We Deserve Better

By my count, the current council held 89 council meetings that were open to the public in this term.  I attended almost all of those meetings.  As a result, one would think that I would be well informed and know what Council was doing.  However, a substantial amount of council business is conducted at meetings that are not open to the public.  To this end, the current Council held 89 meetings during its last term that were not open to the public.

It is difficult to determine the actual business conducted by Council at a closed meeting.  When a closed meeting is announced, the agenda contains no information on the subject matter of the business being discussed and merely sets out the sections of the Community Charter on which Council is relying for closing the meeting to the public.  Information about closed meeting business is released on agendas for subsequent council meetings.  The “released information” consists of only the date of the closed meeting and, typically, one line setting out the motion passed at the meeting.  There is no background information, nor is there any record of which councillors voted in favour or against the motion.  Further, there is no discussion about the about released information at the subsequent council meetings.  In fact, the released information is hidden on one of the multiple attachments to the agenda and is merely received by council at the meeting and not discussed.  Careful reading of the agenda package (which are often hundreds of pages in length) is required to track the business conducted by Council in closed meetings.  Even then, it is difficult, since there is no record of the actual business conducted by Council in closed meetings until the release of the minimal information after the fact.  If, for whatever reason, Council does not release information about a particular matter, the business conducted will remain unknown and the public will be none the wiser.  As an example, little information has been released about Qualicum Commons.  Essentially, all of the business regarding Qualicum Commons was conducted in closed meetings with little, if any, information released.  To put it bluntly, we do not know what we do not know. 

The lack of transparency created by the overwhelming number of closed meetings, and the corresponding failure by Council to properly disclose business conducted in closed meetings, is unacceptable.  The public deserves better treatment from its elected officials.  I encourage you to ask the current candidates for mayor and council to state their policy with respect to closed meetings.

As a background to this article, please see the previous articles in Qualicum Beach Insights which discuss when closed meetings may or must be closed to the public.

James Noel

October 4, 2026

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