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Earlier this year, Ombudsman Ontario released a new municipal resource Codes of Conduct and Integrity Commissioners: Guide for Municipalities. The guide, which intends to prevent future complaints and promote consistent standards across the province, combines and condenses existing resources into a single handbook. It provides a quick reference to relevant legislation and best practices for creating a code of conduct, appointing an integrity commissioner and establishing complaint and inquiry protocols.
This handbook will be of particular interest to our chief administrative officer and clerk members as well as integrity commissioners.
Every municipality is required to:
- Have a code of conduct for members of council and local boards;
- Provide the services of an integrity commissioner; and
- Have an investigator for complaints about closed meetings.
This new resource comes as we await the Province’s much anticipated municipal code of conduct legislation to improve the ways in which local governments work and as part of the broader accountability and transparency framework for Ontario municipalities.
As a continuous advocate for accountable and transparent local government and improved council-staff relations, during the 2021 provincial consultations on strengthening the code, we called for mandatory code of conduct training for elected officials, routine commitment to those codes, increased independence for integrity commissioners, and minimum standards for codes of conduct, among other recommendations.
We look forward to the Province building on the existing resources and bringing forward proposed legislation during the fall legislative session. We will keep you, our members, apprised of the progress.