Citizens’ Hall: Making Local Democracy Work

By Andre Carrel

Based on years of practical experience in small towns, Carrel argues for municipal autonomy–for turning what are now “colonies” of the federal and provincial orders of government into independent, mature, and fully democratic entities. For Carrel, the citizen is the sole legitimate source of political power, and the best tool for citizen empowerment is the controversial tool of the referendum.This is the story of how a small municipality broke the rules of local government. It also recounts the author’s irreverence for the status quo and his ideas on the rebuilding of citizenship at the community level.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Release date: Apr 6, 2001
• ISBN: 9781897071809

Book preview

Citizens’Hall

Making Local Democracy Work

André Carrel

Between the Lines

Toronto, Canada

Citizens’ Hall

© 2001 by André Carrel

First published in Canada in 2001 by

Between the Lines

401 Richmond Street West, Studio 277

Toronto, Ontario

M5V 3A8

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photocopying in Canada only) CANCOPY, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5.

Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 978-1-897071-80-9 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-897071-81-6 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-896357-42-3 (print)

Cover design, illustration, and text design by Lancaster Reid Creative

Printed in Canada by union labour

Between the Lines gratefully acknowledges assistance for its publishing activities from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

978-1-55109-783-1_0002_002001

to Jay & Anya

001

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction, by Jonathan Barker and Christopher Leo

1    Rights and Power: Local Government in Question

2    Changing the Status Quo

3    A Municipal Constitution

4    Municipal Government: Democratic Veneer on a Colonial Core

5    Politics, Accounting, Assets, and Taxes

6    Reforming the First Order of Government

7    The Democratic Way

8    Referendum:Toy or Tool of Democracy?

9    Towards Democratic Local Government

Appendix A    A Constitution for Local Government: The Rossland Discussion Paper

Appendix B    Bylaw no. 1728

Appendix C    Constitution Bylaw Statistics

Appendix D    Principles of Local Self-Government

Appendix E    Revenue Statistics

Appendix F    The Parksville Experience

Notes

Selected Bibliography

001

Preface and Acknowledgements

I can’t remember when the idea of writing a book first entered my mind. What I do know now is that I had no idea what I was about to undertake when I started the project. Linn Teetzel, instructor at Capilano College in North Vancouver, encouraged me to write. Linn gave me access to her public administration classes to test and debate my ideas. The time spent in Linn’s classes was invaluable. Her students are a bright lot; they demanded extensive research and preparation on my part, as they were not about to take a small-town administrator’s word as the gospel’s truth.

I owe a great debt to a number of Rossland city council members who served in the 1990s. Bob Miller, Garry Jenkins, Bill Stevens, Dave Butler, and Byron Siemens were the council members who truly believed in the idea of citizen empowerment. These were the councillors who gave the idea a chance to be tested. I also owe a debt to members of Rossland’s senior staff who worked with me during that period: Alfie Albo, Marilyn Espenhain, Jack Richardson, and Kathy Smith put their trust in me and my ideas. They made it all work in its day-to-day application.

In the early development of the manuscript, Judy Dunsdon spent many hours pouring over seemingly endless pages of writing. She was a meticulous proofreader. Even during her stay in Chile she continued to proofread my writing. By the time I had what I thought was a completed manuscript, Gerrie Waugh, psychology instructor at Capilano College, asked me, Who is your audience? I had not thought about that. I had set out to write a book without giving a thought as to who might some day want to read it. I don’t know, anybody who cares to read it, I guess was not an answer Gerrie was prepared to accept.

Rosa Jordan, who had successfully published several books and screenplays, was the first person to slap me and my project into shape. Rosa took a long and hard look at the bits and pieces of scrambled thoughts and dangling ideas. She forced me, showing remarkable patience, to apply discipline to my work. It was not until Rosa became involved in my project that I began to realize that writing a book was more than pontificating; it was hard work. Rosa understood my struggles. She had nothing but encouragement for me, particularly on those occasions when I thought that the whole thing was a mistake and I was ready to give up.

