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Reframing the Debate: Why Councillor Caradonna’s Opposition to Public Engagement is Wrong and His Analysis Does Not Hold Up

Arthur McInnis

Jan 14, 2025


Councillor Jeremy Caradonna’s opposition to a motion calling for structured reporting on public engagement feedback reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how democratic decision-making should incorporate citizen input. His argument, while cloaked in the language of methodological rigour and equity, narrows the information available to Council and misconstrues the motion’s intent.

Let’s start by examining what the motion proposed and why the opposition to it, by Caradonna, Dell and Thompson, is more revealing than the critiques themselves.  (Councillor Dell has been separately critiqued in the article Matt Dell Says No To Public Engagement.)

The Motion Was About Transparency, Not Replacement

The motion brought to Council was straightforward: create a public engagement program to gather feedback on the Draft 2025 Budget and core services and provide Council with analysis by staff of that feedback alongside existing engagement data.

Critically, therefore, the motion DID NOT:

1. Propose replacing a statistically representative Ipsos survey that was also done.
2. Claim that self-selected feedback represents the majority view.
3. Suggest governing by email volume.
   
   

It is laughable to think that it did.

Instead, the motion sought to ensure that all engagement streams, which the City already supposedly encourages residents to participate in, would be transparently reported to Council with appropriate context and analysis.  That is it.

Yet Caradonna framed his opposition as if the motion threatened to elevate unscientific feedback to the same status as rigorous survey data. This mischaracterisation became the foundation for every argument that followed.  This is hugely disappointing because Jeremy Caradonna is a bright guy and thus when he does this, he knows exactly what he is doing. 

Caradonna’s Core Mistake: Confusing Representative with Relevant

At the heart of Caradonna’s argument lies a category error and the assumption that only statistically representative data deserves formal analysis and Council consideration.

This fundamentally misunderstands how different types of information serve democratic governance. The Ipsos survey and public submissions are not competing sources of the same thing, they provide different kinds of insight.

The survey tells Council what the general population thinks across key demographic groups. Written submissions or email from Victorians reveal the intensity of concern, specific impacts on particular groups, implementation challenges, and ethical objections that merit consideration.  Victorians’ submissions’ value does not come from mirroring population proportions. It comes from:

1. Surfacing unanticipated consequences.
2. Identifying risks that may affect vulnerable groups.
3. Documenting reasoned objections that Council has an obligation to hear.
4. Providing depth and context that surveys cannot capture.
   

By treating statistical representativeness as the sole criterion for whether information should reach Council in structured form, Caradonna confuses scientific sampling with democratic accountability.  And again, he is a bright guy so there is no excuse.

A False Choice: Scientific Rigour Versus Public Input

Caradonna presents engagement as a binary; that is either you have rigorous, representative surveys (legitimate), or you have self-selected submissions (biased and therefore illegitimate).  Dell went so far as to seemingly suggest these self-selecting submissions were somehow responsible for the housing crisis!

Caradonna’s framing collapses under scrutiny.

Self-selection bias is well-understood in public administration. Professional analysis does not require pretending such feedback is statistically representative.  It simply requires labelling it accurately. Thus, city staff processing this information would likely routinely distinguish between:

1. Frequency of a concern versus its prevalence in the population.
2. Volume of feedback versus majority opinion.
3. Intensity of opposition versus consensus.

This is Surveying 101. 

Nothing in the motion prevents staff from making these distinctions explicit. In fact, good analysis depends on them. Caradonna’s argument assumes staff cannot or will not maintain these distinctions.  How disappointing then for the staff doing this work as it undermines the professional credibility Caradonna claims to protect.

The Equity Argument That Defeats Itself

One of Caradonna’s central objections is that marginalised groups are underrepresented in written submissions, and therefore those submissions should not receive formal analysis.  Dell made the same weak argument.

This logic is internally inconsistent.

If marginalised communities are underrepresented in both self-selected feedback and in a 700-person survey conducted once per year (by Ipsos), then excluding written submissions does not solve the equity problem it simply narrows the evidence base further.

MOREOVER:

1. The motion does not prevent Council from weighting survey data more heavily in decisions, which I believe they did.
2. It ensures Council can still see what concerns are being raised through all City-invited channels.
3. Suppressing analysis of one channel because participation is uneven will not advance equity.  What it advances is selective visibility.
   

