The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - When Should the Government Consult the Public?

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

The Ford government has been criticized recently for fast-tracking legislation and skipping the committee stage that usually includes public consultation. But is it sometimes necessary to skip steps in order to "Get It Done?" When should the public be consulted? And what does the public hearing process actually look like in this province?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Matt Nethersole. And I'm Tiff Lam. From TVO Podcasts, this is Queries. This season, we're asking, when it comes to defending your beliefs, how far is too far? We follow one story from the boardroom to the courtroom. And seek to understand what happens when beliefs collide. Where does freedom of religion end and freedom from discrimination begin? That's this season on Queries in Good Faith,

a TVO original podcast. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. Doug Ford's government sometimes gets criticized for fast tracking legislation and skipping the committee stage where bills get the once over, usually with consultation from the public. But tonight we're asking,

is it sometimes necessary to skip those steps in the regular process too as the Premier says get it done. When should the public be consulted and what does our public hearing process actually look like? For a better understanding we're joined by Christopher Terrell. He is senior clerk for committees at the Legislative Assembly of Ontario and it's great to have you here in our studio. Thanks for having me. Nice to have you here. Where does public consultation come in the legislative process? So any bill needs to get three readings and get royal assent before it becomes law. First reading the bill gets introduced, the legislature accepts it, that's the first reading. Second reading debate is the next time the bill is called, politicians get to debate it, that's the first reading. Second reading debate is the next time the bill is called, politicians get to debate it, that ends with a vote. At the

end of that vote, the speaker says, shall the bill be ordered for third reading? If anyone says no or a minister stands up, the minister refers it to a committee and that's where the committee process comes into play. After second reading? After second reading. Presumably if it's a yes vote. Yes. If it dies, it's dead. Yes. Okay. So it goes to committee and what happens at committee? So at committee the committee will set a meeting to organize. They will decide kind of how they want to proceed with whatever items in front of them. They will likely usually pass a motion that will set out you know deadlines timelines how many days of public

hearings how many days of clause by clause. Clause by clause means going through every line of the bill. Section by section through the bill, proposing amendments, seeing if any changes need to be made. If a government is not particularly interested in a lot of consultation and just wants to get to the finish line, can they do that? There are several different tools in the legislative toolbox that allow for expediting of a bill. What do they do? They, I mean, at the end of second reading, after the vote, when the speaker says, shall the bill be ordered for third reading, if everyone agrees or no one objects,

the bill skips straight to third reading. That's one of the options available to them. But if a government, let's say, I'm not trying to get you in trouble here, Christopher, honestly, because you're a nonpartisan neutral guy down at Queens Park. But if the government of the day, regardless of party stripe, says, you know what, we're really not interested in a lot of consultation here, this is important to get through, we just want to ram it right through. If they've got a majority, they're allowed to do that, yes?

I mean, any expedition of a bill would be a decision of the legislature. And if a government has a majority, majority of votes, they're able to do that under the rules of standing orders, which govern the legislature. You're the guy who sits at the table on the floor of the legislature. I'm one of them. Yes. So you've got a front row seat to all this stuff. I do. How long you been there?

Uh, nine years now. So you've seen more than just this government in place. You were there for the last government too. Can you tell whether this government wants to expedite matters and get to the finish line more quickly and on more bills than prior governments? I would say that it tends to, I mean, through history it tends to ebb and flow. So I took a look back at the last four parliaments, the 39th, 40th, 41st, 42nd, and our current 43rd, as well as the 35th, just to get a sense of all governments

of all different stripes. It tends to be between 12 and 35 percent of bills that skip the committee process altogether. And I don't know, is that a big number or a little number or what do we think? I mean that's for you to decide, really. But I can say that the majority of bills do go to committee. They do receive some form of public hearings, and obviously, clause by clause, and reported back to the legislature for further debate.

