The Biggest Problem in Government Today
How “We’ve Always Done it This Way” Can Kill
Hi,
This past week I was watching an interview from The Breach about Medical Assistance in Dying (oh, heads up, this newsletter probably won’t be super fun). One of the things that really jumped out to me was how their guest, Megan Linton, was able to so easily sum-up the growing problem with MAiD in Canada: it represents a systemic lack of imagination.
I’m not really here to outline the pros and cons of MAiD, but to understand this idea, we do need to unpack the issue a bit. In my opinion it’s an important topic to discuss primarily because it makes us incredibly uncomfortable while also having literal life-or-death consequences. While I obviously can’t go into every argument and precise detail here, I think everyone in Canada should learn more about it and understand how it is impacting people’s lives right now.
MAiD, in an ideal world, feels like a pretty clear-cut good thing. Barring some particularly dogmatic religious or political beliefs, I think most people see the move to alleviate unnecessary suffering as an ethical decision. Euthanasia feels like a dehumanizing word, but the fact that we felt able to help end the suffering of animals through euthanasia earlier than we felt we could do that for humans makes me think the dehumanization was happening the other way around. Forcing people to live through prolonged pain when we can’t do anything else to help them isn’t somehow purer than letting them take control of when their lives end.
For a long time, I was staunchly (dogmatically, even) pro-MAiD, and I still feel somewhat proud that the obvious arguments against it in Canada have been overcome. It’s not really taboo anymore. While it’s not fun to think about, it’s better that we do allow it, right?
But then the government went and made it fucking weird, which is where a new push-back against MAiD from the disability community comes from.
Originally in Canada, MAiD was only available to people who had some condition that was declared terminal and that there was little to no hope for recovering from. If your death is near and inevitable, and you’re suffering while you wait, then MAiD is a choice you’re given to avoid the unnecessary pain. Along the way, though, we started to explore non-terminal conditions. Maybe you live a life that is excruciating for one reason or another, but your condition doesn’t seem like it will lead to your death. You can live a long life, but it just might be horribly uncomfortable. Should MAiD be accessible then? The Canadian government said that maybe it should. After some push back, we’re currently on hold for including mental conditions under that banner, too, where we would potentially offer MAiD to someone who is otherwise physically well, but has a chronic mental condition causing them sufficient harm.
Starting to feel uncomfortable?
The reason I’m bringing all this up is to highlight the problem that this expansion of MAiD acts as a case-study for. We had a problem (people with terminal illness suffering unnecessarily) and found a policy-based solution to it (allowing MAiD). The reality is that a DIY form of MAiD was always available, but it was our laws that were perpetuating the problem. So we rewrote them to get out of the way (with guidance and guard-rails, of course).
Policy-based problem, policy-based solution.
The issue that we’re seeing now through the expansion of MAiD is that, due to a lack of imagination, this new solution we have is being applied to other problems that feel similar. Are there people living with chronic conditions whose lives are harder than we’d like them to be? Well, great! We actually just came up with a solution to something very similar! Let’s use that!
What we aren’t doing at this stage, though, is asking if that’s the right solution to the problem. What’s causing the problem? With a terminal illness, the problem is pretty clear and the solutions are limited, but with chronic pain and disabilities, the problems are complex and unique. Add in the case of chronic mental health issues, and we’ve added layers of complexity to the point that the solution we’re trying to use is questionable, at best.
It’s starting to feel like MAiD is the hammer and we’re just pretending everything else are nails.
It’s not hard to imagine how MAiD could be used to avoid addressing deeper societal issues. Poverty and disability make life difficult and can lead to chronic mental and physical health issues. If the root cause of these issues isn’t addressed and instead we use MAiD as a solution, then we’re really just creating a meat-grinder for eliminating poor and disabled people instead of trying to help make their lives better and more tolerable.
What we’re looking at now are dozens of policy-based problems and one single policy-based solution. Is this really the best idea we have?
That’s why this interview caught my attention so deeply. The idea that a lack of imagination at a policy level could be leading to people’s deaths, when we can’t be sure that it has to, feels irresponsible. And yet, I do believe that this is an aspect of what’s happening, largely because we see that same lack of imagination in so many levels of government. Citizens aren’t innocent either, often asking for the most obvious solutions to complex problems, leading us to elect unimaginative politicians who do unimaginative things and continually fail to solve anything at all.
