Good Decision Making?
Good decision making in public policy is generally characterized as being “evidence-based.” This week Ibrahim Sagheer and I got to see first-hand how difficult it can be to gather evidence on the public opinion in public consultations. This idea initially seems counterintuitive — don’t public consultations exist to solicit the publics’ opinions on a specific matter? As it turns out, in practice they more often solicit opinions from stakeholders than from the public, leading to significant gaps in knowledge regarding the public opinion for policy makers.
On Tuesday, we attended a public consultation organized by the City of Toronto regarding the review of the Noise By-law, specifically concerning construction noise in Toronto. It was immediately apparent that the vast majority of participants in the public consultation were stakeholder groups rather than the general public. Members of neighbourhood groups like the Toronto Noise Coalition and development industry representatives dominated the consultation and pushed their respective platforms.
Interestingly, City staff seemed to anticipate this scenario, and kept encouraging the two groups to find common ground throughout the consultation. After the meeting, we stuck around to speak with Jessica Stanley, MPP alumna and Senior Policy Research Officer for Municipal Licensing and Standards at the City. She confirmed our suspicion that staff anticipated that stakeholder groups would dominate the public consultation. She spoke about how “public consultations” are more often than not “stakeholder consultations” and of the struggle to determine public opinion for an issue dominated very vocal and active stakeholders. To try and gather information regarding the public opinion, the City of Toronto commissioned a research project to assess the public’s concern for noise in the City, which can be viewed here. Their research found that the majority of Torontonians are not concerned about noise pollution. They also used findings regarding preferred noise restriction hours to inform their policy options presented at the consultation.
The key takeaway from this experience is that public consultations may not provide insights into the opinions of the general public on a given issue. As such, policymakers need to anticipate this problem and plan for alternatives, like the research project, to ensure that the evidence used to support policies is not plagued by bias. Ibrahim Sagheer and I also discussed whether the City could have done more to try to get the general public to attend the consultation. Often, information regarding public consultations is not readily apparent and available unless you are actively looking for it, leading to situations where only groups with an active interest in the issue attend. We noticed that the venue for the consultation was right nearby a very busy community centre that could have been used as a place to entice the public to attend. Perhaps a potential solution to the problem is to engage in more active outreach and communication. This strategy could be as simple as going out to talk to people where they are, such as setting up a booth in highly trafficked areas, like the nearby community centre. Therefore, another key takeaway for policymakers is to not fall into a trap where you assume that the public will not attend — maybe all it takes to get the general public engaged in a policy problem is a different strategy.
