The Office of the Ombudsman of Ontario says complaints to the agency about closed municipal meetings have steadily declined over the past five years, after reaching a high of 305 in 2012-13.
A decade ago, Ontario established a new open meeting enforcement system through amendments to the Municipal Act, 2001, requiring every municipality to have an investigator to deal with complaints about meetings closed to the public.
On Jan. 1, 2008 the Ombudsman became the investigator for all municipalities that did not appoint their own. Since 2008, the office has handled nearly 2,000 such complaints.
“However, complaints to our office about closed meetings have steadily declined in recent years, after peaking in fiscal 2012-2013 – when a few cases received significant public attention,” states the 2017-18 annual report from Ombudsman Paul Dubé.
The office received 80 total complaints in 2017-18, which is the lowest number since the 68 received in 2009-10, the first full fiscal year the office operated as closed meeting investigator.
This is despite 223 municipalities using the office as meeting investigator – the highest number to date.
The report attributes the decline to the expansion of the Ombudsman’s jurisdiction in 2016 to include complaints about all matters relating to municipalities, not just closed meetings.
“Prior to this, many of the closed meeting complaints we received reflected attempts by complainants to address broader issues; now that they can complain to us directly about these issues, they are less likely to complain about narrow aspects of the open meeting rules,” the Ombudsman explains in the report.
Of the complaints received in the past year, only 59 were from municipalities where the Ombudsman is the investigator (the others were referred to municipalities’ own investigators). These resulted in investigations of 30 meetings, 17 of which the office states were illegal under the Municipal Act.
“In other words, almost 57% of the meetings investigated were illegal – the highest proportion we have seen to date,” the Ombudsman points out in the report.
