Monday, Supreme Court justice David MacAdam overturned the city’s sale of the former St. Pat’s-Alexandra school site to Jono Developments. The ruling is a victory for three non-profit groups in the north end that want a chance to put together a proposal for the property.
Already I fear that we’re learning all the wrong lessons from the incident. It doesn’t take much for this town to fall back on its worst instincts, to castigate poor people and the groups that serve them for imposing unreasonable demands on polite society. And sure enough, the ink wasn’t yet dry on MacAdam’s decision when I heard the first reference to “those damned non-profits.”
But rather than taking refuge in our ugliest traditions, how ’bout we instead try to understand what went wrong and, more importantly, why. With that knowledge, maybe we can figure out how to better govern ourselves.
There’s a lesson explicitly stated in MacAdam’s ruling: city hall has got to follow its own procedures. Council can’t make policy on the fly, willy-nilly, contradicting itself for expediency’s sake.
Underlying that obvious point, however, is the interplay in how we perceive our government on the one hand, and issues of social justice on the other.
Let’s talk about city government. For the past couple of decades we’ve moved further and further away from the view that city government is, well, government. Instead, there’s this perverse desire to turn it into big business, a corporation. City council is supposed to be a board of directors, and people run for office saying they’re going to “run city hall like a business.”
To that end, we reduce the number of councillors lest they talk about stuff that matters to regular people, and we make sure council does nothing more than rubber stamp decisions made by ever-more-highly paid execs. Then we hire in a slick CAO from Toronto who knows how big multi-national corporate boardrooms work, but not so much the hoops a single parent has to jump through to get the kids scheduled in after-school programs, or how a shift worker has to walk for an hour after he misses the last connecting bus or that the community might value solar water heating even if it comes at a dollar expense to city hall.
In the new view of government there are no citizens, no communities, no messy social concerns. Those people out there are simply customers of the city, atomized individuals who buy services from city hall, just as shoppers buy laundry soap from Procter & Gamble. All that matters is “efficiency,” meaning the shortest-sighted quarterly return on a financial spreadsheet. And we’ll change the pricing system with something called “tax reform,” so that the owner of a Young Avenue mansion isn’t charged any more for garbage pickup than a Spryfield apartment dweller, because after all, millionaires and unemployed alike pay the same price for a box of Tide at Sobeys.
What we lose in this new view of government is any sense of collective social obligation through government, which admittedly wasn’t helped when the 1990s Savage government decided the city shouldn’t deal with social concerns at all.
So when the city dealt with St. Pat’s, it saw itself as simply a corporation making a quick deal on a piece of real estate. (MacAdam ruled that the city even failed on that count, as it illegally sold the school for less than it’s worth, but that’s an issue for another day.)
Those people out there— the neighbourhood being squeezed on the one end of Gottingen Street by hip condos and on the other by real estate speculators anticipating the shipyard contract, the people who have seen their monthly rent increase by $100 and more recently? “Screw ’em,” is the new view. They can buy their city services somewhere else, maybe Clayton Park, maybe Truro, if they think they can get a better deal.
There aren’t any easy answers in the wake of the St. Pat’s decision. Maybe the non-profits can put together a workable proposal for the school. Maybe not. Even if they’re successful, how will we deal with the new empty storefronts on Gottingen Street? How do we make sure residents aren’t priced out of the area?
I don’t have the answers. I do know, however, we won’t even ask the questions unless we treat people in the community as citizens, and not as mere customers.
This article appears in Sep 27 – Oct 3, 2012.
MacAdam was a member of the Halifax School Board back in the 1980s and he knows all about proper procedure. His written decision pretty much decimates the arguments put forward by HRM legal staff. Outsiders must think we are a bunch of hillbillies.
I suggest Marian Tyson clean out her desk and take the rest of the Butts kissers with her.
Moving, powerful, and hopefully influential.
Mr. Bousquet, you have – once again – proved to be perhaps the strongest voice against the failings of our city “leaders.” Thank you for that. However, I can’t help but feel you missed an opportunity here…
We the citizens of this city know fully well how unjust the sale of the school was. That’s been well documented. And now it’s been formally confirmed. But it seems to me an appropriate response to this ruling would be to celebrate – to applaud the actions of a group of (extra)ordinary citizens who refused to accept injustice. Citizens who would simply not give up their fight. And a judge who applied reason and logic in hearing their case.
Certainly this story as a whole illustrates the corruption in our municipal government. But it also demonstrates how, thankfully, we also have a system that allows us to call out the mistakes of our officials, and sometimes – however infrequently – to even correct them.
Back to School ! Great title because that’s the long-game answer you’re looking for.
Government and bureaucrats like the term Taxpayer because it imagines the Citizen as Consumer of government services; simply shopping for the lowest price in the big box government mall rather than Citizen as officeholder of supreme importance, highest duty and demanding ultimate respect.
The whole of HRM is premised – absurdly – on a 1970’s business school notion of Economy of Scale. What might have worked in theory in an old-timey widget factory has no relation to civic government yet that is the foundation on which all of our local government is built.
The market model is perpetuated by the bureaucratic professional because it ensures their position as expert, lording over the taxpayer like a weekend-call plumber over a hapless homeowner with an overflowing toilet.
The first duty of Citizenship is not “to vote” as is so often repeated – that’s just the perpetuation of taxpayer as happy shopper. The first duty of the Citizen is to educate themselves and to acquire the knowledge needed for dealing with civic affairs, to confront the expert bureaucrat and the professional politician. What is needed to fight the propaganda of lies, fallacies, and superstitions is common sense and logical clarity – some kind of critical method shared by all citizens to help decide who and what to believe and to what degree.
We live in the information age, but also the misinformation age. The only way forward is through a new kind of education that ensures Citizens are raised keenly aware of their larger responsibilities. We need to be critical as our pioneer democratic society grows into formalized systems where power is wielded by bureaucrats. The more mature the system the less relevant the citizen, or elected citizen representative, becomes. As John Ralston Saul says, “The citizen’s job is to be rude – to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt.” If not, the tide of bureaucratization will continue to rise until it drowns out all the sparks of ideas, effort and excellence.
In the end we simply can’t leave government to experts as we would bridge building or dentistry. It’s not that sort of thing. If we give up our sovereignty as citizens and democracy stops being a messy battle of ideas then it also stops being a democracy.
Berry never said that this was an ISSUE! He said it was not to be an issue until the side winning can come up with a BETTER argument not a WORST argument!!