THUNDER BAY -- The weight of the work ahead for the council composition committee isn’t lost on chair Rebecca Johnson or member Heather McLeod.
The committee will meet Tuesday afternoon on the heels of the three-week Public Engagement Survey period wrapping up.
McLeod stated after the Jan. 9 meeting that with the holiday season wrapped up, it’s now starting to dawn on her the massive amount of information there will be to evaluate.
“It is a little bit daunting, but in a good way, right?,” McLeod said.
“I certainly will be reading everything I can get my hands on, and I really hope we are going to make enough time to put our heads together and not just have read it and decided ‘oh, I'll just highlight this, that's what we'll go with’. This is a big decision and we should do it right.”
The committee has six members, which includes chair Johnson, vice-chair Cody Fraser along with members McLeod, Riley Burton, Wayne Bahlieda and Carlos Santander-Maturana.
Johnson stressed that she would like to see a unanimous answer among all six members before going back to council.
“We must do our research. It's important we have a really good understanding that whatever the recommendation is, we all agree with it.
"We can't go and say ‘well, there's four of us that think this is a good idea and two of us don't think it's a good idea.’ Coming to a consensus is crucial because we are going to be recommending how council should be composed, whatever that happens to look like in the future.”
When the municipality of Thunder Bay was created in 1970, it began with a mayor and 12 councillors elected evenly across four wards.
That expanded to seven wards in 1976, before the city, in 1985, adopted its current hybrid system that elects a mayor, seven ward councillors, and five at-large councillors.
A final report from the committee on the composition of council is slated for completion in advance of the 2026 municipal election.
