Behind the Door: Prince George Council Failing to Heed BC Ombudsperson's Advice on Closed Meetings

Prince George council regularly meets in private. What it decides there almost never comes out, and even its public votes are hard to collate.

Our review of the City's own records counts 100 closed meetings since the November 2022 election.

Closing a meeting is legal. The Community Charter lets councils discuss land deals, legal advice, labour relations and personnel matters in private.

The problem is what information is released afterward. In Prince George, almost nothing is.

A record with nothing in it - For each closed meeting, the City posts minutes listing who attended, the motion to close and the time the doors shut. Then they stop - no discussion, no decisions, no votes. The Community Charter allows closed minutes to be withheld, but nothing stops council from releasing them, and the BC Ombudsperson recommends releasing closed meeting information once it no longer needs protection.

We searched more than 100 sets of published minutes and over 2,400 recorded votes for any formal release of closed-meeting decisions. We found two.

In January 2024, council released its resolutions from a December 2023 closed meeting about missing City gravel, including how councillors voted: a motion asking the RCMP to reopen the file failed, with the mayor and four councillors opposed. In March 2026, the City posted a summary of a code of conduct investigation into Mayor Simon Yu, which found no breach but called his comments "close to the line." That went up on a separate web page - the decision to release it appears nowhere in the public minutes.

Two releases in 100 closed meetings. If council has made any others public, they aren't in the minutes. And council never once used a "rise and report" — a standing item at a public meeting where council announces decisions it made in private. Other BC councils make it routine. For instance every City of Nanaimo regular council agenda carries one.

A closed meeting shouldn't mean permanent secrecy. Council and City staff work for the public, and closed meeting decisions should be released as soon as possible. Some will need names redacted, particularly in personnel or labour matters, but most of the information can and should be made public.

What the watchdog recommends - In January 2026, the BC Ombudsperson published a new edition of its open meetings guide for local governments, updating advice first issued in 2012. Much of it reads like a list of what Prince George doesn't do.

"It is not best practice to regularly or routinely close any local government meeting," the guide says. Closed resolutions "should be made public during an open meeting as soon as possible." Closed minutes should record "any motions, resolutions or votes." Councils should "regularly review" closed records and publish what no longer needs to be secret. The guide also calls it best practice to give a general description of what a meeting is being closed to discuss. Prince George's motions cite the Charter paragraphs relied on and reproduce their wording verbatim, and nothing more.

Is council closing too many meetings? Nobody outside the room can say. Every closed session cites a reason the law allows, but the guide says that is only the start: council must also judge whether open discussion would cause real harm. With the subjects never described and the decisions almost never released, residents have no yardstick to test that judgment against. The guide itself notes that councils should "avoid regularly scheduled closed meetings" — yet 80 of Prince George's 100 were stand-alone sessions held the afternoon of a public meeting.

The open votes are hard to find too- Even the votes Prince George's council casts in public take work to track. The City posts a separate PDF roll call for each meeting. Building a full term's record meant piecing together more than 2,400 votes from 97 files and the minutes.

The City of Nanaimo solved this in 2020. After a council motion, staff built an online Council Meeting Dashboard, updated after every meeting. A bar for each member shows their attendance and conflict-of-interest declarations alongside how many times they voted in favour or against. Below it, every item is listed with each member's vote and a link to the meeting record. Click an item and the full wording of council's decision appears; filter by member, date or meeting type, or search the decisions by keyword. Please refer to Nanaimo's Council Meeting Dashboard link at the bottom of this article.

Prince George could also create a similar dashboard that shows:

Attendance: meetings attended and missed, with the reason where one is recorded.
Votes: each member's yes, no, absent and conflict totals, and their vote on every motion.
Initiative: motions each member moved or seconded, notices of motion they brought forward, and what became of them.
Staff advice: whether council adopted, amended, deferred or rejected each staff recommendation.
Closed meetings: how many were held, the Charter reason and a general description for each, and every resolution released since.

The City already records almost all of this. It just isn't in one place, and closed meeting decisions are almost never shared.

What needs to change - None of this requires new provincial law. Council could adopt it all by policy:

1. Rise and report at every closed meeting. Decide before leaving which resolutions can be announced, then announce them.
2. A release page and a schedule. Review closed records at least twice a year and publish on one web page what no longer needs protection.
3. Say what's being discussed. Describe each item in general terms, such as "acquisition of land on the west side," not just Charter paragraphs.
4. Record closed votes, then release them when the need for secrecy ends.
5. Build a council dashboard showing each member's attendance, absences, votes, conflict-of-interest declarations and own motions, plus closed-meeting figures, updated after every meeting.

Nanaimo has shown it can be done. Residents shouldn't have to dig through dozens of PDFs to see how their mayor and councillors vote, or wait years, if at all, to learn what was decided behind closed doors.

Voters go to the polls October 17. Every candidate should be asked if they will commit to these changes.