Report highlights council hypocrisy

Despite a damning report from the provincial watchdog, Mayor John Henry maintains that he and the rest of city council did nothing wrong when it closed a meeting back in December.

However, comparing what Henry has said following the report’s release to what the ombudsman writes in its pages leaves a lot of questions.

Henry, along with the city’s councillors, proclaim the words transparency and accountability so often inside council chambers that a constant echo can practically be heard throughout city hall.

Yet, Oshawa council has been found to be in contravention of the Municipal Act for the third time in less than a decade, and as council continues to avow that it is more open than ever, the only thing that is becoming more clear is that they continue to try and keep information from the city’s residents.

It is one thing to say the words transparency and accountability – words that have become so overused in municipal circles that they have been downgraded to the level of political buzzword – but it is quite another thing to actually follow through.

Let us take a look at Oshawa’s current situation.

The city explained to the public that it was closing a December meeting to talk with the OPUC about local power company trends. We now know that main crux of the meeting was to discuss a possible merger, and we also know that, according to the Ombudsman, they broke laws set up for municipalities when they did so because they had no legal reason to close said meeting.

Henry continues to vow that the first he and the rest of council heard about a merger was at a meeting in April, the day prior to the signing of the memorandum of understanding between the Oshawa Power and Utilities Corporation, Veridian and Whitby Hydro, which laid out how the trio would investigate a possible conglomeration of their three organizations.

However, it is abundantly clear from the ombudsman’s report that all of council knew that the OPUC was talking about a merger with Veridian as early as the beginning of 2015. Council may even be given credit for bringing Whitby Hydro into the fold because, before the December meeting, it seems they were not involved in the merger talks

So, we have a mayor and council who close a meeting when they should not have done so, according to the ombudsman, and continue to defend their position.

Mayor Henry believes council didn’t “violate anything in an extreme way,” and maintains council needs opportunities to discuss private business matters in private.

And while we agree there is a need for privacy in certain situations, the Municipal Act must be followed if council wants to avoid coming under scrutiny again in the future for its interpretation of the law.