Building Trust in Government: Letting the People Decide
Why transparency isn't just a buzzword — it's infrastructure for legitimacy.
There's a simple but powerful idea at the heart of Helsinki's governance model: the people most affected by public decisions should help shape them. It sounds obvious. But watching how it works in practice - and comparing it to what's happening here in Kingston - you realize how rarely we actually live up to it.
In Finland, participatory budgeting isn't a gimmick or a political stunt. It's not just a pilot anymore. It's how neighbourhoods decide how to spend real money. Residents propose ideas. They debate. They up-vote, down-vote, revise, and resubmit. Sometimes it happens in town halls, sometimes online, often both - over several iterative rounds. By the end, City Council isn't telling people what will happen; it's formally approving what residents have already debated, reflected on, co-designed, and decided is most important for them.
Then the City makes it happen. Just as importantly, people see it happen. Actions are taken. Projects get built. Data is updated in both human-readable and machine-readable formats. The public can track, almost in real time, where their money is going and how decisions were made. If you want to see how remarkably they do it, check out Helsinki's OmaStadi participatory budgeting platform: omastadi.hel.fi – it is mostly in English!
This isn't just better user experience. It's better democracy. When residents have meaningful voice before decisions are finalized, they stop feeling manipulated. When people help shape what gets built, they're no longer forced to accept things they never asked for. And when transparency becomes the norm, trust grows.
Trust isn't just a nice-to-have. It changes everything. In Finland, rising public confidence has coincided with mostly constant police budgets (in inflation-adjusted terms) and even actual declines in 2017 and 2022. When residents trust government, conflict shrinks. Tensions ease. Expensive enforcement becomes less necessary.
(Unfortunately, broader geopolitical fears after Russia's invasion of Ukraine have reversed this trend. But the logic of trust still holds: the safer people feel, the less we need to spend on security.)
You can see the entrepreneurial spirit of this model in unexpected places. Helsinki's official transit app wasn't created by City Hall. It was built by a resident - a software developer whose lived experience showed there was a better way to display transit data to suit his needs. His design became so popular it was eventually adopted as the City's own - through participatory budgeting. That's the power of open data: when it's accessible and useful, citizens become partners in problem-solving. They don't just follow; they lead. Frustration turns into innovation. This bottom-up innovation, actively supported by government, is behind almost all of Finland's most successful social enterprises.
Now look at Kingston.
Too often here, we do the opposite. Council makes a decision, then holds a "public consultation" to explain it and answer questions. The City's engagement policy puts staff on the receiving end of anger, resentment, and incredulity about Council plans that residents had no hand in shaping. An open house is scheduled. A feedback survey goes out. People get "engaged" after the fact. It's not just bad timing. It's bad democracy. And it's trust-destroying.
No wonder tensions are rising and public faith is falling. People who speak up often feel brushed off or quickly labeled as obstructionists or selfish NIMBYs. But most just want to be heard and taken seriously. What we call "NIMBYism" is often a natural reaction when people feel surprised, shut out, and stripped of agency - it's how anyone would respond when decisions are made for them in a way that feels paternalistic.
At its core, this is about what democracy means. One view sees elected officials as rulers, granted authority to make decisions for others because they are supposedly more focused or informed. The other - the Finnish model - sees elected officials as servants of the public will, entrusted not to rule but to carry out the considered, collective decisions of their community.
Our system too often resembles the former: a kind of authoritarian democracy. Helsinki's resembles the latter: a co-operative democracy. One accumulates distrust. The other builds trust - deliberately, iteratively, with humility. The benefits are like night and day. In Helsinki the streets are vibrant, safe, clean, and filled with the happiest people on the planet eight years running.
Yes, this approach takes patience. It means being open to failure. It requires letting go of control. But the payoff is enormous. Once residents know they're part of the process - not just subjects of it - everything starts to change. Participation grows. Innovation improves. Governance becomes cheaper, faster, more representative, more impactful, and more resilient.
That's why participatory budgeting isn't a luxury. It's the foundation of trust. And trust is the operating system of a functional city.
Here in Kingston, we're beginning to take meaningful steps in this direction. When I met last November with Councillors Conny Glenn and Gary Oosterhof - the new Chair and Vice Chair of the Housing and Homelessness Advisory Committee - it was clear we all recognized how much work lay ahead. The first spark of what we're now calling a Dignified Housing Strategy actually came from Councillor Glenn, who saw that Kingston couldn't keep waiting on upper levels of government. We needed to stop believing we were helpless without them - because we are most certainly not. That's what this new strategy is about: what we can do ourselves.
Then the Helsinki study tour came up. I was simply the lucky councillor who won the coin toss to go - and what a stroke of luck that turned out to be. Helsinki offered concrete proof that homelessness isn't inevitable; it can be solved locally with the right approaches and good policy.
The best part is, we're not starting from scratch. Kingston already has grassroots solutions quietly showing us the way. The Whig captured one beautiful example in their piece on a home-share co-operative where Anthony Gifford and Judy Bierma opened their doors to others on a co-operative model - even producing food together (I was offered fresh lettuce, and so was the neighbourhood) Seniors, affordable housing, Kingston, Rideau Heights | The Kingston Whig Standard It's a living example of what's possible, though unfortunately still constrained by policies that make it hard to replicate.
We also have OLS's sleeping cabin initiative, where Chrystal Wilson has quite literally saved lives, offered hope, and created pathways out of homelessness through her determined vision. After meeting many alumni of her program and seeing firsthand just how transformative it's been, I regret not doing more to support her work through Council. Looking ahead, one of the central aims of the new Dignified Housing Strategy is to shine a light on exactly these kinds of local, people-driven solutions - to identify the policies that stand in their way, and then propose new policies that actively encourage and help scale and/or duplicate good ideas from the community.
That's why the strategy we are shaping rests on these same proven principles: support for (or at least stop blocking) social entrepreneurs, start small, co-create with the people most affected, keep everything transparent, and stay accountable - especially when it's uncomfortable. Because that discomfort is how we know both that change is needed, and that it's truly happening. If we want to tackle the big challenges - homelessness, housing, even public safety - we can't keep treating transparency and co-design as optional. They have to be built into our system from the ground up.
Let's have the courage to let go of control and open the door to new ways of doing things. Let's invite residents to imagine what could work better - so that through participatory budgeting, we can surface these ideas and act on them, starting with what people themselves deem most urgent. Let's make Kingston a place where decisions aren't just handed down from on high, but genuinely shaped by the people who live here. Because when trust is established, everything else starts to align, and the best solutions emerge.