We had a challenging meeting on Monday. I am still a little unsettled by what occurred, and as the person required to chair meetings, I am still uncertain about how we could have managed the situation differently. To frame the challenges, I need to first talk about power. Power is an uncomfortable thing to talk about for people who hold it.

As a Mayor, I hold power. Some 6676 people in this community voted for me, giving me some power over how council meetings are run. There are limits on that power, in legislation and procedure bylaws written by people who similarly won some number of votes sufficient to give them power to make those decisions. The vast majority of people granted the power to make those decisions are people like me. People with privilege that comes predominantly with whiteness, maleness, access to education and wealth.

Through these systems created by people like me, we make decisions that impact our community, and impact people with much less power in our community. To do that justly, we in power need to bring humility into decision-making. The history of broken systems is not one of the most vulnerable being protected and supported, so even if we aspire to adapt those systems to make them more just, we must practically operate within the unjust systems to serve our community as best we can until they can be fixed.

And I am going way too deep into sociology for a geologist, so let me get away from the abstract here.

In a recent meeting of Council, a member of the community felt they were harmed by the comments of a member of Council. In a just system, this member of the community would be able to hold the member of Council accountable for those harms. Part of our system is the opportunity to delegate at a public meeting and bring to Council and the community’s attention the harm that was caused in the same forum in which those harms occurred. In some ways, this is a beautiful expression of democracy. Except we have not set up our system to support this.

We have a Procedures Bylaw and a slightly vague set of community standards around what can and cannot be said in that Delegation. We ask that delegates not speak about members of Council or other people. We ask that people speak about issues, not about people. But what if the issue is the words or actions of a person? What if that person is one of those holding power in that room?

In our meeting on Monday, we had a proclamation declaring a Day of Remembrance and Action on Islamophobia. This was not controversial, we have had similar declarations in previous years, and agreed unanimously as a Council in this very meeting that this was appropriate and something we support. What was different this year is that we had a delegate, a Muslim person, saying that they heard Islamophobia in our chamber in a recent meeting, and they wanted to speak out about that. Here is a person with personal and intimate experience with Islamophobia in our community who wishes to speak to personal experience in a system not well designed for them to speak their truth to power.

The question is whether that delegate did so in a way that was consistent with “rules of order” – those procedures and practices that people like me, people with power, have constructed.

When a member of Council calls “point of order”, I am required to pause any other speaker and hear that concern. When the point of order raised is “What that person said is inappropriate”, I have two options in front of me: exert the power given me, or show some humility to the power given me. To be honest, my reflex is to do the former and revert to the procedures and practice that put me in this place and shut the conversation down if there is any hint of impropriety. If you watch the meeting, you see me and other members of Council applying these systems by calling “Point of Order” when the comments seemed to be directed at a single member of Council. But in exercising humility we must consider: does this member of the community have a right to ask an elected official to be accountable for words they spoke in the Council chamber, that the member of the community believed to be Islamophobic? Can I, a non-Muslim person, judge or dismiss the impact these words have on a Muslim person speaking of that impact? Do our positions of power protect us from criticism in delegation? Is that what the system was designed to do?

I have been in many Council meetings where delegates and other members of Council quoted my words back at me in unflattering ways (indeed, it seems inevitable that some part of this post will be quoted back to me, stripped of context). I have also seen this happen to other members of Council. I do not recall ever having heard “point of order” used to repeatedly shut down delegates who unflatteringly quote members of Council and then speak to how those words impact them. What changed here?

My questions here are mostly rhetorical, and many of us will have different answers based on our experience and bias. Could I have managed my Chair role better? Possibly, but whether you think “managing it better” means I should have shut down the delegate sooner, or it means I should have let the delegate speak is likely informed by your relative position of power compared to the delegate. And as a person of privilege, I cannot dismiss that there may be an Islamophobic or other bias in how I view what is fair, what is just, in how I approach a conflict like this. This is why it still matters that a City like New Westminster proclaims that action on Islamophobia is important. If we are unwilling to even hear a Muslim person telling us that we expressed Islamophobia in our work in this chamber, what does that proclamation even mean?

I don’t support a person occupying space in our Council Chambers in a way that takes voice away from the 8 other people who wanted to delegate to Council on matters that are important to them on Monday. But more than this, I don’t like that our systems are so bad at addressing conflict and inherent bias that this occupation of the space was the only way a member of the community felt they could hold power accountable after that person in power would not let them speak.

Ultimately, this is a difficult space, at a difficult time, and as such I think leadership needs to lean more on humility than on power. We all have learning to do, and humility will be needed for that learning.