What is a Meeting? Municipal Councils and the Ontario Ombudsman : Draft
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent decisions by the Ontario ombudsman suggest that informal meetings of small groups of municipal councillors in which municipal business is discussed are in violation of Ontario’s Municipal Act. In this province the Municipal Act provides that, except in certain specified circumstances, municipal council and committee meetings must be open to the public. If a municipality has not appointed its own “closed meeting investigator,” the provincial ombudsman is charged with investigating complaints from the public about municipal meetings that have allegedly been improperly closed. Much hinges on the definition of a meeting. If “meeting” is defined too formally, then a council wanting to do business in private can simply arrange its affairs before a formal meeting takes place. Such considerations have caused the ombudsman to state that, for a municipal meeting to take place in Ontario, “Members of council (or a committee) must come together for the purpose of exercising the power or authority of the council (or committee), or for the purpose of doing the groundwork necessary to exercise that power or authority.” It is this definition that suggests that informal meetings of groups of municipal councillors might well be illegal meetings. The object of this paper is to describe how this state of affairs came to be and what its implications are for Ontario municipal government.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".