It's Not the Size of Council---It's How We Choose It!

I'm going to foolishly wade into a topical issue for this post. I generally avoid doing this because the point of this blog is to acquaint people with the long-term issues that never seem to go away. But I'm hearing a lot of talk about the recent staff report that suggests we should reduce the size of Council to eight plus the Mayor as part of moving towards equalizing the number of voters per ward and making Council positions full-time, paid jobs. I've got a lot of experience working on governing boards and I've also been quite interested in electoral mechanisms in the past. I think that this has given me some insights that I'm not hearing anyone else mention. When you've got a platform to speak on a public issue and you think you have something worthwhile to say, I think anyone would be foolish to not wade in and add his two cents worth---. 

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The first thing I'd like to lay on the table is that the size of Council is quite important---but not for the reasons that I've heard people mention. People suggest that the more Councillors there are, the more different points of view will get heard. I don't want to offend, but for reasons I will get into later on, in my experience this simply isn't true. Moreover, I would like to suggest that decision-making bodies have an optimal size, beyond which they start to descend into dysfunction. There are several reasons why this happens. 

First off, people don't get elected to office to not say anything. They usually have a burning need to express a point of view. Even if they didn't, they generally know that they need to be seen by the public saying things or else people will get the impression that they aren't doing any work---which will harm them in the next election. This means that the more people there are in the meeting, the longer it will take to make a decision. This means that those decisions will take longer to get made. Councils that are too big tend to end up kicking problems down the road instead of dealing with them.

Jo Freeman, Wikimedia

Second, if a group takes too long or is too big to make decisions in a timely fashion both staff and the executive (ie: the Mayor) start to create "work-arounds" that allow them to keep the organization from doing less than the bare minimum needed to be functional. The feminist Jo Freeman talked about this decades ago in her paper The Tyranny of Structurelessness. In it she points out that human groups are inherently self-organizing. This means that to the extent that a group doesn't have a functional, obvious decision-making process, an informal one will emerge to fill the void. The problem with informal structures is that by definition they are neither transparent nor democratic. On a city council this would involve staff managing Council's access to information and cliques forming that become "councils within council" in order to manipulate the process.  

 

H.L. Mencken, Wiki Commons

Third, it's important that boards "jell" to a certain extent in order to create a sense of common purpose and viewpoint. That's because, to quote H.L. Mencken, "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem---neat, plausible and wrong". Groups like councils are supposed to wade through the evidence and come up with a fact-based solution to a public problem. The smaller the group, the easier it is for every member to develop some level of trust and responsibility towards the others. This increases the chances that everyone will sign off on the best solution---even if a significant fraction of the voting public is dead-set against it. But if it gets too big this sort of collegiality never develops and there will always be at least one person who will put their political interests ahead of the institution's needs. And if one person "jumps ship", others will start feeling a need to follow their lead if they hope to win the next election. The resulting council becomes risk averse and never makes the tough decisions that are in the long-term interests of the city---more kicking the can down the road.

This raises the question of "what is the optimal size for a council?" I have been at several sessions where boards brought in consultants to advise different organizations about how their board should work. And what I heard was that the optimal size is between seven and 12 members. When I went to board training session for one group, we told one of the consultants that we actually had 24 members and you could tell from his reaction that he was horrified. He was right to be so, I sat on that board and I can tell you that it fell prey to all the problems I've mentioned above. 

In case someone is tempted to say "well, Guelph has 12 Council members---so it should be OK". No, it doesn't. It has over 13. It has 12 elected members from the wards plus the mayor. That makes 13. And I say "over 13" because he gets elected by the entire city, which means that his influence comes to more than just the individual vote he wields. Just how much that influence comes to is always somewhat fuzzy and depends on his ability to deal with the informal power that he wields. Does it count as one extra member? Or 12 extra? It depends on the individual. But either way, this means that the present situation is well-past the point where we should expect dysfunction instead of being surprised. 

