About Open Council

Awareness through transparency enables education, informed participation and enforcement.

Contents

What is Open Council?

Open Council is an ad-free, non-partisan, independent, non-governmental site with a simple aim: to make it much easier for anyone to follow what is going on in their municipality’s council.

It is a collection of encyclopedic information about municipalities, election candidates and elected officials that can be attributed to reliable, published sources in an effort to pick up where local news and Wikipedia leaves off in the pursuit of democratizing knowledge.

To do this, we make information more easily accessible by publishing Open Data and data acquired through Freedom of Information requests while following Content Standards with the goals of improving municipal transparency and accountability, and increasing civic engagement.

Goals

Increase government transparency and accountability
Encourage and assist our representatives in making better decisions by increasing transparency and accountability.
Increase public engagement and participation
Encourage community involvement in local government activities and decision-making processes by making information easier to access.
Improve government decision making
Encourage data-driven decision-making by representatives and voters by assessing and comparing the effectiveness and efficiency of municipalities.
Promote Open Data adoption
Encourage the implementation of Open Data policies by municipalities by providing examples of implementation and use cases.

Promote the use of performance indicators

Base the success of plans and projects on specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and programmed results.

Promote jurisdictional scans

Many municipalities (or their consultants) conduct “jurisdictional scans” of “comparator municipalities” before implementing new programs or making significant changes to existing ones.

Why?

Municipalities in Ontario had total revenues of almost $57 billion in 2020. However, municipal politics doesn’t get nearly as much coverage and visibility as federal or provincial politics, and individual stories or topics are hard to follow.

In addition, most municipal entities such as candidates, council members and organizations are not eligible for their own Wikipedia page as they do not meet Wikipedia’s notability test, which states:

Just being an elected local official, or an unelected candidate for political office, does not guarantee notability, although such people can still be notable if they meet the general notability guideline.

What is Open Data?

Open Data is structured data that is made freely available online for anyone to download, modify, build on and distribute without any legal or financial restrictions in a way that is easy to access (eg. searchable website) and in a format that is simple to reuse (eg. tables in an Excel spreadsheet).

Under an Open Data approach, all data is required to be made open and available by default, unless there is a legal, privacy, security, confidentiality or commercially-sensitive reasons reason for it to remain confidential/closed.

The data we use is from the thousands of datasets governments already collect, generate and maintain for their own use that have been made available through Open Data initiatives.

Quotes

Democracy cannot function without a well-informed electorate.
Late news broadcaster Walter Cronkite

Parliament is an imperfect instrument. Its Members are subject to the stresses of doing demanding work for thousands of voters under the constraints of tight schedules. Thus, it is naive to expect that an MP’s legislative tasks will always be satisfying exercises in statesmanship. The MP learns to use parliamentary mechanisms to bring about optimum results from a system necessarily founded on compromise.
MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS: THEIR ROLE – Political and Social Affairs Division

The truth would be hard enough to see even if other people weren’t routinely trying to hide it. Politicians, businessmen, lovers, siblings, and professional colleagues routinely tell us things that are not true. Untruths become lies when spoken knowingly.
Unwilful untruth is just ignorance and is to be overcome, like a river in one’s path or a sore muscle. Wilful untruth is the telling of lies; it should be fought with passion and without mercy, ripped flesh from bones and left to rot in the cold light of day.
Tim Bray, Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist

Thus the status quo in the developed world: markets allowed to run free to greater or lesser degree, but always a government standing beside with a gun. We the people, as the saying goes, reserve the right to impose capital reserves on bankers and environmental legislation on manufacturers and truth-in-advertising laws on marketers and insider-trading rules on investors and safety codes on product designers and salary standards on employers. We maintain a social safety net paid for with taxes in part on the rich who least need it. And we reserve the right to arrest you, try you, and lock you up if you don’t play by these rules. And this is a good thing.
Tim Bray, Canadian software developer, environmentalist, political activist

So if you look at democracy as it’s currently practiced, … if every four years someone votes for among, say, four presidential candidates, that’s just two bits of information uploaded from each individual and the latency is very, very long, right? Four years, two years, one year.
Again, when emerging threats happen, pandemic, infodemic, climate, and so on, they don’t work on a four year schedule. They just come now and you have to make something next Thursday, in order to counter it at its origin, right? So, democracy, as currently practiced, suffers from the lack of bandwidth, so the preference of citizens are not fully understood, and latency, which means that the iteration cycle is too long.
Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first Digital Minister

Can I help/volunteer/partner with you?

If you feel like you have something to contribute, we absolutely want to hear from you. Please reach us at [email protected]. We usually respond within 24 business hours.

If you are interested in tracking your municipality’s town council, join our Discord. You can help by monitoring votes taken during council meetings, conflict of interest declarations, integrity commissioner complaints and investigations and more.

There will also be times when our team reaches out to you to get your help. We hope you say ‘yes’!!!

Who are we?

We are not MPs, MPPs or council members, and we don’t work for the government. We are only interested engaged Canadians. If you want to get in touch with your elected representatives, enter your postal code on this page (coming soon), or use the call or email buttons found at the bottom of council members’ profile pages. Please don’t contact us for help with government problems or to express general political opinions.

Questions, corrections and comments related to this site are very welcome, though! We are always looking to improve. You can complete this form or send an email.

Data sources

Open Council contains information licensed under:

Attribution

Unless otherwise noted, the original content on this website is made available under a CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

This means that it is completely free of copyright and can be used or shared as you wish. Though not strictly required, we do kindly request you attribute us by linking back to our homepage from your publication or project.

Mentioned by

20241217 – Owen Sound council votes against exploring lobbyist registry – Owen Sound Sun Times
20241110 – Barrie Today – COLUMN: Some ways to fix Toronto’s ‘serious’ traffic problem
20241028 – The Hub – Hunter Prize: Want to build more houses? We must adjust the committees of adjustment
20241024 – The Squamish Reporter – New mortgage rules extend 30-year terms for first-time home buyers
20240919 – Storeys – “It Defies Logic”: Is Toronto’s Approach To Development Charges Broken?
20240909 – Q9 Planning + Design – Introducing the New Provincial Planning Statement (2024)
20230825 – Guelph Today – Given strong mayor powers, city eyes municipal lobbyist registry
20240824 – The London Free Press Opinion – Legge: Overcoming NIMBYism key hurdle in increasing housing stock
20240810 – The Conversation – From NIMBY to YIMBY: How localized real estate investment trusts can help address Canada’s housing crisis
20240604 – Russil Wvong – Development charges in Ontario
20240411 – Welland Tribune – ‘Pulled out of thin air’: Haldimand takes issue with province’s housing stats
20240410 – Burlington Today – ‘Time to press the reset button,’ mayor says of misinformation on Strong Mayor powers
20240327 – QNetNews – Detox centre on the horizon for Belleville

Feedback

The things that your site does and explains are what should be included in highschool civics classes. As a young person trying to understand municipal housing issues, this site has been great. Keep up the good work!
Mark D.