hat if you received a letter from the City of Ottawa asking you to serve for two years on a council to advise the mayor on his policies and priorities? Would you put aside a few hours every month if you thought you could make a difference?
That was one of the ideas put forward at a focus group hosted by the City of Ottawa to explore ways to encourage more public participation in the decision-making process. The Focus Group was part of a process called "Many Voices - One Government," which seeks public input on how the City of Ottawa informs, consults, involves, collaborates and empowers stakeholders.
One of the biggest challenges is to reach out to the ordinary, work-a-day, raise-a-family citizens who often have the most at stake in city decisions, but do not have the time or inclination to get involved in the decision-making process.
Most public discussion is dominated by people who represent a special interest. At the April 12 focus group, environmental activists, the arts community, anti-pesticide people, pro-forestry people, persons with disabilities, persons from First Nations, and the bicycling community were all represented. These are committed and dedicated people and their voices deserve to be heard. But they do not represent the general population, and they tend to co-opt the public discussion and the decision-making process.
Community associations are a little better at representing a broad spectrum of public interest - but they are not the solution. Although they have a mandate to represent a community as a whole, the boards of community associations tend to be made up of people who have a particular issue they want to pursue at the local level.
Community associations do an admirable job of bringing together various issues and interests into one room once a month. A good community association can also respond quickly and effectively to issues that arise in the community. But when you ask a community association for input into public policy, you are likely to get the points of view of people within the community who have the same focus on narrow issues as the people from special interest groups.
The city has put in place a system of "Advisory Councils" to feed public input into the decision making process. But the Advisory Council system has become just another vehicle for special interest groups to exercise their influence. Citizens apply with their resumes to become members of Advisory Councils. They are chosen, in large part, on the basis of the influence they already have as demonstrated by the hard work they have already put into the public policy process. They don't represent ordinary citizens.
So what if the city had a different method of nominating people for Advisory Councils? What if the councils became an effective tool for filtering public input through a filter that truly represented the "ordinary" people of Ottawa?
How to do this? Perhaps we should use the public pollster's method of random sampling to nominate people chosen by lottery. Who would be included? Every resident? Every taxpayer? Everyone with a telephone listing? I don't know. The details are open to discussion. The essential notion, however, is using random sampling to get a cross section of the people of Ottawa to comprise an advisory council.
Let's flesh out a few more ideas. Terms on the council would be for two years, with half the council chosen every year. One year to learn the ropes, and another to help show the ropes to the next generation of council members.
Nominees would receive a letter from the city, asking them to join the Advisory Council and setting out both the time obligations and the benefits to the city and their community that would result from their petition.
Nominees would be asked to set aside three hours, once a month, for council meetings. In my experience, most people can do this - no matter how busy. The single mother and the high-tech entrepreneur would both find time to do it, I think, if they had confidence that their time would be put to good use in making Ottawa a more responsive city, and a better place to live in.
What if the nominee just wasn't interested - or knew that there wasn't enough time in the month to do a capable job? Perhaps the nominee could name his or her own substitute: a friend, family member or neighbour whom they thought would represent their perspective. The substitute would hold the seat for two years. (This isn't in keeping with the notion of "random sampling," I know, but I think it would work.) How would they cope with background reading and briefings? These can take more time than the monthly board meetings, it's true. The challenge would be for those providing input to the council to distill their presentations to a single page.
One of the positive benefits of such a system would be to encourage more people to get involved in public policy. After a two-year term on the council, most members would, I believe, find other ways to stay involved. These were ideas thrown into the discussion as a result of the city's "Many Voices - One Government" initiative. Anyone wishing to participate in an on-line discussion group on this topic is invited to log onto: http://toponline.ca/Meetings /Topics.cfm?ProjectId=47.