Ottawa Police Board to vote on opening secret meetings

Two months after CBC News revealed that the Ottawa Police Services Board has been discussing police business at secret committee meetings for years, the board is set to votetomake those meetings public.

The board will vote on the matter Monday.

The board's staff is recommending that the dates, times and locations of the committee meetings be advertised in advance on the board's website.Although some items will still be discussed in camera mostly to do with public security or intimate personnel issues the majority ofmeetings should be open to the public.

The board has four standing committees:complaints;finance and audit;policy and governance;and human resources.

While the membershipof the committees is decided in an open session of the board once every four years, the details of the meeting locations have not been made available. Indeed,most people had no idea the meetings were even happening.

Issues of public interest discussed

There have been at least three secret committee meetings so far in 2016. According to a list given to CBC by police boardstaff, 15 different topics were discussed at the meetings.Subjectsincluded bias-neutral policing, a street check update and proposedamendments to the public rewards policy.

Last yearthe committees met privately eight times and discussed at least 20 subjects including updates to policies on racial profiling, thetraffic stop race data collection project, and budget constraints issues of significant public interest.

The revelation that these subjects were being discussed in secrethas been particularly damaging for the police board, whose members have beencriticized for failing to ask enough questions or engage in serious debate at their meetings. The news hasadded to theperception that the real work of the board is being done behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny.

Minutes of the meetings were not publiclydisclosed, although the board's chair, Coun. Eli El-Chantiry, provided copies to the CBC upon request.

At Monday's meetings, members of the board will vote on whether to includethe committee minutes with the board's agenda, as well as requiring committeechairs to give regular updates at public board meetings.

Pressure from province

The day after the CBC reported on the secret committee meetings, Premier Kathleen Wynne weighed in.

"So my expectation would be that first of all, there are public meetings, and thatthe private meetings would have to do with personnel issues or issues that for good reason had to be private or confidential,"Wynne told reportersat a news conference in Ottawa in early April.

According to the provincial Police Services Act, police board meetings "shall be open to the public .. and notice of them shall bepublished in the manner that the board determines." The act also allows some issues to be dealt with in private.

"The rules are there to make sure that if a matter doesn't have to be confidential, then it is in the public realm," Wynne said at the time.

Later that month, the seven-member board voted to review the procedural rules for the committees.