I live in Hamilton, Ontario. It’s a city with a lot of issues that have been deferred, studied and reported on, but never truly addressed. Now, many things in our city are reaching their breaking points. Recently, the public library in Hamilton has been dealing with ongoing issues related to the safety and accessibility of the Central branch. The Central branch of the Hamilton Public Library is located directly in the heart of the city, just a few blocks from City Hall, connected to a large shopping centre and the Hamilton Farmer’s Market. The library isn’t just a place to get books, it’s a community hub. It provides classes and workshops to help people write resumes and find jobs, it has computers and internet access, a local archive where you can find historical materials on our city, and a fantastic Maker Space with 3D printers, large-format printers, vinyl sticker printers and more. It’s also a big, warm building that anyone can go into without needing to spend money or get kicked out for loitering. That’s where this problem starts.
The library, being located downtown and across the street from a shelter, sees a lot of unhoused people using its space. As poverty and addiction have become a bigger issue in our country, we’re seeing more and more problems emerge with the day-to-day realities of having a large population of vulnerable people living in your city with nowhere else to go. The problem isn’t fun to think or talk about. People use drugs in or outside of the library, there are inevitable emergencies relating to the drugs, violence and, frankly, poor people just making people uncomfortable. If you hadn’t bathed in a long time, hadn’t slept indoors for just as long, and were struggling with addiction or your mental health, you probably wouldn’t be particularly presentable, either. All this causes people to avoid the area, complain about it online, and the problem just sits unaddressed.
After increasing issues relating to the unhoused population around the library, it was reported that the library board was considering closing the central branch entirely. They say that would be temporary while they consider changing the layout of the library, but the plan is about as detailed as that. We have a problem, and the solution we’ve come up with is just to lock up this public space, this community hub, and take it away entirely. Unfortunately for the library, that’s basically the only option they have.
How could we avoid this? What are other solutions? Our provincial (conservative) government seems to think harsher penalties and stricter enforcement of drug laws are the solution. The same government killed safe-consumption sites (places where people could safely take drugs in private while monitored by healthcare staff) in our province not too long ago, replacing them with nothing (to be more specific, they replaced them with “heart hubs” that either don’t exist yet or aren’t doing anything effective). That same government, when they were first elected, also killed a UBI pilot program in Ontario which could have been a solution to poverty and housing in our province (we’ll never know because they stopped it before it had accumulated much data), and they have also told municipalities that they won’t be allowed to reduce police budgets, which could free up huge amounts of resources for other solutions, too.
All I see when I look at this problem, manifesting with our local library, but a problem that runs deeper in our city, province and country, is a failure to imagine any new solutions at all. It’s that lack of imagination that is killing people and closing our public spaces. When I see people who are frustrated and saying we should just arrest people with addictions, using drugs in public or camping on the streets, I see people unwilling to admit that we’ve tried that for years and the problem hasn’t gone anywhere. The solutions on offer aren’t helping, and they’re all anyone seems willing to try. How does this change?
We Need More Space for Ideas in Politics
In my mind, the thing we should be looking for in political policy is exactly what Megan Linton identified as an issue with the expansion of MAiD. We really just need more imagination, more ideas, and more creativity in our institutions. But that isn’t something you can ask for in a vacuum, because all the best ideas in the world ultimately mean nothing if you just keep them in your head.
I define creativity as the capacity humans have to create things. Creativity is the follow-through of imagination combined with action. That’s the solution we need to advocate for in our governments: Don’t just try the same things over and over. Come up with new ideas. Don’t just point out what’s wrong.Make things happen.
The issue plaguing this kind of action in the public sector seems to be fear. Because politics can be so volatile, there’s a lack of action and accountability taken on big problems to avoid making mistakes and getting called out for it. In Hamilton we tried a new idea when the city decided to build tiny shelters to help bolster our strained shelter system, but layers of incompetence and mismanagement meant the project was delayed and came in way over budget. The blowback at this is exactly why politicians and public servants don’t try new ideas. When you fuck up, you get yelled at a lot. On the other hand, when you do nothing, people sometimes forget you’re even there.
So what’s the takeaway? Should we try nothing but the status-quo because otherwise we’ll get in trouble? How can we build up systems to be more nimble and decisive without causing huge amounts of damage if something goes wrong?
How can politics be more imaginative and creative unless our governments are empowered to try things out? And if we give them that kind of leeway, how do we hold them accountable?
Collaboration and Iteration
In creative industries like mine, you don’t dive into finished work from the beginning of a project. If you’re making an illustration or a logo for someone, you start with a brief, understanding the goals and ideas behind the project, then work through rounds of rough ideas, feedback and revisions until you have a concept that is confidently in-line with your client’s imagined solution. Only then do you invest the time it takes to finish the work. Crucially, though, the brief is the end of the speculation phase. After that, all the roughs, the revisions and the final work involve actually doing things. You can’t just brainstorm your way to a finished design. The sooner you get to work, the better.
