How enthusiastic are feds about consultation?
Given the prime minister’s predilection for plunging himself, occasionally shirtless, chest first into the public arena, it should come as no surprise that the government he leads seems equally enthusiastic about cross-country conversations on pretty much every major issue — and a good number of relatively minor ones — that hits the policy radar.
From climate change to pot legalization to where to hand out billions of dollars in infrastructure funding, Team Trudeau claims to be keen to hear what Canadians have to say.
Canada.ca may need to add a new server cluster to keep up with the growing number of microsites dedicated to soliciting and, in some cases, sharing their thoughts on how the government should proceed.
The trouble with getting people to talk, of course, is that you have to listen. And when you’re constantly proclaiming your openness and transparency, that means being upfront about what you’ve been told, especially if it turns out entirely different than you had expected.
Most of those consultations are still in progress, so we haven’t seen how much of the public response is relayed back to the public when a final decision is made, or what happens when the consensus settles around a preferred outcome at odds with what the government had been laying the groundwork to adopt.
The Conservatives may live to regret taking the opposite approach to one particularly contentious subject on the consultation roster this summer: According to the online calendar on the government website, just two Tory MPs — Bruce Stanton and Marilyn Gladu — have taken Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef up on her suggestion to hold electoral reform town halls in their ridings.
It’s not hard to guess why most of the Conservative caucus appears to have turned up its collective nose at Monsef’s proposed template: The party has made it clear it believes the only way to truly gauge the view of the electorate on the issue is to hold a formal referendum.
Even so, that does not automatically exclude the possibility of holding town hall sessions, if only to bolster the case for a countrywide vote. There is, after all, a limit to how many times one can cite the same proreferendum op-eds or point to past polling results without it starting to look like you, too, are wary of checking in with the voting public out of fear that public opinion may have shifted in the interim.
It may also lead to what will be, from the Conservative perspective, a glaring gap in the report that the special committee on electoral reform will present to Parliament this fall, which is expected to include summaries from those town hall sessions that all MPs were invited to convene — an offer that it appears was taken up, with varying degrees of eagerness, by every caucus but the Conservatives.
That might make it trickier to persuade those not invested in the fight for a referendum — and, by extension, to preserve the first-pastthe-post status quo — to join the battle, which is crucial if they actually want to force the Liberals to put their proposed plan to the people before making the change. (It could also provide a handy comeback for advocates of proportional representation when facing off against FPTP loyalists lamenting the potential loss of the “direct link” between the electorate and the elected.)
In any case, the clock is ticking down on the Liberals’ deadline for tabling legislation. When they do, we’ll see how closely it matches the tone and substance of town hall sessions, and whether their commitment to public consultations stops at the cabinet door. Kady O’Malley is a political columnist for the Ottawa Citizen.