'I want to be the boss': The frustrating limits of being a city councillor
Joanne Chianello | CBC | Posted: September 8, 2022 8:00 AM | Last Updated: September 8, 2022
Carol Anne Meehan decided not to run again after 1 term, turned off by 4 acrimonious years
All Carol Anne Meehan wanted was a few garbage cans.
Some residents in her south suburban ward complained there was trash strewn about a local park and were hoping for a few recycling bins to keep it cleaner.
"And I think, 'OK, I could do that," Meehan said.
But it turns out that she can't, because there's a pilot project examining recycling in parks and hers isn't one of the test sites.
"So I have to go back and say 'No, you can't have it,'" Meehan said. "I can't even get a garbage can!"
Meehan, a former CTV anchor who's used to being in the public eye, beat out the incumbent in Gloucester-South Nepean in 2018.
She had registered to run again for the Oct. 24 election and kept all her old campaign signs, but changed her mind in late August, even though as a returning councillor she would have been favoured to be re-elected.
"I couldn't get the fire in my belly," she told CBC.
"I want to make change. I want to be the boss … I felt a little bit like a failure. I'm shell-shocked by the personality run-ins that we've had at city hall. I just couldn't face doing it again."
Meehan's not alone.
Almost half of city council won't be returning next term. Most are veterans who are ready to move on. Two councillors who were first elected in 2010 are still young enough they can reinvent themselves, have second careers.
But it's unusual for a sitting councillor to walk away.
Then again, it's been an unusual term.
Anger over a deadly new virus that kept people at home and shuttered businesses was directed at local officials. Outrage over COVID-19 vaccine mandates led to a three-week occupation of the city's downtown.
But even without these extraordinary events, council had to handle a slew of natural calamities — tornadoes, spring flooding, a destructive derecho and a major, fatal crash and explosion.
That's on top of a struggling LRT that experienced two derailments and a provincial inquiry, as well as three separate councillors reprimanded after the integrity commissioner found they had behaved improperly, one shockingly so.
Layer on these unexpected events with the regular work of a city councillor: deciphering dense reports, voting on multi-billion-dollar contracts, deciding how and where the city should grow over the next quarter-century, dealing with neighbourhood complaints about garbage or snow clearing or traffic, and it's easy to see why outgoing council members say the job has never been harder.
'You can't fight it'
Meehan ran for office with an idea of taking care of the residents of her ward. But she found she had much less power than she imagined.
One of the more contentious issues in her ward was a plan to build a warehouse with 100 truck bays in Barrhaven, which Meehan and residents argued should have been located near a 400-series highway and not near the residential area that had grown up around the property.
The councillor worked hard and used every tool at her disposal to try to halt the project — 3,900 residents had signed a petition — to no avail.
"When you're running, you think there has to be a solution," Meehan said. When she discovered the plan for the warehouse — a plan she says another councillor tried to "bully her" into supporting — she geared up to fight it.
"And it turns out you can't fight it."
Like most people who run for office, Meehan dreamed she could actually make a difference. But making change is difficult, if not impossible, and switching the gears at city hall can often take longer than a single term of office.
"As a reporter, you start a project in the morning and at 6 o'clock it goes to air," she said. "You tackle a subdivision or a plan of a subdivision today and it won't happen for seven years. Well, I'll be dead by that time."
These days, sitting by her backyard pool, Meehan is disarming in her honesty about her decision to walk away from city hall, at least for now. The acrimonious tone of the last four years of council has taken a toll.
She admits she needs to remain cooler in tense settings and that she became too emotional during the now-infamous council meeting where Diane Deans was ousted as the police services board chair during the convoy protests.
"I just didn't handle myself in that meeting very well, I was just so freaking mad," she said.
She was frustrated that while the board is not allowed to tell police what to do, it was being blamed for not doing enough to end the protests, both by the public and by her colleagues on council.
It's a contradiction she called "really unfair."
Welcome to public office.
Public misconception of workload
Diane Deans was first elected to the old city of Ottawa council 28 years ago — back before the Internet, before social media, before the LRT. The range and scope of issues were smaller and it was easier to learn the municipal ropes.
"The question that has driven me the most crazy over the years is when people ask me if it's a full time job," she said.
"I think there's a misconception that we're the board of directors and we meet once a month or twice a month and that's it. Of course, it's much more complex than that. And it takes a lot of understanding of a lot of issues."
