Political Protocol in the Twenty-First Century

Blog started: January 25, 2015

I am starting this blog because as a resident of Ontario, Canada, I'm deeply disturbed by the lack of input citizens have been given in the development of our towns, cities, provinces and country, mainly with respect to our energy policies but other issues as well.

For the last three decades, Ontario and the Canadian government have been making energy decisions without first consulting with the taxpayers, the people who are paying for these products. 

They have built nuclear plants, expanded tar sands, laid pipelines every where, without consulting the taxpayers. 

Ontario now has a $1.5 billion dollar cancelled gas plant scandal.  Do you know how many poor people $1.5 billion dollars feeds.  This is just one of our countries many government's scandals, if you were to add them all up, coast to coast, the figure would be mind bogging, but that's an entire different topic to this. 

Any way, one thing that they taught us in Municipal Recreation courses is this:  it's pretty standard twenty-first century (it was actually the twentieth century when I studied this) protocol for elected officials to hold 'town hall' style meetings to discuss matters of their community so that the elected officials are not deciding every thing on their own accord without the taxpayer input. 

This protocol rose from a bit of a minor rebellion in the 1970s when small cities and towns were fed up with major decisions of their community being decided in caucus, behind closed doors. 

Some of this information is from the document 'A Decade of Difficult Task' a investigate case study by Municipal Recreational Programmers in the 1980s.