That’s what I think is missing from creativity in politics. The middle of the process: the iteration and actual making of things.
We see a lot of briefs in the public sector. Studies and consultations and revisions to proposals and public input and delegations and deferrals on votes to authorise impact assessments... it’s no wonder we all have a conservative uncle who just wants small government and low taxes! Government’s inefficiencies that people complain about are, in my experience, typically rooted in a lack of decision making, initiative and fear about taking a first real step.
Occasionally, we see the end of the creative process in government work. Things do eventually happen. Laws pass. Permits are issued. Things get built or money gets spent and the machine keeps churning. Most of the time, the things that happen make you question why all that consultation and meeting was even necessary, because of how underwhelming, mundane or even incompetent the work is. Sometimes we get lucky and good things happen, which is how we end up with things like our public healthcare system in Canada. Or libraries.
But where are all the middle parts of the process? Why do we expect new laws and services to be passed and implemented in finished form all in one go? Why do we fund programs in their entirety before we know if they’ll do what we want? Why do we treat small expenses the same as monumental ones, requiring acres of red tape for any decision, no matter how small? Why do we let big mistakes happen in the first place, instead of course-correcting before the entire thing is done?
When I think about creativity in political, legislative or policy-based spaces, I think about how much more collaborative and iterative we could be. Especially at small scales, we could try things out and slowly modify and work on the ideas over time, arriving at solutions that actually deliver on the problems we’re trying to solve.
As citizens, I think we need to better understand our role in decision making and participate more in the process. Too many people think their part in politics begins and ends when they cast their ballot in an election. Too many more of us fail to cast a ballot at all. Our role is to force politicians and governments to collaborate with us and to make our ideas heard. We have tools to do that, but most of us don’t use them or feel like we don’t have the time. As long as we maintain this attitude, we shouldn’t expect things to change.
Our elected politicians and the many more government staffers should embrace an attitude of imagination and creativity in their work. We should demand more, better ideas from our institutions and leaders and we should push harder to help the best ones rise to the top. Internally, staff shouldn’t be used as scapegoats, should be empowered and encouraged to share ideas and try new things, and we should anticipate problems and try to fix them before big waste or damage happens, instead of freaking out and scaring people out of trying anything at all.
All of this obviously needs to be done within reason. The red-tape and bureaucracy of governments exists for a reason, in theory. We need to study new ideas enough to try things safely, but we also need to be realistic and know when the risks are low and the cost of not trying something is greater than just giving it a shot. I still want building standards and safety rules, but we’ve reached a point where people want to study the effects of bike lanes on individual roads before we put a barrier up on a street, or where we spend more money on consultants than we do on services. That much institutional bloat makes our governments less inspiring to work within, leading to less motivation and creativity at a cultural level. The people working on these problems need to feel like something can actually happen if they try.
A big part of this issue comes back to one of the problems with MAiD: we don’t like thinking about it. In politics, whether a problem is divisive, upsetting or simply boring, our reluctance to engage with the ideas leaves us with a deficit of solutions. I try to highlight that everyone is creative for this exact reason. You have the capacity to imagine a better world and just as much of a right to try to manifest it with the rest of us. But you need to show up and participate. You can’t ignore the problems and you can’t rely on uninspired solutions.
I struggled a lot with what the point of this piece was. It’s way longer than I wanted, and I’m realizing that part of what I’m struggling with is bringing up all these problems when I don’t have neat and tidy solutions for them. I don’t know what the answer to MAiD in Canada is, because I still believe in it in principle but I’m afraid of what it could mean when it’s the only tool we have in an under-resourced system that lacks compassion for people unless that compassion comes in the form of death. I can’t think clearly when I talk about how messy and frustrating the problems in my city are because the problems are so acute, people’s feelings about them are so strong, and the real solutions feel impossible in the face of an uncaring conservative province and an austerity-obsessed federal government.
I don’t like just ranting about how bad things are, and I don’t want to spread negativity, but the only way to come up with good, functional solutions is to truly understand the problem at hand. I think the point of all this is to say that we have a deep problem in our society, rooted in self-preservation, fear, greed and a lack of imagination. I don’t see a way out until we understand that what we really need, from each individual person and every institution, is a willingness to imagine how things can be better and to do our best to make that happen.
Right now we’re really trying nothing, and it seems like we’re all out of ideas. We need to try something else.
What do you think we should do?
Love,
Simon 🐒