Of the many challenges facing councillors, voting on big-money projects is surely the most daunting. They have to rely on city staff reports to make decisions, but they also need to bring intellectual rigour to each issue if they are to act as true citizen representatives and not just rubber stamps of staff recommendations.
And if recent revelations about the LRT — both Stage 1 and 2 — have taught us anything, it's that councillors don't always have all the facts.
Council had to vote on a $4.66-billion rail expansion with only two weeks to consider a 113-page report and without knowing whether the SNC-Lavalin, the giant firm that was greenlighted for the Trillium Line portion of the project, had achieved the minimum technical score.
It hadn't. In fact, the city's own evaluators wanted to throw out SNC-Lavalin's bid. But council didn't know that when they approved the massive contract.
WATCH | Some of that meeting and vote:
The LRT public inquiry also revealed all sorts of things councillors didn't know, including the fact that the city knew the Confederation Line would have reliability issues before accepting the system and that the trial run criteria was changed — three ways.
But when things go wrong, the public doesn't call city staff, it calls the councillor's office. Or emails them. Or perhaps berates them on Twitter.
The pressure on public officials is enormous, not least because of the increase in abuse online, and sometimes even in person.
There are evening meetings and weekend events. There's a loss of privacy and personal time. The job eats away at family life, in big ways and small.
Back in his first term, Scott Moffatt used to go grocery shopping with his family. But he was stopped so often to answer questions about his support for a move to biweekly garbage pickup that his family had to give up shopping together.
It used to be that constituents would thank him for getting back to him within a day. Now, they're annoyed if they don't receive a response to an email in 47 minutes.
Keith Egli has dealt with a lot in his ward dating back to the 2018 campaign, from a tornado to the devastating Eastway Tank explosion that killed six to the recent destructive derecho.
"When the derecho happened, the street I live on got hit pretty hard," remembered Egli, so he went out to check on the community.
"When I got back after a long day, my wife said, 'Well, that's good. Now what are we gonna do about our roof?'"
Mathieu Fleury is stepping away from public office after 12 years because he's missing too much of his young son's life. It probably doesn't help that someone came to his door during the protests, threatening his family.
With all the demands of the office, who'd want this job anyway? It a question outgoing councillors are pondering.
The question of salary
They are concerned that it's getting harder to convince a wide range of qualified people to run for office, not least of all because of the pay.
An Ottawa city councillor will make about $111,000 this year. That's actually more generous than some other cities. For instance, councillors in Vancouver make about $96,000.
But consider that thousands of federal and city bureaucrats in this city, to say nothing of businesspeople, make a six-figure salary. Getting them to leave their secure positions and relative anonymity for life in a fishbowl is a hard sell.
Moffatt admits the last thing anyone wants to hear is politicians complaining about their salaries and points out that when he was elected, he was making $30,000 managing a golf sports store. But the salary is an issue for many.
"This is a conversation that I've had with people who have been interested in running — doesn't matter which ward. And they say, "Well, it's a pay cut for me. And a pay cut for what?"
But because it's up to council to decide their own compensation, increasing council pay isn't likely to happen.
"Politically, it's toxic. It's impossible to get that through and not be criticized," he said.
Instead, councillors suggest an independent third party set salaries for public officials based on a set of criteria, such as hours and inflation and demands of the position.
Deans is also worried that council isn't "attracting the skill set and the knowledge set and the quality of candidate that we need."
One reason she gives? "Lots of people now want to have work-life balance and there's very little work-life balance. Being a member of council, you pretty much are on duty 24/7 and I think also salary is a big issue. Frankly members of council don't get paid very well for the level of effort."
But she also says it's "not all doom and gloom."
A new mayor will usher in a new direction for the city and a swath of new incoming councillors could bring fresh ideas, while leaving behind the baggage of the past.
For voters considering who to send to city hall six weeks from now, the outgoing councillors say people need to consider which candidates mirror their own values, if their platforms sound achievable or if candidates are simply making promises they think voters want to hear.
And the electorate needs to think about which candidates could handle everything this job entails.
"You need to get out and vote — and not just vote," said Deans.
"You need to research who these people are, what they bring to the table. How they have done in other parts of their careers? Because we need to have the right people sitting around that table to to really change the course moving forward.
"I would say to the public," said Deans, "you get the government you deserve."