His first principle emphasized the supremacy of council and the obligation of staff to adhere to this reality or depart. He did qualify this position somewhat in response to a comment about his post in Linkedin, by mentioning occasions when he had cautioned council (in camera) against proceeding with a particular matter in the absence of legal authorization for such action. This type of guidance would obviously have been welcomed by a councillor from one of my long ago workshops. I had asked what councillors could reasonably expect from their staff and one participant replied: “if I am going out on a limb, don’t hand me a saw.”
Insubordination of Staff
While I agree entirely with Bob about the ultimate supremacy of council, I can’t help sharing two examples of “staff insubordination,” neither of which had any serious consequences for the perpetrators. The first concerned a no-nonsense engineer who, late in his career, found himself CAO of a smallish, urbanizing municipality. Several members of his council had a habit of calling for a report on almost any subject that caught their attention. His response was to confront the members toward the end of a council meeting, to hand out a list of all the reports that had been requested at previous meetings, and to ask which ones they wished to drop so that he could make room for the new requests. As they perused the list, councillors decided that some reports were not needed after all or had been overtaken by events. They also agreed that they should adopt a policy of reviewing quarterly the status of reports and, more significantly, agreed that in future a request for a report requiring any substantial amount of time and resources would only be valid if approved by the council not just requested by individual councillors.
My second example concerns a Clerk of a south-western Ontario municipality in the middle of the 20th century, back when welfare was administered by the local council. While information about applicants was supposed to be kept confidential, it was quite common for councillors (in many municipalities) to ask for the names. They would then interject their personal assessment of whether an applicant was an unfortunate chap just down on his luck or a no-good, lazy bum who was quite undeserving – views entirely irrelevant to the eligibility process. In this municipality, the Clerk refused to share such information. Taken aback at such effrontery, council passed a motion directing the Clerk to write to the Secretary of the Welfare Board (a position that he also held) and to demand the release of the confidential welfare files. He did as requested, then wrote back to himself refusing permission, and tabled that rejection at the next council meeting. In spite of this act of rebellion, the Clerk’s career was not jeopardized. Indeed, he went on to become Deputy Minister of Municipal Affairs and then Head of the Local Government Institute at Queen’s University. I had the pleasure of being a student of Professor K. G. Crawford (the rebel in the story), and then working with him in the Institute when I undertook the first major revision of the Municipal Administration Program (MAP) of the AMCTO, back in the mid-1960s.
Responsibility of Staff as Professionals
Unit Two of MAP includes a discussion of the role and responsibility of municipal staff as professionals and while it doesn’t dispute the supremacy of the municipal council, it does illustrate how council-staff conflicts can arise depending on how staff view their professional obligations. For example, instead of just implementing the decisions made by council, senior staff may see themselves as having a duty to argue against what they feel are misguided views on the part of councillors. Some may go further and see themselves as belonging to a public service which is both larger and more continuous than their immediate service with their current council – but the course material notes that those who take too strong a position in this regard run the risk of finding that “their immediate service with their current council” is short-lived! There are even those who see their commitment to professionalism as a “countervailing force” which exists to limit or moderate political power in the interests of local democracy. They believe it is their responsibility to soften or constrain abrupt policy changes initiated by local politicians. The notion that municipal staff act rather like the Canadian Senate, providing sober second thought to guard against overly precipitous actions by elected councils, is obviously an extreme version of the notion of professional self-responsibility and public service – and one that Bob would presumably reject. It ignores the time-honoured concept that the expert should be on tap not on top.