Municipal Act, 2001

And so those are the two top issues for me that we have to address as a city.

Let's turn to Section 284 of Ontario's Municipal Act, commonly referred to as the Strongmare Provisions or Powers.

From memory, What are the powers and responsibilities of the mayor under Section 284?

At a very high level.

What principles and advice will help you determine what information should be confidential and what information should be made public?

Well, it's called the Municipal Act, and there needs to be a very specific reason for going in-camera.

I walked out of two meetings where I thought that was inappropriate, having declared I wouldn't stay.

So there are times when you have to make that judgment.

Well, actually, absolutely, it should be discussed by council.

And again, let me refer to the role of council, one of the role of council from the, uh, Ontario, uh, Municipal Act, to maintain the financial integrity of the municipality, to ensure the accountability, the accountability and transparency of the operation of the mu- uh, the municipality, and to, uh, ensure that the administrative policies, practices, and produ- uh, procedures and controlling policies are in place to implement the decision of council.

This is the Municipal Act.

Now, as far as the mayor is concerned, the Municipal Act again defines the role not only about council, but about the mayor as well, and the staff.

So let me give you this, uh, from the Municipal Act, okay? Uh, "It is the role of the head of council, namely the mayor, to be, to act as the chief executive officer of the municipality." This is, the next one is important.

"To preside over council meetings so that the business of the, uh, can be carried out efficiently and effectively, to provide leadership to, uh, to the council, and also to provide information and recommendation to council with respect of the role of council described in clause 224," the one that I just explained.

So you have to understand, yes, there are the, uh, strong mayor powers that have been voted by the province for the, for the mayors, but that doesn't make the mayor, uh, a dictator or a king.

Let's go see what British Columbia is doing.

In British Columbia, municipalities operate under the community charter, a piece of legislation that gives local governments a somewhat broader range of powers than Ontario's Municipal Act allows.

In practice, the toolkit isn't really dramatically any different.

There is property taxes as the primary municipal revenue source, and municipalities depend on provincial and federal transfers for capital infrastructure, so nothing new there.

There's one last version of the debate that we should note here because it's been raised specifically by Ontario's largest city, and it gets at something the others just don't.

The idea of a genuinely distinct fiscal relationship for major urban centres, sometimes called a big city charter approach, is similar in spirit to how Vancouver already operates under its own charter, separate from the rest of BC municipalities.

The argument here is that a city the size and complexity of Toronto, it has its own transit system, its own public health unit, its own scale of homelessness and shelter response, is simply a different kind of governing entity than say a township of a thousand people and that treating them identically Within the same municipal act framework, it doesn't serve either one well.

Critics of this approach have worried that it would fragment the province's municipal sector even further, creating a two-tier system where large cities negotiate bespoke deals, while smaller municipalities are left with the standard toolkit.

Yeah, hi.

The Municipal Act regulates basic responsibilities of municipalities.

And of course, Toronto has the Toronto Act on top of that.

And I think that the problem is that nobody's holding them accountable in terms of when and how they go outside of their authority-having jurisdiction, the limits of that.

And that cost is well over $100,000 for the elections.

So we opted to err on the side of caution and we picked one of the options that was available to us in Municipal Act and went basically for job interviews.

And we invited members of the community that, you know, had either previously run and not been successful or just, hey, want to be part of this new team to apply and ran the interviews.

And the first one was kind of funny.

Sure.

So it's Municipal Accommodation Tax.

And it was something that was created in the Municipal Act.

It's a new tax that a municipality can can put in place if you choose to.

What do you think council is getting wrong about the way Windsor should be governed?

Well, I think this has been... weaponized extremely to the public such that the public, I don't expect the public to pull out the Municipal Act.

The strong mayor, you know, let's go back to the first base on this one.

The province put forward a bill called Strong Mayors Building More Housing Act, and that amended the Municipal Act, which is the law, the legislation that we have to follow.

And so first of all, they called it strong mayors, which kind of stuck, right? So you're stuck with his moniker of strong mayor.

And so Windsor was one of the first, I think, dozen communities or one or two that started.

You deal with those folks.

But the part that's not talked about is on the budget side.

Okay, so what do the strong mayor powers actually do? Well, when Bill 3 received royal assent on September 8th, 2022, and it came into force November 23rd that year, it was time to coincide with the start of the new municipal council term following that fall's election.

It amended both the City of Toronto Act and the Municipal Act.

And it added a new part 6.1 to each statute.

The title of that new part? Special Powers and Duties of the Head of Council.

Pretty strong statements here, friends.

Mayor Beddoes, for his part, saw things differently.

He argued that the powers reinforced the mayor's role under the Municipal Act as the head of council, but he was alone at the table when it came to that kind of thinking.

And here's the curious coda to the story.