New era of ethics at city hall

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/04/2022 (1513 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

During the past two decades the City of Winnipeg has gradually developed a framework of policies, structures and procedures designed to promote high ethical standards in the conduct of the public’s business within city council and the civic administration. This represented a major shift in thinking about how honest, fair and effective government could be achieved.

Previously, ethical government was assumed to be achieved by electing or appointing honest persons who knew the difference between right and wrong and would act accordingly. Today it is widely accepted that ethical governance also requires policies and practices to ensure public officials understand their duty of trust and comply with both laws and ethical norms.

Ethics moved from being a matter of personal morality and became a vital component of institutional integrity.

It was a string of ethics controversies and a major scandal during the period Sam Katz served as mayor (2004-14), and his former business partner Phil Sheegl served as deputy and then chief administrative officer (2008-13) that brought ethics to the forefront of the city’s agenda.

The two former wheeling-and-dealing entrepreneurs believed the city should cater to developers and be run like a business. They resented and resisted the legal constraints, collective decision-making processes, openness rules, continuous scrutiny and accountability requirements that all exist in the public sector to ensure decisions serve the public interest, not private interests.

The story of the conflict-of-interest accusations that dogged Katz from the outset is too complicated to be told in full here. Examples were contracts with business friends, a bailout of a theatre in which he had a financial interest and a sweet deal on a parking-lot lease on city land for his baseball team.

Meanwhile, Sheegl sought to evade the constraints of the planning process by acting unilaterally, most notably by negotiating a swap of surplus city fire halls in return for land owned by Shindico, a commercial development firm whose owners had close connections with both the CAO and the mayor.

The biggest scandal was the police headquarters project, which involved secret deals, huge cost overruns and shoddy construction. Last month, a Court of Queen’s Bench judge found Sheegl, who had resigned back in October 2013, had committed breach of trust by accepting a bribe from the contractor and should pay damages that could exceed $700,000. Katz’s role in the scheme has not been fully disclosed, but there was considerable damage to his reputation. He left politics voluntarily in 2014.

Current Mayor Brian Bowman made ethics a campaign issue back in 2014 and has provided important leadership to create a stronger accountability and ethics framework at city hall. Confusion over whether provincial government approval was needed for certain initiatives slowed progress.

The key initiative was the creation of the position of Integrity Commissioner and the appointment in 2017 of Sherri Walsh, a lawyer with impressive accomplishments in the human rights and public inquiries fields. Her mandate includes overseeing compliance by councillors with a long-standing municipal conflict-of-interest (COI) law passed by the province, but importantly it includes broader issues of institutional integrity. She is entitled to receive and investigate complaints about conflicts.

Reading her informative annual reports over the years, I would say her approach has relied more on education and prevention and less on policing and penalizing violations. Consistent with this approach, she developed a customized guide to COI law for councillors.

She produced an annotated code of conduct to guide ethical behaviour beyond legal requirements. That document is valuable because it includes real-world examples that help councillors who reason pragmatically about ethical issues.

The code contains a range of consequences for violations, such as a public apology and removal as chair of a council committee. She meets annually with individual councillors and is otherwise available to advise on ethical concerns. A sign of stronger ethical awareness is the frequency with which councillors seek such advice.

The Integrity Commissioner also supported the development of a new COI policy for city employees, but she does not advise or oversee the application of the policy. During the Katz/Sheegl era, no employees who were aware of the alleged misdeeds spoke on the public record. This led Bowman to request and obtain an amendment to the City of Winnipeg charter to bring city employees under the provincial whistleblowing law, which is intended to encourage and protect employees who disclose serious wrongdoing.

Another component of the ethics-reform agenda was the adoption of a lobbyist registry. Lobbyists are not required by legislation to register their activities, but registration is encouraged in order to enhance transparency and the Integrity Commissioner monitors the registration process.

The new ethics framework is not perfect, but it represents a positive development. One cannot know for certain whether it would have prevented the problematic behaviour of the Katz/Sheegl leadership team. However, the case illustrates how important honest leaders are to the development of an institutional culture that promotes “right-doing” and confronts wrongdoing.

Paul G. Thomas is professor emeritus of political studies at the University of Manitoba.