Thursday, October 27, 2022
Sunday, October 23, 2022
Friday, October 21, 2022
Much to like in the makeup of this group. Congratulations to each of them.
— NanaimoCommons (@NanaimoCommons) October 21, 2022
I hope this will be a proactive, outward-facing Council. I hope the low voter turnout is a worry for them and that they work now and through their term to foster a renewed and lively public engagement. pic.twitter.com/PPhTQGTdhN
Tuesday, October 18, 2022
A disengaged and uninterested citizenry.
This is not apathy but something much worse
About three weeks before the election here of Mayor and Council I predicted an historically low voter turnout. I had reason to be concerned...
✦ A public institution — and here I’m thinking of the municipal civil service, the administrative, technocratic, and bureaucratic arms of our City Hall — develops over time a culture and values unique to it. This is as it should be.A prediction : the upcoming municipal election will have an historically low voter-turnout rate. Lower still than the <40% rate of recent years. This will be caused, it will be said, by “apathy.”
— NanaimoCommons (@NanaimoCommons) September 28, 2022
Apathy will not be the reason for this low voter-turnout rate.
We need our civic public institution to be solid, to be there when we need it. Accordingly, its values tend to be inward looking, they tend to the conservative: stability and security are valued more highly than risky innovation and creativity.
The democratically elected legislative body, Mayor and Council, has a culture and values unique to it and these values differ sharply from those of the civil service. The governing body’s values in a democracy are inherently outward looking, they lean to broad based social equity, to innovation and creativity.
While the municipal civil service risks the perils of “groupthink,” Mayor and Council need to embrace something closer to “design thinking.”
The public institution’s values have developed over decades. A new City Council has only the early months of its term to establish its core values. This is a problem, especially if, as I’ll argue has happened here in the recent past, a new Council adopts the values of the public institution.
The result appears to be a kind of hybrid governance model, a co-governing which is worrisome. There are no employment contracts that include a seat at the table of the democratically elected legislative body. Only successful election provides that.
Our new Council needs to reset the relationship between it and the civil service. It needs to empower itself to do this and we need Council to do this on our behalf.
The status quo has not delivered the innovation, the agility, we have needed over the last years of historic crises, health and humanitarian, economic and environmental.
Our new Council finds itself in a time of alarmingly low citizen engagement. A disengaged and uninterested public. (A decline in voter turnout from 40.8% to 24.5% isn’t apathy, it isn’t just people staying home. It alerts us to much greater and deeper problems that we must not sweep under the rug.)
It’s my contention that this is the consequence of recent years of an inward-looking municipal culture that valued business-as-usual stability over the bold innovation and action that these crises demanded.
Together, the five incumbents returned to Council this year take their places at the table with almost 30,000 fewer votes than in 2018. https://t.co/f4gvypNVRa pic.twitter.com/IukA5zYS3j
— NanaimoCommons (@NanaimoCommons) October 19, 2022
Sunday, October 9, 2022
Saturday, October 8, 2022
Thursday, October 6, 2022
207% increase in Nanaimo households
where 3 or more incomes are paying the bills, between 2016 and 2021.
A 207% increase in #Nanaimo households where 3 or more incomes are paying the bills, between 2016 and 2021.
— NanaimoCommons (@NanaimoCommons) October 6, 2022
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