I have never met Philippa Campsie; meeting Philippa is still on my list of things I must do. Philippa was editor for the Cordillera Institute Journal, and in that capacity she edited a couple of articles I had written for the Journal. I was in awe of Philippa’s talent. Her many corrections pulled the message I meant to convey out of my writing. I apologized to Philippa at one point for dumping my vocabulary salad into her lap. Her response was that she enjoyed working on my material. I took that as an invitation, and she agreed to edit the manuscript. Philippa took over where Rosa left off. Her work was both extensive and exhausting. She is knowledgeable in the subject of the book, which added enormous value to her editing. Philippa’s critique could be mean and vicious (in the most caring way possible). More than once her editing reminded me of unflavoured cod-liver oil. However, by the time Philippa was done I was ready to go hunting for a publisher.

I went about the publisher hunt in the same way I tend to do most everything I pursue—go for the objective, never mind the details. The many, many rejection letters I received did not hurt my feelings, particularly those from publishers who very politely explained that their niche was not political philosophy (or revolutionary politics) but children’s books, coffee-table books, or bird-watching books. I could have saved myself a lot of postage had I taken the time to read the publishers’ profiles on the many lists I downloaded from the Internet. I truly appreciate the faith Between the Lines has put in me, and I do hope that the risk taken in publishing this book will earn the company a deserving reward.

I was introduced to Jonathan Barker through his book Street-Level Democracy: Political Settings at the Margins of Global Power. I stopped in at Goldrush Books and Espresso, the local bookstore in Rossland, and the owner showed me the book. Take a look at this, the owner said. You read this kind of stuff, don’t you? Yes, indeed. Paul Eprile of Between the Lines put me in touch with Jonathan, who agreed to be my writing coach and help bring the project to the finish line. Jonathan guided me in rearranging the chapters of the book to flow in a logical sequence. He pointed out a number of holes and missing components, and in a very friendly and compassionate way pointed to passages that had no business being in there.

And, last but not least, my editor Robert Clarke, who taught me the final lesson. If you are going to use a quote, at least in this kind of book, you need to reference that quote. I have spent hours going through my library to retrieve page numbers and other details to back up the quotes I have included in the following pages. I will never, ever again read anything without a pen and paper at the ready to mark down all the details of anything I may want to refer to at some future date. Robert, through his loving attention to every detail on every page, brought the project of creating a book from an idea to a close.

All of the people mentioned above deserve the credit for this book. I could never have said what I had to say without their help. However, the responsibility for any error or omission the reader may find, for the assumptions made and the political views expressed—that responsibility is mine and mine alone.

Finally, I owe an enormous gratitude to Sue, my wife. She has been a front-row witness to my municipal career. Sue raised our two children, and she endured the many controversies and all the difficult times, including (the darker side of Realpolitik at the municipal level) me getting fired more than just once. Sue suffered through more than thirty years of my pontificating on political ideas without ever being recognized for her contribution to the many successes I did achieve.

001

Introduction

by

Jonathan Barker

and

Christopher Leo

Many of us talk about the value of citizen participation in local politics, and some of us support activist groups working on issues we care about. A few of us even go to meetings, write letters, and talk to neighbours about local concerns or electoral campaigns. But few of us work to create forms of everyday politics, even on the local level, that greatly expand the power of citizens. André Carrel is among those few. In what follows he tells about his key part in instituting forms of direct democracy in a small Canadian town. He introduces us to a form of politics that few of us have ever experienced: a politics in which citizens take a direct interest in town affairs and engage town officials in a dialogue with consequences; and in which officials dare to consider a wide array of creative solutions to local problems.

Carrel is both an activist administrator and a man who thinks about what he does. In the light of his years of experience as a municipal administrator, he reflects on the state of municipal government in Canada, finding it so limited that he calls it colonial. He urges municipalities in general to assert autonomy and provide their citizens with a more decisive role in local government. He draws upon practical experience with referendums in his native Switzerland and searches for philosophical and moral grounding for his ideas. The result is rewarding and challenging reading for anyone troubled by the direction of citizen politics in Canada and interested in finding viable improvements.

In his work as city administrator in Rossland, British Columbia, a town of about 4,000 people, Carrel recommended that the town put to referendum a constitution that would give voters new powers of direct democracy. Passed in 1990, the Constitution Bylaw committed council to respond to Rossland citizens and engage in a continuing dialogue with them to a degree unprecedented in Canadian local politics. The new rules would change the relationship between citizens and local council members in surprising and positive ways, as his story indicates.

