The Magic That Happens at Citizens’ Assemblies

Something different happened in British Columbia 20 years ago this October. The Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform almost changed the shape of democracy in the province.

The assembly of B.C. citizens chosen by a weighted lottery, essentially two per riding from the pool of applicants, recommended a referendum on how we vote. It proposed a single transferable vote system using ranked ballots in provincial elections. The assembly’s process was impeccably organized and remarkably transparent. Its recommendation won a majority of voters in 77 of 79 electoral districts, and 57.69 per cent overall.

There’s a pretty good argument that STV is the best way to eliminate some of the inanities of our first-past-the-post system. The most recent local example is the decision of a single individual, Kevin Falcon, to shut down BC United (the renamed BC Liberals) just before an election on the premise that right is better than left.

Unfortunately, the STV vote failed, because it required a supermajority of 60 per cent. But B.C.’s well-regarded initiative did become an inflection point. Democratic process expert David Farrell came to B.C. to explain Ireland’s STV system to the assembly, then went home and applied what he’d learned about assemblies to help reform Irish abortion prohibitions. An Irish assembly recommended constitutional reform that won the support of 66.4 per cent of the Catholic country’s voters.

Last month, at Simon Fraser University’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, in the room where the B.C. assembly had deliberated 20 years ago, assembly experts and members gathered to reflect on the process. It’s not a bad time to wonder what kind of democracy, exactly, might be most effective. One of the best checks on authoritarian behaviour is a well-designed public process that engages citizens in honest conversation.

Peter MacLeod, whose MASS LBP has steered more than 40 assemblies and reference panels, told those assembled at the Wosk Centre that there have been 1,000 assemblies around the world since 2004, including 60 in Canada. Members of two current local assemblies — New Westminster’s Community Advisory Assembly and the Town of Gibsons Residents Assembly on the official community plan — also spoke about the process, its complexities and its risks. But all of them found the process worthwhile, even deeply inspirational.

Vancouver’s thwarted experiment

In 2015, the City of Vancouver also used the process. A year later, council approved a community plan shaped largely by a neighbourhood citizens’ assembly on the Grandview-Woodland Community Plan. Forty-eight were chosen by lottery. They met regularly for 10 months. Almost all of the recommendations were adopted in some way. The significant changes? The city added height to allow 12 to 24 storeys on a site near Broadway and Commercial and allowed 12 storeys to facilitate at a worthy but faltering social housing project at Venables.

Unfortunately, in eight years, subsequent councils have gutted the 30-year plan. Significant zoning changes have been made in almost every corner of the community, often with little or no meaningful consultation. Three towers of about 40 storeys will almost certainly soon be approved at Broadway and Commercial. Single-family and duplex zoning were harmonized and substantially loosened. Transit-oriented development around Broadway and Commercial was imposed on municipalities by the province, and this summer the City of Vancouver gave the public five days’ notice of its plan to approve these and other changes. Last week, the city announced it wants to allow as a right 15-to-18-storey social housing projects anywhere from Lakewood to Clark Drive between Hastings Street and the Grandview Cut.

I was employed by the assembly to document its process — 10 meetings of the full assembly over most of a year, and many others. In all, I went to well over 100 community meetings of various types in this mixed-income neighbourhood with an Indigenous population approaching 10 per cent. And here’s the thing. Local knowledge matters, and the citizens who came to those meetings brought real, thoughtful concerns that way too frequently sail right over the heads of politicians and bureaucrats.

Protecting the historic, low-rise, family business character of Commercial Drive from block-busting development was one very central concern for the assembly. The character of the historic homes to the east and the pace of change to existing affordable rental to the west were also critical. People accepted that growth was required and needed to be included in the planning. A host of redevelopments on Nanaimo, Broadway and East 12th Avenue resulted.

Planners and politicians, meanwhile, have colossally failed to plan the area around Broadway and Commercial in the nearly 40 years since the arrival of the SkyTrain. They did nothing, and the area’s population actually fell. Now they are failing in the opposite direction.

