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July 16, 1998
Citizens panel needed to oversee
public involvement in social union discussions
Ottawa – Governments could do much more to involve citizens in helping to shape the new social union if they put their minds to it and committed the resources, according to the authors of a comprehensive new report, entitled Talking with Canadians: Citizen Engagement and the Social Union, that was released today by the Canadian Council on Social Development (CCSD).
The authors of this 42-page report – Frances Abele, Katherine Graham, Alex Ker, and Susan Phillips of Carleton University, and Antonia Maioni of McGill University – review 15 major public consultation and engagement initiatives in Canada, and they present a list of lessons learned from this review. The report also contains an extensive bibliography and appendix detailing these recent initiatives.
The authors' major recommendation is that the governments of Canada should establish a Panel of Citizens that would oversee the process of engaging citizens in public decision-making. Panel members should be selected on the basis of merit, not political patronage, write the authors. For example, they suggest using members of the Order of Canada or the Royal Society. "The Panel would help to ensure that governments do not revert to traditional ‘tell-and-sell' consultation, while simply relabelling it as ‘citizen engagement'," write the authors.
The CCSD is distributing the report to key Canadian decision-makers within and outside of government.
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Talking With Canadians - Related Material
Canadian Council on Social Development,
309 Cooper Street, 5th Floor,
Ottawa, Ontario, K2P 0G5
Tel: (613) 236-8977, Fax: (613) 236-2750, Web: www.ccsd.ca, Email: council@ccsd.ca
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