its not that there should be no consultation whatsoever, but rather that there needs to be a massive rethink on this continent on how and for what consulting is done. As it stands, consulting is something that is done during work hours where the only people that can attend are retirees that don't have weekday commitments, and often carry views that favour enforcing existing status quos, whilst offering feedback on engineering decisions that they frankly have no qualifications to give.
In turn, this means that "consulting" just devolves into giving a massive soapbox for NIMBYs to stand on and give feedback that often doesn't align with the views of the local population. An easy example of this would be the quagmire that is transit planning in LA, with the sepulveda line mess being a prime example. Despite the scoping period returning data that 93% of residents support building the line as Heavy Rail, the project has a serious risk of being built as the awful monorail because local SOHA and Bel-Air NIMBY's have done a great job politicking in favour of the monorail through equity arguments, threats of lawsuits, harassment of metro employees, and spreading nonsense BS that reads like facebook level conspiracy theories. No joke, Fred Rosen (the former CEO of ticketmaster) spent months spreading complete nonsense like "A TBM digging under Bel-Air would create a Tsunami-like Tidal Wave in the local reservoir" (I'm paraphrasing here).
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And look, I'm not going to claim that there is no place for consultation because there's an obvious need for it. There is a need to have checks and balances for the government to make sure that it doesn't get too disconnected from regular citizen needs and result in bulldozing local neighbourhoods to build a 12 lane highway. I am for the most part sympathetic to "Don't Tread on Me" Ideas, but its also important to have clear limitations especially in dire ecological/environmental circumstances where we need to build public transit to minimize our carbon emissions, and to add capacity for the millions of immigrants we invite to Canada each year. The last thing we need is crucial projects getting cancelled or delayed because of people like this:
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/a-...cle_a4a16eec-07b2-525b-930e-67836ae24962.html