Public consultation isn’t always the answer
Posted by Lamespotting on 26 Jul 2010 at 04:00 am | Tagged as: suggestions
New Brunswick’s upcoming provincial election has promises about better “public consultation” on certain issues. The problem with the past Liberal government wasn’t the lack of consultation, it was because the policies were dumb:
Closing a university and turning it into a polytechnic: DUMB
Cancelling Early French Immersion: DUMB
Selling the power company: DUMB
Public consultation can help in some situations, but in many others, you need experts in the relevant fields. And by experts, I mean actual experts, not consulting firms that you paid to come up with a report that supports your pre-determined conclusion.
Are you saying those ideas were dumb from a public perception point of view? I agree 100% that public consultation isn’t always the answer; in fact, I’d argue that it is very rarely the answer.
But none of those ideas were dumb at all. They way they were explained to the public may have been dumb, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument why any of these proposals were dumb.
No, I’m saying they are dumb because they are dumb.
The EFI cancellation went against what the majority of education experts suggested. It was cancelled to solve the inclusion problem, which is an entirely different issue.
The NBPower sale went against the results of an earlier report that the Liberal Government commissioned. Don’t forget that most of the opposition came from NBPower employees whose jobs were secure no matter how the sale went.
Essentially, an idea is dumb when the person making it goes against the opinion of experts and attempts to do something for political reasons.
Don’t forget that the Croll-Lee report the government used to backup the EFI decision was laughably bad.
“Instead of following cohorts, let’s just take graduates of 2000 minus entrance numbers in 2000 and come up with a meaningless number” among other bad research in that report.
Whatever the objective facts are about EFI, they weren’t present in the government’s decision.
This liberal government is just a case-study in stupid decisions.
For every report that takes one side of an issue, you can find a report that takes the opposite side.
What I’m saying is the government used a bad report. Not that there were two equally valid reports that came to different conclusions.
Just because you can find those reports doesn’t mean that you instantly have a 50/50 chance between the two. If it did then schools would have to teach the flat-earth theory of the world.