Question 8 of 10: Public Participation in Planning and Environmental Assessment

Question 8: Public Participation in Planning and Environmental Assessment (10 marks)

Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.

(a) How the public can become involved (5 marks)

Involvement runs along two tracks that should be distinguished, because they carry different rights and different influence. The statutory track is the set of opportunities the legislation guarantees. An applicant’s proposal must be publicised by notice on the property, by mail to owners within a prescribed radius, and in the local newspaper or on the municipal website. Any person may make written submissions, which form part of the public record. A public meeting or public hearing must be held before council decides a plan amendment or a rezoning — Ontario’s Planning Act s. 34(12) for a zoning by-law amendment, the British Columbia Local Government Act ss. 464–466 for a public hearing — and at it any person who believes their interest is affected has a right to be heard. Individuals may appear as delegations to council or a committee, and may appeal a decision to the applicable tribunal, historically the Ontario Municipal Board and now the Ontario Land Tribunal, where evidence is heard and the decision reviewed. On the environmental assessment side, the statutory rights are comparable and sometimes stronger: comment periods on the project description and on the draft assessment report, the right in a municipal Class EA to request that a project be elevated to a higher level of assessment, and the right to register as a participant in a hearing before the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada or a provincial assessment office, sometimes with participant funding.

The non-statutory track is where influence is actually greatest, because it operates before positions are fixed. It includes open houses and information centres, design charrettes and mapping workshops, focus groups and key-person interviews, standing advisory committees for heritage, cycling, accessibility and the environment, statistically valid surveys alongside open online ones, project websites with interactive mapping, social media, walking tours, pop-up booths at markets and arenas, school and youth programmes, and participatory budgeting. At its most ambitious it includes randomly selected citizens’ assemblies: after Vancouver’s Grandview-Woodland community plan process broke down in 2013, the City convened a forty-eight-member randomly selected citizens’ assembly which met over a year and produced recommendations that shaped the adopted plan — a Canadian example of moving from consulting to genuinely involving. Other illustrations worth citing are the multi-round consultation programmes of the Toronto and Calgary plan reviews, the mandatory points of contact built into Ontario’s Municipal Class EA, and the extensive hearing records of major federal projects. Two categories sit outside both tracks and should be named: engagement with Indigenous Nations, which is a constitutional obligation conducted government to government and not a form of public consultation; and the ongoing participation of residents through neighbourhood associations, business improvement areas and advocacy organisations, which is how most people are actually represented. The International Association for Public Participation’s spectrum — inform, consult, involve, collaborate, empower — is the standard framework for describing which of these a given process really offers, and the honesty of that description matters more than the number of events held.

(b) Does participation aid or hinder the process? (5 marks)

On balance it aids the process, and the case for that view rests on four arguments. First, information: residents hold knowledge that no consultant study contains — where the field floods, which intersection is dangerous at school dismissal, where the informal trail runs — and plans are technically better for it. Second, legitimacy and durability: planning allocates public resources and imposes real costs on individuals in the name of a collective interest, and in a democracy that authority requires the affected to have been heard; a plan built with a community survives changes of council in a way that a plan imposed on one does not. Third, risk and cost: objections raised early are resolved by design changes that are cheap, whereas objections raised at the hearing or on appeal are resolved by lawyers, delay and sometimes abandonment — participation is, among other things, the cheapest form of risk management available to a proponent. Fourth, procedural law: consultation is a statutory requirement and, in the case of Indigenous consultation, a constitutional one, so a decision taken without it is vulnerable to being quashed regardless of its merits.

The case that participation hinders is real and should not be waved away. It takes time and money, and approval timelines are now a recognised contributor to housing supply shortages and therefore to unaffordability. It is unrepresentative: those who attend evening meetings are disproportionately older, wealthier, longer-tenured homeowners, while renters, shift workers, newcomers, young people and the future residents of the housing under discussion are largely absent — so the “public” that participates is systematically not the public affected, and giving it decisive weight is a bias, not a neutrality. It can confer an effective local veto over regionally necessary housing, shelters, transit and infrastructure, so that costs are borne by whoever is least organised. The adversarial public hearing format rewards volume and repetition rather than argument. And participation conducted after a decision is effectively made is tokenism, which corrodes trust more than silence would.

These criticisms are best read not as an argument against participation but as a specification for how it should be designed. Engage early, when influence is real, and be explicit about which level of the participation spectrum is on offer and what is not open for discussion. Pair self-selected forums with representative instruments — valid surveys, random-sample panels — so that intensity of feeling is not mistaken for weight of opinion. Take the process to people rather than requiring attendance. Report back on what changed and what did not, and why. And concentrate the deepest participation at the policy stage, when the plan is written, while making implementation of that settled policy more predictable and as-of-right — which is precisely the reasoning behind recent Canadian reforms that reduce or remove public hearings for individual applications that already conform to an adopted plan. Participation legitimises a plan only when it is early, representative and consequential; the reform agenda is aimed at those three adjectives, not at participation itself.