ELORA – Centre Wellington has a new staff-council relations policy.
The new policy was adopted by council on Jan. 27, the same day it approved a new code of conduct for council.
“This is more aspirational; how do we speak about things,” said councillor Steven VanLeeuwen, who chaired the meeting in the absence of Mayor Kelly Linton (who was in the hospital with a bacterial infection).
“There’s no enforcement here. It’s a set of norms where we try to lay out how we’re going to communicate and how we’re going to treat people and if speaking the truth is a problem for people then you can remove that, but I think we need norms,” said councillor Neil Dunsmore.
The policy originally came to council on June 17, but was deferred to allow council to submit comments to the clerk.
Councillors Stephen Kitras, Ian MacRae and Kirk McElwain submitted written comments and because they were so varied, staff chose to refer it back to council.
“Differences of opinion on various aspects of the policy made incorporating all of the comments very challenging,” clerk Kerri O’Kane said.
“Therefore, staff will defer to council to select the appropriate direction.”
The first point of contention was a reference to team building sessions run by consultant Juice Inc.
“These norms were kind of developed for a particular situation because we have kind of a dysfunctional council and these norms were designed to address that,” said councillor Kirk McElwain. “They are not necessarily the proper norms for the next term of council and they aren’t particularly meaningful norms to somebody who hasn’t sat through the Juice session.”
VanLeeuwen asked whether council would be comfortable just removing any reference to Juice Inc.
“Something like this would be reviewed each term of council,” he said. “I can see where we could remove the ‘developed with the assistance of Juice’ – scratch that line.
“But I do think that these are important things, that we went through a lot of work to talk about how we work together.”
VanLeeuwen’s motion to remove references to Juice Inc. was defeated by council.
Stephen Kitras objected to the inclusion of “Speak the truth, no holdbacks” under the council norms section.
“I just have to be really frank. We don’t know the truth. None of us do,” Kitras said. “I’ve said that many times – we’re not in the truth business.
“If you have speak the truth with no holdbacks, you’ll have war because everyone thinks they’re speaking the truth and I don’t want that and I don’t think that’s a great aspiration.”
VanLeeuwen said the objections were “a little bit incredible” because council voted on each of the items in the Juice Inc. report.
“We literally did this exact thing, so I’m reminding council we’re doing the exact same work and having the exact same conversation a second, probably third time,” VanLeeuwen said.
However, McElwain saw it differently. He said he didn’t know the Juice sessions would lead to a proposal or a report.
“That was done afterwards and if it had been advertised as policy development, I would bet that the words would have been completely different,” McElwain said.
“Conceptually there might have been a lot the same, but it would have been completely different wording because it was going to be a policy and it would have been meant for a long-term policy but for council.”
Kitras agreed, saying he was against the process.
“I think that this has not been very fruitful; it’s caused a lot of division actually, because we disagreed on it fundamentally and I was willing to fight against it,” he said.
“So I think this whole effort that has happened … is partly about this whole thing and I think it will continue if we don’t vote on this and we’re all unanimous about the whole thing then we shouldn’t move forward with this.”
VanLeeuwen said council has to agree on some direction, because that’s what staff is expecting.
“I really think we are the only ones that can do the scratching as council and the only way we can do the scratching is to look at it and say which are the things that we don’t intend to do?” he said.
“This is a document of aspirations, a document of our desires. If you don’t intend on speaking the truth, we don’t intend on having a positive intent, start scratching.”
Council chose to remove all references to Juice Inc. and the outcomes of those sessions, as well as a section entitled monitoring/contravention, which council felt is covered in the code of conduct and by the integrity commissioner.
With those changes, the staff-council relations policy was passed unanimously.
