‘Consultation’ is a dirty word
By Susan Ong
Part One of our three part series
Throughout Canada, municipalities regularly run public consultations about all kinds of things. Should the park at the corner have a play structure or a splash pad? There’s a new development on the corner, what are the residents’ concerns? What opinions do residents have on waste collection?
Seems simple right? Put out a call for input, wait for the information to come in, incorporate the feedback and go ahead. Sadly, no. We’re not here to kill the vibe, but when done without an equity lens, public consultations or engagements run by government are at best, perfunctory and ineffectual and at worse, perpetuate harm.
How? We’ll explain.
It begins at the beginning of the process. In a digital age, the automatic default for how this information about upcoming consultations being disseminated is through platforms such as Bang the Table, a popular platform used by municipalities to have an engagement platform. City Councillors put the call outs for consultation or engagement in their newsletters, which are also emailed, usually once a week.
But while the Internet can be widely accessible and a phenomenal tool for having broad reach, statistics indicate that, even in urban areas, about 15% of people do not have access to a reliable broadband internet connection. And no surprise, given the cost of Internet in Canada, this affects people who are living on a fixed or a low income.
Even those who do have an internet connection, frequently encounter connection speeds that are too slow to participate in an online streamed meeting. Some community members rely on internet enabled devices like cellphones, but don’t have connection at home, relying on libraries, coffee shops and other public wifi points.
So if you’re keeping count, first, we have barriers to knowledge about consultations or engagement opportunities. Then, if community members know about the consultation held online, there will be barriers. Even if it’s not online, critical consideration like the time consultation activities are held create additional barriers. In our experience, most opportunities to participate in community consultations in person are in the evenings where additional question arise - is childcare offered? will there be food? And fundamentally, what is the value proposition for someone to participate, ie. why should they care?
At this point, busy public servants may argue that they have limited resources and that it is hard to reach other community members. And we get it.
Government staff regularly hit the easy button on consultation for a few reasons:
People who are pre-organised (community associations or existing groups) are easy to access;
Bureaucrats gets to then check the ‘we talked to people’ box
Those who participate, or the ‘Consulted groups’, are usually the most vocal, most active, very opinionated and have a lot to say!
Who is the consulted group? These folks have the time, privilege, resources and energy. The typical attendee at an evening community consultation on <whatever> is going to be a homeowner in their mid to late 50s to 70s with no children / grown children / often male, who work a salaried job or is retired. They’re community minded and very engaged, often members of community associations. Community associations are amazing local groups that organise on a local level to provide value to their communities with BBQs, events, and yes, organising for consultations. But just like the public servants putting out calls for consultations, they are only attracting the same people.
This is again, through no fault of either party. Statistics indicate that our social circles dictate our worldview and that we tend to attract the same people. If we are middle income parents with kids, most of our friends are going to be middle income parents with kids. If we’re very connected to our culture through regular attendance at a religious or cultural centre, our friends are likely to be similar. Likewise, if you’re a public servant with a stable, full-time job and housing, you’re going to default to spaces that you understand, which is assuming that others are in similar circumstances to you because they live in the same City. Community associations tend to attract the same people that are already there, and assume that this is representative of the community, writ large. Sadly though, this is not always the case.
Where we start seeing a pattern emerge, or people who are exactly like us in all our circles, this is a sign. It’s a sign to get out of our echo chamber and to take a wide angled equity lens to engage communities. At the beginning of this article, we talked about perpetrating harm and you’re likely wondering how well intentioned outreach could possibly be harmful and how you can do this properly.
In the next part of this series, we’ll talk about what happens when equity is considered but the outreach is clumsy or perfunctory and what solutions could be explored to do the work of engaging in a better way.
If you can’t possibly wait till the next part and want to chat about QuakeLab’s community engagement method, or community engagement in general, reach out, we’d love to hear from you!