Committee is a committee that includes all members of council and the mayor.

[4] Through a parliamentary-style three-readings procedure.

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Other City Things

Covering city hall in 2021, I’d just catch my breath from one “holy fuck what the hell?” story when we’d get hit by another. back in January I did not imagine that my writing this year would be dominated by oil company sponsorships, a conversion therapy ban and a surprise motion to stop in-person delegations at city council.

There are only so many hours in a day. And I only have so many nerves on which this council can get. That means there have been many stories I’ve failed to cover sufficiently. Here are six. /Paul Dechene

1 CAMP HOPE

This could be the single most important thing to happen in Regina this year as it forced people to finally notice we have a housing crisis thanks to the Saskatchewan Party’s sabotage of their social services system. Lots was written about this while the camp was in Pepsi Park. But now that they’ve moved indoors and out of the public eye is when vigilance is really needed.

2 WELLNESS

Council passed a Community Safety & Well-being Plan with an ambitious list of short-term priorities covering domestic violence, harm reduction, overdose prevention and more. It looks great but, I’ll be honest, it’s hard to get excited by another awesome-sounding master plan when you’ve been disappointed by the lacklustre implementation of so many that came before. Speaking of…

3 REVITALIZING DOWNTOWN (AGAIN)

Seems our moribund downtown is in need of a revitalization. Hunh? We even formed a new advisory committee to guide that effort. Hunh! That’s all very ironic considering 2022 is the 10-year anniversary of the Downtown Neighbourhood Plan becoming a bylaw. This crucial revitalization work was supposed to have started a decade ago. Someone really needs to spend some words on why that went nowhere.

4 DILUTING DENSITY

Increasing our urban density is a cornerstone of the Official Community Plan but councillors Bresciani and Hawkins have been working in earnest to reverse course on this with a forthcoming Market Choice Of Housing report that could undermine our barely implemented density targets.

5 SUSTAINABLE DONUTS

A local landowner got the OCP changed so we could get a one-of-a-kind “sustainable” Tim Horton’s (with drive-thru) on Chuka Blvd. It’s as absurd as it sounds. But it will probably pass.

6 FLOODS AND DROUGHT

Even the Queen City isn’t immune to climate change. Duh.