A truly equity-sensitive approach would maintain multiple channels of input, clearly contextualised, rather than privileging only the channel that happens to align with Caradonna’s, Dell’s and Thompson’s preferred outcomes.

Staff “Politicisation” Is a Red Herring

Caradonna warns that asking staff to analyse public submissions would “politicise” them and undermine their credibility.  Let me repeat this.  Caradonna warns that asking staff to analyse public submissions would “politicise” them and undermine their credibility. 

This claim is wild and does not withstand any type of scrutiny.

Staff already receive, organise, and manage public engagement throughout the year.

Summarising themes from that engagement is a technical function, not a political endorsement. If thematic analysis constitutes politicisation, then the Ipsos survey, with its question framing, weighting decisions, and demographic modelling, is equally “political.”

Yet Caradonna treats survey analysis as neutral while casting submission analysis as suspect. This is not a principled distinction, but a selective definition of politicisation that protects preferred information sources while questioning others. 

Misapplied Academic Authority

Throughout his speech, Caradonna invokes “academic” literature and supposedly notable thinkers to suggest that public hearings and written feedback lead to poor governance outcomes.

But the research he cites addresses a different question and that is whether public hearings should replace deliberative decision-making, not whether supplementary engagement feedback should be analysed alongside scientific surveys. 

The motion does not propose:

1. Replacing professional analysis with public sentiment.
2. Governing by email volume.
3. Privileging vocal minorities over representative data.

Invoking academic warnings about those practices to oppose structured reporting of engagement feedback is a rhetorical overreach that mischaracterises the actual issue.

Personal Sufficiency Is Not Institutional Policy

Caradonna notes that he personally reads all public submissions and as such does not need staff to summarise them. He suggests that staff time is better spent elsewhere.

These are arguments that reflect his individual preference but are not institutional governance. Council has not been voted into office to accommodate Jeremy Caradonna’s workflow. Staff analysis serves purposes beyond individual convenience; namely it:

1. Ensures consistency across council terms.
2. Creates institutional memory of public concerns.
3. Provides accountability to future councils and the public.
4. Guarantees transparency in how feedback influenced decisions.

So-called administrative efficiency cannot justify withholding structured information from Council as a body.

What Caradonna’s (and Dell’s and Thompson’s) Opposition Really Reveals

When the layers of methodology and equity rhetoric are peeled back, Caradonna’s position rests on a simple, unstated premise:

Only information that can be statistically generalized to the population should be formally visible to Council.

This is a technocratic view of governance and one that privileges aggregated data over articulated concerns, breadth over depth, and administrative convenience over democratic transparency.

The motion sought balance: Ipsos for population-level attitudes, engagement analysis for intensity, specificity, and unanticipated impacts. Opposing that balance is not a methodological necessity.  It is Caradonna’s policy choice about what kinds of citizen input matter.

A Missed Opportunity for Transparent Governance

You know it is funny how a guy like Jeremy Caradonna runs on governance among other things and seems to get buy in on this from progressive groups like Dogwood (who are currently advertising for a campaign manager right now at $59,000 for nine months for unknown candidates because there is that pesky Local Elections Campaign Financing Act, SBC 2014, c 18) but where is the real transparency when it comes down to his actions (and for that matter Dell’s and Thompson’s).  It is AWOL (Absent With Out Leave).  If only this message could break through, then this triptych could be judged on their real merits not those imagined.

Ultimately Councillor Caradonna’s opposition to structured public engagement analysis fails for six crucial reasons; namely it: 

1. Misrepresents what the motion proposed.
2. Conflates statistical representativeness with democratic relevance.
3. Creates a false choice between surveys and submissions.
4. Uses equity concerns to justify narrowing, not broadening, participation visibility.
5. Selectively labels staff analysis as “political” only when inconvenient.
6. Substitutes personal workflow preferences for institutional transparency standards.

A rational, evidence-based approach would embrace both engagement streams each clearly contextualised rather than suppressing one in the name of methodological purity.

The real question is not whether public submissions are representative. It is whether Council wants to see what residents are saying when the City invites them to speak and whether that information deserves a place in the public record.

Caradonna’s answer is no.

That tells us more about his vision of governance than any appeal to academic literature or campaign platform ever could.

OUST THE MAYOR AND THE GANG OF FIVE

Caradonna, Dell, Thompson, Loughton and Kim