New Westminster city council has rejected a proposal that would limit each council member to bringing forward a maximum of five notices of motion each year.
A Nov. 18 staff report outlined a series of proposed changes to council meetings and to the city’s notice of motion (NOM) process policy for council. A policy endorsed by council in March 2023 outlined the maximum number of notices of motion that can be presented at each regular council meeting.
“Since the implementation of the updated policy, a total of 75 notices of motion have been presented before council,” said a staff report. “These notices have been brought forward over the course of 33 regular council meetings and represent approximately 26 per cent of all items consider by council.”
According to the report, the corporate officer must review each notice of motion and consider its compliance with the city’s code of conduct bylaw and the city’s respectful workplace and human rights policy, its conformity to the law, the accuracy of its legislative references, its applicability to existing bylaws and policies, and prior council dealings on the subject matter.
“The current process is labour intensive,” said the report. “It is estimated that, on average, each notice of motion requires two to three hours of dedicated staff time to carry out due diligence prior to placing it on an agenda.”
If each council member used their maximum total of notices of motion available in a year under the status quo, it would result in 154 NOMs in 2025, said the report.
“Staff proposes revising the policy to limit the number of notices of motion permitted to be added to each regular council agenda as well as introducing an annual maximum number of notices of motion per member of council,” said the report.
The option recommended by staff would result in a maximum of 35 notices of motion in a year if every council member used their maximum. It proposed a maximum of two notice of motions per meeting and a maximum of five per year for each council member.
“I think approving this with five … just sends to me the wrong message,” said Coun. Daniel Fontaine. “It just says you can only have five and if you happen to have a really great idea, happen to have a constituency concern, and it's your sixth one, you have to wait till Jan. 1 when the clock resets. And that's just not how democracy works.”
Instead of the option recommended by staff, Fontaine put forward a motion that each council member may only submit one notice of motion per regular council meeting (which is current practice), and once the maximum number of notices of motion on the given council meeting agenda has been reached, the corporate officer will refer any subsequent notices of motion to the next available scheduled, regular council meeting.
According to Fontaine, the current practice allows council members who have submitted one motion to then submit a second one if that meeting has not reached the seven-NOM maximum that is currently in place.
“If this was approved, members of council would be allowed one motion for a council meeting, not two,” he said.
In a 6-1 vote, council supported Fontaine’s motion.
“I'm hoping council will support this and go back to almost the current policy that we have with a little bit more of a restriction, but not go to the to the point where we're going to limit elected officials,” he said. “If Councillor Henderson or Nakagawa wanted to bring in seven motions in the year, I encourage it. … I don't want to limit my colleagues in any way when it comes to their democratic right to do that.”
Fontaine said there were “a lot of motions” following the 2022 municipal election, but “things seem to have normalized” and there is usually only one or two notices of motions on agendas.
Coun. Jaimie McEvoy said he’d come into the meeting thinking he would be voting against the staff recommendation.
“The five per year maximum is too much of a constraint on the democratic process; that's what I think,” he said. “A person could fill five through just totally goodwill, hearing from their constituents and bringing things forward they've heard from the constituents. … It can only be so restrictive before it actually starts impacting on the city.”
McEvoy agreed with some of his colleagues on the need to address workload issues, but felt it was going “too far” to impose a five-NOM limit per year.
Johnstone also spoke in support of Fontaine’s motion. He said changes introduced about a year-and-a-half ago have allowed council members to bring forward motions, but not overwhelm their colleagues.
“I think we're actually in a pretty good place with that, as far as council function goes. That said, I recognize that it's not just about council functioning; I recognize that this recommendation is a little bit more about back-of-house functioning and I recognize that in there may be some requests coming for reallocation of resources or new resources related to doing this, and I fully expect that,” he said. “But I do think we found a good place balancing our notice of motion work.”
Staffing impacts
Coun. Tasha Henderson said she didn’t view the recommendation as “stifling our democratic right” but as an acknowledgment that more staffing resources are needed if council wants to maintain the status quo when it comes to notices of motion. She said each of the potential 154 new items that could come forward from council members as notices of motions in 2025 (under the status quo) have budgets attached to them and require staff time to process those motions.
“I'm happy with how things are sort of leveled out, but I'm also hearing that even in its current state, we don't have enough staff resources,” she said. “So, we're trying to keep the tax increase tight, but we want to be able to bring in 154 new ideas. … We can't have both things.”
Coun. Ruby Campbell said her reading of the report was that it was about addressing staff capacity issues and creating efficiencies. Campbell was the lone council member to vote against Fontaine’s motion.
Like Campbell and Henderson, Coun. Nadine Nakagawa said her reading of the staff recommendation was that council could continue to bring forward “many new ideas” on top of staff’s existing workload but there is a staffing cost associated with that.
“It's not possible to say that we want to be able to do this enormous amount of work, but we don't want to pay for it,” she said. “I mean, if we applied that budgeting to, let's say, our own homes, that'd be like saying, ‘Well, I'm going to renovate my kitchen, but I don't want to pay for it.’ That doesn't work. We have to pay for the work we want to do. … We can't efficiency ourselves into being able to do everything with no more resources. That's not possible.”