It is tremendously important that Council be as efficient as possible when it makes its decisions. That's because it has adversaries surrounding it who are constantly trying limit its ability to make the system work for the good of its citizens. Cities only get the crumbs of power that fall from the hands of the province or Ottawa. Moreover, the planning decisions they make have profound and immediate impact on the profitability of the development industry---which means that particular business interests have a real interest in the decisions it makes and often put a lot of energy into lobbying its members. At the same time, the decisions that Council makes have the most direct impact on ordinary people's day-to-day lives. This means that our Councils should ideally be the most efficient part of our governance structure.

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As I write these words, I'm really beat. It takes a lot of work to produce these articles and the past seven days have been particularly hard. This is my third attempt to produce something because the previous two didn't work out. One never really "jelled". The other could have been a good story, but for technical reasons I wasn't able to come up with a good way of presenting the evidence I needed to illustrate the key point. In addition, I did a long interview for a future story at the beginning of the week and in a couple days I'm scheduled to do another with someone I've been chasing for about a year. 

That's why I ask for money. I can use it, and I think that the amount of work I put into them really does mean I deserve it. I'm lucky in that I can afford to let the community have my writing for the hordes of people who really can't afford to send money my way. But if you can afford it, I'd like you to consider buying a subscription. It's easy using Pay Pal or Patreon. 

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I've started off emphasizing the importance of how efficient council should be because generally "progressive" people don't even consider this issue. I understand this point. A lot of people go through their lives feeling like they have been effectively disenfranchised because they never hear or see people who look like them voice opinions like the ones they hold. (I know I do.) But there's no point at all in having your point of view represented in an organization if it has very little real influence. There's even less if the people who you support always end up losing the vote. 

I've studied boards that tried really hard to be so inclusive that no one part of the population could say that their point of view wasn't represented. Probably the weirdest example was one of the federal parties that had well over 100 members on its governing board! But in actual fact, most of these people really weren't members of the board, because it ended up being managed by a much smaller "executive". (That's the "board within the board" problem that the consultants warned us about if they get too big.) I was a member of this group for a short period of time and my personal experience was that it was the least democratic organization I've ever been in---but all the things that made it that way were "fiddles" that weren't explicitly mentioned in the constitution or bylaws.

Margaret Thatcher

This leads to the key point that people who long for more representation miss. There is a trade off between increasing the "fine grain" of how much people are represented and how much ability to change the system each has. There is a name for this: "tokenism". The point of inclusion isn't to make sure that each different point of view is around the table, it's to change society so each of these people can live the fullest life possible. In practical terms this means, for example, that we don't just want women to be in public office---we also want society to change such that single mothers don't live in poverty, women don't face sexual harassment in the workplace, and, every woman has access to safe, effective birth control. This sort of systemic change in the world is a lot more difficult than just changing the gender of the people we elect. (Hence Margaret Thatcher.) 

This raises the fundamental problem at the problem of inclusion. In order to avoid the pitfall of tokenism, it's important to understand that the essence of democracy isn't direct representation but rather inclusion in the decision-making process. That is to say, for example, success for women won't necessarily come from having a woman like Margaret Thatcher running the government, but could come from having a man who really does understand the issues involved because he is part of an organization where women's interests are front and centre. 

And what this means is that to really have all parts of society represented in Council we need to change the way we do politics from one where individuals run in municipal elections to one where organizations have a process where they nominate individuals to represent the group. This is a point that a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their heads around because they often have strange ideas about what "democracy" really is. 

One of the things I learned while participating in electoral politics is that a lot of people seem to really believe that "democracy" just means them getting their own way. This misses the point that lots of people see the world differently, which means that there are myriad of different possibilities that people want. "Democracy" is really nothing more than a process where people with different ideas have a conversation about the issues and then vote to adopt the one that---after intelligent deliberation---the majority think best. It isn't about getting your own way, it's about being a genuine part of the conversation. And if we can't have a genuine conversation during the election to Council, we could have one when a political group decides who to nominate or endorse for the election.

