Archive for the ‘municipal’ category

Sharing City of London PDFs

July 31st, 2012

Through a simple combination of Automator (a little known feature of OS X), Dropbox and GoodReader, I now have more than 450 City of London PDFs available on my iPad. The documents cover a wide range of topics (budgeting, business planning, bylaws, research and statistics, planning and development, etc) and are organized into subfolders.

Here's how it works:

  • I created a workflow in Automator to retrieve the contents of the current webpage in Safari, get the URLs linked to from that page, filter the URLs to only include PDFs, and then download those PDFs to my dropbox folder.
  • For each topic, I visited the City of London's helpful web pages and run the workflow, which downloads all of the PDFs in a matter of a few minutes.
  • I've shared the dropbox folder with a half a dozen Londoners who also would like access to these PDFs
  • I connected GoodReader on my iPad to download and keep the the City of London dropbox synchronized with my iPad.

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Posted in Web, municipal

Zero debate on zero per cent

July 26th, 2012

The public part of Tuesday's city council meeting ended on a rather awkward note, as Mayor Joe Fontana acknowledged that council had not followed proper procedure on an earlier vote on the tax levy target for the 2013 budget. This was the vote on whether the target for the 2013 budget should be a zero per cent tax increase.

At the outset of the meeting, before any debate on the tax levy motion itself (the main motion), councillor Dale Henderson made a motion to "put the question" on the taxy levy, which means ceasing to debate the motion and moving immediately to voting on the motion. This is a common procedural tactic in deliberative meetings, often employed after an extensive debate, when the participants are starting to repeat themselves. However, since it puts an end to debate, it requires greater than a simple majority support to pass. According to the the council procedure bylaw, which governs council meetings, such a motion to put the question requires at least 2/3rds support to carry (see section 11.15). The error on Tuesday night occurred when Mayor Fontana declared that the motion to put the question had carried with eight councillors voting in favour (53%). The motion to put the question actually required the support of at least 10 councillors.

A motion to put the question has a lot of qualifications in the council procedure bylaw (see 11.14), including one that prohibits such motions when the matter involves approval of an expenditure by council of $1,000,000 or more.

To his credit, Fontana raised the issue of the improper decision later in the meeting and asked council if they wished to reconsider the main motion. Councillor Joni Baechler moved a motion to reconsider, but Fontana noted that a motion to reconsider the taxy levy target must be made by a member of council who voted in the majority. Further, a motion to reconsider also requires 2/3rds support. No one who voted in the majority (for no debate and in favour of zero) was willing to make such a motion, including, apparently, the mayor himself.

Now this may seem like so much procedural bafflegab, but it actually matters.

The vote on the taxy levy target is an important one. It sets a goal and establishes a framework within which all of the subsequent budget consultations and debates will occur. As this table of potential expenditure reductions under three different taxy levy scenarios shows, it means about $25 million in cuts, as opposed to $8 million or so if the taxy levy were to increase by 3.8%. Both proponents and opponents of the idea of a zero per cent tax increase agree that the issue is important.

Despite the importance of this vote, eight councillors voted in favour of pre-empting debate by putting the question. There were no arguments made in favour or in opposition to the tax levy target of zero per cent. Having employed this procedural tactic effectively (though improperly, as we later learned), the same group of councillors then proceeded to vote in favour of the tax levy target of zero per cent.

No debate on what was arguably the single most important item on city council's agenda that evening. Why?

It would seem that the coalition of councillors who are voting in favour of a zero per cent tax increase target are not interested in trying to convince their fellow councillors to support their position. Nor are they concerned that any member of their coalition is wavering in his or her support of the zero per cent tax increase. So they see no need to debate the issue. The outcome of the vote on this issue, it seems, is a foregone conclusion.

Of course, council has previously debated the issue of a 0% tax increase, in committee and as a council, with both debates ending in a 7-7 tie vote (tied votes fail), which brought the issue forward to Tuesday's meeting. But this specific vote on the tax levy target for the 2013 budget would finally decide the matter, and the implications for the 2013 budget are different from those in 2012 or 2011.

Most importantly, the purpose of debate on such issues at city council is not only to persuade councillors, but to justify the policy to Londoners, to articulate the rationale and to outline the expected costs and benefits. It would seem that the coalition of eight councillors can no longer be bothered to do so.

