Future role of EPC in city government is worth debating

Re-elected Mayor Scott Gillingham has selected the five councillors who will comprise the executive policy committee (EPC), often called the mayor’s “cabinet.”

That label is misleading because it implies that city government has the same separate executive and legislative structures and operates on the same norms of cabinet secrecy and solidarity that exist in federal and provincial levels of government.

Actually, in city government, the executive and legislative roles are legally combined in council. And, without organized and disciplined political parties at city hall, there are not the predictable majorities for the mayor’s policies as exist for those of a premier or a prime minister. Finally, the requirements for confidentiality within EPC are not as strictly respected or enforced as those for provincial and national cabinets.

This has to be the starting point for any informed debate on the future of EPC.

That topic was raised by the recent report of the inquiry into the corruption involved with the purchase/renovation of the Police Headquarters. Among his 25 recommendations, commissioner Garth Smorang called upon the provincial government to consider amending the City of Winnipeg charter to modify the composition and method of selection of EPC.

It is unclear from the Smorang report whether the commissioner believed that the so-called “strong mayor” model of city government was a major contributing factor to the scandal.

Some history: EPC was established in 1972 by provincial legislation that created a unified City of Winnipeg (Unicity) and a governing structure that included a mayor elected at large, 50 councillors representing wards across the city, and a decentralized system of community committees and regional advisory groups to deal with local matters.

The trend since then has been to streamline city government, with the managerial goal of efficiency clashing with the political value of representation of community concerns. Council was shrunk to 29 members in 1977 and then further reduced to 15 members in 1991. A four-member board of commissioners was eliminated in 1998 in favour of a single chief administrative officer.

Throughout these changes EPC remained as the central co-ordinating body in city government. It is chaired by the mayor and includes up to six other councillors. With the passage by the provincial legislature of the City of Winnipeg Charter Act in 2002, the membership of EPC was restricted to less than 50 per cent of council, with the purpose of preventing a situation in which a majority of councillors were beholden to the mayor for the power and bump in pay that comes with being on EPC.

The latter change reflected longstanding criticism, from both inside and outside council, that Winnipeg’s strong-mayor model leads to the exclusion of non-EPC councillors from key meetings, limits their interactions with senior administrative officials and restricts timely access to such strategic information as budget documents. All of these conditions are said to undermine the effectiveness of councillors as representatives of their wards.

The mayor is clearly the single most influential actor at city hall. His or her appointment and removal authority provides leverage with council colleagues. Acquiescence in proposals is not guaranteed, however; the mayor must at times persuade and negotiate to obtain majority support in EPC and council.

A practice adopted in 2016 by then-mayor Brian Bowman illustrates how the mayor can work informally to develop a majority on council for his agenda. Bowman began inviting two additional councillors to regularly attend closed-door meetings of EPC to receive briefings from department heads in advance of council meetings.

The creation of an unofficial “EPC+2” was criticized for relying on secret undocumented meetings and violating provincial legislation by creating a potential nine-vote majority beholden to the mayor.

Abolishing the EPC without specifying what might replace it is not practical. A city government with a $1.5-billion operating budget supporting the delivery of a wide range of essential services needs a core executive to set policy and budgetary directions for approval by council, to oversee the execution of such decisions by the bureaucracy, to work with other orders of government and to focus responsibility and accountability. Modifying the size, selection process and role of the EPC would require provincial approval. One option would be to have full council vote to decide which councillors would join EPC, leaving it to the mayor to decide their assignments. In 2014 mayor Sam Katz agreed to a council resolution that three of the six EPC members would be elected. It is unclear from the public record whether that resolution was reviewed by the province, but clearly it was not incorporated into the city’s charter.

In any political system that concentrates authority in a working executive, there are bound to be complaints that an inner and outer group of elected representatives exist, that the governing process is less responsive to local concerns and that those actors with power are not fully accountable. So-called experts on the design of government institutions cannot predict with certainty on how to get the balance between efficiency and representation just right.

In addition to his call for a provincial review of the composition of EPC, Smorang recommended that EPC play a much stronger role in providing input and oversight of planning and infrastructure projects. More training and the timely provision of usable information to all councillors were also recommended.

Such changes would do more to promote more meaningful collective decision-making on council and limit the power of the mayor than tweaking the rules for selecting the EPC.

Paul G. Thomas is professor emeritus of political studies at the University of Manitoba. He served as a member of the City of Winnipeg act review committee (1986) and chaired the capital region planning committee (2003).