Langley City aims to cool the 'world of hot takes' with citizen democracy

Langley City Mayor Nathan Pachal believes a made-in-BC approach to constituent engagement can help cool political tensions—even if it’s just in his community. 

This fall, after two years of planning, Langley City will potentially launch a new “citizens’ assembly,” bringing together a group of residents to deliberate on social issues facing the city and come up with potential solutions. 

Pachal first suggested the idea in 2022, when he was a councillor hoping to increase public safety in the community. This summer, Langley City finally tested the initiative. And in December, council will decide what place the citizens’ assembly has in the city’s future. Pachal thinks it has the ability to help combat the “world of hot takes,” he said.

BC may be the home of the very first citizens’ assembly—or at least, the first one by that name in modern times to tackle a monumental challenge: electoral reform.

The story begins in 1996, when Gordon Campbell’s BC Liberal Party lost that year’s provincial election to the BC NDP. Despite garnering more votes than the NDP, the BC Liberals claimed just 33 seats—six fewer than the NDP.

Losing in such a manner stung, and in the next election, Campbell ran on a promise to shake up BC’s electoral system—not by choosing a new system himself, but by gathering a random selection of citizens to lay the groundwork for a referendum on the topic.

Campbell won. In 2003, his promised Citizens’ Assembly came to life.

Some researchers say the assembly was the first time a group of random citizens were convened and given the power to fundamentally change a political institution. (Or at least to recommend how to do so.)

The assembly was comprised of 160 British Columbians who were chosen at random (albeit in a way that ensured BC’s diversity was relatively well-represented). After six weekends of deliberation on the future of BC’s electoral system, the group endorsed a form of proportional representation. The system—called single-transferrable vote (STV)—was put to the entire public in a referendum in 2005. There it met its unsatisfying fate: although a majority of voters endorsed it, STV failed to meet the pre-determined 60% threshold needed for the province to adopt the new system.

The work of the Citizens’ Assembly was over. It had a brief, arguably fruitless, life. But it sparked a wave of other groups like it, bringing average citizens to decision-making tables around the world.

Since BC’s assembly, there have been 88 other citizens’ assemblies created around the world—from the Irish Constitutional Convention to an assembly on green urban life in Copenhagen. In BC, municipalities have also made use of the concept: Burnaby formed a citizens’ assembly in February to provide input to council on the city’s new community plan, and the Victoria-Saanich Citizens’ Assembly is discussing a potential amalgamation of the two municipalities.

In 2022, before Pachal took the mayoral chair, Pachal wanted Langley City to create its own citizens’ assembly. At a September council meeting, he advocated for a citizens’ assembly to look into community safety, including crime and homelessness, in the city.

“This is something we’ve never actually done in Langley City, where we go out and say ‘We want to have people that represent every facet and demographic of our community, combine them with experts, and really dive deep into all the calls for service we get in Langley City,’” Pachal said during his pitch to the rest of council.

“The real key about a citizen’s assembly is it’s not just volunteers,” he continued. “When you get volunteers that come to a group, you generally bias it towards people who are privileged. What this does is it actually seeks people who are a cross-section of our community, and folks that might actually not be privileged enough to volunteer or consider volunteering.”

Council, as a whole, was supportive of the idea, saying Langley City needed to start looking holistically at the challenges it was facing. (Then-mayor Val van den Broek was opposed because of the cost.)

It took nearly two years of planning to bring the concept to fruition—although maybe not exactly as Pachal had promoted it in 2022.

This summer, a trial version of the citizens’ assembly got underway. The “Solutions Lab” initiative, as the city called it, was more or less what corporate folks would consider a focus group: a collection of local residents, non-profits, local businesses, school representatives, Indigenous agencies, and community service organizations.

Throughout the summer, the group met to discuss four main topics: supportive housing and community models of care; family supports; community safety and health; and transportation, employment, and education connections.

Together, group members researched issues facing Langley City residents in the four areas, and created a list of recommended actions for the city. Those recommendations are set to come before council on Dec. 2. When they do, council will not only discuss the suggestions laid before them, but also the concept of the citizens’ assembly as a whole.

If council likes what the Solutions Lab team has done so far, a more-permanent, citizen-focused assembly could take shape in Langley City.

Langley staff have already laid the groundwork for the Citizens’ Assembly—all they need is council’s rubber stamp of approval.

In order to ensure members are representative of the city as a whole, staff would select people based on their socioeconomic background, their location within the city, disability status, and other key factors (similar to how the Solutions Lab was organized). In the group of 29 members, at least four people would represent Indigenous groups near the city, and one would represent Langley’s urban Indigenous people.

So the Citizens’ Assembly on Community Safety, Health and Well-being Transformation—if it is endorsed—won’t be a purely random, out-of-the-hat membership system. But that’s not what most assemblies aspire to anyways. They want to match the community’s composition, and ensure that every sector of society has a chance to provide input on their future.

Those people will be responsible for making concrete recommendations to council on how to make life better for Langley City residents long into the future. The recommendations won’t be legally binding—decisions will still be made by the city’s elected representatives. But it is hoped that the recommendations will give those politicians a better understanding of what the people of Langley want to see.

For Pachal, that would be a benefit not just for Langley City, but democracy at large.

“When you look at the United States, a lot of it is really divisive and a lot of people believe government isn't working for them. And for me, I think how we combat that is making people a meaningful part of the decision making process,” he said.

“That doesn't mean hot takes—that’s bad decision-making, right?” he continued. “But when we get into the citizens’ assembly model, you're getting folks from the community, you're bringing them up to speed on really complicated topics, and then asking for their insight. It takes a lot of work, but I think that's important for democracy.”