This goes to the question of the complexities of the design of consultation processes in general.
I've been involved over recent years in consultation processes in a whole variety of forms. With some of them, you arrive and are given a fairly narrow set of options to consider at the outset. Your discussion is solicited, perhaps briefs are invited, and you leave the table feeling as though what you had to say will have absolutely no impact on the outcome of the proceeding, because the decision was already made prior to the proceeding.
Then somewhere down the road you end up seeing the communication strategy that surrounds that policy decision or that consultation, and you know that what you said mattered not so much to the outcome of the decision as to the communication strategy that came out of that meeting. You were almost like a test subject upon whom certain kinds of policy options were given a test flight to see how people would respond, so that the communication strategy could be better crafted.
There are many of those kinds of consultation exercises, and I think there's a wide variation of quality in the consultation that goes on throughout the federal government right now. The consultations leave people more discouraged about engagement and less likely to engage again down the road. Those kinds of practices need to be avoided.
Better kinds of consultation practices are those that involve a high degree of deliberation, that allow people to participate in setting the agenda, that combine expertise with engagement, that give people access to very good information, that allow them to ask questions of experts who are charged with responding to them comprehensively and in a language they can understand, in which they're given a good deal of time to deal with the issues, and in which the outcomes that arise from the consultation process have an identifiable role to play in the policy outcome.
That doesn't mean the outcome of the consultation becomes the policy, but at least there's a sense that there's a very real meaning to the consultation that's going on and that the results are communicated in an effective way to those who participated. Those are the elements of a better structure for consultation than what I described before.