OK, when it goes to a committee hearing, and this is MPPs make up the committee, and they've got a chair, and they want to hear from members of the public, how do they decide who they want to hear from and who they don't need to hear from? It's completely up to the committee to make that determination. So there's usually a motion at that organization meeting where they will say, again, they'll set out how many days, times, all of that, deadlines. They will usually also put in

provisions as to how they will select who they want to hear from. If it's depending on the subject matter, they might choose to only hear from experts in the field, they may choose to listen to industry leaders, they may choose to listen to advocacy groups, individuals, it's really up to the committee to decide how they want to consult consider whatever is before them. Because I've seen examples where people want to make a presentation to the committee in person and I've seen other examples where they're just happy to sort of dump a report on the table and say read this when you get a chance. How do they decide

who gets to be what? So in terms of people who actually come before the the committee or who want to come before the committee there is a way that they can sign up for that if they go to ola.org click on the get involved tab and then on get involved in committees there's a web form that allows anyone who wants to participate to participate, to make a request to appear, to submit written materials. I mean, it's open to the public. OLA, Ontario Legislative Assembly, dot ORG. That's correct.

We will keep that on speed dial for future reference. Christopher, thanks for your help on this. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Okay, let us continue our this. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me. OK. Let us continue our discussion. Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us here at TVO tonight. We're now going to welcome four guests to follow up on what was unquestionably the nerdiest

conversation we've ever had on this program. Let's welcome, shall we, Jeff Rutledge, who is vice president at McMillan Vantage and a conservative strategist, Kim Wright, principal and founder of Wright Strategies and an NDP strategist. Dan Moulton, partner at Crestview Strategy and a liberal strategist. And Jessica Smith-Cross, editor-in-chief of The Trillium, one of the finer digital publications down

at Queens Park that follows all things political down there. Great to have you all here tonight, incidentally. Jesse, I want to start with you because we're going to do some real life examples here of the kind of thing that I was just talking to Christopher about. Let's go back to November. Government announces it wants to close safe injection sites,

so-called, within 200 meters of schools or child care facilities. And essentially, they skipped the public consultation process on this, because they thought it was so important. They fast-tracked the legislation. But the public didn't really get a chance to comment on this. Is that unusual? Yes and no.

So this government has skipped public consultation before, whether it's with a bill or with a big environmental issue. They've gotten a little bit of trouble for it before. For this particular bill, it's so controversial that supervised consumption sites are highly polarizing. I would say it is unusual to skip the public consultation stage on this dramatic change. This government has done it before on smaller things. Governments have skipped public consultation on bills and strikes. They do it on non-controversial bills that all parties agree on.

But for this particular one, yeah, I would say it's quite unusual. Let me go to you and ask why they did that. You know, the conversation today has been a public consultation. And I think what I asked myself in coming to the discussion is, what are you trying to achieve out of that? And I think when it comes to something like the supervised injection sites, I feel as though most Ontarians felt as though they had been consulted effectively on this.

And that was because they are seeing the challenges that they're creating in their community. And they're reporting that back to their MPPs. I mean, I think you could take a tour around most of the caucus of the Ontario PC party and ask them what they're hearing from their constituents about, its concerns about crime in their communities, about tent encampments in their communities, and the impacts of these safe injection sites, and particularly the proximity to schools. I think that's a very reasonable and rational thing, and in fairness, I think something that

has been spoken about at length on talk radio and on TV and in the papers, we've seen the public response from it. And so I don't know what would have been further achieved aside from giving a platform for those who propagated the idea of safe ejection sites in the first place. Okay, you say reasonable, but also anecdotal and not really systemic. Is that a problem for you? It's a huge problem and in particular on safe consumption sites. Look, there is, I have a political pearl clutching problem, which is what the government was trying to solve for on this, as opposed

to what is the actual problem we're trying to solve for. How do we make sure that people have a place to get rehabilitation services? How do we make sure that those who are suffering from addiction and may not have the resources that others, they can get into an OHIP funded bed? That needles that we're seeing in parks can be picked up safely and disposed of safely? All the government has done with this pearl clutching notion of shutting down safe consumption sites is to move it into other places. So now what you're seeing is a bigger propensity of people still doing drugs but doing them in coffee shops or in alleyways. They haven't changed the

