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Comment: A sensible sewage-treatment decision process

Today’s world requires the Capital Regional District to install sewage treatment, with common sense calling for the latest technology.

Today’s world requires the Capital Regional District to install sewage treatment, with common sense calling for the latest technology.

The CRD’s decision process thus far appears to have been to make a decision to obtain federal government financial support within the federal time limit for reaching a decision. Thus, the CRD itself made a location decision producing predictable municipal rejection.

The CRD did not apply what renowned physicist and humanitarian Ursula Franklin, having unmatched insight into the workings of society, advised in her 1989 Massey Lectures.

For dealing with decision-makers’ intended projects, she told citizens: “Don’t ask, ‘What benefits and costs?’ Ask, ‘Whose benefits, and whose costs?’ ” This means citizens holding to account.

Formalized, the Franklin questions for decision-makers’ intentions become:

• Who would gain what benefits from what is proposed, and why should they, in both the short and longer term?

• Who would bear what costs and risks, and why should they, in both the short and longer term?

Citizens need to require decision-makers to answer these questions publicly, fully and fairly, concerning intended actions affecting citizens in important ways. The obligation is unassailable.

The importance in a public issue is not only having citizens ask the right questions. Franklin set out for all citizens and decision-makers in authority the core meaning of public accountability. This shifts decision-makers’ accountability obligation from explanation after the fact, such as in after-the-fact audits and inquiries that don’t prevent a wrong act, to public explanation before decision-makers act on their intentions.

This public holding to account allows citizens to sensibly challenge the intentions and reasons, and encourages decision-makers to think carefully about the implications of what they intend as outcomes — for whom, and why.

If decision-makers, such as an organization’s governing board, answer the Franklin questions themselves and give their answers publicly, it can be expected to improve the fairness of their decision and gain respect from citizens.

For example, for proponents and opponents of a specific sewage-treatment intention, or of a particular option in the amalgamation issue, each can be reasonably expected to publicly answer the two questions for what they wish to see done.

And if members of a legislature must publicly answer the questions for their constituents before a vote on a public issue, it can make power-seeking political partisanship compliance obsolete, because citizens can tell if the public answers are fair and complete.

For proposed sewage treatment, the process of public answering of the two questions can be done within what the funding government allows as a time limit. If the decision-makers have done their jobs diligently, they will be able to publicly answer the questions, since what they know they can report.

If they don’t have credible answers to the formalized Franklin questions, the questions provide the structure for them to learn the answers and state the implications of the intention as they see them.

In Ottawa, for example, city councillors in 2012 voted 19-5 to support the mayor’s proposal for a casino in the city. They did that with no public consultation and without learning the implications of the intention that public answers to the Franklin questions would have brought out. The proposal eventually died.

Henry McCandless of Esquimalt was a principal in the office of the auditor general of Canada from 1978 to 1996. He has professional expertise in public accountability, authoring A Citizen’s Guide to Public Accountability. He manages the Centre for Public Accountability.