People wanting to delegate at City Council today had a rough time of it: mistakes were made at almost every level.

By Pepper Parr

February 17^th, 2026

BURLINGTON, ON

 

It was a very messy Council meeting, parts of which was on the Agenda are not going to take place until sometime in March.

A number of people who wanted to delegate were unable to do so because of the actual releasing of the Agenda by the City Clerk late on Friday.  People usually have a day or two to register their wish to delegate.  The agenda was released after City Hall closedon Friday.  This was family day week, which meant City Hall was closed until Tuesday morning.

There were late requests to delegate, and Council had to vote on those requests.

And that is when things got silly.

Mayor Meed Ward serving as Chair:  We do have a late request. Two late requests to delegate. David Barker regarding options for the temporary elimination of development charges, DGM 326, and Shannon Gillies regarding heritage response to Bill 23 phase two, short list of designation candidates. We do need to move, waive the rules of procedure to allow these two to speak.

Before that vote could be taken Councillor Stolte wondered about people who wanted to delegate but weren’t able to do so.

Councilor Stolte:  I had a procedural question for the clerk, and it was in regards to some information that was shared over the course of the long weekend about when the agenda for today was made public, and how that may have impacted residents ability to delegate, and I think it’s relevant in the request today to for a late delegation that now requires us to move on that procedurally,

City Clerk:  The agenda was  late. We would have liked it to be on Friday afternoon, and because of the holiday Monday, yesterday, the delegation deadline reverted to the Friday at noon. So the agenda was issued after the delegation deadline, which is obviously not ideal for us.

Any requests that did come in throughout the weekend, we did forward to council and let them know that, let the delegates know that there would be an opportunity for council to waive the procedure by law and be added to the delegation list.

Stolte: Was there a message put on the city website along with that agenda to let everyone in the public know that there was the opportunity to come to council and register late

City Clerk: No, there wasn’t. That’s certainly something that we would do going forward.

Stolte: So the delegates who are here today requesting to delegate with a late request are only because they happen to know our procedural by law that that’s available to them, but the general public wouldn’t have known that.

City Clerk: Yes, I think that’s fair to say.

Councillor Kearns:  My question is to the Clerk, is this the complete list of the late registered delegates? I believe there might be one more, and I just want to be certain that we’ve captured everyone, or that this amendment allows everyone to speak who wishes to speak

City Clerk: This is the late this that was submitted to the clerk’s email after Friday afternoon.

Kearns: I will do a follow up.  I do have an email here saying “hello. Yesterday morning, I sent the delegation form, I will be there in person. I don’t have slides or notes. Can I be recognized?”   Is that person here? Do we know if this was sent to the clerk’s mailbox?

Chair: Would you like a minute to check the clerk’s mailbox to see if there’s anyone else or would you like the name of the individual that’s asked to be added to the list?

Okay, we’ll take a five minute recess.

After the break: We didn’t receive a delegation request over the weekend, but we did receive an email this morning noting that a person would like to delegate or looking for a follow up. So not too sure what happened there, but if council would add Lynn Crosby to the list, that would be appropriate.

Councillor Nisan:  I’ll support all the late delegations, obviously, however, I would just like to read 46.1 of our procedure by law. It says request to delegate at a committee meeting and Council must be submitted to the clerk’s department prior to noon the day before a meeting. If the meeting is held on a Monday, delegations must register by 12pm the Friday before the meeting. Obviously, today is Tuesday, and I recognize that we don’t want our staff working on the weekend, but the procedure by law does not take that into account.  I would like to understand why we didn’t allow these registrations. And basically, there could be people who thought they would delegate, but weren’t given the opportunity because the agenda wasn’t released in a timely fashion,

City Clerk:  My apologies, my understanding what the procedure bylaw was. It did revert to the Friday on a with the holiday Monday. But the warning, the wording is very best, not clear there. So I tend to agree that in that with that with that wording, that maybe that delegate should have been confirmed and listed.

Nisan: My concern, and it’s a concern to ask Blake Hurley, our commissioner of legal services is we’re supposed to be approving a zoning by law today, and I want to confirm that we might have to go into closed session, I hope not, but that we’re not exposing ourselves here by not having provided the correct the agenda in a timely fashion and correct notice for delegations on Our zoning by law kind of a big deal.

