I live in Stittsville, a ward of the City of Ottawa that boasts one of its highest growth rates. The incumbent Councillor, Glen Gower, is the chair of the planning committee (and my former boss, as you will read later) . One of Glen’s opponents claims that Glen doesn’t have the expertise to chair the planning committee or to properly represent Stittsville residents because he doesn’t have a background in urbanism. This opponent has a double major in planning and urbanism from Concordia University, which – allegedly – makes him uniquely qualified to govern the kingdom of Stittsville.
In the ward next door (Kanata South), Dr. Rouba Fattal – an excellent candidate running against an incumbent that can only be charitably described as “long in the tooth” – claims from the top of her electoral flyers that she is a “Senior Economist” who will use her professional skills to find “cost savings and efficiencies to keep taxes low.”
In 2006 Larry O’Brien was elected on a claim that his successful business experience made him uniquely qualified to run the city like a successful business. He ran and won the mayoral race on a tax freeze reminiscent of Bob Chiarelli’s current platform and inflicted such mortal damages to city services that we are still catching up almost 20 years later.
Claiming that public services can be run with private efficiency only works until you remember that private business fails in greater proportion than it succeeds. When a business defaults on its obligations, it goes bankrupt and investors lose money. When a municipality fails, residents stop receiving critical services like safe drinking water and policing. In a municipality, default looks like emergency services not being available when you call them and boil-water advisories. Investors are not on the hook, bondholders are not on the hook. Residents are on the hook. Chuck Marohn and the Strong Towns podcast gave a great take on this particular aspect of municipal governance in his episode on the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi. You can listen to it it here.
In Ontario, section 224 of the Municipal Act defines the role of council as “supporting the municipality and its operations while ensuring that the public and the municipality’s well-being and interests are maintained.” In other words, City Council acts as the Board of a municipality. In February 2020, I wrote a column about transit governance with my employer at the time, Glen Gower. In it we argued that the root cause of the transit failures in Ottawa were failures of governance:
“As elected officials, we do not come to city council with subject matter expertise on transit or any other area of municipal operations. We receive a broad mandate to represent our communities on the basis of our ability to communicate a vision that voters support. Once we take office, our job is to communicate the values of the community to the experts who are employed by the city. In other words, we tell them what we want and they tell us how they are going to do it. The ongoing dialogue between values (what we want) and expertise (how we get it) shapes city services and operations. These values have to be clear or else we’ll never get the transit system we are looking for.”
The belief that what ails us is a lack of technical knowledge rather than a lack of clarity in our values is politically expedient. What this beliefs fails to recognize is that the City already has a wealth of subject-matter expertize in its executive branch: we call it “city staff”. City Staff are the planners, engineers, social workers, technicians, and managers whose subject-matter expertise and professional experience give shape to the directions of elected officials.
It’s impossible to under-state the importance of separating the expertise from the vision in representative democracy. Without that separation, we cannot have a functioning democracy. What makes a strong democracy and what makes a strong administration are completely at odds: the skills and knowledge that characterize a competent administration are earned through years of experience in a given field. We benefit from the institutional knowledge that results from keeping competent technicians and managers in their positions over time. Representative democracy is the opposite: experience easily becomes stagnant and we need regular check-ins in the form of general elections to make sure that the values and priorities of the community are adequately represented. When we start narrowing the playing field by requiring our decision-makers to have a certain expertise in a given area, we move away from democracy and into technocracy.
In the 1982 cult classic The Scarlet Pimpernel, Sir Percy Blakeney highlights the pitfalls of downplaying governance as a form of expertize (although he makes this point in reference to preserving the French monarchy, which we will overlook for argument’ sake). Pointing to Chauvelin’s poor dress, he taunts him by saying that French tailors should be sent to the guillotine, to which Chauvelin replies that they will exalt their tailors and send their kings to the guillotine. Percy replies:
“Then the tailors will rule the land, and no one will make the clothes. So much for French fashion… and French politics.”
(You can watch the whole brilliant exchange here.)
When I started my work at the city in 2018, my first meeting with City Staff was about a future woodland park. At the time, the park was nothing but a clump of centennial sugar maples and a crab apple orchard leftover from the land’s previous identity as a family farm. Part of a tract of land owned by three builders, the old growth had been identified by city staff and saved from land development which favors clear-cutting and replanting trees where required later. In 2018, I watched as park planning staff presented an early plan using the area's natural and historical features as design elements in a future community park. The park planner was thrilled to tell me about the difference between sugar maples and silver maples and how amazing it was to have been able to save these amazing trees.
The planning work that allowed the park to come together started under the previous Councillor and went undisturbed through the 2018 election. City staff ensured the continuity of the project when the new councillor took office.
When I came home after that first meeting in December 2018, I drove past the area in question. The land was bare except for the preserved maple forest standing like a toupee on a bare head. I noticed that once built, the park would be an easy walking distance from my children’s schools, from the dog park, and from the Trans-Canada Trail. It would later become a sought-after location in the summer as one of the only parks with enough shade to keep young children cool in the middle of the day.
None of this would have happened without knowledgeable staff to see it through. The project needed the input of forestry staff, to identify the trees and their ecological value. It needed the urban planners to find it room to exist within our development rules and policies. It needed civil engineers to make sure that the water draining from the surrounding development wouldn’t pool in the leftover forest and drown it prematurely. It needed a park planner with the creativity to design it into a gathering place for the community.
When my husband and I separated and I had to find a place of my own, I drew a 200m circle around Putney Park and waited for a rental to become available. I have been living across the park for 2 years now. It’s where I go when I need some space from the kids. It’s where I walk to get my kids to and from school. My family ate dinner there on several occasions, hauling our charcoal BBQ and sausages to the park on many beautiful evenings.
This didn’t happen because our city councillors had degrees in planning, economics, or business management. It happened because our city councillors listened to residents asking for better tree conservation policies and better master planning of new communities, and directed city staff accordingly. It happened because our elected officials understood their roles as stewards of the public good and representatives of the community.
If my toilet backs up someday, please don’t send me someone with a business degree and a good election sign game. Send me the guy from sanitation who has done this for 20 years.
Excellent points. People undervalue the governance aspect and how important it is to have someone with vision 'driving the bus' so to speak but not tinkering with the engine.