It’s come to my attention that some recent documents I received, wrote about and posted online may have ruffled some feathers at Brantford city hall.

What a great opportunity for me to explain a philosophy when it comes to documents.

When a document is commissioned by a publicly funded government or agency, the inherent ownership of that as far as I’m concerned lies with the people who’ve paid for it. The public. Plenty of exceptions to this rule exist, to protect intellectual and other property that may be contained in said documents when they’re commissioned, which allows those documents to be kept and viewed only by authorized personnel.

Some of these exceptions are understandable and logical— these governments and agencies should have the same legally protected ability to view certain things in confidence the same way that you and I would be extended that ability. If I receive written advice from my lawyer, for example, I don’t have an obligation to share that with the world and in that respect, when a council commissions a document from its lawyer it should have the same ability to respect that solicitor-client privilege.

However, when that document is meant for public consumption, such as these reports are, and I receive a copy of them, where possible, I’m sharing. In this particular case, the documents were sent to committee members. Not members of council, nor under any advisement that the matter the reports pertain to was legitimately an in-camera item. Public documents sent to members of the public appointed by council to advisory committees.

The frustration, if any, in part, with those documents ending up in my hands is that council has not officially received or reviewed them. However, once the documents are sent out to members of a city committee, whether or not any official action or statement on them is ever made, they’re in the public domain and they’re public.

Any time I receive documents under those conditions, you’d better believe I’ll be reading them, writing about them where necessary and sharing them where possible.

If I receive other documents under different conditions — plain manila envelopes always welcome — I, in consultation with editors, will be weighing whether to write about them and post them for public view using much of the same criteria: Should the document(s) have been private to begin with? Is it in the public interest they be made public? How is the public best served by publishing? And so on…

My colleague Michael-Allan Marion has two articles in the Expositor today (Thursday) on discussions in the County of Brant regarding its police service. The article on the discussion at the county’s police services board is here, with a related story on the City of Brantford’s reaction here.

Policing— something I thought I had evolved past when I came to the Expositor. Though I’m not alone in saying so in this newsroom given the changes in policing when the single-tier County of Brant was created, I did get the joy of covering the dissolution of the former Oxford Community Police Service and its replacement by the OPP in three townships and a newly created Woodstock Police Service.

As irritating as it might be to the members of the Brant police services board to hear it, Brantford Mayor Chris Friel — also the chair of Brantford’s police services board — is 100% correct when he says discussions over the future of policing are entirely within councils’ prerogative.

Provincial legislation dictates that one of the many strategic and policy responsibilities of municipal councils is to decide how to provide policing service within its borders. Council leads that process and is solely responsible for determining how policing will be offered.

If it chooses to hire an existing police service, then it enters into a contract and has a right to form a police service board including locally appointed members, provincially appointed members and members of council. If it goes its own way then it also forms a police service board. The police services board hires a police chief to take care of operational matters and it covers policy and budget as a body of administrators. Council pays the budget.

If at any time council is interesting in changing its arrangement, the task it its alone and the police services board has no say. Neither, despite the impact such uncertainty may have on the rank and file, does the police chief or ranking officer within the detachment. Both would be wise to keep their noses out of these politics and leave them to the political bodies— the municipal councils.