Of course, all the problems that I've raised above can happen in any political organization too. Indeed, I learned about them by seeing these pitfalls in action both in non-profits and political parties. The secret, therefore, isn't to find the perfect system of governance but rather in raising the level of political literacy among the general public. (Hence The Guelph-Back-Grounder.) Unfortunately, this involves changing the way you live your life. It means that people have to learn that being a citizen of a democracy comes at the price of having to live the democratic life. And that means lessening the energy you can put into the private sphere so you have more to put in the public. People often repeat some variance of the line "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance”, but I think I'd paraphrase Lenard Cohen's line to the extent that "they sentenced me to 20 years of boredom" for taking part in the democratic system. 

That's because democracy is boring, frustrating, and, profoundly annoying. Personally, I find it excruciatingly boring to have to listen to people without any great skill or insight try to haltingly explain their view of a subject. I also find it profoundly frustrating to have to bite my tongue in a public discussion because it isn't my turn to speak. And it's crazy annoying to realize that your point of view is a minority and the group has committed itself to something you disagree with. But that's what being part of a democracy is all about. It takes a lot of discipline to put up with it and place the greater good of society over your own personal opinions. In fact, I would suggest that being committed to the ideal of democracy is just as idealistic and difficult as devoting your life to charity work. It's unfortunate that the vast majority of citizens don't understand this point and are unwilling to make even modest efforts to engage with the political system. Indeed, I don't think a majority of Guelph's citizens have even voted in a municipal election since I moved here in 1978.

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The place I'm trying get to in this long-winded diatribe is to suggest that the size and composition of Council is only important insofar as we don't make the body so big that it becomes dysfunctional. Frankly, I think it's already too big. I really don't have any problems at all with the staff report. Eight wards with roughly similar populations represented by one full-time council member plus a mayor works fine for me. What is important, however, is how those people get elected. 

What I'd really like to see is a transferable ballot that avoids vote-splitting. For those of you who haven't thought this through before, vote-splitting is a disaster for representation. It means that if two or more candidates representing roughly the same position equally split the vote between them, another single candidate representing the polar opposite can "come up the middle" and win with less---sometimes much less---than 50%. 

Ideally, I'd like to see Guelph adopt some form of transferable vote. But it looks like the Conservative government under Doug Ford want to remove that option. That isn't because he opposes the system in principle---after all he won the Tory leadership through it. But probably they realize that without vote splitting Conservatives would probably lose power all over the province because the overwhelming majority of Canadians always support left-of-centre political parties. I understand the Conservatives were trying to slide this legislation through with a COVID relief bill, but got caught. So it might not be a done deal. 

But the key point isn't the legislation. If the culture of Guelph evolved to the point where more people were engaged in local politics, there's no real reason why we have to wait for changes in legislation. We could create a municipal coalition of progressive voters who could have informal primaries to select which individual candidates they chose to endorse. They could then offer support for those candidates in order to ensure that they had better chances at winning. 

For those of you who think such an idea is "pie in the sky", let me point out that in 1991 I was involved in the creation of such a group: The Municipal Democracy Movement (MDM). It was a ground-breaking attempt to create a municipal political party and it had tremendous long-term impact as it first introduced people like Karen Farbridge to voters and over several election cycles was able to effectively dominate Council for years. It nudged Guelph in the direction of environment leadership that it has followed (actually, coasted on) to this very day. So even if Ford sabotages any attempt to move towards a ranked ballot, there's no reason why a suitably engaged electorate couldn't create their own system that would created the same results. 

But that's where the rub lies. It's true that electoral systems are important. But far more important is the level of engagement among the general public. I hope that the engagement I see among young people means that the bad old days of dominance by self-absorbed boomers who lacked any social conscience are coming to an end. But that's up to ordinary folks. All I can do is write these screeds and hope someone pays attention. 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!