Councillors I am Saleh Waziruddin.
Disbanding the Niagara Transit Public Advisory Committee and replacing it with a Customer Insights Panel is part of a larger problem happening with advisory committees in Niagara and beyond: they are being turned into focus groups for staff, in this case that’s the literal meaning of Customer Insights Panel. This is what Public Relations does, it shouldn’t be how government works.
Governance is something that is too big to be done by staff and elected officials alone, and resident input cannot be staff-driven. You know as elected officials there is such a thing as antagonism between your roles and staff, and between yourselves even, and as the elected officials you have the political power to direct staff and make or delegate the final decisions.
But there is a third piece of this puzzle, the residents. I’m talking about us. It’s not enough that you hear from your constituents when there’s a problem, or that staff survey them in focus groups. A way for residents to have an active role in governing ourselves, interacting with elected officials and staff, is also needed, and replacing an advisory committee with a customer insights panel is the logical destination of how this has been eroded step by step over the years.
Being able to contribute to your work not just as a one-to-one constituent but as an advisory committee empowered by the municipal government or abc (agency, board, commission) and part of its structure can do much more and much better if given the chance. Yes, it will have some antagonism too, just like what happens within your Council or between Councillors and staff, but that is a necessary part of the process of governance that’s being squashed.
The Pakistani activist Aitzaz Ahsan described his country as a “bonsai democracy” because from outside the store window it looks like a democracy but it is actually stunted and pruned every time it tries to grow into a full tree. That is how the residents’ roles in government in Niagara and beyond have become as well.
Residents will apply to advisory committees when they see that they are effective, listened to, and given a role to contribute to governance. The governance review says that there is a recruitment problem for the public advisory committee, but there wouldn’t be if it was supported in making the contributions it can make. Riders will clamor to apply to be on the committee when they see it as a vehicle to contribute. That’s how more people will be interested and get involved. Getting residents involved is part of your leadership role, part of working collaboratively not just with each other and staff but with your residents as well.
The governance review says it’s a best practice to have insight panels, or staff-driven focus groups, but often what’s the most common practice is called a “best practice” but is just the common denominator, the worst practice. We should strive to do better than most, to go beyond and not just try to copy what everyone else is doing.
The public advisory panel should be retained and strengthened, supported, and given opportunities to pro-actively send recommendations to the Niagara Transit Commission Board. We need to reverse the “bonsai democracy” of residents’ role, it shouldn’t just be a display model for the store window. Only when we allow the garden to bloom will we solve the recruitment and effectiveness problem. Going further down this dead-end garden path we’ve been on is the wrong direction. Bring us out of the cold.
Thank you.