MidlandToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following is a letter to the editor and an open letter to Tiny Township council.
Please accept this letter as a friendly appeal to your conscience of reason as well as your love of democracy.
Like many concerned Tiny Township residents (as shown by the July 31 rally in front of Tiny Township Hall), I urge you at your upcoming meeting to decide in favour of holding a referendum.
I’m referring, naturally, to the referendum proposed in my scheduled deputation at the June 26 regular meeting of council, which you will be discussing at your Aug. 7 meeting of the committee of the whole. This would be a referendum on whether to proceed with your new administrative building project, or instead to seriously consider alternative, less expensive ways of improving Tiny staff’s working conditions and achieving other, related goals, before deciding how to proceed.
What are the reasons for our urgent request? First, consider that were such a referendum to be held, it would be preceded by a wide-open public debate on the issue nourished by extensive media coverage. So, in agreeing to a referendum, you’d be signalling your respect for an informed, enlightened public opinion, and your willingness to accept the popular position on the issue, even if it opposes your position.
On the other hand, if you decide against a referendum, you will in effect be saying that you know better than we ordinary citizens do what’s good for us (even if we take the trouble to adequately inform ourselves on the relevant issues). You will therewith betray the elitist attitude of rulers who act as though they possessed a monopoly on political expertise and wisdom.
Well, it’s clear from multiple past deputations to council, petitions, rallies, among numerous other actions — all aimed at persuading you to put the new administrative building project on hold and seriously consider valid but less costly alternatives — that many Tiny residents aren’t exactly convinced of the superiority of your wisdom and expertise.
Nevertheless, you can persuade us that you are at least open to reason. How? Precisely by agreeing to hold the proposed referendum, and thus to pit your strongest rational arguments and evidence against the strongest rational arguments and evidence of your critics, and then let an informed, enlightened people of Tiny decide.
Second, as I stated in my June 26 scheduled deputation, holding a referendum would be as close to an exercise in pure democracy as you can have in a modern representative democracy.
True, what you have been doing so far may well be perfectly within the constitutional bounds of our system of representative democracy.
Even so, when it comes to undertakings of such enormous magnitude as your new town hall project, it is important, indeed morally obligatory, that you have the people on side. What better way to fulfil this moral political obligation while demonstrating your love of democracy than through a referendum?
Thank you kindly for your consideration.
Borys Kowalsky
Tiny Township
