In the private sector, outcomes are everything. We seem to care less about how companies get to the finish line, as long as they make a profit once they get there.
The public sector is completely different. Yes, landing on an acceptable outcome is, of course, important. But how you get there -- the process -- is also crucial.
It's with that in mind that Ontario's minister of finance, Charles Sousa, has been traveling the province over the past few weeks, visiting a dozen different cities and listening to hundreds of different citizens and groups about issues of importance to them.
Does any of this really matter? Will anything that Sousa hears during the course of these presentations actually make it into the budget when he presents it in the spring?
You'd have to say that's pretty doubtful. At yesterday's budget presentation meeting at the 519 Church Street Community Centre in downtown Toronto, I asked a finance ministry official that question. He had to go back several budgets to recall that someone had once made a presentation about the importance of insulin pumps for diabetics. In the ensuing budget, the province decided to subsidize the cost of purchasing those pumps. That idea came directly from one citizen's presentation.
So it can happen.
But more probably, these sessions can be chalked up to the further education of the minister of finance. The higher up you go in politics, the more isolated you can become, and the more intractable the bubble becomes. So it's in some sense gratifying to see that ordinary citizens can still have access to high-ranking public officials to make their pitch to the minister of finance.
Having said that, Sousa wasn't leaving the crowd with any illusions about what he would do with the information he was getting. The deficit, he told them, was still huge. He was still adamant about balancing the budget by the fiscal year 2017-18. Yes, the people in the room would get a polite hearing, but certainly no promises beyond that.
Yesterday, almost every issue under the sun was represented in the room. Sharon DeSousa was there from the Public Service Alliance of Canada pitching a higher still minimum wage. Diana McCauley from Spinal Cord Injury Ontario admonished the minister to do more to create jobs for people who need to get around in wheelchairs. Doris Grinspun was making the case for registered nurses as she has for so many years.
Has Sousa heard it all before? Almost certainly yes. But that's not the point. The point is, in a functioning democracy, the public needs to know -- and to see -- that even the highest ranking officials, who work for them after all, are hearing what they have to say. We'll see in the budget in the spring just how influential any of these presentations really were to the budget's outcome.
But in some respects, that's only half the battle. The other half is being heard. Too many people say the government needs to act more like a business, and in some respects, that's good advice.
But that advice was less important yesterday at The 519. Yesterday was mostly about process. And unlike in business, process really matters in politics, particularly if you're trying to convince another party in the legislature to support what you've done, so you can live to govern another day.