Fighting the Dragons of the Opaque
- kblairsmith
- Feb 22
- 4 min read
Imagine that you have hired someone to mow your lawn, tend your garden, do your taxes, shovel your snow, prune your trees, provide recreational facilities for your family, ensure that your neighbours don’t build things or do things on their property that badly affect you and, generally, plan out what your neighbourhood environment should be over the next few decades – but you don’t know who the contractors are or how they can be reached. You’re paying them and the costs just seem to grow but you can’t speak to them without knowing the secret words and numbers to call. You must first contact a nameless, faceless intermediary whom you also pay to provide the service but who might (or might not) connect you to the appropriate contractor with whom you need to speak.
Or you can go to the magic wall that is provided to tell you about the contractors’ services and what you need to know about them, including how much they actually cost, but the information is never really there. And you find this tolerable – barely – when things are operating as they should but when things go wrong and you don’t like what is being done or you have suggestions to make things better, you begin a long and tortuous ‘quest for knowledge’ that is reminiscent of something out of the Wizard of Oz.
Well, in many ways less fanciful, this is exactly what the citizens of Burlington face when trying to interface with those responsible for a variety of products and services that affect their quality of life. How much of this confusing state could be resolved through the existence of a ‘staff and organization directory’ simply accessible on the City’s website? Virtually all of it.
So, let’s start with a bit of background and general philosophy. For at least twenty five years, there has been a popular concept called “open government”. Simply expressed, “open government” is the governing doctrine which maintains that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight.
The concept is broad in scope but is most often connected to ideas of government transparency, participation and accountability. Transparency is defined as the visibility and inferability of information, accountability as answerability and enforceability, and participation as true engagement and is often graded along the "ladder of citizen participation”. For any level of government to be accountable, its actions and proponents must be transparent to public view. In fact, there is a direct correspondence between the degree of visibility that citizens have on the operations and ‘operators’ of government and the accountability that can be expected of them.
In this context, the simple vehicle of a staff listing or directory with contact information and married to program responsibilities, is a critical component of ‘open government’. It allows citizens to identify those individuals and organizational departments responsible for delivering the services and making the decisions that affect their lives. And it is revealing when such a utility does not exist. When absent, given that the technical and logistical difficulties are very minor, it suggests that the government does not value transparency or accountability or true engagement with its citizens; that it views its stewardship responsibilities in a more remote and autocratic way.
Contrary to popular expectation, it seems that the larger the enterprise (and conceptually more removed from the citizen) the more transparent it is. So, the Ontario Provincial Government which, arguably, is more distant from residents than the Region or Municipality, has had a hardcopy directory (phone book) for over fifty years and an online version for more than twenty five. Called InfoGO, the online utility enables searches by organization, position or name. It provides location, email and phone information and it places the contact within an organizational context/reporting structure. The following is a link to InfoGO:
Similarly, the City of Toronto – Ontario’s largest municipality - has a very useful and accessible online presence. The following link brings you to a complete staff listing by City organization:
However, the closer that we get to home – to the Region of Halton and the City of Burlington – the mist becomes thicker, the organization more murky and the people within, our contractors, almost invisible. This information vacuum is both unnecessary and intolerable. The information already exists and in a form that can be easily displayed on the City’s website – unless you believe that the clerks in ServiceBurlington are connecting you from memory or some more mystical means.
I believe that a readily accessible staff and organizational directory is fundamental to promoting the transparency and accountability of the current City administration and staff. Accordingly, a request has been sent to the Jacquiline Jones, Commissioner of the COB division that contains the Communications Department, to post on the City website for public use, the staff directory and contact reference material used by ServiceBurlington. Alternatively, I have requested a copy to put on an Advocacy Group's website for use by Burlington citizens. I await a response.
However, I believe that the issue is far broader and more systemic than the apparent reluctance of a single municipality (and as promised by its current mayor) to virtually ‘drain its protective moat, lower the drawbridge and open its doors’. Essentially every Region, City and town in Ontario that has a website should provide its citizens with a view to the organization and the people within it. It costs little and the benefits are huge to establishing a more open and accountable government.
As such, a request has been sent to the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs, Local Government Division with a copy to the Minister and the Premier’s Office, congratulating the Province on its history of open and transparent government and requesting that it consider making “readily accessible staff and organizational directories” a mandatory component of municipal governance. Ironically perhaps, we used InfoGO to establish the most appropriate contacts to receive my request.
I expect that this will not be either a simple or a swift process. However, it will be a useful demonstration of how easy or difficult a relatively straightforward and unproblematic request fares amongst our current levels and chambers of government administration.
I believe that should be Jacqeline Johnson, but without an organization chart, who can tell?
Kind of proves your point.