If you would like to view the press conference, it can be found here.
And here is the province’s media release about it.
As I expected, the province announced the elimination of all directly-elected Regional Councillors in Ontario.
Of grave concern is that the province will now be appointing all Regional Chairs in the province. The Regional Chairs in Durham, Halton, and Waterloo were directly-elected by their communities, so it appears they will be losing this democratic right. As I’ve written a few times before, following the 2022 municipal elections in Ontario, the province re-wrote the Municipal Act to explicitly allow them to appoint the Chairs in Niagara, Peel, and York.
The much more concerning part about this loss of democracy, though, is that the province will also be introducing “strong chair” powers, similar to the “strong mayor” powers they’ve been instituting throughout this term.
This means the regional budget will be the Chair’s budget. The provincially-appointed Regional Chair with strong chair powers will present the budget.
Asked repeatedly, Minister Flack tried to deflect the question of who will be appointed and if these people won’t just do the bidding of the province. However, rightfully so, the “Bob Gale incident” and the “Hitler debacle” were raised by journalists who were present, and we know from other discussions that the province is very investing in appointing Conservatives, even when (in my view) party politics do not belong in municipal and regional council chambers.
As I also expected, there was no discussion about safeguards for weighted voting.
Asked about it several times, Minister Flack sidestepped the question of if and how votes will be weighted. Near the end of the press conference, he said we already have weighted voting in Niagara with the number of people who represent each municipality, so if we are to assume votes will be weighted based on current representation, then:
- St. Catharines – 7 votes
- Niagara Falls – 4 votes
- Welland – 3 votes
- Fort Erie – 2 votes
- Grimsby – 2 votes
- Lincoln – 2 votes
- Niagara-on-the-Lake – 2 votes
- Pelham – 2 votes
- Port Colborne – 2 votes
- Thorold – 2 votes
- West Lincoln – 2 votes
- Wainfleet – 1 vote
HOWEVER, and I cannot state this more clearly, this presumes that members representing each community vote in blocks, and we do not.
Other than unanimous votes, I cannot recall a single time that all seven people representing St. Catharines have voted the same on an issue.
Weighted voting like this puts the decision-making power in the hands of three people who only ever need one other person to agree with them. Safeguards are needed to ensure smaller municipalities are heard and those safeguards were not put in place.
Laura Ip - Regional Councillor 