Library board re-vote fuels friction on new city council

Round two in city council’s fight over citizen appointments to the library board exposed a gap in the application process.

Last week, an initial vote selected five men, one woman and one non-binary gendered person to sit on the London Public Library Board.

However at the time, several councillors expressed concern about the lack of gender balance and pushed for a second vote from a shorter list of top vote-getters.

The second vote resulted in a new selection of three men and four women.

• Brian Gibson
• Jeremy McCall
• Scott Andrew Collyer
• Zeba Hashmi
• Beth Allison
• Heather Jack
• Sharon Desserud

Almost a week later, some councillors remain concerned about the optics of re-voting.

“Personally, I hope we will turn down this [second] slate of candidates,” Coun.Steve Hillier told council.

Coun. Jerry Pribil agreed, “I don’t think that was the fair decision to the ones we had [first] selected.”

“We paid a disservice to many of the citizens and stakeholders,” added Coun. Peter Cuddy who expressed remorse for not speaking up at last week’s committee meeting.

But other members of city council argued that the previous votes were a non-binding selection tool to pare down a long list of applicants.

Repeating a selection process is different than changing a council decision.

“Until this council [meeting] today approves this slate, it was simply a committee discussion,” explained Coun. Sam Trosow.

“It didn’t go ideally,” admitted Coun. Skylar Franke. “But we are trying to move forward with an equity lens.”

Council voted 9-6 in favour of the second slate of applicants.

There was general agreement on council that the situation exposed a need for more information from applicants so that diversity can be a criteria in future appointments to local boards.

Deputy Mayor Shawn Lewis telling CTV News that the Governance Working Group will consider changing the application form to include an optional declaration of gender, sexual orientation, age or membership in other diverse groups.

“There’s lots of data that we can voluntarily ask people to give us that can help us form our thoughts around who our preferences are moving forward. That’s a change we have to make to the application process,” he said.