The citizens of Sechelt who have been clamouring for the district to release the findings of last November’s online survey will get some satisfaction after all.
After rejecting a freedom of information request and facing a complaint to the province’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, district staff this week informed the complainant, resident Graham Moore, that the online Citizen Satisfaction Survey results will be posted before the end of May on the district website.
The move reverses last month’s decision by council to conceal those results because, in the infamous words of Mayor Bruce Milne, the survey had been “hacked by a group of people on social media who encouraged negative responses to come in.”
The term “hacked” raised the hackles of our readers, who noted that the survey results might have been shaped or manipulated by a concerted campaign of like-minded respondents, but to claim it was “hacked” was misleading and invited ridicule about Russian involvement and other hallucinations.
Mayor Milne was very certain the results had been skewed, however, and this is where the story really gets silly.
As he explained to councillors at their Ides of March meeting, he had a friend “test” the survey back in November and the friend was able to enter 14 “neutral to positive” responses (there were only 132 in total), proving that the survey lacked sufficient filters to stop people from taking it multiple times.
Despite this knowledge on Milne’s part, as he explained to reporter Christine Wood the following week, staff went ahead with compiling and posting the survey results online in February. Milne ordered the results taken down moments after he saw them – because, he said, they were “very, very different” from the parallel telephone survey, which brought in a grand total of 301 responses.
This is where he put two and two together, learned that Mr. Moore was pushing to have the results made public and concluded there was “a group of people who took this as an opportunity to compromise an attempt by staff to get an online survey.”
Milne himself pushed to have the survey suppressed because he was not “interested in furthering” this alleged group’s “agenda and their aims.”
What we know about this nefarious group is that Mr. Moore put up a post on Facebook back in November, encouraging people who were angry that “Mayor Milne is ignoring young families, not creating good employment opportunities,” etc., to take the survey and let their feelings be known.
It’s a completely typical and legitimate thing to do in a democracy, and if it distorted the results (more than the “test” by Milne’s friend had already done), that would be due to the pathetically low number of responses, which is not something that can be blamed on any hackers or plotters and would have made the results a big nothing anyway, had they been released as they should have been back in February.
One of our online commenters said it best: “Hinky.”