The city’s own neighbourhood consultation meetings in Grandview-Woodland 10 years ago were a mess of conflicting goals and values. Some planners came to listen, with the best intentions. Some senior city leaders tried to jam the process to impose towers and other substantial rezonings. The city lied to the community about what was going on. The planners charged with leading the discussions at community meetings became mute. Trust evaporated.

Vision Vancouver stalwart Andrea Reimer, another speaker at the Wosk Centre forum, had advocated for the assembly process as a city councillor with the Vision majority on council. A citizens’ assembly on the plan became a noble experiment and a way out of a sticky situation.

Listen, deliberate, decide

I’ve been to a lot of public meetings, as a journalist and as a neighbour in my community. At most, the public gets its turn at the table, but nothing really chewy is resolved or even discussed, because the job of planning-department foot soldiers is to give no offence. The noisiest, most partisan critics get the attention. The results are tabulated and delivered, reductively and misleadingly, to the political and administrative bosses, who will likely do what they were going to do anyway, because public consultation is noisy and partisan and not to be trusted.

Conversely, the assembly meetings were inspirational. At the roundtable that concluded the Grandview-Woodland assembly, almost all the members talked about the process with real pride, and some saw the experience as life changing.

The central tenets of the assembly process are pretty simple. One is that the participants are representative. A lottery process aims to duplicate the age, origin and income profiles of the community from the pool of applicants.

When the members of the B.C. assembly on electoral reform were selected by lottery, there was no Indigenous representation. So organizers went back to the pool of applicants and added two seats for that. The Grandview-Woodland assembly gave young people an equal voice — and seniors, and renters, and members of the Indigenous community. It ensured people who are excluded from public processes because of money, time, trust and political experience had a meaningful say.

Another key principle is that the process is divided in three: listening, deliberating and deciding. Assemblies listen first to a range of experts and interested parties, chosen by assembly members. Then they tease out possible ways forward. The final third is the deciding. Lines are drawn not at the beginning but at the end. It’s harder to demonize a neighbour who disagrees after you’ve had a half-dozen lunches together.

The day after the Wosk Centre symposium, a Democracy R&D conference on Granville Island drew 173 delegates from 21 countries to explore topics ranging from empowering citizens to shape public budgets, to what artificial intelligence might mean for democratic deliberation. There was a lot of talk about careful process design and proof of concept. The citizens’ assembly movement is organized, thoughtful and consistent. Assemblies get results, particularly on sticky issues where public confidence on politicians is low. In the United States, assembly processes have found consensus on abortion rights and gun control.

But politicians don’t like to give up power. Neither do the people with all the money. And they are happy to add poor-washing to greenwashing as a strategy.

The current citywide social housing initiative could change the character of Commercial Drive and its neighbourhoods, on a short timeline with just two public meetings. It shows us that a lively and effective public process that builds community consensus can be quickly overruled. It shows that if you go to a lot of public meetings believing that the process is meaningful, you are horribly misguided. You don’t have enough money, and you don’t have enough powerful friends.

An antidote to authoritarianism

At the Democracy R&D conference, many people talked about the deliberative democracy wave. One panellist said she was more of a ripple person.

In Ireland, everyone understands what a citizens’ assembly does. In B.C., despite some notable history here, not so much. There was talk in the movement of the long game, of waiting for the right political opportunity.

At SFU the night before, former BC Liberal attorney general Geoff Plante put B.C.’s electoral reform initiative in perspective. He argued the appetite for change arose because the BC Liberals had just lost an election to the NDP after the Liberals split the vote with the Reform party. Values somehow changed when they subsequently defeated the NDP 77-2 (and denied the two NDP MLAs the funding they needed to provide an effective opposition).

Democracy is popular when it works for you. That’s a bit of an issue right now in the United States. One panellist, an American journalist, worried that “deliberate” people advocating patiently for deliberative democracy might get us all killed by taking too long. He wanted vigorous advocacy for democratic reform.

Politicians everywhere need to be called on their weaknesses, because authoritarian behaviour is just around the corner for governments of every stripe — unless they truly commit themselves to honest democratic process.