Tempers flare at committee meeting

By Graeme McNaughton/The Oshawa Express

An 11-hour meeting can get the best of anyone’s nerves – this was a lesson learned by many councillors at the region’s first meeting back following the summer recess.

The meeting marked the first under the region’s new pilot program, which sees individual standing committee meetings replaced with a single committee of the whole meeting once per month.

The inaugural gathering ran for more than 11 hours, with a few 10-minute rests and one half-hour lunch break to give councillors and staff a breather.

However, one councillor says this set up was not fair to her or others having to arrange childcare.

“It was a total lack of respect not only for me as an individual council member who needed to be accommodated for childcare needs, but a total lack of respect for staff that had been there longer than us and deserved to have a break,” Councillor Amy McQuaid-England says.

At approximately 5:30 p.m., or about eight-and-a-half hours since the committee meeting began, McQuaid-England told councillors that she was going to need to leave soon to pick up her daughter from childcare, and requested that a one-hour break at that time – which is part of the committee of the whole procedural bylaw that councillors were at the time debating – be taken.

Shortly after, Regional Chair Roger Anderson said that he had promised those in council chambers that a break would be called for.

“I did give council and committee of the whole my word that if this went past 5:30 today, that we would take a break because some people had to leave,” Anderson said, later adding that he would ask for a motion for a one-hour break.

“I’ll give you a motion to recess, I hope someone will second it and I hope it gets defeated,” Anderson said, addressing Councillor Bob Chapman who, as the head of the finance and administration committee, was chairing that portion of the meeting.

After the motion was defeated, McQuaid-England left the meeting. Shortly afterwards, councillors voted on taking a 10-minute break.

However, she returned later in the meeting and, with her daughter sitting next to her, addressed her colleagues on what had happened.

“I was afforded, by this council, a promise that we would take an hour break at 5:30 to pick up my daughter and be accommodated for childcare. And this council made a joke of it. This council took a 10-minute break and…some of the councillors said it was my fault because I took too long today in council with my questions and doing my job,” she said.

“There are staff members right now, female staff members, who have young children who are trying to make arrangements. The same as I had to do with my daughter. It’s not accessible, it’s not fair and it is completely disrespectable. I am completely disappointed in all of you as my colleagues who stood up and said I would not be disadvantaged when we moved to committee of the whole.”

Speaking with The Oshawa Express the day after the meeting, McQuaid-England said she had to leave to pick up her daughter because her husband was unable to do so as he was at work.

The Oshawa councillor adds that, after meeting for more than eight hours, she did not see it as an unreasonable request to break for an hour.

“I think it was a total lack of respect for a young parent on council, and also for staff members who have their commitments. Or maybe they have dietary requirements, could have diabetes, you don’t know,” she says.

“To not take a break after you’ve been there…for almost 12 hours, and staff would have been there longer because they come in before us. This wasn’t just about the fact that I needed accommodation. It was also about the fact that they were ignoring that staff should’ve had a break.”

Anderson did not return The Oshawa Express’ request for comment prior to press time.

Back to the old system

McQuaid-England says that how her colleagues treated her and one another during the first committee of the whole meeting shows that the pilot program may not be working.

“I think that council really needs to consider whether this structure is beneficial to the public, whether it is beneficial to the decision-making and the decorum of council members,” she says.

“I think the first day was a disaster.”

That sentiment was shared by Ajax councillor Colleen Jordan, who says that 11-hour meetings lead to breakdowns in decorum like what happened with McQuaid-England.

“Many of the things that are indicitive of it being a very bad governance system. I feel strongly that we shouldn’t have changed to this,” she says.

“People are dealing with a massive amount of information and decision-making and just the sheer volume and the length of the meeting, people are tired, hungry and I don’t think meetings that are that long provide a culture of good decision-making.”

Jordan says that business at the region worked better under the old system, where standing committees met separately.

“I think that the public and the residents of Durham deserve better. We’re dealing with a number of very important issues, hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets. These programs, they’re extremely important and they deserve good decision-making, good debate, good discussion, and those opportunities are gone,” she says.

“In the old committee system, you had more time to deal with issues and discussion. Staff could give good presentations and give information. You could delve into issues with more depth, and a lot of these issues are really complex. By the end of the meeting, there were 19 councillors. A third of regional councillors were not there. That fact alone should show that this isn’t a good structure.”

The Ajax councillor says that, moving forward, meetings could get longer as agendas get lengthier, and that such a thing would only benefit one person.

“The agenda we dealt with, I would say is a light agenda. If we get a much heavier agenda, how much longer are we going to be? We could be there for a couple of days. To me, there’s no benefit to the people that we are supposed to be representing with this system,” Jordan says.

“The only benefit I can see is that it may make the regional chair’s life easier because he doesn’t have to attend five meetings to be at all of the different committee and only needs to be at one of those now. I have no idea why other councillors voted in support of this new system.”

Jordan is not the only councillor that is not a fan of the new committee structure. Currently on the agenda is a motion being brought forward by Councillor Joe Neal of Clarington and Councillor Shaun Collier of Ajax to revert back to the previous committee structure, with the exception of making any joint committee sessions a meeting of the committee of the whole.