Select 1,2 or 3, unless you don't want to

I attended a consultation on Ottawa's Transportation Master Plan last night. The TMP, as it is called, is the blueprint that will carry (literally) Ottawans into 2031. That's well after I am dead and my body blown up by my kids.

There were questions about Light Rail (LRT) versus Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). There were questions about traffic congestion, how to clear it and, more importantly, how to pay for it.

But was I the only person in the room to roll their eyes at the way this consultation was carried out?

The session deteriorated from the very beginning. Two, count them, two City Councillors left the budget consultations to glad hand the crowd and tell us what great work they were doing. I would have preferred that Maria and Alex had stayed at the budget consult. It was also quite obvious, from the number of people that Maria recognized in the crowd of 77 or so, that this was not a random sampling of Ottawans.

Then on to the questions. An earnest pollster gave a bit of background to each question and then asked the assembled group to press 1,2 or 3 on our wireless keypads to give our choice.

It started with one guy who asked "what if I don't like the options you propose?" He wanted to answer the poll question with another question. Rather than the moderator saying "suck it up buddy and answer the question", she allowed the whole blessed two hours to turn into a criticism of everything from whether or not biodiesel fumes were safe to breathe to "we need a new poll question to determine if people think that this whole poll was comparing one fruit to another or not". What a waste of time.

One good "extra" question that was posed was "where do you live... urban or rural?" The answer to this was the most revealing of the whole tawdry affair and it was absolutely amazing to me that the pollsters did not have it on their list before they were nudged by an audience member. The majority of the attendees, who live in the core of the city, want commuters from outside the core to pay extra taxes and tolls for the right to drive to work or shop downtown. They could give a tinker's damn for the needs or realities of suburban and rural residents. I wonder what they would think if the Canadian government moved all of their offices to Barrhaven, Munster and Orleans and they, the cool and sophisticated core dwellers, had to commute to the burbs? Want to bet that the poll results would be different.

The city might also want to take a second look at Pace Consulting, the company that was hired to run this "consultation". They covered themselves by saying that this was a first of its kind consultation in Ottawa but does that mean that we have to pay them to test out their techniques? According to their web site, www.paceconsulting.ca, they are very experienced strategic planners with clients like: Ontario Hydro, Medtronic, TD Securities and many other names familiar to this blogger. I suggest that Pace regroup to get their message together before the next consultation.