Leaders fear public participation

It is not surprising that the civil service, and lurking above them, our current slate of elected “leaders,” are loathe to enact meaningful legislation that draws all citizens into “our democracy.”

To do so would be providing us – citizens – with equal stature and access in the eyes of the law, and not inconsequentially, would mean writing laws and regulations that guarantee citizens meaningful, effective participation and influence.

The extreme fear of the great “unwashed hordes” – my apologies, but that means me, you, and your neighbor – terrifies todays elected government and appointed civil service.

A foundation strategy of the industrial development and consumption agenda is to hand pick “process” participants; after all, if public hearings were held widely, and the doors open to all citizens who wanted to be heard, the progress and growth agenda that drives governments today would be critically examined, and in many cases, exposed as ecologically, socially and economically fraudulent.

Governments have created a special category of insiders – stakeholders”, as opposed to citizens – and grants these select few invited access. Public policy making has degenerated into internal meetings between civil servants and stakeholder interests who, with few exceptions, are people impaired by conflict of interest perspectives; that is, after all, the working definition of a stakeholder We see this at work, at the federal level, with the “planning” for a South Okanagan-Similkameen national park, where the Aboriginal industry gets preferential treatment, and a collective of handpicked citizens, none of whom have any science conservation credentials, is mixed in to build a false impression of public input.

The foundation for this advanced and complicated state of mismanagement, and the (anti)process that enables it, rests with a string of governments, and a compliant yet somewhat surreptitiously independent civil service. Management for intact ecosystems has consistently failed, not by accident or oversight, but because there was an orchestrated effort not to establish legally enforceable and written standards for environmental management and conservation.

Senior civil service management, including deputy ministers and ADMs, commonly “survive” through election after election. The civil service culture consequently dominates government decisions, sometimes for decades. It’s why, as so many citizen and organization activists clearly see, very little seems to change even when elected people and subsequent “governments” do.

It’s a strange paradox; the civil service, on one hand, is a robotic dogmatic belief system and culture religiously married to industrial growth and consumption. At a functional level, dealing with the public, they take refuge within a regulatory agenda in which there are virtually no defensible rules.

Here, the civil service freelances and controls almost every decision, unconfined by principles of citizen equality, lacking objective rules, hoarding information, and far too often favouring private interests at immense cost and damage to the public trust.

It is not ecologically or ethically possible to have operating principles, scientific standards for protection, or full public disclosure and participation and still enable and license the explosion of human industrial, agriculture and extreme recreational consumption of watersheds, landscapes and ecosystems without severely degrading biodiversity and ecological function.

Sadly, that’s where we find ourselves today.

Dr. Brian L. Horejsi is a wildlife and forest ecologist. He writes about environmental affairs, public resource management and governance and their entrenched legal and social bias.