dynamics of what is happening in real people's lives and frankly they didn't actually care about what was happening in real people's lives and that's why they didn't want to actually go to the public because when you talk to people with these addictions and who have gotten the help they've needed it works but when it that wasn't a part of the government's agenda especially not in a fundraising Dan what's your view on whether the government ought to or ought not to have rushed to the finish line on this one? They've done it on a number of bills and I think we've got to ask

ourselves why can they do that? And particularly, why can they get away with it, frankly? And I'd say it has a lot to do with the fact that these public consultations, the ones that we're talking about here, that happen at committees of the legislature, in my experience, they're not taken very seriously, and they don't actually have very much impact

on government policy. I worked for the Minister of Finance for a number of years, traveled the province with the Standing Committee on Finance for two years in a row, doing public consultations in advance of the provincial budget. It was a huge effort, a Herculean effort. We traveled eight cities across the province. You've heard from hundreds of people.

Hundreds and hundreds of stakeholders and people. It all comes together in a big report that clerks like Chris work on for days and days, weeks and weeks. And you know what that report, you know what happens in that report? A kid like me when I was 21 got it delivered to my office and I asked somebody, what do I do with this? And I was told, throw in the garbage.

It is a complete waste of time, these consultation processes. They have very little impact on government policy and I would say that the reality is they've become so meaningless, the government can cancel them. And I don't just think it's this government, I don't think it's because this government

is particularly cold-hearted. I think it's because these consultation processes, we've allowed them to evolve, are a reflection of how meaningless they've become and a reflection of how, frankly, I think we have a serious absence of a democratic process in our legislature. Let me hear from a couple of the players on this one.

Here's Steve Clark, who's the government house leader for the Progressive Conservative government, followed by the opposition leader, Marit Stiles. We'll hear from them and then come back and chat. Sheldon, if you would. I've been an MPP for 14 years. This is the shortest session that I can remember in recent memory.

And the government's got a busy agenda. We want to get people moving. We want to get things done. And that's exactly what's going to happen in the next four weeks. Look, this government, their whole focus has always been distract, deflect, and then get the hell out of here.

Language. Opposition leader language. Not very parliamentary. Does a majority government, Kim, in your view, have the mandate to get bills passed quickly without necessarily ticking all the boxes as it were? No, and I think this goes back to needing to have a curiosity, both of MPPs and those staffers who

are writing these reports and helping shape these policies. What is the problem we're trying to solve for? How can we actually help committees? What we've seen unfortunately with the Premier and the way that he's approached a great number of issues and look at Greenbelt as one of those examples, which is make a decision, be definitive, and then have to backtrack because there is a couple of oopses along the way. We've seen this on housing policy where absolutely and should have done fourplexes across the province, but then a couple of folks called the premier

on his cell phone and said, hey, Dougie, this might be a problem for me and my community. Oh, let's back this up. As opposed to take just a breath, just a moment, not threaten, notwithstanding clauses and every other legal indemnification that they can possibly throw into a bill, but actually figure out how to get it right. The question is, if you had more consultation, could those oopses, I think you called them, which were more than oopses, could they

have been avoided in your view? What do you think? Yeah, I think so. We cover committees. Actually, sometimes it's been you and I are the only reporters sitting in a committee, to be honest. But we do cover them. And you can see a few things that happen.

Some groups will come up with useful feedback to the government on a bill. And the government itself will propose some amendments to the bill before it passes that avoid some unintended consequences, which is one reason to have a consultation. The other is to just let the people have their voice, right? The decision to close supervised consumption sites. Had they have a consultation. The other is to just let the people have their voice,

the decision to close supervised consumption sites. Had they had a consultation, you would have heard from grieving mothers who have lost kids to the opioid crisis who think these are a good thing. You may have heard from nurses and health care workers. You may have heard from people who live next to these sites and want to say about how it's changed their lives.

