As I’m coming up to 2 years as a City Councillor, I’m reflecting on my time at the table and examining some things more deeply. One of the things that caused me to run in the first place was the mistrust I had in the government, and the longer I think on it from my perspective as both a City Councillor and a tax payer, the more I see some root issues.
So let’s quickly address the more obvious things. It’s easy to blame a scandal, a party, or a personality issue. So let’s look at DEED, the library, and now the EU talks side by side, and none of those explanations hold up. Different governments, different parties, different scales are involved. Yet the same shape keeps appearing, and that tells me the problem isn’t who’s in charge. It’s how decisions get made once they cross a certain threshold.
Small decisions get made quietly all the time and nobody objects, because the stakes match the level of consent involved. Council votes on road resurfacing or a logical zoning bylaw variance, nobody expects a referendum. But DEED climbing past a billion dollars and dramatically changing downtown, or Ottawa quietly exploring a shift in Canada’s basic relationship with Europe, crosses into territory where the old assumption “that’s what we elected you to decide” feels significantly inadequate.
To be clear, nobody sat down and decided the threshold moved. It just did, because the size of the commitments governments are deciding outgrows the mechanisms we use to say yes to it.
Then there’s the mandate gap, which is subtler than “they never asked us.” DEED was actually a live issue in the 2024 election, but the financing vote at Council landed three months before the election. Under Council’s own procedural rules, a motion to rescind a decision isn’t available once action has been taken that can’t be undone, so by the time a new council takes office, the door on reversing course may already be closed, not for lack of political will but for lack of a procedural path.
added to this, the project wasn’t even on anyone’s radar as a platform question back in 2020 when it still could have gone a different direction. So, a mandate earned once years earlier on a much smaller and vaguer version of a thing, gets treated as if it still covers whatever the thing has grown into. That’s not consent. That’s consent’s scope and expiry date being ignored.
And we should also consider what the engagement actually asks people. Saskatoon ran real public input on DEED involving surveys, feedback sessions, and design workshops. But it asked what the district should look like, never whether to build it or how to pay for it. People walk away technically consulted and substantively bypassed, and that combination breeds more resentment than being ignored outright because it comes with the added insult of being told you had your say.
And underneath all of it sits the piece that’s hardest to talk about without sounding cynical: the quiet institutional habit of treating expertise as though it settles the question of permission. A feasibility study, a KPMG projection, a technical briefing, etc., all these are real and often right. But saying “we did the analysis” and “we’ve earned the authority to act on it without asking” are two different claims, and governments at every level keep collapsing them into one. That’s not really corruption, nor do I think It’s bad faith, it’s just an old habit that survives because nobody’s forced to notice it until a citizen petition or a document leak does the noticing for them.
That’s the actual root cause, as far as I can tell. It’s not any one bad decision, but a slow drift between how much governments now decide on their own judgment, and how little of that judgment ever gets checked against the people paying for it.
Fixing it isn’t about stopping projects or picking sides on any of them. It’s about being consistent and intentional to close that gap before residents have to force it open themselves.