By Don White.

Back in May, Nanaimo City Hall’s announcement of the creation of The Mayor’s Task Force on Recovery and Resilience offered everyone a ray of hope. We thought we’d shortly be learning ways to harden our capabilities to survive and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. But that’s not quite the way it’s gone.

For six long months of only in camera meetings, we got silence. I wrote about the lack of transparency on September 30, and it is fair to note that the veil was lifted by the Mayor at the October 16 meeting. Then at the regular Council meeting on November 2, Task Force member, Donna Hais, gave a one and half hour presentation reviewing the Task Force mandate and setting out its recommendations. That session was followed immediately by City Hall putting out a news release and posting the full report online.

If you haven’t read the posted report, I recommend you do. There are many details and nuances I won’t be covering here. I simply list the eight recommendations by their key features so that I can identify them the same way as they appear in the report, oddities and all.

The Mayor’s Task Force Recommendations

1. A Nanaimo citizen-directed campaign to instill enthusiasm.
2. Establish a Mayor’s Nanaimo Leaders Table to become informed and build collaboration.
3. Promote recognition of Nanaimo as the Heart of the island “north of the Malahat.”
4. Launch an anti-racism awareness program.
5. Prioritize the emergency preparedness and resiliency measures.
6. Support elimination of Provincial Speculation and Vacancy Tax for Nanaimo.
7. Work with and support the Small Business community.
8. Develop transportation and digital infrastructure strategy.

Even a quick scan begs the question: Why on earth did any of these topics need in camera meetings in the first place? None are proprietary in nature nor involve negotiations. The unwarranted secrecy suggests the old culture of non-disclosure continues, if unchallenged, at our City Hall. Mayor Krog was right to end this practice on October 16 and likely should have done so sooner.

There are also other concerns about the recommendations that need additional dissection. First and foremost: what happened to the stated objective of resilience? Resilience is not only the capacity to recover, it includes the ability to cope in spite of setbacks and limited resources; and the fortitude and flexibility to overcome obstacles. Resilience is about surviving to the point where recovery can begin. Since we are still in the depths of the pandemic, why did the Task Force put the emphasis almost entirely on recovery when every day we’re still struggling to keep going?

The report only indirectly acknowledges that we need more than money to make living seem worthwhile. The recommendation for a “citizen-driven” PR campaign to instill enthusiasm is its one oblique admission. It proposes no support for arts, culture, or any aspect of community; no assistance to mitigate the social and psychological consequences of a long-haul shutdown. There’s nada on anything that raises life from the daily drudgery under the novel coronavirus that might make you want to get out of bed each morning. It’s silent on how we might help ourselves and each other go the distance.

This is where The Mayor’s Task Force on Recovery and Resilience falls down badly. However, even in terms of its prematurely exclusive focus on recovery, the recommendations given are neither as novel nor as helpful as we might have expected.

Many of the included recommendations are for initiatives that existed well before the pandemic began. It may be reasonable to recommend existing initiatives as top priorities, but it’s misleading to imply that they are new. The recommended importance of establishing Nanaimo as a Vancouver Island hub has long been a key feature behind ongoing drives for a tertiary hospital, improved infrastructure, and expanded transportation (all items also recommended). Nor is there anything new about supporting small business or promoting reconciliation with First Nations.

The recommendation for emergency preparedness is, reasonably, tailored to reflect the pandemic. We do need to establish PPE stores (not PP&E as the report incorrectly names them). Implementing waste water (i.e. sewage) monitoring may be helpful, although this process is more of a currently theoretical than accepted practice. But emergency preparedness, itself, has been around for decades.

Even in terms of its prematurely exclusive focus on recovery, the recommendations given are neither as novel nor as helpful as we might have expected.

Just two of the recommendations are new: the already mentioned citizen-directed feel-good-about-Nanaimo campaign and the continuation of The Mayor’s Task Force on Recovery and Resilience under a new name. More on the second of those in a moment.

One recommendation in the report stands out mostly for its questionable appropriateness: “6. Support elimination of Provincial Speculation and Vacancy Tax for Nanaimo.” In the words of Donna Hais, “We need that gone. … That hurts us. We need it to go away.” The question is: Who is “we”? Not those of us who watched the tax stabilize soaring real estate prices and reduce the disturbingly high number of vacant houses on our streets. The tax seems more a problem for speculators, for those who buy second homes in Nanaimo and leave them empty, and/or indirectly for those in residential/commercial construction. The inappropriateness of its inclusion justifies our questioning the credibility of the other recommendations. Perhaps this is why the City’s press release omitted it from its list.

The report is also mostly devoid of actionable undertakings, particularly ones we might be able to do ourselves. The promotion of Nanaimo “as the Heart of the island “north of the Malahat”’ gives no specifics on who would carry out which tasks. Like the “citizen-driven” PR campaign it appears intended to convince others to do something, not our City Council nor our City Hall.

The de-emphasis of action permeates even the language used in the report. Instead of the lexicon of doers, it adopts the one of talkers. It tells the city to “prioritize strategic investing” (rather than invest in X by doing Y); to “create a process” (rather than getting out and doing a process); to “leverage lessons”, “review methods”, “develop strategy” (rather than to implement).

Even the recommendation to continue The Mayor’s Task Force under a different name is what bureaucratic entities often try to do: perpetuate themselves. Continuing this process as The Mayor’s Nanaimo Leaders Table isn’t necessarily wrong. But whatever benefits it will produce – if any – are off somewhere in the future, while our need is now. Furthermore, another committee under another name – with the same leadership – may be vulnerable to the same shortcomings of The Mayor’s Task Force unless it learns from the latter’s mistakes.

Given this vulnerability, and with a purely benevolent perspective, I’ll itemize five demonstrated predilections of the outgoing Mayor’s Task Force that the incoming Leaders Table will need to keep in mind (as will Nanaimo City Council when defining the mandate of the new body) for the new group to have a chance of achieving the goals that are espoused.

Recommendations For The Mayor’s Nanaimo Leaders Table

1. Resiliency: People in Nanaimo are still in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic and currently in need a vast assortment of supports and services that contribute to their ability to cope and, later, to recover. They need assistance in bolstering traits that make continuing daily survival seem worthwhile. If we look after our community’s resilience, its recovery will follow.
2. Anti-secrecy: Understand that the business of The Leader’s Table involves the whole community. Discontinue demonstrably unnecessary in camera meetings. Practice inclusion, disclosure, and community involvement. Actively seek citizen engagement and buy-in, not just periodically deliver proclamations from the mount.
3. Anti-hijacking: Safeguard the objectives of The Leader’s Table from being suborned by the self-interest of individuals. Guard against personal agendas promoting positions on issues that are not broadly accepted as beneficial to the community as a whole. Distinguish community from special interests. Special interest groups, by definition, advocate for their own perspectives.
4. Immediacy: Acknowledge that we are still where we were last May: waiting to learn what we can do individually and collectively to build resiliency to sustain ourselves and recover. But now we are COVID-fatgued and facing an even higher pandemic wave that looks to dwarf the first. Nanaimo needs support and sustaining initiatives now, not only in the future. We need that help today.
5. Action: This is perhaps the most important recommendation. Committees, by their nature – and often their mandates – tend to be focussed mainly on producing rationale, not action. This can result in their outcomes being similarly focussed. Guard against this tendency by looking always for actionable items to address the problem(s) and framed to facilitate their implementation.

Will The Mayor’s Nanaimo Leaders Table do any better than it’s predecessor? Will it, unlike the Task Force, actually improve our individual and community resilience and recovery? Who knows? As it stands, it is just another initiative for which we have to wait to see.