Municipal politics and black swans

The consequences of our own actions

We’re learning first hand in Ottawa the power and importance of municipal politics. Municipal politics is often ignored by the general public, those who live outside the Twitter bubble. Questions like “Who is your mayor? Who is your city counselor?” are often unanswerable. It makes sense, municipal politics doesn’t have the flashiness of federal or provincial politics. Federal political issues like taxes and abortion make the media and they’re emotional, but they are really far abstracted from the everyday life of Canadians. Libraries and urban planning are much more important to our everyday lives, but they’re boring.

Our interest in the two streams of politics show in voter turnout. According to Wikipedia, the turnout for the 2018 municipal election was 42.55%. The previous election in 2014 was 39.92%. Turnout during the recent 2021 Gatineau election was even worse at 35.10%. This is compared to the turnout for the 2021 federal election of 62.30%.

With that in mind, let’s talk again about the occupation:

People who live in downtown Ottawa are bracing as a nearly week-long protest against COVID-19 public health mandates looks poised to continue, with the police chief concerned that policing alone may not end the "intolerable" and "unprecedented" demonstration. - CBC

The word “unprecedented” annoys me to no end. Of course, the convoy told us exactly what they were going to do. They were going to come park their trucks downtown Ottawa and not leave until they get what they want. Because of course:

have they ever been on twitter - twitter

How is it that the Twitterati knew but the police didn’t? Journalists had been talking about it for the week leading up to the convoy arriving as well, documenting their trip across Canada. Of course, its true that an occupation like this is without precedent in Canada, but I don’t think that’s a good excuse.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book the Black Swan has been eye opening for me (see a summary on Wikipedia here)¹. To briefly summarize, the name comes from the fact that black swans were assumed not to exist, since no European had ever seen one. Then, a black swan was found and suddenly it seemed obvious in hindsight that they could have existed. A black swan event, according to Taleb has three fundamental parts:

1. A surprise event (to the observer)

2. High-impact (positive or negative)

3. Easy to rationalize as something that could have been expected.

The thesis of the book is that black swan events have a disproportionate impact on society - they do not follow a normal distribution of events. Since black swan events cannot be predicted in advance, the key is to prepare for possibilities in order to be not taken off guard.

Black swan theory doesn’t tell us that the convoy should have been predicted though. If it were predicted, it wouldn’t be a black swan after all! Instead it tells us that we should be prepared to handle unpredictable eventualities, especially ones with high impact. With preparation, a negative black swan event like the convoy occupying Ottawa likely would not have had such a negative impact. After the first day of the convoy reaching Toronto on February 5:

After a full day demonstrating, the trucks and protesters who had blocked Avenue & Bloor have been safely moved out. We appreciated the cooperation as we opened & returned the intersection for safe use by residents & businesses.Officers will remain in the area over the weekend. - twitter

We won’t know until later if claiming success in Toronto will be possible, but preliminary reports seem to say that with preparation the police were able to prevent an occupation. Chief Ramer did not need to go to a press conference and claim that the convoy was unprecedented and there was nothing they could do. They had prepared.²

It’s easy for me, the keyboard warrior with no skin in the game, to say that Chief Sloly has done a bad job, and it’s easy for Chief Ramer to learn from Sloly’s mistakes. But we should be able to prepare for eventualities and not need to claim that they were unprecedented. It’s not a great excuse to say that something was unprecedented, and therefore excuse the failures, especially when the convoy did exactly what it said it was going to do.

Which brings us back to municipal politics. We ignore municipal politics collectively as a nation. The star candidates probably run for federal politics, or go make a ton of money in the private sector. Are there good candidates who run for municipal politics? Probably! Catherine McKenney appears to be a very competent individual who is a city counselor. But we ignore municipal politics, a minority of voters elect whoever happens to be running (Jim Watson has been elected as mayor essentially unchallenged for years), leaving our institutions weak and unscrutinized. Us citizens don’t care as long as potholes get filled (or don’t) and as long as our taxes don’t go up too much.

That is, until a crisis occurs, then we ask why our institutions aren’t working properly. Just like how no one had any idea how our public health institutions worked until the pandemic started, and then we ask why they dropped the ball. We’ve been ignoring them as they trudge along for decades. Black swan events are probably more likely to be impacted by municipal decisions rather than federal though - think things like Walkerton, ice storms, tornados, etc. Therefore, we as a society have weighted our talent towards federal politics where decisions are less meaningful and less likely to have large impact, and away from municipal politics where there is more impact and more possibility for extreme impact.

I’m not saying the mayor of Ottawa or city council are not necessarily the best people for the job, but they have not had a lot of competition for their jobs, so chances are they are not. But since its municipal politics, if Watson was not mayor, who else? It’s not like there were a lot of candidates for the job. It’s not like Trudeau wanted to become mayor of Ottawa. After all, Churchill was Prime Minister, not mayor of Liverpool.

1. You’re probably going to be hearing a lot about him here.

2. Niall Ferguson, author of Doom, would probably say that the convoy wasn’t a black swan but a grey rhino event - a high impact, highly probable event that was ignored, like a grey rhino charging at you.