Blake Hurley, City Solicitor: The short answer is, No, we are able to proceed today with respect to that, with respect to the larger picture of the procedure by laws, as this council knows it’s we’d like to treat it as a living, kind of breathing document that makes amendments over time to improve the process. This is certainly something that we’ll take back so we don’t find ourselves in this situation again. It’s striking that balance between getting the agenda out at a reasonable time to allow people to review it and request to delegate before this council, and on the flip side, internally, making sure that any additional information that needs to be provided to council that was requested from Committee, there’s time to produce that information.

So it’s a balance, and I think we fell a little bit short on the public access side of it, but I think there’s tweaks that we can make to the procedure by law to improve that, and that’s something that we’ll take away and bring forth in the future.

Councillor Kerns: I wasn’t going to ask this question until I was alerted and alarmed by the clerk indicating that the delegate did indicate that they’ve filled in the online form, but didn’t receive a confirmation until an email follow up. So how ought we to know if there are other people who filled in the same form and then didn’t receive a confirmation and are unable to delegate today,? Councillor As Nissan mentioned, we have some very serious issues on the agenda today that would require public engagement: that complimented with the late agenda notice and a failure for confirmation of delegation registration, how we know that we have all of the community’s voice here with us today?

This led to yet another back end check of the website. That would require another recess to do that, but I think maybe five minutes.

All right, let’s take five minutes to do a double check on our it to make sure that everyone who wanted to delegate was able to delegate.

City Clerk:  I’m satisfied that there are no other delegates wishing to delegate today.

Councilor Stolte: I just want to comment and express my concern about the comments made by our legal Commissioner.  Which were, I understand, totally appropriate, but just the very comment to say we fell short on the public access side of it. That is the truth here, and it makes me feel entirely uncomfortable that we’re moving forward not having the ability to respect  democracy and notify the public in an appropriate manner, to allow them the opportunity to create a delegation and come forward.  I would have felt much more comfortable if on Friday, knowing that we had a late agenda, that we had posted a notice online to say that the, you know, the deadline to register was extended, that I know that we’re going to do that moving forward. But that doesn’t change the fact of what has happened for this meeting today. I just want to register that I’m very uncomfortable moving forward. I think we’re pushing things through on a very heavy agenda, making big, big decisions, potentially today, without having had the opportunity for everyone who wanted to delegate to be able to do so. So I just wanted to register that.

Nissan: , I agree with Councillor Stolty, even if this was a light agenda like we had in previous months, I wouldn’t be supporting this. I’m not sure we should even be going ahead. Frankly, I’m not sure how to deal with it, but here we are. It doesn’t meet our own standards. I understand that the procedure by law is a tweak, is a living document, but it’s really an amendable set of rules that we live by here. So in terms of engagement, not following our procedure by law is problematic. It’s not a tweaking. It’s that’s not a tweaking matter in my in my opinion, and we don’t know if there are other delegates who would have wanted to delegate today, my question for for staff is, why didn’t the agenda come out in a reasonable time on Friday? What was the hold up that forced the agenda to come after any reasonable time? What was staff doing?

City CAO Curt Benson:  Council will recall at Committee last week there were several requests for additional information that we were compiling. We wanted to make sure that we were compiling that information and responding to the nature of requests in a comprehensive manner. It took a little bit longer that delayed the release of the agenda, and that was, you know, the circumstance in this case. I think there are lessons to be learned. I think the statement around the fact that we do need to build in these circumstances and address them in future updates to the procedural by law and always be erring on the side of being more open, transparent and inclusive to public perspective is fundamental, and that’s something that we don’t take lightly.

City Solicitor Blake Hurley:  I also just want to make sure that council is aware that the procedure by law requires that delegates request to delegate must be submitted to the clerk’s event prior to 12pm one business day before a meeting.  The fact that we were late on the in the day, on Friday and providing the agenda was that, in of itself, was not the issue. The issue was that the Monday was the holiday, and we have a couple of times, I think, over the last number of years, ran into this problem where Council followed on a Tuesday after a holiday Monday, and that’s where we find ourselves in an issue in providing that access. And I think, as I mentioned previously, there’s opportunity to address that, both when we look at setting the meeting calendar in advance for a following year and making any adjustment to the procedure by law to address those circumstances where we have a Tuesday council meeting following a holiday Monday.

Nothing in this is black and white that I’m aware of and I don’t believe there’s anything in procedure by law. It’s, it’s standard for council to amend a committee calendar, committee and council counter throughout the year.

Councillor Nisan: Okay. Thank you. So just as a heads up to my fellow colleagues, I’ll be putting forward a notice of motion that I will be looking to do that, because this is this is absurd on so many levels that we’re pushing things through. We’re not giving people the opportunity to read, we’re not giving the opportunity to delegate. We’re putting staff in a very difficult position. If none of that is necessary, then I think we need to fix it.