I think those voices deserve to be heard, even if they've been heard in the media, have them come and talk to the MPPs as well. Jessica, you pointed out a really great example of where the government of Ontario, the public service, the government itself, is actually pretty good at engaging the public when it comes to stakeholders. They engage really well with associations, with companies that operate in Ontario, take their feedback at the beginning of a public policy

process all the way through, you're right, to the committee stages of the legislative process, where feedback is taken and it does shape government policy. We're actually really good at that. Where I think we're quite deficient is in how we engage in a public. You talk about allowing people with specific concerns about specific legislation to come forward and air

their public grievances. That's fine. We can have a release valve for an angry public, but if that's the only service that these consultations offer, what really is the public policy benefit? And not it that you know, that's the point that I was trying to make off the top there is you know, what are you trying to achieve through the consultative process? And and I you know, I think as a lobbyist, you know, I spend a great deal of time trying to advise my clients on how to most effectively engage with the government and provide what is valuable information that can be used to help form public policy.

And I think the struggle is that conversation versus the conversation of somebody who may be upset about a piece of policy. And I say that totally nonpartisan, from a nonpartisan perspective. There are many access points for Ontarians to their democracy. We need to do a better job at enabling that access. And you know, it's great to hear that there's a link that they can go to through the legislative assembly website to be able to participate.

But should we reasonably expect Ontarians to care enough to go to the website, to click, to get engaged? They have a lot going on in their lives, and for them to sit down at the end of the day and go online and enter their information to speak to a specific bill at a committee, which they may or may not know how to speak in front of. But I guess the point is, and Dan, let me get you to pick up on this, you know, for those who want that moment in the sun, and maybe that's it, maybe they're not really going to change government policy at the end of the day.

You talked about your budgeting experience. Maybe they're not going to have any actual legislative change, but they just want that 15 minutes to be able to say their piece. That's part of the democratic process, and that's OK, isn't it? Yeah, I think it is. And you see it really probably at its probably best, maybe some people would say its worst at City Hall, right?

I mean, at City Hall committees, you have an angry public coming forward, really little barrier to entry in terms of getting forward and having your two minutes or a few minutes in the sun to make your point. Does it have an impact? I don't know. I think at City Hall, it probably does a little bit more

because you don't have a party system. What I think we really should come back to though, Steve, is your question about whether or not a majority government has a mandate to ignore the public, to move forward with change. And I think it's a reflection of the role that we've allowed big majority governments to have in the Ontario legislature, where we've allowed

the standing orders of the legislature, the processes by which we, the rules of order that govern who gets to do what in the legislature, we've allowed those to erode to such an extent that majority governments really do have their way with the legislature. And I think we need to have a conversation as a province, as a legislature, as members of the legislature about whether or not we have a set of rules in place that is preserving and protecting a democratic process that Geoff talks about.

Because I would argue right now We really lost that and we I think we need to get back in touch with it If this is to be a sort of meaningful public conversation Dan talked about when he was 21 what he was doing when I was 21 I was a City Hall reporter in Toronto and I'll pick up on your City Hall knowledge there I thought it was quite wonderful that anybody could come forward and speak about any piece of business That was before City Hall to a committee or to council whatever It was both wonderful and deeply upsetting at the same time

There was a lot of just crazy wacky stuff that also came forward. Yeah, is that all just part of the mix? It's it's the messy part of democracy and actually hearing from people and one of the things that is that you're going to hear from There isn't here is your one hour, whoever wants to come, no, it is sometimes hundreds of people who come to speak on an issue. And if you take the time and listen to the conversations, beyond the bingo cards of the NIMBY movement of like, I need to preserve the character of my neighborhood nonsense.

But when you actually start to get into, what are some of those unintended consequences? What are things that we can do slightly better? How are people coming and showing up in a way that is quite meaningful? Then it actually is incredibly valuable. And the rest of the time, there's a lot of theater to be had in politics.

Like sometimes it's an off-Broadway musical. And other times it is it is actually incredibly valuable and politicians would do better to watch those engage in those and not just do their grocery lists in their head. One of the great things about the public consultations at Queens Park is that whatever everybody says goes on the public record so if you have to look back in the future on like how were made, what was taken into account, and what was ignored, that can be invaluable.

Whether it's like, lawyer advice from a public interest group, or just somebody up there telling their story, it's kind of important that it's there. To me as a journalist, he was a Ontario politics nerd. I'm sure there's value in that. Yeah, that's quite true. Let me go back though, years and years ago. And I don't know if it still works this way.

