{"id":1937,"date":"2023-12-12T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-12T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/henry.olders.ca\/wordpress\/?p=1937"},"modified":"2023-12-16T09:19:14","modified_gmt":"2023-12-16T14:19:14","slug":"what-is-a-council-meeting-what-is-their-purpose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/henry.olders.ca\/wordpress\/?p=1937","title":{"rendered":"What is a council meeting? What is their purpose?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Published as a Letter to the Editor in the Westmount Independent, 2023-12-12.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>City Council has decided to reduce public meetings to one per month (November 28, p. 1), but will continue to hold \u201cgeneral committee\u201d meetings, closed to the public, mid-monthly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<p>How does this respect the Quebec Cities and Towns Act (C-19) which requires (para. 322) \u201cThe sittings of the council shall be public.\u201d ou <em>en fran\u00e7ais, \u00ab Les s\u00e9ances du conseil sont publiques. \u00bb ?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<p>Or does Council believe that by calling it \u201cgeneral committee\u201d it therefore magically is no longer a council meeting? If council&#8217;s goal is to circumvent the provincial law, it would make more sense to have an English-only meeting where everyone stands, so that it will not be a \u201csitting\u201d!<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<p>Transparency in government is essential to democracy. While holding in-person meetings which are poorly attended by the public may not be very efficient, the pandemic has shown that online broadcasting of meetings, whether in-person or virtual, is highly practical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Published as a Letter to the Editor in the Westmount Independent, 2023-12-12. City Council has decided to reduce public meetings to one per month (November 28, p. 1), but will continue to hold \u201cgeneral committee\u201d meetings, closed to the public, mid-monthly. How does this respect the Quebec Cities and Towns&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87,7],"tags":[420,387,124],"class_list":["post-1937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters","category-opinions","tag-municipal-councils","tag-municipalities","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henry.olders.ca\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henry.olders.ca\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henry.olders.ca\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henry.olders.ca\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henry.olders.ca\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1937"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henry.olders.ca\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1938,"href":"https:\/\/henry.olders.ca\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1937\/revisions\/1938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henry.olders.ca\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henry.olders.ca\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henry.olders.ca\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}