But as Carrel himself recognizes, the story also raises larger questions: of how local government in general operates in this country, and of how citizen participation tends to be relegated to the margins of power. His account of the Rossland experience raises necessary, compelling questions about the need to instigate more creative forms of local democracy.

The Problem of Local Government

André Carrel’s work and thought reflect a distinct dissatisfaction with the effectiveness and responsiveness of local government in Canada. He is not alone in his discontent: witness the daily chorus of complaints from citizens and the local media about sluggish bureaucracy and grandstanding, do-nothing politicians. We might dismiss this dismal chorus as routine grousing except for the concrete evidence of unhappiness with local government found in chronically low voter turnouts.

In municipal elections, with occasional exceptions, voter turnouts in the range of one-third are common.¹ The routine interpretation of the low turnout is that municipal voters are apathetic. Left unexplained is why a third or more of these same voters apparently lose their apathy at federal election time, when turnouts of more than 70 per cent are common. In the federal election of 2000, a turnout in the low 60s produced worried commentary about the unusually low interest drawn by the proceedings.

Provincial governments echo voters’ sentiments. Here the dissatisfaction with local affairs is signalled by the apparent necessity of repeatedly redrawing municipal boundaries and restructuring representative institutions and administrative arrangements. Local government texts usually devote one or several sections to municipal reorganization, and these sections typically deal with each and every province. A similar state of affairs at the federal level would have the authorities undertaking a thorough rewrite of the constitution every decade or so. Most voters would be horrified at such a prospect; yet they have grown accustomed to comparable upheaval at the municipal level.

Perhaps the provincial governments have no one but themselves to blame for their dissatisfaction with municipal government. In Canada local governments are creatures of the provincial governments, and this provincial dominance, as Carrel argues, is responsible for many of the prevailing problems. However, other forces are also at work, and other issues are at stake.

The structure of Canadian municipal government is based not on the British parliamentary model, which concentrates power, but on the U.S. model, which divides it. Unlike the prime minister (the elected head of the majority party in the House of Commons), the mayor (the head of the municipal government) is, like the U.S. president, elected separately by a ballot of all the voters. This system constitutes a separation of powers, American-style, with an executive mayor unable to control the legislative agenda and a council poorly placed to formulate and supervise the implementation of a clear policy agenda.

The delegation of many local government functions to bodies exempt from direct council control, such as police commissions, planning commissions, parks boards, parking authorities, and a host of others, further limits the power of municipal councils. The result is that city council, which is supposed to set the local agenda, is caught in the middle of an administrative and political maze well calculated to limit its power over government.

The outcome is not surprising for institutions modelled on U.S. government, since the prime objective of the U.S. system of separation of powers is the limitation of the power of politicians and of popular majorities, both presumed to be potential tyrants. In defending the U.S. constitution, the author of Federalist 51 (either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton) favoured the system of building rival interests into the very structure of the new state. He expressed special satisfaction with the way in which local government demonstrated the desired system: We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may check on the other—that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.²

This fragmentation of power is only part of the story. Provincial governments have found many other devices that have the practical effect of limiting the ability of council to respond to its constituents. For example:

• The establishment of at-large systems for the election of council—with each councillor responsible to the whole city, instead of a single ward, so that it becomes less and less clear who is responsible for representing whom. With everyone responsible for everything, in practice no one is responsible for anything. (At-large elections also make it easier for councillors to overlook the needs of low-income neighbourhoods, where voter turnouts are typically lower.)³

• Decrease in the size of city councils, or councils that stay the same size while the city grows. Edmonton, for example, has had twelve councillors since the beginning of the twentieth century, even though it has grown from a small town to a city of about 650,000. Winnipeg has about twice as many MLAs as it does councillors—the representatives who serve the level of government supposedly closest to the people. Similar perverse representation ratios exist across the country, creating obvious limitations on each councillor’s ability to serve a constituency in a coherent manner.

• Direct provincial intervention, as well as strings-attached provincial funding, with ten-cent, thirty-cent, or fifty-cent dollars giving council an incentive to do the provincial government’s bidding, rather than the public’s.