You guys can tell me. Back in the day, so I'm talking three, four, five decades ago, the big bank economists and some of the leaders of the CEOs of the biggest companies in the province used to go have a meeting with the Minister of Finance. And basically, they figured out the budget there. And they went through this whole dog and pony show about having public consultations. But the fact is some of the heaviest hitters from corporate Ontario wrote the budget with the treasurer then.

Does it still work that way? In some capacity. I will say that it is important to hear from the big movers and shakers in our economy, right? Like you cannot make a decision and talk about unintended consequences that could, you know, particularly impact some of our largest employers. And so it is important that you hear from them. But I will say, from my experience,

it is a more diversified audience that is coming in, knocking on the door. Organizations, associations, groups, they're more sophisticated in how they're engaging government now. They've understood the recipe of what they need to present to government and how it needs to be presented to them.

But I think they also are starting to understand, and it's fully dependent on each individual government, this is in many ways a populist kind of grassroots government where... Sometimes. Sometimes. Where kind of the movement in a riding can make its way up to the Premier's office. And so understanding your ability to affect out in those writings, to bring it back to the Premier, escalate it up to that office, can help to drive that narrative within the Finance Minister's office.

So the answer is yes and no. So my key tip though, my pro tip for viewers out there, if you're going to talk to elected officials, you're going to talk to officials, change your language slightly. I come from the left of the universe and I talk a lot more about community building than I do social justice. Same thing, slight different meaning,

different conversations. And please stop coming with the 40 page PowerPoint Deck of Doom, nobody's reading them. Deck of Doom, that's a good one. You wanted to say, Dad. Well, you know, what I would say, Steve, to your question about who writes the budget, how does it get developed?

You know, I worked for two ministers of finance, Dwight Duncan and Charles Sousa. In my experience, budgets are really crafted by public servants, right? Like the Ontario Public Service, the Ministry of Finance, spends a lot of time and a lot of energy developing a budget that comes forward that is really a reflection of stakeholders, associations, businesses in

Ontario, the broader public sector that has expectations about what the government can deliver and can they put the adequate amount of political pressure on decision-makers to actually get those things reflected in a final budget. I think it is a far more open process than perhaps it used to be. It is not one that is just written by bank CEOs in the finance budget. I think it is a far more open process than perhaps it used to be. It is not one that is just written by bank CEOs in the finance minister's office. It is an open process. But it is largely about an effective process

of making your argument when you're an association or a stakeholder to this government. And Jessica talks about some of those stakeholders who maybe don't get their way in the earlier stages of a public policymaking process having influence at a committee. That does happen. Usually it's because they didn't get the decision they wanted,

included in the first draft of the bill, and they put an adequate amount of public pressure, probably because they got some good advice by one of the folks at this table, about how to do that. And it does lead to a change at the last stages of a legislative process. But it's rare, and it's really only in circumstances where an adequate amount of pressure

can be brought to bear. Jeff, let me talk about your favorite subject for a second, the green belt. Yes. OK. He's been waiting. He's been waiting for that. A couple of years ago, the government, in its wisdom,

decided it wanted to take 30 days to have public hearings about the original green belt development plan. And in the end, they said in the report, no changes were made to the proposal as a result of public consultation. So the question is obvious. Did the government actually really ever care about getting feedback from the public on this?

Or was this, what did you call it, an off-Broadway show? Or was it just an off-Broadway show? I think this is the challenge of being a majority government with a pretty clear mandate, that you have the political impetus to go through a process and set your agenda and move that agenda forward. We heard previously about how they can expedite the process. And I think in terms of doing a limited consultation, look, I think there's a reality in that

and that they had an outcome that they were looking for. There's no question about that. And that very much aligned with the perspective that more houses needed to be built faster and they needed to find a place to do it. And so how you as a government decide to coordinate that dance towards the outcome is an important discussion. But this is not just this government.

This is, to your point, Dan, about how majority governments in this country typically operate. They do it with almost an absolutist mandate. We receive the mandate from the people. This was the direction in the election. And now we are executing all those things. And in some cases, that is completely fair and reasonable because they feel as though they went through the consultative

process during the election properly. However, there are missteps that happen and I think that you know certainly looking back as a reporter or as a citizen in a number of years looking back at the process around the green belt there's going to be questions about that. Well you've anticipated what I want to do next because you've covered this obviously since the beginning. We famously remember the Premier getting caught on tape saying we're gonna build on the green belt. And then Al Held broke loose.

