Citizens' Assemblies & Democratic Renewal: Building Public Trust on Contest

Explore how citizens’ assemblies can build public trust, navigate contested issues, and strengthen democratic decision-making. Across mature democracies, governments are discovering that some questions cannot be resolved by traditional consultation alone. When policy issues cut across values, geographies, and generations — amalgamation, land use, electoral reform, end-of-life care — conventional public engagement often deepens division rather than resolving it. In response, jurisdictions from Ireland to France to communities across Canada have turned to citizens' assemblies: bodies of randomly-selected residents who deliberate together, hear evidence, and issue recommendations on complex public questions. British Columbia has its own distinctive history here, from the 2004 Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform to the present-day Saanich–Victoria Amalgamation Citizens' Assembly. This panel convenes practitioners, scholars, and participants at the leading edge of this democratic innovation. Panelists will explore questions such as: What conditions make a citizens' assembly succeed — and what causes them to falter? How does deliberative democracy build (or fail to build) durable public legitimacy on genuinely contested questions? What does the Saanich–Victoria experience reveal about the promise and the limits of assemblies at the local level? And what should public administrators learn from these processes about designing engagement that citizens actually trust? Drawing on the live case of the amalgamation assembly, the panel will connect local experimentation to a broader international movement in democratic renewal. Join us for a timely, grounded conversation on how public institutions can partner with citizens to work through the hardest questions — and what deliberative democracy can and cannot do for the trust deficit facing modern government.