The road to hell is almost certainly paved with “best practices.”
We might pick on BC Ferries for rolling out a “what we heard” document mentioning the Vesuvius homeporting issue months after a decision had already been made, but the islander’s eternal torment — of being defined by the interpretations of others, rather than by our own authentic selves — comes indeed from all sides.
As we watched the rocky “harmonization” of public notice policies among our delightfully varied Islands Trust area communities, it struck us: in many of our important moments, we are beginning to substitute completion of a standardized process for understanding or support of an issue.
It is to our collective detriment. The idea that Trust-wide “best practices” could be happily dragged from one island to the next was a manifestation of perhaps the purest optimism — and should charitably be praised for its attempt at frugality.
But it reflects a wider tendency toward substituting standards for legitimacy, and it demeans the individuality of each island.
Keeping islanders informed is so vitally important that our legislation prescribes very specific means by which it should be done.
And we can agree that times change, and processes should meaningfully change with them, but under the mantle of modernization and austerity, that sliver of public engagement is being — explicitly — whittled down to the minimum needed to survive a lawsuit.
The use of standardized community engagement as reputation management could perhaps be expected in BC Ferries’ case — the power dynamic between a handful of islanders and the vast province-wide system is apparent to anyone who can count — but it is far more disappointing to see our Islands Trust reduce policy to risk management.
Being able to say there has been “a thing” has become more important than what that thing is meant to accomplish; a public notice process crafted to frugally meet legal minimums is as saddening as “best practice” engagement set too late in a timeline for islanders’ input to be meaningfully incorporated — and as doomed as a presumption that one island’s needs could be met in precisely the same manner as every other’s.
Like any process, there is likely a way to improve public notice policy. But we doubt it will be found within a framework of legal minimums, austerity or homogenization.