This term’s Hamilton City Council was elected on promises of making City Hall transparent, and have gone in the opposite direction.
On March 5, 2025, Council voted 9 to 6 to eliminate Hamilton’s Citizen Advisory Committees, citing Municipal Act transparency requirements as the reason for ending them.
Open citizen advisory committees are being replaced with “community liaison groups” that will report to City bureaucrats, will not produce minutes, and will not be open to public viewing.
We are now learning details about how Council’s new “community liaison groups” that are replacing decades-old advisory committees will work. A concerning new detail is emerging.
The new CLGs will be self-recruiting. No longer will the City conduct city-wide recruitment processes. No longer will different expertise and viewpoints be sought.
The CLGs will select their own replacements or, failing that, staff will make appointments.
There’s an irony in this, because one of the concerns of the new Council’s ‘progressive’ wing upon taking office in November 2022 was that citizen committee memberships were stacked with people who’d been on board for so long, they were now ‘insiders.’
During the September 23 Climate Change Advisory Committee meeting, the committee was told “that it’s no longer going to be councillors selecting members” through the city-wide selection committee process.
Instead, the Climate Change CLG will select its own new members.
To his credit, citizen committee chair Ian Borsuk recognized that next term’s Council could change things again. They could eliminate the CLGs, return to advisory committees, or not have either.
He also noted the new CLGs do not have clear processes for removing members.
The upcoming Emergency and Community Services Committee meeting agenda includes a similar summary of the new Veterans CLG structure. Recruitment for it will involve an open call for applicants, but it will be staff and the existing CLG members who will decide membership.
The purpose of the new committees is to enable staff to “consult” with selected individuals while not being required to meet Municipal Act open meeting requirements.
In 2020, City Clerk Andrea Holland and Deputy City Clerk Janet Pilon declared all advisory committees to be “local boards.” This enabled the then Integrity Commissioner — the firm of retired City Solicitor Janice Atwood-Petkovski — to sanction citizen advisory committee members.
The City of Hamilton succeeded in a Divisional Court challenge of the division, with the Court replacing previous definitions of “local board” with Hamilton’s new definition.
The impact was felt by all of Ontario’s 444 municipalities.
With advisory committees operating as “local boards,” all of the onerous requirements of the Municipal Act that apply to Council meetings now apply to citizen committees.
The goal of the CLGs is to avoid the Act’s requirements.
We’ll see what happens next, I’m skeptical the City will be able to escape the Act’s transparency requirements.
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Published: September 28, 2025
Last updated: September 28, 2025
Author: Joey Coleman
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