Don Cayo: In my opinion
Meaning: Term is loosely used, but lacks clear defi nition
“Social licence” is a popular term these days, with pipeline protests and other public movements. But what exactly does it mean?
“Social licence” — a recent offshoot of the millennium-old concept that state power must have the consent of the governed to be legitimate — has come to play a substantial role in modern democracies, nowhere more so than in B. C.
“British Columbia appears to have hosted more frequent drama, colour, and noise around social licence than anywhere else in the world,” in the words of forestry professor emeritus Fred Bunnell of UBC.
And although he wrote these words in a paper published more than a year ago, they ring even more true today in light of a raft of recent disputes between neighbourhoods and city hall, the Kinder Morgan pipeline fuss in Burnaby, the further developments — or non- developments — in the Enbridge Northern Gateway saga, the ongoing dance of steps forward and steps back in the New Prosperity Mine and Jumbo Glacier Resort approval processes, and more.
Which seems odd to me in light of the considerable confusion over what the term actually means.
Social licence can be “either a synonym for cool, calm, intelligent risk and reputation management by government and industry, or else a polite term for mob rule,” in the blunt words of Brian Lee Crowley, the managing director of the Macdonald- Laurier Institute.
Crowley, in an institute paper published last month, raises some interesting questions about the concept.
What’s the address to which you write to obtain a social licence? What form must be used? Who are the authorities entitled to decide if your application meets the rules, and to whom are they accountable? In fact, what are the rules? What are the procedures followed in determining if you satisfy them? What appeal procedures exist if a project proponent feels their project has not been fairly assessed?
In my view, the problem may not be so much that there are no answers to these questions, or to the broader one that asks precisely how social licence should be defined. On the contrary — it may be that there are too many mutually exclusive answers. Like Humpty Dumpty when he was asked what a word meant, each of us seems to think social licence means — or at least it should mean — exactly what we say it means, neither more nor less.
Such highly personal interpretations also apply to the key issue of what size of group is required to constitute a morally, if not legally, valid “social licensing authority.”
Is it the provincial governments as a group, as was suggested by my Postmedia colleague Andrew Coyne in his column this week on how the premiers routinely use their political clout to encroach on federal powers? Or is it a single province, as seems to be suggested by Premier Christy Clark — and more recently by her counterparts in Ontario and Quebec — when the feds or the Albertans come to talk about pipelines on our turf?
When the project is national in scope, does the power reside with a single municipality, as Burnaby maintains in its pipeline dispute with Kinder Morgan? Or with 200 self- appointed folks with picket signs on a hill, some of them with masks so you don’t know who they are, let alone who they represent?
Or are decisions up to neighbourhoods, unofficial entities whose spokespeople, whether authorized by a formal group or not, insist their views should trump those of elected officials in city hall?
And should the answers to these questions be any different when the matter under consideration is confined to a limited geography, like a mine or a community centre, as opposed to one that spans many communities of interest, each of which may or may not be all for it, like a pipeline or a bike path?
Answers to these questions are neither simple nor obvious to me.
If you think you have some or all of them, or if you have questions to add, please let me know. I’ll revisit this issue in a later column.