NEWS: From Protest to Power

By Think City Staff

In the past few months, citizens in three BC communities have forced local governments to reconsider their plans for major projects. Using a little-known process under BC's community charter, citizen David has taken on the government Goliath. And won.

In BC, councils can choose to hold referenda or use a counter petition to gauge public opinion on matters that require the local government to obtain approval of residents. For example, long-term borrowing requests such as Vancouver's three-year capital budget would be an example of the type of initiative that must get citizen approval.

Over the past five months, Cranbrook, Dawson Creek and Victoria city councils opted for a counter-petition process on major initiatives. The East Kootenay city wanted to double the city's land area to facilitate development, while Victoria and Dawson Creek were seeking multi-million loans to finance major capital projects.

For those opposed to their respective council's proposal, more than 10 per cent of eligible voters had to sign a counter petition within 30 days. If the counter petition hit the signature goal, the losing city council would then have to hold a referendum on the proposal, if it wanted to proceed.

In all three cities, residents easily gathered enough petition signatures to force their city councils to hold referendums. In November, Cranbrook and Dawson Creek's council went forward with referenda – both lost by less than 50 votes, stopping the two initiatives cold. In Victoria, Mayor Dean Fortin and his council are considering their next move, following that city's counter petition loss in early January.

But defeating city council on a single question is only one part of the potential victory for these cities' citizens. Single-issue battles may have brought residents and businesses together, but it is the promise of shaping the future political and policy agenda of local government that may keep them working on municipal issues.

In Hamilton, Guelph, Saanich, West Vancouver, Winnipeg, London and many other Canadian cities, issue or value-driven citizen groups are starting to flex their muscle at the ballot box. More often than not, it starts with three elements – a hot local issue, a small group of committed and talented citizens and a protest petition.

Will the three organizations that have tasted victory take a bigger role in shaping the civic agenda in their home towns? For Victoria and Cranbrook it would appear so.

While the Citizens for a Livable Cranbrook Society have been active for several years and are more advanced in their organizational development than Victoria's johnsonstreetbridge.org group, the leadership of both organizations understand there may be a bigger prize.

"Citizens for a Livable Cranbrook Society are now planning events around sustainable development and related issues," said Citizens for a Livable Cranbrook Society President Sharon Cross. "Many of our members were involved with the previous municipal election, so there is a good possibility that some of our members will become engaged again in 2011."

One example of the type of citizen power that can develop from single-issue campaigns is the Guelph Civic League (GCL). Using an 8,000-person anti-Walmart petition gathered in the spring of 2005, the then largely inactive and unfocused one-year old GCL developed an ongoing relationship with the petitioners and built on that supporter base through a variety of offline and online outreach tools addressing timely local issues and guided by progressive values.

In just over 13 months, the GCL was able to grow their supporter list to more than 11,000 citizens. By election time in November 2006, they asked their supporters to democratically choose the best candidates for council and mayor and sent voting cards to the homes of thousands of GCL supporters. In the end 12 of 13 GCL-endorsed candidates were elected to council. The local press called the GCL kingmakers of that election.

It's an example of how an organization can grow and develop civic power that johnsonstreetbridge.org petition organizer Ross Crockford is well aware of.

"It's become even bigger than the original small band of critics who were focused on a single project," said Crockford. "There are a lot of people who joined up who now see the value in forming a Victoria civic league."