Closed doors at City Hall: what three councillors pledged
Windsor council met behind closed doors 18 times this year to Sept. 28, City minutes show. Three councillors-elect ran on opening it up: Darcie Renaud wants board appointments made in public, Angelo Marignani wants closed meetings strictly limited.
Topics: Council and City Hall
Get these every Sunday: the free Windsor News weekly digest.
Windsor's council met behind closed doors 18 times in 2026, up to Sept. 28, according to the reports of closed sessions adopted in the City's own minutes. It met in camera 21 times in 2025 and 20 times in 2024. Those counts are on our closed-door meetings page.
Ontario's Municipal Act lets council close a meeting only for a short list of reasons, such as legal advice, land deals, labour talks and personal matters about an identifiable person. Appointments to City boards fall under that last one. City agendas show the Striking Committee, which recommends board appointments, meeting in camera to pick members, for example for the Windsor Public Library Board and the Windsor Essex Community Housing board in May 2024.pdf) and the Windsor Canada Utilities board in October 2025, under section 239(2)(b).
Three members of the council that takes office Nov. 15 ran on changing that.
Ward 1, Darcie Renaud. Her platform calls for "fewer closed-door meetings" and says "if a Council discussion can happen in public, it should." She pledges to "make appointments to City boards and committees in public," saying council should make appointment decisions in public "with recorded votes," while still protecting applicants' personal information.
Ward 7, Angelo Marignani. In his answer to the Windsor News candidate questionnaire, he wrote: "In-camera meetings must be strictly limited to their original purpose - protecting individual privacy and sensitive real estate matters - so that public business stays open and fully visible to taxpayers."
Ward 10, Mark Masanovich. His platform pledges to list Ward 10 infrastructure priorities, explain how they are funded, tell residents what was approved, delayed, rejected or completed, and "report publicly twice yearly on progress." He told CBC Windsor the same.
These are campaign pledges, not City policy. We track every new member's pledges, with sources, on our promise tracker, and a pledge's status changes only when a public record shows council acting on it.