Councilor Kerns: Since I have the ability to comment, I would just like to bring everyone’s mind to a reminder that when the procedure by-law Amendments came forward, I flagged that there were major deficits and it wasn’t viewed as a complete document for these reasons. One was demonstrations, two was holiday Mondays, and there was a number of other ones, including speaking time, and there were gaps that were unclear, also including how the code of conduct is embedded within the by law, which it should be a standalone policy. Can we please make sure we have clarity on how we’re treating the delegates today procedurally?

Meed Ward as Chair: I will now answer that question by way of bringing us back to how we’re going to proceed today. So the motion on the floor, which we will need to vote on is to allow the late registered delegates to speak.

City Solicitor Blake Hurley: I wanted to respond to Councillor Kearns question. I think as we consider this motion to waive the rules procedure. She had a question with respect to delegates. So delegate who is registered to speak today can speak today, even if the item that they’re looking to speak to is deferred to a future meeting. Their comments would still be heard if the delegate decides that, you know what, I’d rather speak at the meeting. This item is going to be called at they can register to delegate at a special council meeting in the normal course.

Meed Ward: Issuing the Strong Mayor’s Powers was simply to ask the questions on the floor of Council, as is my normal practice. I give staff a heads up that the questions are coming so that they can be prepared. Due to the nature of the questions, I felt that it was important to issue a mayor’s direction in full transparency, so that the answers could be posted and be available to everyone in advance, rather than doing the questions on the floor

Nisan: I will not allow a strong mayoral direction, giving two days notice to be considered a matter of transparency and giving staff time. If this was really about giving staff time, then this item would be deferred to a future council meeting that was voted against that committee. But that’s exactly what needs to happen. That’s why, the despite all of this being caused by a last minute mayoral direction, that is mandatory to respond to. That’s how we got here, and as a result, the staff did their best, but they couldn’t even provide complete information. How did we go from a committee meeting where I was being told that this was no big deal, and that the CFO had already given us what he could give us, according to members of committee, to multiple pages of questions and expecting a response within 24 hours. That’s not even fair to staff, never mind to the public.

That’s why this item is going to Special Counsel is a start, but there are, legal questions that are unanswered in that report. There are financing questions that are unanswered in that report. So I’m not going to sit here and be told that this is, this was a good thing that occurred, far from it. That’s why we got all these people, many of whom are being paid right now, to be here to deal with this on a matter that, frankly, shouldn’t even be here because we couldn’t even get delegates in time. I’m sorry, but this is not right.

Kearns: I just wanted to widen the scope a little bit on the conversation that we’re having today about late notice. It is not just the matter of the development charges. I have a number of email communications and an in-person  xxx legation who only received a notice regarding heritage designation on February 11 and were given until February 6 at committee to respond. You can obviously know that those dates don’t line up, and maybe some of them are here today, or some of them have written, we’re not sure the root cause of that delay in notice. But this is another item that I was going to seek a deferral on to another committee cycle because of the late notice for the community to understand what the city is doing and what the impact is on their property or on the policy.We’re really in a bad spot today, and that’s going to be one of the items that I was either asking for a referral to another cycle, asking for a root cause and corrective action, or understanding more about what we’re doing to appropriately notify the community so that they can appropriately delegate and understand the matters before committee. The notice of non designation for new designation heritage properties was going to be another item. I just wanted people to understand this whole delay is not scoped to one item. This is starting to become a behavioral trend that needs to be addressed. I just wanted to add that clarity to the reason why we’re having such a difficult start to this morning.

It was time to call the vote on letting unregistered delegations speak.

It was seven in favour.

Three people who were not able to register are now able to speak. That took close to an hour.

Mayor Meed Ward as Chair: Our next item is approval of the agenda. During approval of the agenda, council has the ability to take out all or some of the items that we are going to deal with and refer them to a special council meeting to be called by the mayor in accordance with the rules of the procedure, which at this point, the earliest we could do that would be next week, or it could be tucked into committee.

We don’t need to land a date. When we get to that, once we vote on this, and when we get to approval of the agenda. We do have a motion from Councillor Sharman and Bentivegna  to refer any items Council wishes to a future meeting. We we can go through item by item. There may be several. There may only be one. That will be our opportunity to deal with that and see what we want to deal with today.

Settling the agenda is another story, during which we saw the switching of positions on the part of several Councillors.

More on that on Wednesday