Public officials don’t always have to side with majority of citizens

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/07/2015 (3728 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was a great stunt, designed to get a media response. Put up amendments that were rejected at city council on the Mayor’s office door, with the inscription “democracy denied.” This is what Transcona city councillor Russ Wyatt did Wednesday and it raises a good question: What is democracy?

Usually, this is the kind of broad, philosophical question that could be debated at length in a graduate political science seminar. But it is also a very practical question, one that has real implications for how political decisions are made — or not made — based on whether a particular event or tactic is seen to be democratically legitimate.

In recent weeks, some Winnipeg city councillors have been suggesting there is something illegitimate about the way the city’s active transportation plan was developed. They criticized the consultation process and the report it produced. Then, these councillors aired radio ads in an attempt to rally public opinion against the 20-year, $334-million strategy. When they tabled 20 motions at Wednesday’s city council meeting that would have amended the plan, the majority of council voted against their efforts to essentially filibuster the passage of this plan by tabling all of these motions at once. This move — which, it should be noted, was completely council’s prerogative and within the rules — led Wyatt to engage in a bit of political theatre.

So was democracy thwarted in this case?

In the practical context of politics and public opinion, democracy is usually defined as being a situation where decisions are made based on the will of the majority. In a city where most citizens drive to get to the places they need to get to, it is likely, although not completely certain, that the majority of Winnipeggers would oppose the plan to expand active transportation infrastructure.

In a related example, last year a Probe Research survey showed 71 per cent of Winnipeggers wanted a chance to vote on whether to extend bus rapid transit to the University of Manitoba. When asked how they would vote in a hypothetical plebiscite, 53 per cent of Winnipeggers said they would vote against funding Phase 2 of BRT. Despite the public pressure to put rapid transit to a vote — and a clear indication that the majority of Winnipeggers are actually against spending money on bus lines — 13 out of 16 democratically-elected members of council (or 81 per cent) voted against holding a plebiscite.

In that case, did the vast majority of councillors ignore the will of the majority? Technically, yes. But those elected representatives are chosen to do just that — represent us — for four years at a time. And they also have an obligation to lead rather than blindly follow public opinion, whether that comes in the form of a scientific poll or what they’re hearing at the doorstep.

Public officials should know what the public is thinking and must be responsive to their concerns, but they do not have an unbending obligation to always side with the majority of citizens (or, in many cases, the vocal minority who appear to be a majority based on how much noise they make). They have an obligation instead to steer public opinion rather than to blindly follow it.

Case in point: former premier Duff Roblin had the vision and foresight to build the Red River Floodway after the 1950 flood, even though he was loudly criticized by those who felt this massive public works project was an expensive and potentially unnecessary undertaking. There was no poll taken of Manitobans in the 1960s regarding what they thought of the Floodway, but rest assured that if people then were anything like today, they would oppose spending such a massive sum of money on something that may or may not be required. Thankfully, the Floodway was built, and today if you polled Winnipeggers you would be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of citizens who believe building the Floodway was a bad idea.

We know from quarterly surveys that Winnipeggers strongly believe that the most pressing political priority for the city is to address our infrastructure challenges. But something very strange happens when we start to talk about “infrastructure” a little more broadly.

When there is a proposal to spend money on bus rapid transit or active transportation, suddenly the debate is framed in zero-sum terms where a dollar diverted to bike lanes or bus corridors is a dollar stolen from filling potholes or widening regional streets. What you get then is the sort of dumbed-down rhetoric and fear mongering that we have heard over the active transportation strategy, where the efforts to develop a long-term plan that takes cars off the road and makes cycling less dangerous are attacked as being the nefarious work of a sinister-sounding “bike lobby,” a well-connected minority subverting the wishes of the car-driving majority that just wants their streets re-paved.

This sort of discussion — and suggesting democracy has been thwarted when you don’t get your way — is not helpful. If a majority of Winnipeggers are truly upset about what happened at council this week, they will have their opportunity to make their voices heard at the ballot box in 2018.

Curtis Brown is the vice-president of Probe Research Inc. His views are his own.

curtis@probe-research.com

Twitter: @curtisatprobe