About Open Council - Open Council

Awareness through transparency enables education, informed participation and enforcement.

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.

Why?

Municipal governments are responsible for many services you use every day and in Ontario they spent almost $65 billion on local services and infrastructure in 2022.

They also decide how land – a fundamentally scarce, finite resource – is allowed to be used through their official plans and zoning bylaws, effectively determining property values, growth rates and what gets built, where.

Local news is dying

Local news media is in decline and the consequences are worse than you think.

While some politicians no doubt celebrated the disappearance of pesky journalists, others are lamenting their absence, because municipalities must now work harder and spend more to keep people informed. Local governance more frequently morphs into crisis management as residents angrily protest decisions by local councils that take them by surprise. Activists who counted on watchdog journalism to keep an eye on elected officials are discovering they must do the job themselves. Social cohesion is taking a hit in the absence of local coverage that introduces people to different perspectives and explores solutions to thorny community problems.
April Lindgren for The Walrus

Without local news, disinformation, often from social media, will happily fill the void of high-quality, trusted local news.
David Macdonald, CCPA senior economist

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.

Municipal entities don’t qualify for a Wikipedia page

Most municipal entities such as candidates, council members, committees 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.

Municipalities are abysmal at collecting, archiving and sharing information as required by provincial law in a structured and predictable way

Municipal clerks are required to provide municipal records upon request and one of council’s statutory roles is to ensure the accountability and transparency of the operations of the municipality. Yet, the experience of Open Council and journalists, researchers and activists shows that many municipalities fail to meet even the bare minimum required by law.

When you request access to documents that they are required by law to keep and make publicly available, they seem to go out of their way to make it hard – they’re unresponsive, unhelpful and redirect you to file a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, sending the message that they understand they need to do this but don’t want to, so they won’t unless we make them.

Open Council inquired about access to the City of Belleville’s Pecuniary Interest Registry and Personal Information Bank Index it did not receive a response from the Deputy Clerk, Clerk/Director of Corporate Services, Assistant responsible for FOI requests or the Mayor. It was only until FOI requests were filed that the documentation required by law was produced.

The Globe and Mail’s Secret Canada’s audit of Canada’s 53 largest municipalities found that public institutions are routinely breaking access laws. These institutions violate statutory time limits, overuse redactions and claim no records exist when they do – and face few, if any, consequences for ignoring the precedents set by courts and information commissioners.

The Missing Middle Initiative emailed 224 municipalities after finding that they did not have a complete set of Development Charge documents on their website and some did not have the bare minimum required by law. The vast majority did not respond and others included:

No response
Look at our website. (The website only has data for the last couple of years)
I’m away. Contact someone else (someone else’s email is only sometimes provided.)
You need to file a Freedom of Information (FOI) request for that information.
Here are some links, find it yourself or do an FOI but not until you’ve tried to find it yourself.
We don’t keep historical data on our site, but we can look up the information and send it to you. It will cost $XXX, and the fastest we can turn it around is 3 weeks. Do you still want us to do it?
We E-mailed 224 Municipalities Asking For Data – Missing Middle Initiative

These responses show a consistent pattern of institutional resistance to transparency. Municipalities know what they are required to disclose. They just don’t want to make it easy for the public to see it.

Policy execution performance and funding impact aren’t often measured precisely and reported publicly

Election – Candidates get votes and are elected for having “good ideas” – a big positive goal that they can run their campaign on. They might say “it’s a shame that houses aren’t affordable anymore, we need a government program to build more houses”. The news covers these goals. People love to see these goals. They vote on these goals.

Legislation – Elected politicians pass motions, bills and bylaws to implement a version of their ideas, allocating tax dollars to making that goal real. The news covers these goals. People take an interest and follow up.

Execution – The actual execution of the task and the details of where the money goes is boring and results take years to come to fruition. Politicians have moved on and are focused on the next thing, programs don’t always have sufficient follow-up, accountability and disciplinary mechanisms built in and if the results aren’t good, there is an incentive to bury them.

How?

Promoting Open Data adoption

Encourage the adoption and implementation of Open Data policies by municipalities by providing examples of implementation and use cases.

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.

Requesting, collating and publishing data and documents

Municipal staff and external consultants are given public funding to conduct studies and surveys and write reports, policies, plans and projections. These documents are used to write policies and inform municipal decision making.

Making these valuable, insightful documents more accessible – located in a stable and predictable location, search- and AI-indexable – may help other communities learn what’s working and what isn’t and reduce reliance on consultants who are paid to generate duplicative reports for neighbouring communities.

You pay taxes for this data to exist. The public should be able to see it easily. Without consistent, open records, it’s impossible to compare how municipalities set fees, spend reserves, or plan growth. Cities can’t learn from each other, and residents can’t hold them accountable.
We E-mailed 224 Municipalities Asking For Data – Missing Middle Initiative

Promoting the use of performance indicators and jurisdictional scans

Encourage the setting of specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based (SMART) goals for plans and projects and set to periodic reports track their performance and success.

Municipalities (often their consultants) conduct “jurisdictional scans” of “comparator municipalities” before implementing new programs or making significant changes to existing ones. This way, they will be able to learn from each other’s successes and hopefully avoid the most egregious errors.

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

We can’t fix problems that we don’t understand. And we can’t resist systems that we can’t see.
Audrey Henson

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

20260330 – Homeowner.ca – Canada and Ontario Commit $8.8 Billion to Slash Development Charges in Half for Three Years — What It Means for New Home Costs
20260315 – The Varsity – Opinion: Learning your way out of the chaos
20251114 – The Globe and Mail Opinion – Are MPs who switch parties principled dissenters or opportunistic sellouts? Why not let their constituents decide?
20251028 – Ottawa Citizen – How to save the city from shrugging off $450,000
20251018 – The Deep Dive – Federal Housing Funds May Bypass Key Cost Condition, Expert Warns
20250923 – Macdonald-Laurier Institute – Making space for home—the linchpin of community and workforce: Peter Copeland for Inside Policy
20250813 – Niagara Now – Arch-i-text: It’s time: Let’s go over the draft of the new official plan
20250520 – Burlington Gazette – Affordable rental housing: how does it get created?
20250512 – CIBC Thought Leadership – Fast-tracking homes: why lowering development fees and speeding up approvals can help solve the housing crisis –
20250423 – BlogTO – Doug Ford sneaks exemptions for Ontario Place construction into unrelated new law –
20250410 – Orillia Matters – City council up in arms over ‘undemocratic’ strong mayor powers –
20250313 – The New Wark Times – Tantramar council gives preliminary approval to contentious code of conduct
20250310 – The Grind – Commercial use allowed on 30% of Therme’s Ontario Place ‘public’ outdoor space. Plus: doubts about the ‘$200 million’ investment
20250221 – The Grind – The Dealmaker?
20250221 – TorontoMet Today – Voting in the provincial election is easy, so flex that civic muscle
20250203 – Engadget – Ontario un-cancels its Starlink contract after trade war ceasefire –
2024 – Grizviz – Toronto’s Development Charges Rise Visualized
20241217 – Owen Sound Sun Times – Owen Sound council votes against exploring lobbyist registry
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

References on social media

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.