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rfmcdonaldHamutal Dotan's Torontoist post goes into great, and much-appreciated, detail about the special session of Toronto city council called by Karen Stintz. What? How? Where? When? Why? It's all there.
It's a great post. Go, read.
What is a “special meeting” of council?
Council meetings are planned and scheduled on an annual basis; the rules state that council must meet at least 10 times each year, and that the schedule must respect religious holidays. Special meetings are ones that are called outside of this regular schedule.
There are three circumstances under which a special meeting can be called:
•At the request of the mayor, who can call for a special meeting at any time and for any reason; he or she must give 24 hours notice.
•In case of emergency, in which case the mayor can call a meeting without 24 hours notice, so long as all members of council are individually informed about the meeting and a majority of those councillors agree to it.
•At the direct request of councillors, by way of a petition signed by a majority of councillors. The petition must include “a clear statement of the meeting’s purpose” and the meeting must be held within 48 hours of filing the petition with the city clerk.
The special meeting that will be held on Wednesday is this last type of special meeting—called by councillors—and it is unprecedented: no special meeting of city council has been called by a petition of councillors since amalgamation. (Special meetings have been called by mayors to deal with time-sensitive matters, such as the meeting to decide on purchasing streetcars in 2009, or last year’s meeting regarding the constitution of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation board.)
What will be decided at the meeting?
There will be only one item on the special meeting’s agenda: Metrolinx’s transit projects in Toronto. More specifically, Karen Stintz has said that she will move a motion for council to recommit to the 2009 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) it signed with the province: the one that outlines a light rail–based transit plan, with lines for Sheppard, Finch, Eglinton, and Scarborough. None of the councillors who signed the petition used the words “Transit City” today—there is too much political baggage associated with the term—but in effect that is what’s on the table.
Other motions may also be introduced at the meeting, but they must all relate to transit planning—it’s not open season to try to pass anything at all.
At one point, it seemed possible that council would, in some meeting or other, consider a compromise motion that would restore the original plan for building Eglinton above-ground in less congested portions of the route, with the money saved going to Rob Ford’s Sheppard subway proposal. Stintz and other councillors were advocating this compromise as recently as last week, but the mayor has made it clear that he isn’t interested in it. Depending on how the next couple days go for the mayor, however, he might become more amenable, at which point the landscape of what gets debated may change.
It's a great post. Go, read.
