If we did such things, we’d give the 2025 Word of the Year award to “engagement” — and not in a complimentary way.
From BC Ferries to our own local and regional governments, this year seemed to highlight a growing trend of allowing engagement as a metric to supplant its mission. Instead of using the tool to help build the informed public critical for guiding its own governance, time and again we see our officials too eager to embrace a pro forma process brought by well-meaning consultants who know how to get the “job” done.
No one wants to work harder (or spend more), but whether it’s placing too much value on a single tickbox on a website or placing too little on a raucous town hall’s 50 pages of handwritten notes, we see officials gradually abandoning the creative mess of proper deliberation in favour of a strict, if arguably easier, tally.
Engagement now mistakes a measured amount of attention for consensus-building; it counts heads rather than ideas, leaves a voicemail to qualify as consultation and values clicks over connections. Engagement proudly proclaims the virtue of its own “reach” while tweeting into the void; it seems indeed fully imported from its usage on the internet, mistakenly applying an attention-economy mindset to a field where once our elected officials were tasked to persuade.
It does not need to be this way.
Engagement can be rooted in public deliberation — not just an argument, although we shouldn’t shy away from a good one, but a process with a shared goal or at least a common direction. It can begin the real work of consensus with an informative conversation, and bring neighbours into decisions earlier and with a fuller understanding of the issues — and why they might care.
In 2026, we invite those tasked with engagement to take steps to make their work more difficult, meaningful and indeed risky.
It will be worth it. Whatever civility left behind should neighbours cluck at one another in a town hall is certainly outweighed by the futility of the alternative: waiting until decisions are made, and clucking at the sky.