Questions and Answers IV
Updated: 10 hours ago
Should City Hall rescind the current council's 2-year-old "gatekeeping" questions from citizens to City Council? If so, should we revert to citizens having a 30-mqinute session to ask any questions that are not pre-vetted 2 days in advance, so that City Councillors can answer freely?
My position on democratic access at City Hall is pretty clear: I would vote to completely rescind the current pre-vetting restrictions on citizen questions and restore an open, transparent public comment period. When Council changed the procedural bylaws to enforce strict gatekeeping requiring citizens to submit written questions days in advance to be pre-vetted by administration it systematically broke the feedback loop between the public and elected officials. Using procedural rules as a political shield under the guise of 'efficiency' only alienates the very taxpayers who fund municipal operations.
We saw the breaking point of this policy during public town halls, where local residents were barred from asking real-time questions from the floor, leaving people understandably frustrated by a wall of bureaucratic silence. Democracy shouldn't require a permission slip. A city council that is confident in its decisions should have no fear of answering to its constituents in real time.
I support returning to a structured but completely unvetted 30-minute open forum at council meetings. If a question cannot be fully answered on the spot due to technical details, council can simply track it openly and bring the data back to the next meeting. We need to make City Hall approachable again, and that starts by ending the corporate pre-vetting of our own citizens.
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