AWNA meets with Municipal Affairs Dept. re Bill 20
AWNA President Dave Bruha, former president Duff Jamison and Executive Director Dennis Merrell met with Municipal Affairs Department officials on December 9th to discuss AWNA concerns with Bill 20, particularly Section 606 that deals with legal advertising guidelines. Deputy Minister Brad Pickering and Larivee’s Chief of Staff Nat Smith represented the department at our meeting.
A committee consisting of Economic Development and Trade Minister Deron Bilous (Chair), Municipal Affairs Minister Danielle Larivee and Finance Minister Joe Ceci will steer this legislation through the process. First up for the committee is an internal review, which should result in a draft by the end of February or early March 2016. The new Bill 20 will be introduced late in the Spring 2016 legislative session. Public input will then be sought during a summer road trip around the province.
It appears that the draft will be reviewed and tweaked to add an NDP flavour, but the essence shouldn’t stray far from the Progressive Conservative version.
The AWNA will obtain a copy of the draft and has been invited to make “specific” recommendations.
Given the view from department officials (see italicized comments below), local publishers need to determine ASAP whether their municipalities are considering changes to the way they ‘advertise’ notices now published in the newspaper. Members should meet with local councillors in advance of the summer meetings to explain the importance of continuing to advertise in the local newspaper. For its part, the AWNA will provide talking points to member newspapers soon after we receive the draft.
Nat Smith said a couple of times that “city governments were driving the change to allow legal advertising on websites, due to the sheer volume of notices and the accompanying cost of advertising them.” He appeared a bit surprised that there were smaller local governments that were also leading the charge on this.
Nonetheless, both he and Deputy Minister Brad Pickering advised community newspapers to meet with their CAO’s and councils to impress upon them the “power of community newspapers’ reach”. Not surprisingly, both of them viewed their role as ‘defending the new Bill 20 legislation’ and neither was anxious to agree to any changes. They instead mainly counseled us on “having conversations with councils and likely very little will change”.
Pickering said at the meeting’s outset that local governments are required to enact an advertising bylaw, complete with public hearings, if they are to change anything with respect to the advertising of public notices, i.e., advertise on websites only. If this isn’t the case, (and at least one AWNA publisher has reported this), then the publisher should 1) meet with the CAO immediately to bring this to their attention, 2) bring it to the attention of the Municipal Affairs Department in the event Step 1 doesn’t net the desired effect, and 3) take legal action and let the courts decide in the event Steps 1 and 2 fail to get anything changed.
One of their overriding messages was that the MGA is one of the province’s most comprehensive pieces of legislation, and a fundamental tenet of that legislation is that it aims to keep most of the decision-making at the local level.