Tri-council isn’t useless, it’s not being used

Feb 06, 2008

It’s hard to say whether Sundridge, Strong and Joly’s tri-council meetings are really a good use of time.

The difficulty lies in deciding just what the meetings are supposed to accomplish, and the problem might be that even the participants aren’t sure.

In its favour, the tri-council offers an opportunity for the kind of discussion you just don’t see at individual council meetings. Tri-council is where the best questions are asked, where the important matters aren’t crowded on the agenda by everyday minutia, where a decent debate, or at least a lively discussion, is virtually guaranteed.

It is also one of the few council meetings that does not involve any kind of speculation about what the other two councils are doing. The very issue of ending quarterly meetings is a fine example of this.

Strong passes a resolution. Sundridge needs clarification, and must wait three weeks to decide what to do about it, assuming they have all the information they need. At someone’s request, Elgin Schneider will relay second-hand what Steve Rawn told him. Joly, meanwhile, is waiting to see what Sundridge does, and might not be able to make an official response until the following month. That’s how things work when you do it on your own.

The joint committees suffer from a similar problem – different people reporting back to different councils on the same meeting, with each council potentially discussing something that has already been thoroughly discussed, asking the same questions that have already been asked, and possibly wanting to change something, which would require the agreement of everybody else.

How bad this is depends on the council and the committee. Most aren’t bad. Something like the airport, with five councils in charge and not a whole lot of expertise, can get seriously bogged down. It might actually benefit from a regular five-council meeting.

If you want to talk about wasting time, talk about having too many cooks in the kitchen. Is an extra evening four times a year really that bad?

It might be if it doesn’t actually help to streamline anything. Tri-council is great for discussion, but not so good for action. The problem is that tri-council is….. What is tri-council anyway? It isn’t a level of government. It has no official status. The decisions are made by three councils – the same people, but not together.

After discussing an issue together, one would think they would be in the best possible position to decide something. Instead, they typically decide to take the matter back and discuss it as individual councils. Then they are either supposed to go through the whole resolution rigmarole or worse yet, wait three months to discuss it again, and then go and pass individual resolutions. And in the most recent example, they couldn’t agree on which it was.

Tri-council meetings are good things, useful things. The problem is that they could be much more useful. There should not be loose ends. There should be no room to disagree on what was decided. Things shouldn’t be left undecided. Decisions should be made, and made clear, while everyone is together. Everyone should understand what they are expected to do – not assume, but understand. Most importantly, nobody should leave with any expectation that does not involve something happening before the next tri-council meeting.

Tri-council needs to be taken seriously. It must be a valuable part of government, not an informal chat, and certainly not a pointless pain in the backside. Yet, when you look at the comments of the three mayors, indifference is the most positive thing there.

When the tri-council meets, it should function, at least in spirit, as a single council. The parochial attitudes should be set aside and the meeting should be treated as if it were a real meeting of another tier of government. It doesn’t need any official decision-making status, just a willingness to treat its decisions as binding and ratify them as separate councils without any fuss.

If councils are going to own things together, they should make their decisions together. If Sundridge, Strong and Joly can master that, the question will not be whether quarterly meetings are worthwhile, but whether quarterly is often enough.