ADAM OLSEN: When more voices are added to the mix the decisions become more complex, and more of the public interest is considered in the debate
I was on a panel at the College of Applied Biology conference last week. Our task was to Define
the Public Interest.
The panel included Andrew Gage (Staff Lawyer, West
Coast Environmental Law), Kevin Kriese (Chair, Forest Practices Board) and Jody
Shimkus (VP of Environment and Regulatory Affairs, Kirk Environmental.)
It was an interesting group with a diverse set of
experiences and approaches.
Defining the public interest is an ever-morphing
target. It's been a big part of my pursuit as an elected official. I am always
seeking the point where the interests of individuals and the interests of the
collective meet. I pointed out that even in that conference room, there are 200
individuals who are unique and each have interests, while at the same time
there is the collective interests of the group as a whole.
There are approximately 50,000 individuals in my
riding. They each have opinions and ideas. In every decision I make, I know my
constituents will fall somewhere in the range of agree to disagree and vice
versa. Also, there are countless special interests in my communities,
represented by collections of individuals. They also need to be factored in the
decision.
Getting connected
The dictionary definition of the public interest
is the "well-being of the general
public; commonwealth.” That means looking out for the common health of our
relationships with each other and the ecosystems that sustain us.
Serving the public interest requires a deep
connection with the broad / diverse and narrow / focused representations of my
constituency. Politicians and political parties like to categorize people and
ideas, name them and lump them together into big broad groups.
For decades in our province the public interest has
been represented by a binary choice: either this or that. This makes the binary
choice (yea or nay) of our decisions in the legislature easier. But easier is
not always better. When more voices are added to the mix, the decisions become
more complex and more of the public interest is considered in the debate.
At the end of the hour-long panel discussion we got
about as far as I have got in this post.
I'm just scratching the surface. There
is so much more to explore in this issue, fodder for future posts.
Adam Olsen ... is a Green
Party Member of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia for Saanich North
and the Islands.
Born in
Victoria, BC in 1976, Adam has lived, worked and played his entire life on the
Saanich Peninsula. He is a member of Tsartlip First Nation (W̱JOȽEȽP), where he and his wife, Emily, are raising their
two children, Silas and Ella.
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