To the editor,
Two years in a row now, South Bruce council has been asked to video record their meetings and post these videos on YouTube.
Protect Our Waterways (POW) has made this request, twice now, so that there would be a permanent record of not only the decisions council makes, but how and why these decisions are made. The request to post the recordings to YouTube was made to ensure that any taxpayer, at any time, could view the council meetings and participate in the democratic process.
Our council is in charge of making decisions that will affect our community for decades to come. It influences multi-billion-dollar investments that will affect our lives for generations. Our organization represents many members of South Bruce who want to hear more from our elected officials, not less.
Each time we have requested video recording and online posting, council has said no (taking the advice of administration). Their message is, if people wish to hear what’s being decided at council, then the current practice of people having to attend in person is just fine, thank you.
The administration’s written rationale for no live video, recording, and distribution was first presented to council in September 2021 and repeated in September 2022. In summary, its rationale is that council is not legally required to do so. And, even if they wanted to, it is too complicated, would take up too much staff time, and would be expensive – as the recordings would need to have closed captioning as well. Demonstrating her due diligence, CAO Leanne Martin attached quotes to her report. She told council the entire process would cost about $30,000 a year for two meetings a month.
In her report, Martin added one more point. While there are many municipalities in Ontario that do indeed record their council meetings, distribute them live on YouTube, and leave them there for a permanent record – most municipalities of similar size to South Bruce do not do this (by extrapolation, of course, some do).
This is typical of how our municipality’s administration and council collaborate. Nothing about what was reported by the administration or discussed at council on this issue could be considered, by law, improper. From a respect for a resident’s perspective, administration and council failed to recognize the rather substantial elephant in the room. Twice.
South Bruce is one of only two municipalities in Canada giving serious consideration to hosting all the nuclear power industry’s spent fuel. Seventy-thousand tonnes of it and more for generations to come. That’s one big elephant to overlook.
This makes South Bruce so much more different than any “similar sized communities.”
Our repeated requests to record council meetings were not made so more people could watch the proceedings live. The request was made so all South Bruce residents would be able to watch the proceedings on their schedule, not the municipality’s. Our municipal leaders, elected and non-elected, know that well.
The real issues are transparency and ease of public access to the democratic process. Both issues, providing citizens with more or less of each, are council decisions. With the prospect of tens of thousands of trucks delivering nuclear waste into our community and storing it here, forever, Protect Our Waterways believes that our local government needs to provide residents with more access to the democratic process. Council’s decision-making process must become more transparent (a stated goal of the municipality in all of its strategic plans since 2014).
With the municipality’s and the NWMO’s shared emphasis that we become “more informed,” providing residents with YouTube access to council meetings would be a welcome step.
Based on the CAO’s own report, that would cost about $1,200 a meeting – and probably less. At that price, transparency seems good value for money.
Anja van der Vlies
Protect our Waterways
