A form that sends complaints to oblivion, an inaccessible application, requests that we lose track of: the processing of citizen requests leaves something to be desired, noted the Commission municipale du Québec (CMQ) in three municipalities of less than 8,000 inhabitants.
Until very recently, citizens of Mont-Joli who used the municipality’s online complaint form were automatically excluded. The form “went to spam from the designated address. We did not receive him at the City, ”summarizes the spokesperson for this municipality of Bas-Saint-Laurent, Sonia Lévesque.
It was the CMQ that detected this anomaly, as part of an audit on the management of requests and feedback from citizens of three municipalities with 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants. Mont-Joli was part of the sample, along with Saint-Césaire, in Montérégie, and Brownsburg-Chatham, in the Laurentians.
Mont-Joli is unable to say how many complaints have gone unanswered. The majority of them being made by telephone, at city hall or with municipal councillors, “I don’t think it’s a large number,” says Ms.me Levesque. This problem has been corrected, but the municipality does not yet have data on all the complaints it receives.
The CMQ took an interest in the processing of complaints, reports, requests, comments and suggestions because it “directly affects the citizen” and “returns regularly in the municipal world”, explains its spokesperson, Isabelle Rivoal.
This is an audit, not a survey: municipalities were selected for their comparable characteristics, not because they were problematic. However, shortcomings emerged everywhere.
“Each municipality audited has at least one inefficient means of communication (eg invalid email address), which prevents the receipt of the request or the feedback sent by the citizen”, indicates the CMQ in its report published on Tuesday. As for the application offered by Brownsburg-Chatham, the instructions for downloading it did not work at the time of the audit.
Thirty queries were tested in each location. What proportion was treated adequately? Impossible to assess, found the CMQ. Mont-Joli does not register the requests received, and the two other municipalities only register part of them.
The observation made at the very end of the exercise is obvious: this lack of rigor means that we escape from it, and certain requests are not honored.
Isabelle Rivoal, spokesperson for the Commission municipale du Québec
Mont-Joli has invested more than $10,000 in software it will train its staff in the spring. As for the other two municipalities, they should use the tools they have “adequately […] including by registering all citizen requests,” the report recommends.
All three “have adhered to all the recommendations”, underlines the CMQ, which wishes to see all the other municipalities of Quebec do the same.
No access to information
However, the CMQ did not evaluate the requests for access to information, because these are governed by the Act respecting access to documents held by public bodies and the protection of personal information. It therefore did not verify the extent to which municipalities require their citizens to go through access to obtain answers.
The Professional Federation of Journalists of Quebec (FPJQ) has already denounced the fact that municipalities force journalists to make requests for access to public documents. “Some basic data is no longer accessible despite the transparency policies of cities and municipalities. This also complicates access to information for the citizen,” noted the FPJQ last year in its report on a survey of 147 participants (9% of members).
On the other hand, the CMQ took an interest in the websites of the municipalities, to see if the information that they are required to publish, or that should appear there for the sake of transparency, is indeed present. This audit was carried out last year with 20 municipalities of 500 to 10,000 inhabitants, including Montreal West. “This report should be out before the end of March,” predicts Mme Rival.
The audit on citizens’ complaints and requests published on Tuesday covered the period from 1er January 2020 to October 15, 2022.