Council web recordings to omit question periods

Director General Bruce St. Louis made the revelation during city council's monthly session last Monday night, while responding to an inquiry from Patrick Barnard of Melville Avenue.

St. Louis confirmed that one of the local French-language papers, which had been posting audio recordings of city council meetings on its website, was recently forced to stop doing so when St. Louis advised its editor that he was breaking the law.

"'We have been obliged to stop making public the recordings of council sessions at the formal demand of Mr. Bruce St. Louis, director-general of the municipality, who says that he has received a number of complaints from citizens who are unhappy to find the taping of their public remarks on our Internet site,'" Barnard said, reading from a notice posted on the website of Actualités Westmount.

The paper quoted St. Louis as saying that Westmount has the intention of making council sessions public on the City's own site. While denying that he had received complaints, St. Louis said the problem stemmed from the fact that Actualités had been broadcasting not only the essence of council meetings, but also the question period.

"There is a legal requirement, if you are taping someone and broadcasting it, you have to get the permission of that person in order to do it," he said, adding that the action was taken after the City received legal advice. "Certainly they weren't posting signs to say 'do you have a problem being recorded?' …

"My concern is good citizens are coming to the microphone not knowing that they're being recorded and that their voices are being broadcast on the Internet. And as far as I know that is illegal, unless they are properly informed beforehand that the meeting is recorded."

Questioned further, St. Louis insisted that the City's position in the matter "has nothing to do with complaints … My concern is that when we found out that was being posted on the Internet, I advised council. And at the same time I spoke to him — and I did not order him — I asked him to remove it, which he said he would do voluntarily …

"The City will be posting all recorded sessions of council, excluding the question period, because the council are public figures and they can be recorded and put on the Internet," St. Louis added. "But certainly we're not in the position, or council has not instructed me to, say, post a waver at the start of each council meeting."

Barnard, a retired journalist and broadcaster, said he always assumed that comments made by residents standing at the microphone during city council meetings were part of a public record. "I'm not worried about that, and I don't think anybody here is," he said.

The director-general replied, "When you approach a microphone at a public meeting, there is a reasonable degree of your privacy."