Input useless without action

Oct 11 2006 EDITORIAL http://www.saobserver.net/
A swanky four-page colour flyer from the Province of British Columbia (The Best Place on Earth)⠠landed in local mailboxes last week, asking local residents to play politician. It takes a look at the upcoming 2007 B.C. budget and asks the question:"What choices would you make?" Inside it asks residents to chart their own pie graph of priorities including health care, social services, transportation, economic development and education spending. It also gives a list to rank items from greatest to the least priority. After all, the flyer notes, "It's with your help that the best choices are made." The government also recently announced another major public input-gathering exercise in health care with the "Conversation on Health"⠠project. This effort is estimated to cost $10 million and will see a series of regional citizens' forums held in communities across the province. (For Shuswap residents, the closest forums will be in either Kelowna or Kamloops.) Hopefully the forums will offer some actual solutions, rather than just reiterating the woes of the current system. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to know that there aren't enough doctors and nurses, wait lists are too long and there are more patients than there are beds. The sentiment behind these public information gathering exercises is sound. People often complain that governments don't listen to the little guy. The problem with these expensive public relations exercises is that a lot of time and effort goes into gathering the public input, and creating reports and recommendations, only to find that, in the end, the government just does as it pleases and the little guy gets rejected again. The money spent on gathering public input is really only worthwhile if it leads to concrete government action.