In 2013, the Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW) received the Canadian Association of Journalists’ (CAJ) annual Code of Silence Award, meant to highlight Canada’s most secretive government or publicly funded agency.
Whether or not you agree with the public name-and-shame method, the award was not undeserving.
In giving it out, the CAJ noted municipal officials in the resort had “virtually stifled” communications with the media in the three years since the 2010 Olympics, allowing just three people—the mayor, municipal administrator and public information officer—to speak for Whistler.
The control over information exercised in Whistler “now rivals that of certain federal departments and PR at the most secretive private corporations,” the CAJ said.
That was 10 years ago. Surely the flow of information has loosened since then?
If anything, the RMOW has only grown more insular and opaque over the years, even as would-be elected officials pounded the campaign trail with promises of transparency in 2018.
The latest front in the fight for total control of the message is now playing out at the council table. On Dec. 5, elected officials debated new rules for public input at council meetings—in effect as part of a pilot project for much of the past year.
The new rules limit each speaker to three minutes, and the total Q&A portion of the meeting to 30 minutes. They require participants to sign up in advance of the meeting, and provide their topic and relevant questions ahead of time.
But here’s the kicker: questioners can only touch on topics on the night’s agenda, or those that have appeared on an agenda in the past two meetings.
Needless to say, this severely limits what a person can comment or ask questions on.
As someone who spent six years attending every single council meeting, I can empathize with the desire to streamline or contain the public process—let’s be honest: the peanut gallery is not always bringing its A-game to the podium for public Q&A—but restricting what the public can ask or talk about at a public meeting is a bridge too far.
With this restriction in place, the RMOW effectively controls what is entered into the public record at each meeting. In practice, a speaker can be procedurally gagged the second they begin to say something that isn’t included on the agenda. And that’s a problem. Because the RMOW controls what gets put on council agendas.
Staff’s suggestion that the public can simply write a letter to council first to put their item of choice on the agenda, then come ask a question in person, is downright farcical. This community has a very obvious problem with engagement at public council meetings—the RMOW should be counting it as a win when people show up in person to engage them, and bending over backwards to hear what they have to say, not throwing up more obtuse, unnecessary roadblocks to prevent them from contributing.
As Councillor Ralph Forsyth pointed out at the meeting, this “elegant solution” amounts to little more than “chicanery”—a not-so-subtle lever to further control the public record.
Coun. Jessie Morden had the right of it when she proposed an amendment to strike the restriction on topics.
“There’s no other time that we are all together, that [the public] can address us … I think we should be giving people every opportunity we can to address anything they want,” Morden said.
“I understand they can write a letter and get it put on the agenda, [but] that’s a process not a lot of people know about, and they don’t watch the council meetings so they won’t know about it now.”
In the end, Morden’s amendment failed, with Forsyth and Coun. Arthur De Jong supporting it, and Couns. Jen Ford, Cathy Jewett, Jeff Murl and Mayor Jack Crompton opposed.
One of the arguments in favour of restricting topics is that it’s easier for staff to prepare when they know what’s coming, so they can then provide a more robust answer to the questioner. Fair enough, but the more time staff has to prepare, the more time they have to spin, or deflect, or massage the perfect message into existence. That’s not to imply the municipality is inherently untrustworthy, only that the new process ensures every single response will have been thoroughly deep-cleaned in the RMOW’s vetting machine before making it onto the public record—an obvious win for municipal message control.
Another argument is the restrictions keep meetings focused on “the business of council.” Again, this line of thinking doesn’t carry water. Our business is council’s business. We elected you, and you should be interested in hearing what we have to say—even if it isn’t on one of your municipally-curated agendas.
It also doesn’t make any sense when you consider some of the other restrictions. You’ve now got a 30-minute time limit in place for the entirety of the Q&A period, and a three-minute time limit for each speaker—why do you also need to restrict the content of their speech?
If what the speaker is saying is particularly painful or upsetting to you, it will be over in three minutes. It might be ill-informed, and off-topic from the current business in front of you, but at least it will be on the public record, in the speaker’s own voice.
As it stands, the restriction on topics is unnecessary overkill, a transparent attempt at further influencing public discourse in favour of the municipality, or at the very least limiting the opportunities for public, municipal embarrassment.
But hey—at least the RMOW is transparent at something.
