General Committee started fourty-five minutes late on Tuesday, February 18th, after the mayor and Peterborough City Council spent an extended period in closed session past the posted 6:00 PM starting time.

Council had been in closed session since 5:00 PM discussing four items, the first two of which related to labour negotiations and litigation over city lands. 

Following the national anthem, approval of previous minutes, and coun. Dave Haacke’s disclosure of a pecuniary interest pertaining to the Carnegie Planning Area / Heritage Park Subdivision Information Report, both passed without incident, as did an agreement relating to a report by the city’s Commissioner of Community Services, Sheldon Laidman.

While the agreement to Laidman’s report passed unanimously, a motion to receive a verbal update the commissioner had provided during closed session for information drew attention from Town Ward coun. Alex Bierk, who said he “wanted to attach a motion that we could decide upon as a council for some direction in addition to this plan.”

While being careful to avoid details from the in camera session, Bierk suggested that while the report “covered a lot of ground,” that contributions he had provided “didn’t warrant to be discussed in closed,” and that he wished to see additional details provided by the community services commissioner.

In the previous meeting community services had been front-and-centre, as councilors debated the creation of an emergency shelter space, despite protestations from Staff that they had not been approached by homelessness portfolio chairs Bierk and coun. Keith Riel about the potential project—an accusation which Bierk and Riel categorically denied.

Chair Andrew Beamer wordsmithed Bierk’s request into a motion to have “council ask Staff to return back to a closed session committee with a plan with additional information,” adding that “I think that commissioner Laidman is aware of the additional information [Bierk] w[as] seeking.”

The city clerk sought clarification as to whether Bierk’s motion constituted an addition to the report or an outright deferral, to which Laidman expressed that believed it was “not sure it’s within council’s authority to defer the actual underlying issue.”

Ultimately, Bierk agreed to amend his motion to have council receive the closed session report for information—meaning, in Beamer’s words, “nothing proceeds”—and to have Staff subsequently return to the committee with more information.

Whatever aspect of the community services portfolio had taken so much of council’s attention—and a closed session meeting longer than the general committee itself—will return to the committee at least once more before we, the public, know more about the specifics.

After the reception of the closed session report, discussion turned to housing as council heard a delegation under the planning committee from developer EcoVue Consulting, who sought to rezone a property adjacent to Thomas A. Stewart Secondary School to include two additional rental units.

Mayor Jeff Leal, speaking to the proposal, expressed his stalwart support for the idea, saying that “this is a very positive example of infilling which will increase density and address the city of Peterborough’s housing challenges, one unit at a time.”

Upon a vote, council unanimously approved the rezoning decision.

After the approval of the planning act presentation, coun. Alex Bierk motioned to defer the transfer of the water utility and Riverview Park and Zoo to direct municipal control, citing concerns about councilors’ personal responsibility in the delivery of water services to residents under the Safe Drinking Water Act, and specifically whether they might be held responsible for catastrophic failures of the system. 

“What I’m doing may be unpopular,” Bierk said. “It’s not that I don’t want us to move forward with this…I just feel like a big step was jumped from the last time we were talking about this in camera…to have this in our general committee agenda and have just four days to look it over.”

Coun. Lesley Parnell expressed her opposition to the deferral, saying that “as much as I wasn't in favor of this big change to start with, it has been the majority will of this council to move water, the zoo, and IT directly into the city versus it being with our utility company.”

“A deferral at this time would serve no purpose,” she declared, noting that the Peterborough utility employees have been “waiting and waiting and waiting for reassurance that their jobs were going to be protected.”

City Chief Administrative Officer, Jasbir Raina, assured coun. Parnell that “everything has been done: all the job offers we have received…all the union things have been done—no issues.”

He added, responding to coun. Bierk’s concerns, that “even when the PUC [Peterborough Utilities Commission, who previously administered the water utility] was still with the CoPHI (City of Peterborough Holdings Inc.) it was still at that time that the council was responsible.”

“There is no hanky panky going on there,” Raina concluded.

Essentially, councilors’ legislative responsibility to provide clean drinking water would not be changed by the merger any more than they had been under the PUC, Municipal Operations Commissioner Ilmar Simanovskis explained. “The risk isn’t really a question of what council’s decisions are, the risk is around not ensuring that the system is properly funded and resourced to operate,” he explained.

