Salt Spring has decisions ahead that will reverberate for years to come: the Trust Policy Statement, the Official Community Plan review, housing, and climate adaptation. These are not abstract policy debates. They will shape what kinds of homes, services and neighbourhoods we make room for, whether teachers, nurses, tradespeople, young families and service workers can keep living here, and how we respond to drought, fire risk, water security and shoreline change.

These are not small matters. They are choices our children will live with. They deserve more than another Facebook argument and another meeting where many of the people most affected cannot be there.

I do not say that to dismiss the people who show up. Many care deeply about Salt Spring and have given years of volunteer time and civic attention to local governance. That matters. But attendance is not the same thing as representation. A democracy cannot be reduced to who has the most flexible Tuesday morning calendar, the most practiced speaking voice, or the most positively forward email list.

The people pouring concrete, stocking shelves, caring for children, running ferries, teaching classes, responding to emergencies and trying to make rent are not less committed because they cannot spend half a weekday at a public meeting. Renters are not less affected because they are absent. Young families are not less invested because bedtime comes before the end of the agenda. Indigenous neighbours are not an "interest group" to be slotted into a process designed without them.

We all share this island. Our process should act like it.

The trouble is that our current approach often rewards the loudest and most available voices, then mistakes the resulting record for public consent. That is how a community becomes divided even when most people want some version of the same thing: a livable island, a protected environment, a functioning local economy, and a future our children can see themselves in. People do not become persuaded by decisions made without them. They become resentful.

We can do better than camps.

There is a better path forward. This past April, at the Fulford Community Hall, I watched a screening of 9/11: Reclaiming Ground Zero, and it presented an important model for community decision making. After September 11, New York faced an emotionally charged decision about the World Trade Center site. Instead of leaving it entirely to officials and experts, thousands of ordinary New Yorkers reviewed proposals, deliberated at facilitated tables, and registered a collective judgment. They rejected the options on offer, forcing planners back to the table, and then helping to shape what came next around the spirit and needs of the community. Salt Spring is not Manhattan, and no model should be copied blindly. But the lesson is powerful: under the right conditions, citizens can move beyond complaint and become a source of direction.

Carolyn Lukensmeyer, who helped design that process, spoke afterward about what real deliberation requires: be prepared to be wrong, be curious about why someone else sees the issue differently, and do not expect trust to be rebuilt instantly.

That is why I think Salt Spring should seriously explore a community assembly, sometimes called a citizens' assembly, for one or more of the major decisions ahead.

The basic idea is simple. Choose a defined question, such as housing options, climate adaptation priorities, or how Salt Spring should respond to the Trust Policy Statement. Select a representative group of residents by lottery, the way juries are selected, while making sure the group actually looks like the island: renters and owners, working-age people and seniors, different incomes, different neighbourhoods, and Indigenous participation on terms set by the Nations whose territories these are. Pay people for their time, provide childcare and transportation support, give them balanced information, and let skilled facilitators help them work through the trade-offs.

The jury model matters because trust is not built by asking people to accept the loudest faction's version of the public interest. Trust is built when people can see the island in miniature, and watch their neighbours struggle honestly with the same questions everyone else is struggling with. People are often skeptical at first. I would be too. But something changes when a neighbour who sees the issue completely differently sits with the evidence, wrestles with the trade-offs, and says, "I changed my mind." That almost never happens in ordinary politics. It is exactly what a good community assembly is designed to make possible.

At the end, the assembly would make recommendations. Elected officials would still make decisions. But they would be responding to a considered judgment from a group that better reflects the whole community, not just the people most able to attend daytime meetings.

This is not theoretical. British Columbia helped pioneer the model through the 2004 Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform, and similar approaches have since been used in places like Ireland, France, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The point is not to copy any one model exactly. The point is to admit that our current process is not producing enough trust, enough inclusion, or enough durable solutions.

Salt Spring's future should not be decided by one faction, one demographic, one room, or one election cycle. The housing crisis, the Trust mandate, and climate adaptation and mitigation will require contributions from many kinds of knowledge: scientific, Indigenous, practical, professional, generational and lived. We need the retired planner and the young carpenter. We need the farmer watching the water table and the renter watching the eviction notice. We need people who have been here for fifty years and people trying to decide whether they can stay for five.

If we want to overcome the divisiveness that has marked so many local debates, we cannot simply ask people to be nicer inside a broken process. We need a process that makes broader participation possible, and then asks more of all of us once we are there.

Let the whole island be represented in the room. Then let us do the harder, better work of deciding together. That is how we stop fighting about who gets heard and start building a future where every part of the island has a real voice at the table. We should give it a try.