City and town councils in northeast reject calls to restructure before next election

City and town councils across northeastern Ontario are refusing to look into possible changes to how councillors are chosen.

This despite calls from the public to re-draw ward boundaries or adjust the structure of councils before the next election in 2022.

The latest was West Nipissing, which last week discussed reviewing the ward system which has been in place since amalgamation 20 years ago. 

"I don't see the system broken. I think it's working fine. I say let's leave it as is," said councillor Roland Larabie.

The vote came out 4-4, which means the motion brought forward by councillor Lise Senecal was defeated. 

"So now it's dead for the next two years and to the next council to bring it on," she said.

The city councils in North Bay and Greater Sudbury have also rejected calls to review how many seats there should be around the council table and which parts of the city they should represent. 

In North Bay, several candidates pledged during the 2018 campaign to look at bringing in a ward system, but a call to have staff study the question was voted down 6-4 in January.

"We'd create huge divisions in the city," warned North Bay city councillor Mark King. 

Sudbury councillors received a staff report in the fall of 2019, laying out possibilities for changing the ward boundaries and a possible governance review of the number of councillors and potentially adding some "at-large councillors" elected by the entire city.

"People are being represented well and if we start talking about changing boundaries, we'd open up a big can of worms again," Ward 5 Sudbury city councillor Robert Kirwan argued. 

Ward 4 city councillor Geoff McCausland was one of the few to push for a review and says it's tough to convince sitting councillors to vote for something that could hurt them at the ballot box. 

"The people who are voting for any change are the people who benefit from the status quo," said McCausland.

"You're going to want to keep the status quo because that's what got you elected and if you change it, maybe you won't be elected."

He says the current council structure was "done sort of on the fly" and compares the boundaries for the 12 wards —which include some neighbourhoods not traditionally connected to each other — to colonial powers carving up Africa. 

"Every once and awhile somebody who takes a close look at it says 'This is really weird' and they're not wrong," McCausland said.

"I'd be surprised if the majority of people cared that much about it."

He says "there's a problem there inherently that needs to be addressed somehow" but he says he's OK with the current structure remaining in place for the 2022 election because Sudbury city council has "much bigger fish to fry."

David Siegel, a political science professor emeritus at Brock University who specializes in municipal government, says the vested political interest of councillors is one reason changes are rare. 

"It's also a long, drawn out and can be a fairly expensive process," he said.

That's partly because any changes to ward boundaries or council structure can be appealed to a provincial tribunal, which means the review process really has to begin at the start of a council's four-year term to be in place for the next election. 

Sault Ste. Marie successfully shrunk its council from 12 seats to 10 for the 2018 election, starting the process about two years before voting day. 

While some would like to see politicians cut out of these decisions, Siegel doesn't think it's possible.

He says if the public doesn't like how a council structures itself, they can hold them accountable by voting on election day.