Re McLean Lake Consultations Better than Vote, say city planners:
There is a Catch-22 rationale to the city planners’ hypothesis in the McLean Lake consultations article: A community is better served by the will of politicians than by the will of the citizens who elect politicians!
It leads me to conclude that the election process is not a popularity contest at all. It must be a sophisticated extraction procedure separating the citizenry’s wheat from its chaff to fill council seats with citizens who possess the rare capacity to make wise decisions for ordinary citizens who, unfortunately, are lacking in wisdom, unable to fathom what is best for them.
The problem is not the referendum. The root of the problem is democracy’s assumption that, right or wrong, citizens have the responsibility to govern their own affairs. Alas, democracy’s principles are so passe, so 18th-century thinking in the age of leadership worship.
Andre Carrel
Terrace, BC