Legibility, North York, and Civic Virtue
As a kid, I did a lot of swimming at Douglas Snow Aquatic Centre in North York. It was a great pool, but there wasn’t really a lot of waiting area. I therefore ended up spending a lot of time wandering around North York Civic Centre — it had a library, of course, which was an immense draw. But it also had all kinds of other stuff, most notably the North York Community Council. As a kid, I had no idea what that actually was. But it kind of stuck out to me in my memories. Or it sort of did — mostly I just associate that whole experience with what happens when your sinuses meet frankly ungodly levels of chlorine.
I mention this because during last week’s discussions, I’d asked one of the alumni how people interacted with local government. It’s nominally more democratic, closer to the public, and therefore more responsive to their concerns — how does that play out? The answer was that it didn’t — people tended to just take any problem they had and phone their local councillor. In other words, nobody actually knows how municipal government works. There’s a sort of popular rough and ready understanding of provincial and federal parliaments — vote for a party’s candidate, if they win they go to the legislature, and they then try to enact their agenda. This kind of legibility is fundamental for a democracy.
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Municipal government, bizarrely enough, doesn’t seem to be legible in the same way. Take the community councils. After doing far more research than is strictly sane, I ended up finding out that a community council is a geographic basket of city councillors who periodically sit in different chairs. They can make recommendations to the general council on zoning issues. They can also rename previously unnamed streets and alleyways, and can issue bylaw waivers on fences. One can offer an official submission to a city councillor if they’re on a community council, but not when wearing a city council hat. Finally, they can appoint certain business improvement zone officials.
In theory, this seems kind of intuitive — it’s good to have a local body to handle local problems, and it’s a cut above the proliferation of hyper-specific single-issue local bodies which are almost impossible for citizens to parse. Makes sense, right? Not necessarily. I did a bit of impromptu unscientific polling, and nobody I asked — all of whom could be considered extremely engaged in municipal politics — knew a thing about community councils. In other words, even the most engaged non-academics genuinely don’t understand municipal government.
What this suggests to me is a genuine problem. For a democracy to work, its institutions must be legible to the public. People have to know what they’re voting for, who to lobby, and when to lobby them. If the informational barrier is too high, this drives ordinary citizens out of politics and leaves it to highly-motivated, high-information special interests. I think it’s essential for a democracy to retain certain ideas of republican citizenship. Above all else, this implies universal engagement by a mass informed citizenry in the pursuit of the common good. Voting, particularly when it comes to civic government, isn’t enough. But here, we see that municipal institutions are illegible, people don’t actually know what they’re voting for, and they certainly don’t know how to engage once they’ve voted. It’s a genuine problem in municipal governance. It reduces civic virtue, increases the power of special interests, and ultimately allows municipal government to become alienated, weak, and unresponsive. Low engagement reduces the incentives for good governance. For good cities, we need more legible institutions.
