Alberta’s government says it’s soon instituting provincewide rules to police bad behaviour among local municipal councils.
The move comes after Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative government prohibited councils last year from adopting their own codes of conduct, saying those codes were being misused to silence dissent on municipal councils.
Municipal Affairs Minister Dan Williams says he’ll propose changes to the Municipal Government Act in the coming weeks to bring provincial third-party oversight to ethics complaints in an effort to prevent abuses and boost public trust in local leaders.
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Williams says the new Councillor Accountability Framework will also propose publishing the salaries of municipal officials in the name of transparency.
Dylan Bressey, president of Alberta Municipalities, says they’ve been calling for the re-institution of codes of conduct and are pleased to see independent investigators as part of the plan.
Opposition NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi says Smith’s government has violated ethics rules in the past and its effort to oversee the behaviour of other levels of government is like “the fox guarding the hen house.”
If municipalities don’t smarten up the province should abolish them and return to the governance of provincially assigned govenors like some other countries do.
U cee pee setting a code of conduct for others? ha ha