DKS's picture

DKS

image

When making decisions, be all-inclusive

I don’t like to namedrop, but I will. I had lunch last week with Owen Sound Mayor Deb Haswell.

She was guest speaker at the meeting of the Rotary Club of Owen Sound. Politicians like to speak to groups of people.

It’s more time effective to speak to a group and get their point across.

Over lunch, we had many conversations, including the possible transfer of the Owen Sound harbour to private interests.

I asked Mayor Haswell if this transfer would affect people who used the harbour as a park or place for recreation. She said that the city would strongly advocate for that kind of mixed use.

I think that’s a reasonable answer. It said to me that the city understood that a variety of people had many different uses for our harbour, from running to dog walking to concerts to fishing.

Public policy isn’t always that way. Public policy can often be arbitrary, appear to be capricious and sometimes downright strange.

Often that’s because those who are making policy use their own biases and background.

One of the more common issues our public servants in Grey and Bruce encounter is that once you reach decision-makers in Queen’s Park, they think “rural” is north of the 407.

One person told me that when they went to a meeting at Queen’s Park, the decision of the policy makers was to hold rural consultations. In Guelph.

Now I have nothing against the wonderful city of Guelph. But Guelph is, not, by any stretch of the imagination, rural.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our government held consultations in Goderich or Kincardine or even Wiarton?

Many years ago, I used a study group program offered by the local District Health Council to talk about the impact of hospital restructuring in a rural area. A group of half a dozen people sat around for a couple of evenings with a flip chart and talked about the impact of hospital amalgamations.

These were men who had had farming injuries stitched up in the ER, women who had had babies in the maternity ward and kids who had seen their GP at the hospital because the GP was on call.

The planner from the District Health Council called me up personally to thank me for the input. The people had given valuable insight into the impact of proposed changes.

Often that kind of consultation is the exception and not the rule.

We hear more of it, but I’d like to think it was the rule and not the exception.

One of the realities of the ministry of Jesus was that he was broadly inclusive of people. He had no time for hypocrites or pious pretenders. But he made a point of welcoming the outsider. In his day, that was widows, orphans, the chronically ill, tax collectors and just about anyone else the community shunned.

That’s the point I try to remember when I am in a position of decision-making or authority.

Who else is affected by this decision? Who is not here? Who is on the margins? What do they have to say?

Recently the Ontario government settled a $1 billion lawsuit by former residents of the Huronia Regional Centre. Former residents will receive cash payments, but more importantly they will receive an apology from the government for the abuse they experienced and those who died there will be identified and not left unknown in numbered graves.

It’s not always about money. It’s about listening and including people in the circle of community. It’s about honouring them and their stories. It builds stronger bonds between us all; those in power and those on the edges.

Share this
cafe