Much has been said about the age and gender of new mayors elected in the last municipal elections. We also talked about their environmental concerns, but there is another subject where they stand out: citizen participation.
Posted at 9:49 p.m.
Updated October 31
Mayors Fournier in Longueuil and Beaudin in Sherbrooke are already giving their population new tools for citizen participation, tools which, until this spring, did not exist outside of Montreal.
In the traditional municipal world, there has always been resistance to the idea of consulting citizens. The phrase “We are paid to decide” would sum up quite well the traditional attitude of elected officials and “we are the experts”, quite well that of civil servants. The cities therefore generally maintained fairly tight control over the public consultation processes, when there were any.
Over the years, things have changed. On the one hand, the citizens’ “expertise in use” has been recognised.
No one knows a neighborhood better than the person who lives in it. On the other hand, citizens have never been so educated and never so informed.
I once participated in a meeting with the executive of a neighborhood association where all the participants had at least a bachelor’s degree, and the majority had a master’s or a doctorate!
Urban sprawl, environment, homelessness, street or park redevelopment, zoning change, heritage, addition of recreational services, addition of bike paths, citizens express themselves and mobilize on all subjects. If citizens want to influence the decisions of their city, they also have many means of doing so, means which they use happily: social media, traditional media, emails, text messages, city sites, elected officials’ sites, good old telephone, etc
Cities have therefore adopted citizen participation policies. These policies may be sufficient for most situations that arise, but they contain a loophole that the two mayors want to close.
Municipal officials are closely associated with all the major projects that are the subject of consultation, when they are not downright designers. They are therefore often judge and judged… and the citizens have the impression that the dice are loaded, that everything is arranged with the views guy, that they are managed more than they are listened to.
It is also developing what researchers call “event democracy” or, in other words, the “smoke show”.
We organize big consultation events that have no impact on decisions. Why ? Because municipal officials control what will be transmitted to elected officials, which is not a problem in the vast majority of cases. On the other hand, when the time comes to write the consultation reports on the projects that they themselves helped to design, even with the greatest rigor and the greatest good faith, it is sometimes difficult for them to contradict their own work.
The first institutional response to this conflict of roles was given 20 years ago this year with the creation of the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM). Until last spring, the OCPM was, in the municipal world, the only neutral and independent municipal public consultation organization in Quebec. Thanks to the mayors of Longueuil and Sherbrooke, two other large cities have now followed Montreal’s lead and have each given themselves an independent public consultation body.1.
This is a giant step for these two cities and, I hope, a decision that will inspire others.
Community consultation is a relatively complex expertise. It involves a certain connection with politics, specific methods of communication, the ability to differentiate between facts and opinions, strict rules of transparency, rare skills for framing sometimes stormy discussions, mechanisms so that neither the the opinion of civil servants or that of citizens are not overshadowed, etc. The existence of a body specializing in the field makes it possible to enrich all the municipal services and to reinforce the credibility of the city, if not of the State.
Yes, elected officials are paid to make decisions and they will always make them at the end of the consultation processes. Yes, civil servants have valuable expertise that they should always have the opportunity to express. Yes, but citizen participation is a welcome extension of representative democracy. The city belongs neither to civil servants nor to elected officials, but to all citizens. It is normal and desirable that their city be in their image, that it respects their will. Longueuil and Sherbrooke are moving us forward in that direction.