Back to council

This week, children across Oshawa will be returning to school. Whether for the first time or the last time, young people across the city will be learning lessons and applying what they’ve learned towards their futures.

Students aren’t the only ones making a return this week, with regional committees getting underway ahead of the Sept. 23 session of council – the first since the summer break. Municipal committees are doing the same thing ahead of the next regular meeting of city council on Sept. 28 (there was a special meeting yesterday, Sept. 8).

As with students, councillors will be looking back over what’s happened last year, and also looking to the year ahead.

This session of regional council brings forward matters that will impact the future for a long time to come. A committee is currently working on deciding the composition of the council for the future, and many scenarios presented at its first meeting over the summer will see Oshawa lose seats. The reasoning behind this is that Oshawa has more councillors per capita than any of the other Durham municipalities, with others wanting their fair share. Councillors on the committee, such as Pickering’s Bill McLean, said at the last meeting that the committee can’t get hung up on representation by population. Corporate services commissioner Matthew Gaskell says more needs to be looked at besides population, and he’s absolutely right.

Gary Valcour, chair of the Oshawa Port Authority and member of council composition committee, said it best at the first meeting in July.

“Generally speaking, the man with the gold rules and whoever is going to be paying the piper for all of this…we’ve got to factor that in, and there’s ways to do that.”

Over at the city, the future of the city’s priorities are soon to be decided, with the next five-year plan soon coming up for public consultation. This document, as mentioned before in these editorial pages, will be what steers the city, and it is up to the public at these consultation meetings to help decide what direction to turn the wheel.

We have a few months of decision making at both levels of government that directly affect this city coming up in the next few months before the next recess over Christmas, and we hope the city and region move in the right direction and take into account the voices of their constituents.