And he went back on that. And then he said, OK, we're going to build again. And then Al Held broke loose. And he went back on that again. And we're now where we were at the very beginning of this whole thing. Again, if there were really genuine, better public consultation, could the premier

have avoided looking fill in the blank for whatever word you want to use there on this issue? Yeah, it's the same idea as what we're talking about with the bill that goes before committee. If the decision precedes the consultation, you can find yourself in some trouble. The way that we've learned through the Auditor General's report, the Integrity Commissioner report,

is that this whole process was shaped by people who managed to have some access, the stakeholder access, behind the scenes to the minister's office. There things got removed. That led to this whole unfairness that led to the uproar. It just it was a mess and it had to be taken back. If they had done an open process where they said this is something we're considering doing, let's hear from everybody and not just the stakeholders behind the scenes but everybody in front of everybody, they probably wouldn't have had to reverse it again.

OK, everybody knows that. Everybody, I mean, it's a, it's a, everybody understands that if you have the public consultation process ahead of time, you can avoid a lot of the headaches that come after the fact. So why don't they do it? Well, I don't think it's just public consultation, though. I think it's about what we call in political communications

trial ballooning, right? In that case, the government made no effort to publicly communicate about their plan, to publicly signal their intention to change a rather sacrosanct public policy, something that, as you pointed out, the Premier had been very clear on his position on in the past. And they didn't forecast any of that.

They didn't put any trial balloons out there. Jeff talked earlier about how people feel about safe consumption sites. I think he's right. I think the government signaled very publicly on many occasions what they were planning to do on that, and the public did not respond. They didn't do that in the case of the green belt. And it was a failure of political communications management, not so much public consultation,

in my opinion. You agree with that? Yeah, I think that's right. I think the decisions that government takes are both informed by the people and by the politics. And we know well, I think, around this table and across the province that the Premier pays very close attention to polling. And so, you know, in this circumstance, I think that there was certainly an opportunity

to more effectively communicate what could have been some of the benefits of changes to the Green Belt policy. And I think, you know, now coming out of this process and seeing how the Green Belt issue is pulling, I think you may see some further decisions around it in the future. Oh, like what? Well, not necessarily by this government, but I would say that as a policy and as a Green Belt as an issue itself, I think Ontarians look at it and go, we need more houses, we need to make decisions about how we sort out land use planning in this province, and there needs to be a broader discussion about it. I mean the real challenge here

is that you know before that decision was made we were talking about a housing crisis and we're still sitting here talking about a housing crisis and how do we get it done and that's on that's on all of our shoulders of how do we do it effectively. Let's quote from Marcus G. here. Sheldon, you want to bring this up? He's the fine op-ed columnist for the Globe and Mail. And he was writing about the Ford government's habit of sort of speeding things along,

as we've alluded to here. Here's what he had to say in a recent column. The governments that really get things done don't run roughshod over correct practices and processes. They don't play footsie with developers. They don't announce projects when they don't really know what the cost will be. They don't denounce every objection as a barrier to progress. The governments that get the most done in the end are the ones that listen to their

critics and play by the rules. React if you would, Kim. Yes and no. The Premier is very good about how do I change the channel from talking to talking about things like tunneling under the 401 as opposed to the fact that people are still receiving hospital care in hallways. He doesn't want to talk about those things. He wants to talk about Captain Canada stuff right now, but he doesn't want to talk about crumbling schools. And so some of this is very much a how do I quickly change the channel. I want to talk about bike lanes because that's how

he's going to you know raise some more money and get some more clickbait and not talk about some of the more challenging parts of the Canadian economy. And this becomes the MO of the Premier and it becomes the MO of a whole bunch of actually elected officials and it's entertaining. Have you been able to discern any drop in support for the current Premier and it becomes the MO of a whole bunch of actually elected officials and it's entertaining. Have you been able to discern any drop in support for the current Premier and or government because of the approach he takes to getting some things done? We've done some polling that did find a dip around the green belt time but the vote numbers are back up.

