Nicholas
Gollé

I’ve worked in the public service since 2018. In the early days of the pandemic, we saw how a shared threat could bring people together and prompt action. As the economic consequences unfolded, concerns about crime, homelessness, addiction and whether public spending was making things better contributed to a growing sense of anxiety.

When people feel economically insecure, it becomes easier to see someone else’s gain as their own loss:

In my work, I've learned that things get done best when there is a shared understanding and purpose. Things rarely move an inch when people have misunderstandings or disagreements, and progress is only made when we find at least one thing we agree on, even just a common intent, do what we can to move it forward, and go from there. It also takes someone to make clear the cost of inaction and build agreement around that cost between parties.

“The cost of inaction is that, eventually, everyone loses.”

We are at our best when we care more about trying to solve the problem, checking our results, and adjusting our approach.

Co-operation requires us to take the risk of assuming good faith, even when we disagree. People can reach different conclusions for reasons that make sense from their experience. If we treat disagreement as evidence of bad character, we lose the chance to understand those reasons and find common ground.

Back to why I'm running. If you look at municipal politics today, we have to consider our scarcity mindset. Politicians are trapped in a paradigm where they need to offer solutions that soothe our anxiety rather than solutions that solve the root cause of our anxiety. No politician is incentivized to tell you that you may not get all you want, that we may have to accept an imperfect agreement to make a problem smaller. This leads to a narrow mindset where policy proposals must show that 'we won', and when everyone is engaging in this behaviour, it becomes a downward cycle of policies which attempt to secure bigger pieces of an ever shrinking pie, or maximalist moral positions which divide communities instead of bringing them together.

We owe voters an honest explanation of the costs and compromises involved in achieving the prosperity we want.

Most solutions are band-aids and reactions to the immediate sentiment of a crowd, rather than the result of analysis and the creation of a public understanding of the problem itself.

This crab-in-a-bucket, reactive approach to governance never has the depth or broad support needed to achieve long-term solutions. And when long-term solutions do occur, it's often once the problem has become big enough and expensive enough that we have no choice but to fix it. The best and cheapest time to fix problems is before they reach critical mass.

So problems don't seem to get solved very often. And that makes people feel like government doesn't deliver.

You see this in municipal voter turnout, not just in Somerset Ward. At the level of government that interfaces most directly with our daily lives, we see less than fifty percent turnout, and we think that's good comparatively.

But what we really see there is that we have accepted such low participation as the norm. And why is that? Could it be that people feel like their vote doesn't matter? That problems won't get solved regardless? That they are getting five different versions of the same options?

And why does it seem that we always get people basically arguing over minor variations of the same set of things? Because candidates running for municipal office all engage in the same activity:

Talk to people.
Hear what makes them unhappy.
Hear what types of solutions make them happy.

And not coincidentally, you end up with similar proposals for every problem as candidates perform the task of identifying what solutions make the most people feel better rather than what approaches they will take for solving their problems. This is pandering, not representation.

• Talking to people and understanding their perspectives is literally the bare minimum.
• Holding our institutions accountable is the bare minimum.
• Engaging stakeholders is literally the bare minimum.

Responding to people’s immediate concerns matters. But we also have to explain whether a proposed response addresses the underlying problem, what it will cost, and how we will know it is working.

Our public institutions can deliver. America went to the moon through a public institution by giving it the resources and mandate to do so. It is elected representatives who give our institutions their mandates and resources. And you need broad support to supply that resourcing and mandate.

I'm not a politician. I work in IT, and it's a domain I am much more comfortable in. But I would not be upending my life if I hadn't realized that you cannot wait for someone else to meet the moment. Nobody rises up until somebody does. And the fact that our candidates and elected representatives don't even think to say this demonstrates the problem: they are stuck in the perspective of salespeople, not representatives. I say this to make it clear that they are doing their best. It's just that this perspective has become the norm, and it has limited their creativity and options.