OPINION: The consultant class – how rural municipalities outsource judgment

By Mike Barcz

No municipal system of managed decline sustains itself on bureaucracy alone. It needs outside validation. It needs a professional class willing to arrive with a briefcase, confirm what the department already believes and leave with a cheque.

That class has a name: consultants. And rural Ontario has never paid more for less.

There is a founding myth around the municipal consultant. Small municipalities lack the in-house expertise to handle complex planning, engineering and policy questions, so they bring in specialists as needed. This is a reasonable arrangement in theory. In practice, it functions as a deniability machine.

When a department head does not want to approve something, they do not say so. Saying so would invite a conversation, a challenge and a council vote.

Instead, they commission a study that takes six months. It costs tens of thousands of dollars. And it arrives with the answer the department wanted before the first invoice was signed, wrapped in enough technical language that no councillor would ever read past page 12. Nobody is accountable for that outcome. The consultant delivered the report they were hired to deliver. The department followed the advice of an independent expert. Council approved the staff recommendation.

The applicant – a farmer, developer or small business owner – lost a year of their life and has no one to hold responsible while they foot the bill. That is not a flaw in the arrangement. That is the point of it.

What makes the consultant class particularly entrenched is how completely the market has closed around itself. The same firms that write municipal official plans are hired to audit them five years later.

The same consultants who design the environmental assessment framework are contracted to guide applicants through it.

The firms that train planning staff on provincial policy interpretation are the same ones advising private clients on how to navigate that interpretation. At every turn, the same small network of companies captures the fee on both sides of the transaction.

This is not a conspiracy. It does not need to be. It is simply what happens when an industry is built on complexity it has a financial interest in maintaining. A consultant who simplifies the process bills fewer hours. A firm that resolves disputes quickly loses the retainer.

The incentives all point in the same direction: away from the interests of the rural taxpayer.

The municipality does not see this conflict because they are not looking for it. They are looking for a firm with provincial experience, recognized credentials and a portfolio of completed studies. The consultant class has spent 30 years ensuring that entry requirements to that list are ones only they can meet.

There is a deeper problem beneath the economics: how we have come to define expertise itself. A road superintendent with 30 years of experience in rural drainage knows things that do not appear in any provincial guideline. A farmer who has worked the same concession for two generations understands water movement across that land in ways no hydrological model will capture.

That knowledge is real and in a functioning system, it would be weighted accordingly. But it’s not. It is dismissed as anecdotal and overruled by a consultant who has never set foot on the property but holds the correct designation and can cite the correct subsection. The credentials become the argument, and the argument becomes the decision, and the decision gets made by someone whose relationship to the land is a line item on an invoice.

Slowly and without public debate, we have disqualified the people most affected by local decisions from having meaningful input into them. We replaced judgment with process, and process with credentials, until the only voice that counts is the one that arrived from the city with a briefcase.

The relationship between municipal staff and the consulting firms they hire is rarely examined but it should be. It is common, across rural Ontario, for senior planning and engineering staff to leave municipal employment and resurface within a year at the firms they previously contracted.

They bring with them something more valuable than technical knowledge: relationships, institutional familiarity and a detailed understanding of various departments and what language moves a file forward.

From the other direction, consulting firms place junior staff into municipal roles, building relationships and familiarity that pay dividends when those same municipalities need to retain outside expertise.

The door between the public payroll and the private consulting market spins continuously, and the people passing through it are not breaking any rules. They are simply operating in a system built to accommodate them.

The rural taxpayer funds both sides of this arrangement. They pay the municipal salary on the way in and the consulting invoice on the way out. They do not typically know this is happening because no one is required to tell them.

But it would be wrong to suggest outside expertise has no place in local government. There are genuine technical questions in municipal planning and infrastructure that benefit from independent analysis. The problem is not that municipalities use consultants, it’s that they have surrendered their judgment to them.

An honest consulting relationship looks like this: the municipality identifies a specific question it cannot answer internally, retains a firm for a defined scope and timeline, receives a recommendation, weighs that recommendation against local knowledge and common sense, and makes a decision. The consultant informs the process. The elected official owns the outcome.

What we have instead are municipalities that outsource the question, analysis and recommendation, and then ratifies the result without meaningful review. Council becomes a notary, staff becomes a routing system and the consultant becomes the government, without the accountability that comes with the title.

Fixing this does not require eliminating the consulting industry. It requires rural councils to remember that they were elected to exercise judgment, not to receive it from a third party and pass it along.

It means publishing the full scope, cost and timeline of every consulting contract so taxpayers can see what is being bought and whether they got it. It means requiring consultant recommendations to be summarized in plain language and presented alongside staff analysis before council votes. It means setting a ceiling on what any single engagement can cost before it triggers a public review.

Most importantly, it means treating local knowledge as evidence.

The road superintendent who says the culvert is fine is not less credible than the firm that charges $15,000 to agree with him three months later. The farmer who has managed drainage on a given concession for 40 years has standing in that conversation.

A functioning rural government would treat it that way. The consultants did not capture rural Ontario on their own. They were invited in by a system that had already decided accountability is more trouble than it is worth.

Fixing that requires elected officials willing to own their decisions again. They need to say this is what I believe, this is what my community needs, and I will answer for it at the ballot box.

That is a harder job than approving a staff recommendation. 

But that is the job.

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Mike Barcz is a Grey Highlands resident, small business owner and founder of TrackMyTax.ca, which analyzes and explains municipal spending and property taxes.