Opinion: We need to move away from this paradigm

1) "I can only serve the hard working people of Hamilton from Council and or Committee."

2) "Therefore I urge you to be a public delegation and to attend a meeting or send a delegation so I can serve the thousands of residents in Ward 4 that do not have access to a computer."

3) "Until then please feel free to ask council for permission to be a delegation to present your case so we can conscientiously serve our constituents globally."  

Ward 4 Councillor Sam Merulla regarding responding to the HWT queries as directed to him by The Hamiltonian. 

The attachment to this 'access to the throne' process has to stop. (Never mind the bizarre interpretation of responsibilities, the hyperbole and the general condescension.)

Especially with an issue in-play. (As opposed to a planned process, or where sensitive deliberations shouldn't be risked.)

I may have been born at night, but not last night, and I'm no dumb-bunny. I get how there has to be structure, that things can't be dealt with (all the time) on-the-fly. Otherwise...

However, I'm going to go back to my last post and reference that 'The times, they are a-changin'.'

I'm beginning to think that we have a real paradigm problem on our hands.

One where City Hall is stuck in the past, constantly working within what used to be the norm, a paradigm going back decades. That is, that information pertaining to governance is meted out 'as required'. 

A paradigm that's conflicted by electronic interconnectivity. By the wonders the Internet. By smartphones. By Twitter and Facebook and open data...

So you have all this 'modern' stuff going on against the backdrop of what amounts to parochial, paternalistic control. 

Hence you have what could kindly be referred to as 'Sam's Barley Rant'. (I have no idea if he'd been imbibing and I don't know the councillor well enough to make any comment as to whether the content of his -shared- emails were out-of-character. I will say that at the least, they were ill-advised. Seriously.)

This conflict of 'old' and 'new' is actually more of a problem than is probably –and properly– acknowledged. 

We focus on 'transparency and accountability', but really, those catchwords are aspects that are affected in wholesale ways by what I'm talking about here. 

Our world has changed. Our expectations have changed. And as a result, governance has to change. But it won't change unless we guide the mechanisms, because Lord knows that Council isn't going to be the driving force behind it. They're a little too conflicted and seemingly cannot see the forest for the trees. 

M Adrian Brassington