After a series of questions from councilors seeking to better understand the Water and Zoo transfer report, which were each dutifully answered by Simanovskis and Raina, coun. Bierk expressed that he felt sufficiently reassured, and decided to withdraw the motion of deferral.

As council moved on to discussion of the Heritage Park subdivision, coun. Beamer raised concerns about additional traffic which might be brought in from the construction of more houses.

“I think it’s important to point out: one of the big issues in this area is traffic,” Beamer noted. “The residents of Cumberland feel they’ve been ignored for years and years and years as there’s been build-out in the subdivision with very little traffic solution.”

“Nice to see the lightbulb come on to the North End councilor with respect to transportation,” coun. Gary Baldwin quipped after Beamer voiced his concerns.

Baldwin went on to present the final item of the agenda: a notice of motion calling on the province of Ontario and the Federal government to redistribute more of the revenue from the provincial land tax and federal GST respectively to municipalities, an imploration he stressed followed in the footsteps of other municipalities across Ontario.

“I’ve been thinking of bringing this for quite some time,” Baldwin said. “We've heard recently, not only through our constituents, but others, about our finances and how our finances are being challenged, and how the City of Peterborough isn't doing with our finances what we should be doing.”

“I think everybody knows whom I’m speaking about,” he acknowledged, “and I take exception to that.” 

“This [motion] will allow us to have some financial security in the long-term, and allow our staff and council to make decisions with respect to infrastructure needs,” Baldwin concluded.

With Baldwin’s motion was carried and the meeting agenda nearly exhausted, councilors took Other Business as an opportunity to air their grievances with the state of politics both international and federal.

Mayor Jeff Leal presented council a motion aimed at bolstering support for the Canadian economy and industry coming off the recent Canada–U.S. spat over President Donald Trumps proposed 25% trade tariffs.

“[B]e it resolved that, the City of Peterborough supports Team Canada and the provincial and federal governments on the measures they have put in place in response to the proposed U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods and ask that they take any and all measures to protect the interests of Ontario in any upcoming trade negotiations,” the motion reads.

The motion also specified that, upon adoption, it should be sent to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and “All provincial and territorial Premiers; All local MPs and MPPs,” and “All Ontario Municipalities for their support.”

Speaking to the motion, coun. Dave Haacke confessed that he “find[s] it very sad that we’re put in a position that we put ourselves in—not we as a municipality, but generally as a country—and it takes a foreign country to try and right our ship that should have been done beforehand.”

“I’m not getting into the politics of it,” Haacke insisted. “I’m annoyed; I’m fed up with both sides of the ledger on this.”

Haacke declared that for years he has been imploring council to “start pushing things back up,” but that the Association of Municipalities of Ontario has been largely ineffective at doing so.

“What does it take?” he asked. “Some guy with orange hair in the U.S. to get us on our game.” 

Speaking to the earlier subject of housing, coun. Kevin Duguay reserved harsh words for Peterborough–Kawartha MPP Dave Smith.

“I’d like to rise on a point of privilege if I might,” Duguay declared, “and I’m actually going to stand up to recite this…I rise to discuss recent comments by MPP Smith regarding housing in the city of Peterborough.”

“I stand before you as a council member and a resident of Peterborough, and I’d like to correct the record,” Duguay said. “It’s very important, because these comments were in print media and various media forms, and factually they are simply not correct.”

“The comments in the media were that we do not have land for residential development,” the councilor told his colleagues. “We absolutely do.”

Duguay lambasted Smith’s comments, noting that the provincial PC government—whom Smith represents—had earlier confirmed the City possesses an excess of residential development land when they confirmed the City of Peterborough’s Official Plan in 2023.

The City of Peterborough has been scrambling to build new housing, in abid to assuage the current housing crisis, both by increasing the vacancy rate—which has long hung around 1% in part due to pressure from student reneters—and to provide low-income and supportive housing for persons currently living in the Wolfe Street Transitional Modular Housing project. At the start of February, it was announced that the city would receive $10,690,354 in funding through the province's Housing Accelerator Fund.

“This plan—our Official Plan—was recently approved by the provincial government,” Duguay said. “The implication that this city—my city—and its land use approval process is an impediment to development is simply and factually incorrect.”

Following Duguay’s comments, General Committee adjourned, to be immediately followed by a special meeting of council in which the only items were the approval of a closed session report. 

The meeting, which had been scheduled for 7:00 but was delayed by council’s extended closed session, started shortly after 8:00 PM and lasted just over three minutes.