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Ontario’s Bill 9, which cracks down on misbehaving municipal politicians, passed third reading at Queen’s Park on Tuesday and is on its way to becoming law.<\/p>\n
The Municipal Accountability Act passed handily by a vote of 110 to one. It must receive royal assent from the lieutenant governor before coming into effect.<\/p>\n
The Independent MPP for Haldimand-Norfolk, Bobbi Ann Brady, registered the only vote against the bill.<\/p>\n
Introduced by Municipal Affairs Minister Rob Flack, Bill 9<\/a> standardizes codes of conduct across Ontario municipalities, and gives them the power to remove and disqualify from office members who are found to be in serious violation.<\/p>\n The bill requires a local integrity commissioner to investigate misconduct allegations. If that person believes a breach of the code of conduct warrants a politician’s removal, the case will be passed on to Ontario’s integrity commissioner for review.\u00a0<\/p>\n If that watchdog also recommends removal, the case would be passed back to the local council for a decision within 30 days. A councillor could only be removed by a unanimous vote of all council members who are not a subject of the complaint.<\/p>\n This is the latest attempt to pass legislation to address serious misconduct by municipal councillors, following previous efforts by the Liberals<\/a> and NDP<\/a>.<\/p>\n Municipal politicians and staff have for years been asking for legislative tools to deal with allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination and ethics abuses.\u00a0<\/p>\n The province took the bill on the\u00a0road last summer to gather feedback<\/a>\u00a0and pledged to have the new law in place ahead of the next round of municipal elections on Oct. 26.<\/p>\n Unanimous vote requirement draws criticism<\/p>\n One example of a case where this law could have been applied is that of former Ottawa city councillor Rick Chiarelli. CBC News has reported extensively<\/a> on allegations of harassment of women on Chiarelli’s staff<\/a>. <\/p>\n Despite multiple integrity commissioner reports, Ottawa city council had no power to oust him, however.<\/p>\n There has been some criticism about the bill’s requirement of a unanimous vote before a councillor can be removed.<\/p>\n “Two integrity commissioners can have found serious harm, harm of a sexual nature, harm to real people, and if a single councilor votes no, the person walks away without so much as a formal sanction,” said Ottawa Centre NDP MPP Catherine McKenney, who served on city council with Chiarelli and generally supports the bill.<\/p>\n “This is not a high enough bar, this is more of a wall that does not prioritize accountability.”<\/p>\n Orl\u00e9ans Liberal MPP Stephen Blais, another former Ottawa city councillor whose similar private member’s bills failed to get this far, said in a statement that the law is a step in the right direction, but could have been stronger and come sooner.<\/p>\n “I continue to believe accountability decisions should be more independent and less political, and I believe the government waited far too long to act,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 3 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-244155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779819013_993_default.jpg\")
Ottawa city councillor Rick Chiarelli in November 2019. He did not run for re-election in 2022. (Giacomo Panico\/CBC)<\/p>\n