Citizenship is more than a client-service relationship
By Francis Moran
Yesterday morning’s excellent Social Media Breakfast Ottawa got me thinking again about a recurring conversation I have been having about the nature of citizenship. Presenter Mark Kuznicki is an organizing force behind ChangeCamp, which will appear in Ottawa for the first time on May 16, and a consultant who helps forge open, creative communities whose purpose aligns with his personal social mission, “to reinvigorate community resilience and adaptation in response to accelerating global change.” It was an uplifting and thought-provoking session that left me in exactly the opposite state of mind from last month’s breakfast.
ChangeCamp is about “re-imagining government and citizenship in the age of participation,” and Kuznicki bemoaned a devaluing of the concept of citizenship that limits our participation to occasionally voting for our governments and regularly complaining about the quality of the services we receive from them.
In a comment after his presentation, I suggested to Kuznicki that it’s even worse than that. Citizenship has been reduced to a client-service model, I said, where the governed look only to receive the services they individually require and to pay the least amount possible for them, and to pay nothing at all, if they can help it, for services other people receive.
A parsimonious business ethic has invaded the relationship between governments and the governed that has many of us clamouring for the lowest possible level of investment into public services. On a local level, this ethic reached its pinnacle during the most recent mayoral race in Ottawa, where the winning candidate’s platform was the single-note promise that he wouldn’t raise municipal taxes. (That he was unable to even remotely keep his promise speaks eloquently of his woefully inadequate grasp of the realities of government.)
In several recent conversations, I have allowed myself to get a little heated when someone else argues that this city would be better off if the mayor had his way and investments in public services were whittled down to the bare minimum. Not only is this bad for the citizens who rely on those services, it is also bad for the very business and economic well being of the city that these misguided cheapskates, uh, business people, would insist they’re trying to promote. A robust public infrastructure that includes excellent public transit, public housing, public funding of arts and cultural activities — the list goes on and on — is exactly the kind of environment that attracts the entrepreneurial and creative talent that Ottawa likes to think it welcomes. In other words, not only is the right thing to do, it’s a bloody good investment.
More to the point, however, it’s part of our obligation as citizens. I am not a client of the City of Ottawa, or the Province of Ontario, or of Canada, or of the world for that matter. I am a citizen, dammit, and that places on me an obligation to do more than merely exercise my electoral franchise and complain when things don’t go how I’d like them to. It obliges me to invest both my human and fiscal capital into creating a public infrastructure in which all our citizens can thrive.
I suggested to Kuznicki that the client-service model, the minimal-investment model, is a right-wing construct and he objected that notions of right and left are antiquated and that the kind of open government he promotes is as much a threat to the left as to the right. My experience, however, is that I never hear progressive lefties argue against robust investments in public infrastructure; I only hear that from the more conservatively minded. And I don’t think Kuznicki’s open government philosophy really challenges either the left or the right; engaged participation can come from all points on the spectrum. It challenges a closed, silo-like approach where governments build and protect service-delivery establishments that reduce citizens to the business-school role of clients.
