Canadian Lawyer

22 M A Y 2 0 1 8 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m rom her office at Hill Sokal- ski Walsh Olson LLP, Sherri Walsh is about a 10-minute walk from Winnipeg City Hall — a place she's been visiting quite often in the last year as she establishes herself as the city's first integrity commissioner. Her job is to offer ethics advice to members of Winnipeg city council, investigate allegations of conflict of inter- est and report on potential conflicts. Named to the role in Feb. 22, 2017, Walsh, a prominent lawyer in Manitoba, officially started in the job April 1 of last year. Reflecting on the past year, she says it's been a challenging one bringing forth two important aspects of her mandate — creating a tougher code of conduct for the mayor and members of council and overseeing the creation of a voluntary lobbyist registry. "I'm coming to the end of my first year and loving it and so far I think they are happy with my work," she says. Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman ran on a campaign of transparency and accountability in 2014 and was keen that under his mandate the position of integrity commissioner would be created. While a code of conduct for mayor and council was in place since 1994, it really had no teeth if rules were broken. The City of Winnipeg had been consid- ering the idea of an integrity commissioner going back to 2009 when it was asking the province of Manitoba to amend the city charter to allow for the creation of an eth- ics commissioner. It asked again in 2013 and the province said the authority already existed in legislation, so in December 2015 council commissioned a report from the public service on what an integrity com- missioner's position would look like and did some cross-jurisdictional analysis. It then voted to create the role of integrity commissioner with the mandate to cre- ate a code of conduct and then issued a request for proposal and ultimately hired and appointed Walsh in February 2017. Walsh is the co-founder of Winni- peg law firm Hill Sokalski Walsh Olson LLP, which she started in 1988 as a litiga- tion boutique with David Hill. Much like Walsh, many integrity commissioners in other parts of Canada operate through companies or law firms. Although the integrity commissioner job in large municipalities such as Toron- to are full-time dedicated positions, in many jurisdictions, it is a role filled by individuals who have other jobs in addi- tion to being integrity commissioner. In Calgary, for example, the job resides with two people: an ethics adviser — Univer- sity of Calgary law professor Alice Wool- ley, and Allen Sulatycky, a retired justice of the Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta, who acts as the integrity commissioner handling complaints and writing reports as to whether there's been a breach of the city's code of conduct. "My colleagues across the country are the smartest group of people and the most generous with their time and C R O S S E X A M I N E D Making city hall accountable Winnipeg lawyer Sherri Walsh is completing her first year overseeing the implementation of a code of conduct for city council By Jennifer Brown F

• Cover