They will likely come to regret that decision.

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Posted in Politics, Public policy, municipal, tax

Opting-out of CETA: what does it mean for London?

May 2nd, 2012

Observing the debate last night on London "opting-out" of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the European Union, I had to wonder if some of the councillors understand international trade negotiations and how trade agreements are implemented.

After debating the issue, city council voted 10-5 to opt-out of CETA. This notion of municipalities "opting-out" of CETA is being advanced by the Council of Canadians, which celebrated its success after the council vote.

During the debate, Paul Van Meerbergen, Joe Fontana and Harold Usher were the strongest voices against the motion to opt-out. Stephen Orser also spoke against the motion. Both Van Meerbergen and Orser said that this motion would send a signal to businesses that London isn't open to trade. Usher argued that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, of which he is a director, needs the city's support to advocate for the agreement to respect its seven principles.

Several councillors clearly do not trust the federal government to negotiate a trade deal that would benefit London. They were quite concerned about the impact of a potential future agreement on municipal procurement policy. Sub-national (ie provincial and municipal procurement) is a relatively new topic in international trade agreements for Canada. Although Canada is a signatory to the WTO's plurilateral (which means not all of the members of the WTO are signatories) Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA), that agreement only applies to procurement by the federal government, not provinces or municipalities. The more recent Canada-US Procurement Agreement, which allowed Canadian firms to be exempted from US Buy American provisions, included:

  • provincial and territorial procurement commitments under the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) for all provinces and territories (except Nunavut) in exchange for U.S. sub-federal GPA commitments;
  • temporary Canadian procurement commitments for construction projects for some provincial/territorial agencies not included in the GPA and a significant number of municipalities in exchange for the U.S. exempting Canada from the Buy American provisions of the Recovery Act for 7 programs of interest that receive funding from Recovery Act; and
  • a commitment to explore the scope for a long term government procurement agreement between Canada and the U.S., within the next 12 months, to deepen on a reciprocal basis, procurement commitments beyond those in the WTO GPA and NAFTA.

London was included in the list of municipalities in Ontario that these temporary procurement commitments applied to (see Part B - Market Access).

The Canada-US Procurement Agreement also includes these general exceptions:

3. Subject to the requirement that such measures are not applied in a manner that would constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination where the same conditions prevail or disguised restriction on international trade, nothing in this Appendix will be construed to prevent Provinces and Territories from imposing or enforcing measures inter alia:

  • necessary to protect public morals, order or safety;
  • necessary to protect human, animal or plant life or health;
  • necessary to protect intellectual property; or
  • relating to construction services of persons with disabilities, philanthropic institutions or prison labour.

It is also worth mentioning that the negotiated rules are reciprocal: if we agree to no longer discriminate against European companies in municipal procurement, then European municipalities will not discriminate against Canadian companies in their procurement decisions. The idea is to increase competition and thereby lower costs for government procurement. Increased market access to Europe could be very good for a London success story like construction company Ellis Don.

Now, regardless of whether you think an agreement between Canada and the European Union would be good or bad for Canada, Ontario or London, it is worth considering how international trade agreements actually function.

First, two or more national governments enter into negotiations with each other. Once they reach agreement, each national government is responsible for enacting or updating legislation to implement what was agreed. In federal states like Canada, to the extent that the agreement affects sub-national governments within the federation (provinces in Canada's case) or the municipalities within those provinces, the national government will need to negotiate with the provinces to implement the agreement. This is why provinces are involved in negotiating CETA.

Whether a municipality is "in" or "out" during negotiations means little. It is totally impractical to have individual municipalities involved in international trade negotiations -- just think how many cities at least the size of London there are in the European Union! (answer: there are roughly 100 such cities in Europe).

Regardless of what city council decided last night, the federal government and the provinces will continue negotiating a deal with their counterparts in the European Union. If they reach agreement and the federal government and provincial governments enact legislation and regulations to implement CETA, then London -- or any municipality in Canada, for that matter -- will not be able to opt-out of those federal or provincial laws and regulations.

At best, this "opting-out" decision is a negotiating tactic between the city and the Province of Ontario. At worst, it is just an roundabout attempt by the Council of Canadians to scupper the trade negotiations before an agreement is reached.

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Posted in Politics, Public policy, municipal, trade