The Premier's popularity isn't doing as hot as it used to be so that's a different way to measure how the public is feeling about all of these things. But I suppose I agree with Marcus completely. If the government has had to reverse so many different decisions that it has made, I think if it had just gone a little bit more slowly, played by the rules, talked to people more publicly, more openly, as it went there'd be fewer decisions reversed and more progress towards its own goals made. I should actually ask you about that rules, talk to people more publicly, more openly. As it went, there'd be fewer decisions reversed and more progress towards its own goals made. I should actually ask you about that, Jeff,

because they've been empowered now for six and a half years. And Jesse is right. There have been a lot of 180s done by the government because the premier in his wisdom gets out there. He takes a position that he thinks people are at. The public blow back at him, and then he changes his mind. Why has he not yet kind of appreciated that if he just followed a bit of Marcus G's advice he might be able to avoid that?

Well I think there's certainly fair commentary around decision making and decision reversal but I think I think the real critical challenge here is there is there is a difference between what what Marcus is talking about and the ability to to get actually get things done, not to use the slogan too much. But what we have found ourselves, I would say, in Ontario and in Canada, generally speaking,

is crippled in decision-making. We are unable to move on the big issues, and for that matter, the issues that matter now, but also thinking big about future issues because it's just not worth the effort. It's not worth the effort of getting in the fight on the front pages of a newspaper or in local town halls. So what I think that does is it prevents governments from thinking big.

And they try to, what it forces you into is making small micro decisions that aren't going to inflame anything. And when you do bring issues forward that are big, we as citizens and as people who play in the political realm need to be prepared that sometimes governments are going to move quickly and that's okay. But consultation is critical and it is a fine balance. In which case, I want to circle back to you, Dan. If you wanted to put in place a consultation process that was genuine as opposed to the

off-Broadway shows, what could we do? Well, I do think one of the things we need to look at very seriously, as I've mentioned a few times, is how we run our legislature. Ontario used to be much more like Ottawa, where governments had less power and less control over the legislature. The process was much more in the hands of all of the opposition parties and all of the members of the legislature. And we've slowly been migrating to something more like what you find in Saskatchewan or Alberta where you have like almost a one-party state

where you have a majority government that can control all the levers of the decision-making process in the legislature. The House is sitting less as Steve Clark pointed out earlier on. And I think that is the wrong direction for us to be moving in if we want a strong and healthy democracy at Queens Park. What could we do Kim? Part of it is thinking a bit bigger being curious and and one of the things we still have two million homes that we are short in the province of Ontario there is not a community across this province that is not dealing with tent cities and encampments that is a failure failure of every level of government to build housing, to approve housing, to get those permits done because there's something seedy about developers and all

the rest of it. No, that's just a failure of government to say these are actually the ways in which we need to build our communities and build them stronger and that's how we need to get back to a thinking. You watch this stuff all the time, how could it be better? Careless about polling I think is one of the things that was hard for anybody in elected office to do but might serve them better in the end because if you respond to every poll that says this is you know popular, if you try to micro target different writings you're not making the best decisions in the end and sort of stay steady and do what's right despite

what the polls may suggest could be a small problem, you'll get to better decisions. Jeff, I'll give you the last 30. Yeah, you know, I really think that there is a responsibility by MPPs to thoughtfully engage their constituents. I think that there is a lot of time, and this goes for everybody, and we're talking about getting re-elected, there's a lot of time spent in glad handing, but I think that there is a very sincere responsibility by MPPs to engage their constituents,

to effectively communicate that back to their caucus, and to communicate it at cabinet and at other meetings. They are the ones who carry the voice of their constituents, and it's an important one. I want to thank the four of you for engaging with us here tonight at TVO. Jessica Smith-Cross, the editor-in-chief of The Trillium. Kim Wright from Wright Strategies.

On the other side of the table, Jeff Rutledge from McMillan Vantage and Dan Moulton from Crestview Strategy. Great to have you all into 2180 Yonge Street tonight. Thanks so much, guys. Pleasure. Thanks.