Dozens of Niagara-on-the-Lake residents, particularly from the Nelson Park area, came to the NOTL Community Centre earlier this month, and some of the audience members gave NOTL a lesson in how not to conduct yourself in a public meeting.
They were there to make their concerns known to Signum Wireless planner Lucas Cuff, who was trying to sell them on installing a cellphone tower at the entrance of Nelson Park, around which many audience members live, in King’s Point and Greystones residences.
Ultimately, detractors of the plan were successful. On Monday, the town sent an email saying that Signum Wireless withdrew its application.
Catharine Cornell, a King’s Point resident, said after the email was received that it showed what can happen when people “stand up and make sure to express those concerns clearly, rationally and not too emotionally … People in charge … will listen.”
I agree, and I believe this statement could reflect the conduct of their larger effort to have Signum Wireless reconsider its proposal.
The following observations, however, are solely about what took place during the public meeting.
While there were respectful attendees in the audience, including among those who spoke during the meeting, there were enough people yelling and being inflammatory to make the overall atmosphere unpleasant.
There were heckles coming from the audience even before Cuff finished his opening presentation.
There were multiple grandstanding speeches during the question-and-answer period, with some members of the audience attacking Cuff in terms that went well beyond the demerits of his company’s proposal.
The presentation was referred to as a sham by one audience member.
It felt more like a raucous American town hall meeting than a public consultation.
I have attended a lot of public events, including quite a few where passion is more typically expected. These include political rallies and presentations about contentious topics like war, religion and human rights.
One of these events was a discussion I went to in Tel Aviv on the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. It featured Meir Javendafar and Emily Landau, academics who argued for and against the deal, respectively.
This is a debate seen by many in Israel as an existential matter, and yet while the discussion was very passionate, I also remember it being generally more respectful than what I saw at the community centre over a cellphone tower.
This is not to say that the tower is meaningless. I acknowledge the significance of the cellphone tower building to the residents who live there, and what it could have meant for their local park and their neighbourhood.
They should make their opinions known about what’s happening in their own neighbourhood.
And, of course, this comparison is not perfect.
But I hope to give a rough illustration of how it felt for me to be in the crowd during the community centre event. Compared to many experiences I’ve had in my life, it felt unsettling, confusing and absurd.
You’d be hard-pressed to argue that an event involving a cellphone tower is more worthy of incivility or even passion than one where the topic is nuclear weapons.
This is particularly true in a country where national defence and war are not abstractions, regardless of what you think of Israel or the conflict with Palestinians and its Middle East neighbours.
These residents should consider themselves fortunate that cellphone towers are the kinds of battles they get to fight rather than what many people around the world must deal with.
To be clear, I am not endorsing one position or another on the issue of the tower. I am not taking a position on town issues, which I have only been covering for three months.
My interest is only to advocate for basic civility, especially when emotions run high. It’s when the stakes are highest that the need for calm and reason is most essential.
Without civility, we also cannot have a democracy, because a lack of civility often implies that those involved believe some people should be shut down while others get a say.
There are ways to deal with issues that matter to people. They can organize. They can get the town on their side. That three councillors attended the meeting demonstrates they’ve already made some progress on this front.
They can make their voice heard to the federal government, which has regulatory authority over the cell tower. They can show up to public meetings, yes, and make arguments and ask questions.
They can decide not to do business with Signum Wireless or any of the companies it carries.
They may not win. Nobody always wins, and no one person or interest should always win in a democracy.
But if the arguments have merit, they will at least have been shown to have made them when it mattered, and they will be vindicated no matter whether the tower is built or not.
It doesn’t take interrupting and being unpleasant to someone whose job is merely to present their company’s case.
How you make your case matters. It starts with letting people have their say without interruption, it starts by speaking in calm tones, and it starts by talking about the issue and not the person.
It’s not worth winning a fight over a cellphone tower if norms of basic civility are abandoned in the process.