• Unduly detailed provincial legislation covering the powers of municipal government. The practical effect is that enterprising local politicians wanting to innovate often find themselves stymied by statutory restrictions. The upshot is that council usually has to consult the city solicitor before it makes a move on behalf of its constituents—and is frequently told that it cannot do what it thinks best. As Carrel shows, Rossland was able to achieve more responsive government only by exceeding its formal authority.

In Canada the result of these limitations has been chronic dissatisfaction with local governments that are predictably unresponsive, at least in part because they have little real power. This lack of power tends to deter ambitious and capable people from seeking local office. Despite notable exceptions in most municipalities, typically the most capable candidates for office either look for the earliest opportunity to move up to provincial or federal politics or bypass municipal government altogether.

Both public citizens and provincial governments, observing the frequently low quality of representation, may demand a reduction in the power wielded by people they perceive to be of limited competence. Although occasional attempts have been made to restore powers to municipal councils, or grant new ones, much of the history of the past century has the appearance of a vicious circle: reductions in power lead to reductions in the ability to respond to constituents; the poor response, in turn, provokes demands for still more reductions of power.

Along with these derogations of the power of elected representatives, the past century has seen a more generalized erosion of decision-making at the community level. A century ago much of what we today call the health care and welfare systems, as well as the education system, was subject to control at the community level, either by formal local government bodies or by churches and other community-level organizations. Local governments also largely controlled their own transportation networks and sometimes owned gas and electric companies and coal yards. Even though many of these functions were removed to provincial and federal governments for the very best of reasons (equal treatment, greater capacity to tackle bigger problems), the fact remains that higher levels of government now do much of what was formerly done by and for the community itself.

Today provincial governments exercise substantial control over education, allowing in most instances only a show of local control through district school boards. Provincial governments may even exercise a strong grip over road, water, and sewer networks through tied funding. Of course, national and provincial governments also control health care and welfare. Overall the trends amount to a centralization that may supply needed services in an orderly way but too often leaves vulnerable people at the mercy of a bureaucratic machinery far removed from them and from an understanding of the conditions they face. It also deprives local people of the rewarding experience of public responsibility and deprives decision-making of often-relevant local knowledge.

The most significant remaining local power involves land use. Their control of planning, zoning, and building codes puts local governments in charge of the regulatory framework that determines how the physical community will grow and develop. Leaving such powers in the hands of weak local governments may well give influential land developers and their associates in business and law easy access to levers of power. In the end this access can allow those players to determine not only the shape and structure but also the character of our communities. The irony of the situation is that while local communities have lost much of their power over the education of their young, the levers of power over the development of land have been placed within easy reach of those who stand to profit the most.

We are not suggesting a return to an idealized age of community control, much less to the abysmal wages, miserable working conditions, patriarchal dominance, and poor standards of health and safety that constituted much of the reality of Canadian cities at the beginning of the twentieth century. But perhaps it is time to take a fresh look at how we distribute power and responsibility among the levels of government. That point rests at the heart of what Carrel is doing in this book.

Nor is he the only one considering these questions. Alain Lipietz, writing in the tradition of regulation theory, which is rooted in neo-Marxism, proposes the replacement of the welfare state, as we know it, with a centrally administered universal basic allowance (known in North America as a guaranteed annual income) combined with the flowering of what he calls the third sector of the economy (known elsewhere as the social economy or non-governmental organizations).⁴

Jane Jacobs has been arguing for more than a generation that we would be better off if the economies of cities, which she sees as the real engines of everyone’s prosperity, were managed in their own interests and not according to national economic models.⁵

William Barnes and Larry Ledebur argue that much more governance should be focused on what they call the regional economic commons—whose boundaries are drawn around urban centres and the regions oriented to them. These, they argue, are natural boundaries, which respect neither provincial and state nor national frontiers: Even the most closely guarded roles of the federal government—monetary, fiscal, and trade policy—should be opened up to voices that speak for and about the [regional economic commons].⁶

If these four writers and André Carrel got together for a discussion, the five might not find much to agree on; but they would soon recognize that, coming from very different starting points, they were all fundamentally questioning how power is shared among nations, provinces, and localities. Their recommendations strike a surprisingly resonant chord: each advocates far more community choice and local control than our current system of governance affords.

The Effects of