On Thursday evening, Sackville’s municipal reform committee met for a third time, with a narrow mandate of providing input on whether Sackvillians would elect their future Entity 40 representatives at large, or in up to four separate wards.

But before they got to that question, councillors sounded off on a previous decision made by the province, to forego its own representation-by-population guidelines and allot just 50% of representatives to the former town of Sackville, which is home to 68% of the population of the new Entity 40.

Right off the bat, Councillor Allison Butcher asked Deputy Mayor Andrew Black if there was any chance of changing what she called “a skew as far as population goes?”

“No,” said Black. “That has been decided. That meeting that we had on the 15th, whatever decision was made at the end of that night with the advisory committee that was there, that decision was final.”

It’s become a theme of the municipal reform process so far: rushed decisions made in private meetings, with no substantive engagement with councils, much less the general public.

It was enough for Butcher to forego her usual attempts to put a positive spin on her comments: “At the risk of sounding really, really jaded, it probably doesn’t matter what I think should happen with the four councillors representing the 7000 people,” said Butcher, “because I’m starting to feel like it doesn’t matter what we think.”