This N.B. council wants help handling code of conduct complaints

Tanchimar's Municipal Council wants to lean more on the province's local governance commission to handle Code of Conduct complaints. At this year's Union of Municipalities of New Brunswick meeting in Moncton, the municipality put forward a resolution asking the group to lobby for the change. The request comes after Tanchimar Council was deadlocked on a vote about whether to investigate two complaints against its mayor. Tanchimar's Deputy Mayor says Code of Conduct investigations pose challenges for tight-knit community councils. We're kind of in that same situation because we're all working as a team and it's kind of, you know, you have to make a judgment on somebody that you're working alongside. So having an impartial party come in and say, this is what we think, this is our recommendation, I think would make it a lot better than us trying to decide if, you know, if it should proceed or not. Gauguin says municipalities also have limited resources for handling complaints properly. Our municipality, we're lucky. We've got a good amount of staff, but you get smaller municipalities like Straight Shores that only has one or two staff people. If they're dealing with this, it takes up their time. We're not lawyers, so yes, it's our responsibility to know the bylaw, but when it comes to the whole legalities behind it, different things could be interpreted in different ways. So it's definitely, those are the big reasons why we were pushing to get this kind of taken off our plate and sent off. But the proposal hasn't found much support. The Union of Municipalities Board of Directors said the proposal to turn over complaints to another body presented concerns around municipal autonomy. And the Department of Local Government said local governments themselves are best positioned to develop and enforce their bylaws. The two complaints that recently deadlocked Tanchamar Council have since been submitted to the Local Governance Commission. The Commission wouldn't comment on the Tanchamar proposal. It says any changes to its mandate would need to go through provincial lawmakers.