By Ken Westhues
Published March 1997
Every age is burdened by belief in some cure-all touted to relieve all real and imagined social ills. Every age also has a smattering of citizens able to recognize the cure-all as quackery and courageous enough to say so.
Craig Hoddle, a member of Waterloo City Council, is such a citizen. He is not caught up in the expert financial opinion that currently holds sway in the provincial government. His letter in the Waterloo Chronicle exemplifies a clearheaded citizen’s ability to see through myth.
What is this myth, this dominant quackery of our time?
It is the idea that if a medium-sized bureaucracy has become distant from ordinary citizens, unresponsive to their needs, wasteful and ineffective, the solution is to amalgamate it with similar organizations and create a bigger bureaucracy. The application of this principle that most incenses Hoddle is to the municipalities in Waterloo Region. That Waterloo’s city government leaves something to be desired is common knowledge. Ask any taxpayer. The same goes for the governments of Kitchener, Cambridge, and Elmira, not to mention Woolwich and Wilmot. The solution is obvious to all who have swallowed the snake-oil sales reps’ line. Merge all these municipal governments into one.
Hoddle cites the example of schools. Who can deny that our children could be better educated? Sometimes, when some child’s needs are clearly unmet or when some teacher is clearly incompetent, nobody seems able to do anything about it. The problem gets lost in a school board with thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of students. The solution? Consolidate school boards, so that a given board will have twice as many teachers and students to worry about. Solving problems will be a piece of cake.
Hoddle could have mentioned hospitals. All are agreed that health care costs too much and that the two hospitals in this community fail to satisfy. Don’t we all, for example, in the long run end up dead? Something must be done, and the provincial planners know exactly what: turn them into a single hospital.
The current quackery is applied also to Ontario prisons. Currently, with jails scattered all over the province, nobody much wants to live in them and the costs of forcing people to do so are deplorably high. The remedy, so Queen’s Park assures us, is to replace 14 jails with two new super-jails near Toronto.
One more example. Unlike anywhere else in Canada, Waterloo has two autonomous universities, both funded with public money, next door to one another. Neither university is perfect. Their imperfections would disappear if they were merged.
Where does this myth come from? What tempts so many well-meaning, well-educated Ontarians onto the bigger-is-better bandwagon?
Hoddle points to the origin of current quackery. It is how things go in the private sector, the unregulated realm of the market economy. The trend free trade permits, as big firms swallow smaller ones or squeeze them out, is toward ever larger bureaucracies.
What lies behind the trend, in government as in business, is passion for short-term cost-cutting without regard for long-term consequences. No matter if studies demonstrate that over the next five or ten years, costs will actually increase. No matter that, by all the evidence, centralization of power estranges citizens from their society, fuels apathy and cynicism, diminishes citizen participation, and tears at the threads that bind us into a democratic society. The cure-all promises nirvana if only tomorrow’s bureaucracies are fewer and bigger than what we have now.
The handwriting is on the wall not only of the Waterloo Council Chambers, where Hoddle works after hours. It is written also all over Heer’s Decorating and Design, the small, independent, locally owned company where he works by day. Chains and mega-stores, most of them not even Canadian-owned, have already eliminated hundreds of local retailers and are breathing down the necks of those that are left.
Hoddle’s letter says nothing new in principle. Dozens of books document that small is generally more beautiful than big—also more efficient, productive, humanizing, sustainable, and fun. Good Work News has been hammering at this point for fifteen years. Hoddle is hardly the first thoughtful citizen to observe that the emperor of amalgamation has few if any clothes.
He deserves applause even so. The point of his letter needs to be made over and over again, issue by issue and setting by setting. Each of us needs to make the point in our own words, our own way, with originality and independence of mind.
Quackery is exposed by the kind of questioning Hoddle’s letter illustrates. Let’s have more questioning, more doubting, more demands for evidence, more debate. Write your own letter to the editor of the Chronicle, the Record, the Globe, the Star, or Good Work News. The result will be sound public policies informed by reason as opposed to blind faith in a cure-all that is quackery.
A Small and Beautiful Reading List
If you want to read further before writing your own thoughts, here are ten books that combat the quick-fix, economistic mentality with sober, balanced proposals for strengthening the body politic.
Goodman, Paul, People or Personnel (New York: Random House, 1965). A Classic defense of pluralism and decentralization. (No Longer in print).
Korten, David C., When Corporations Rule the World (West Hartford: Kumarian, 1995). Documentation and critique of corporate power, with practical proposals for an “awakened civil society.”
Lappe, Frances Moore, and Paul Martin DuBois, The Quickening of America (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 1994). Practical outline of what government “by the people” means.
Lasch, Christopher, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1995). An Historian’s explanation of the “democratic malaise” and principles for turning things around.
Menzies, Heather, Whose Brave New World? (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1996). Keen analysis, founded on commitment to democracy, of the all-important place of computers in the reorganization of work.
Putnam, Robert D., Making Democracy Work (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1993). Much discussed documentation of the roots of well-functioning government in the civic community.
Saul, John Ralston, The Unconscious Civilization (Toronto: Anansi, 1995). Lucid defense of the engaged, independent-minded citizen against “corporatism,” the bureaucratic perversion of democracy.
Schumacher, E. F., Small is Beautiful: a Study of Economics as if People Mattered (London: Blond & Briggs, 1973). The most pertinent chapter of this classic describes “how to achieve smallness within large organization.”
Sclove, Richard E., Democracy and Technology (New York: Guilford, 1995). A clear statement of what democracy means and of the kind of social and material technologies that strengthen it.
Teeple, Gary, Globalization and the Decline of Social Reform (Toronto: Garamond, 1995). A Clear and powerful explanation for the cutbacks in social programs occurring across Canada.
