Last week in this space we looked at the use of social media as a tool for news gathering and information sharing. It wasn’t my intention to prime the pump for Tuesday’s committee of the whole meeting where a new social media policy stymied council, but if you’re confused about the use and role of social media in your life, you might be relieved to know that your city council is right there with you.
Or not.
I knew we were in trouble when Coun. Rodrigo Goller asked Laura Dean, the representative from integrity commissioner Aird & Berlis LLP, if councillors will really have to scrub their social media feeds of references to their job when an election begins. Goller was referring specifically a line in section II that says, “A member’s title is not to be used in a member’s social media for election campaign purposes.”
However, this is clarified a few scrolls down under section 2(a) about what a councillor should do in the event that they decide to use their councillor account as a campaign account. In that case, they need to “remove any reference to the City of Guelph, City logos or images proprietary to the City of Guelph, and reference to the member's title from the account handle name, the username, or the profile description.”
Of course, this confusion can be avoided if councillors running for re-election use a separate social media account for their campaign, which brings us to the point of any new policy: What is the problem you’re trying to solve? And if Goller, or any member of council, is looking for that, then they need only look to the centre chair around the council table.
Last election, Mayor Cam Guthrie ditched his re-election social accounts to use his main feeds mid-campaign. Why? Volume! The account he uses as mayor has more followers than his campaign account, which is understandable because there are reasons for people to follow the Mayor of Guelph that have nothing to do with supporting his or her re-election.
Guthrie also had complaints about the new policy, specifically in the realm of not posting “content that promotes or appears to promote any candidate or political party in any election at the municipal, federal, or provincial level, including leadership campaigns.” Guthrie said that he felt this was an overreach, and trampled on council’s free expression, but he did so without any hint of irony because this clause was clearly aimed at him.
In the last two elections, Guthrie has run on a platform of “give me a council that thinks like me”, including the production of an actual slate of Guthrie-approved candidates in 2018. If we’re to go into the relatively ancient past we might recall that Guthrie was one of the users with multiple accounts on the old Guelph Mercury 59 Carden Street blog, so if the integrity commission feels that council can’t be trusted with the awesome persuasive power of the internet, there’s precedent.
Now some of the onus is on the electorate itself because the proposed policy makes it clear that the average voter is not doing the mental gymnastics between what is an election account, what is a government account and what is a personal account. We see the same thing in the media space too, where often people don’t see the distinction between what is news and what is opinion or analysis.
And that speaks to the real crux of the issue, the problem that none of these solutions can solve: We have an electorate that really doesn’t understand how our government works.
This may be a problem on the government side too because my focus at this week’s meeting was the future of the Advisory Committees of Council and what they will look like in the years to come, and those changes sailed through council with pretty much no push back at all.
For years, I’ve been concerned about the city administration’s obsession with appearances. They want to be the perfect employer with the perfect plans and where everyone loves and respects each other, but here’s the thing: Democracy is messy. It always has been. And the more our local government tries to resist that – being the most immediate and impactful level of government that we have – the more they turn people off from wanting to participate.
The biggest barrier to entry in politics is that there’s an entire system you have to learn before you can get involved. You can’t pull some collected volume off the shelf and catch up on all the business at city council from the beginning, and no one hands out programs with names and titles and definitions when you enter the council chamber.
In many ways, this is the job of the media, and it’s something that I occasionally try to do in my work, which is breaking down the systemic barriers between Joe and Jane Resident and city hall and making sure that our local government doesn’t build some more. Through the entire review of the Advisory Committees of Council my biggest concern has been the loss of access, and nothing I heard on Tuesday relieved me of any of those concerns.
There was the rejection of adding carve outs for anyone outside of planning policy experts to the new iteration of the heritage committee, which smells to me like staff don’t want to let in any rabble-rousers who are going to have any “crazy” ideas about setting any of their own priorities.
And if that wasn’t the case, then why did they reject almost all of the Accessibility Advisory Committee’s requests for more autonomy? Here is a group of equity seeking people, actively engaged with civic policy, and saying point blank to the administration through proper channels that they’re not feeling like they’re being heard, or that they want to be heard better. Looks like they’re still not being heard.
The lesson of the last few years is that a void is created when people don’t have access or information to help them make decisions, and that void ends up filled with misinformation, and conspiracies, and an anger that cannot be expressed in rational or civilly acceptable means. While council worried about its own access this week, they quietly took part in the eroding of ours, and if you think that’s not going to come back to bite, I have bridge I want to sell you.