After Orillia declared a state of emergency in the wake of a devastating ice storm last spring, Mayor Don McIsaac turned to the province for help.
McIsaac asked Housing Minister Rob Flack for a package of unprecedented authorities introduced by Premier Doug Ford’s government: strong-mayor powers, which bestow the ability to veto council decisions, hire and fire staff, and approve bylaws with minority support.
Flack quickly granted Orillia the powers on a temporary basis, “In response to your request as head of council for strong-mayor powers to help manage the significant impacts and power outages within your municipality resulting from recent ice storms,” he wrote.
McIsaac’s next move stunned members of council and the public.
With his first flex of the new powers, the mayor terminated the incoming chief administrative officer, the city’s top public servant, who was due to start in a week.
The hiring had been approved by council, and the official learned of the news minutes after meeting with Orillia city staff to pick up his new phone and laptop, according to local media.
Ford’s government advertised strong-mayor powers as a tool to fix the housing crisis. But a comprehensive Toronto Star analysis found that just two per cent of more than 4,200 strong-mayor decisions issued since the law’s inception have been directly in support of housing.
Instead, the top use of the powers was corporate organization, including hiring and firing staff, the Star’s analysis shows. Previously, the process required the approval of the majority of council, but strong mayors can hire and fire any division head other than a handful of protected positions including the police chief, the integrity commissioner and the auditor general.
Experts and professional organizations warn this quieter recalibration of local government creates a risk that is difficult to measure: a chilling effect on public servants who now serve at the pleasure of an individual politician.
“Culturally, the powers are having a really big impact,” said David Arbuckle, executive director of the Association of Municipal Managers, Clerks and Treasurers of Ontario.
Some of his members fear “retribution” for offering unwelcome advice, he adds.
“It does put some handcuffs on staff if they feel that ultimately their actions and their advice are being brought forward to someone who can make a decision in relation to their employment.”
Firings provoke controversy
While most strong-mayor hirings and firings attract little attention, in some cases, they have erupted into major municipal controversies — including in Orillia.
A petition circulated in the wake of that firing attracted more than 400 signatures, with some calling the move “a gross abuse of power” and a decision that “spits in the face of democracy.”
Council approved a motion to ask the province to rescind Orillia’s strong-mayor powers. It was unsuccessful: instead, the province soon made them permanent.
“I find it ironic that Doug Ford criticizes Donald Trump so much. Strong-mayor powers are very much something like Trump would do, giving powers to these individuals to upend the system,” said Orillia councillor David Campbell, who voted along with six others to ask the province to rescind the powers.
“That idea of power and control — it’s not right. It’s not the way our system should work in Canada.”
In an interview, McIsaac had no regrets about cancelling the incoming chief administrative officer’s employment and promoting the city staffer acting in the role instead. The mayor argued the move strengthened accountability because he could be held responsible for the performance of the staffer he chose.
“That’s what this is about — accountability. I think that we have used (strong-mayor powers) only to advance the interest of the province in the city, and I think it’s been well used by Orillia,” McIsaac said.
McIsaac recently announced he would not run for re-election.
How many strong-mayor firings?
The Star’s analysis counted at least nine occasions when strong mayors fired chief administrative officers or other top city officials. But Arbuckle warns that this undercounts the true volume of staffing changes triggered by the powers, since the mayor can also use the powers to delegate authority for hiring and firing to their top public servant, whose decision-making does not carry the same public disclosure requirements.
In Caledon, Mayor Annette Groves fired the town’s chief administrative officer a month after she was granted the powers in 2023.
Her hand-picked replacement led a dramatic restructuring that saw the town’s chief planner, top lawyer, clerk, chief financial officer and several other senior bureaucrats replaced through terminations, resignations and retirements, the Star’s Alyshah Hasham reported.
Groves, under fire for her use of the powers — including a proposal to fast-track the rezoning of 2,000 hectares of formerly agricultural and environmentally sensitive land to allow residential development — recently announced she would not run for re-election either.
Another controversy erupted last year in Haldimand County after Mayor Shelley Ann Bentley used strong-mayor powers to fire popular chief administrative officer Cathy Case.
Bentley denied the move was retribution after Case and another local official launched an investigation into leaked confidential correspondence — a leak that Haldimand County’s integrity commissioner later concluded the mayor had orchestrated. Bentley dismissed those findings.
“Let’s move on, let’s move forward. We’re refocusing here,” Bentley told her council last September, after refusing to give detailed reasons for Case’s dismissal.
Consequences of a ‘chilling effect’
Bestowing hiring and firing powers on mayors isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because it creates a direct line of accountability to a political leader, says Gabriel Eidelman, a professor at University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
But other orders of government with this kind of reporting structure also have clear guardrails to protect public servants’ neutrality and “make sure that their analysis is objective and evidence-based as opposed to politically motivated,” said Eidelman.
Eidelman and colleagues at the Canadian Municipal Barometer are undertaking a survey of chief administrative officers in Ontario to try to quantify anecdotal reports of a strong-mayor chilling effect.
The fear is that “maybe they’re not feeling it yet, but after this round of elections, you would see people in the public service that are really just there to serve the mayor as opposed to council as a whole.”
