Recipes by Sarah Bondy and John Stapleton
Disability advocates have become connoisseurs of a peculiar form of government communication. They say:
We recognize the challenges. We value lived experience. We are listening. We remain committed. We continue to work with our partners. We are taking a whole-of-government approach. We continue to monitor the situation. Our work is ongoing.
Each sentence sounds reassuring. None is necessarily untrue. Indeed, that is part of the problem. They belong to a class of statements so universally agreeable that they tell us almost nothing about the particular matter at hand. Consider this example:
Customer satisfaction is important to us.
Has any organization ever announced the opposite?
Customer satisfaction has become tiresome
and we would prefer that customers stop calling.
At least we would have learned something.
Sarah Bondy recently supplied the perfect response to all this:
“The Word Salad Bar is closed.”
No more unlimited trips. No substitutions. No dressing on the side. The word salad bar is closed.
Perhaps we should begin with a definition, in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary:
WORD SALAD, n. A government reply in which every word means something and the sentence means nothing.
Or, for the more technically minded:
WORD SALAD, n. The bureaucratic art of answering a question without incurring the hazards associated with an answer.
If government says it recognizes the challenges faced by people with disabilities, ask:
Which challenges?
If it is committed to income security: Committed to what income?
If it is working toward reducing poverty: To what level, and by what date?
If it values lived experience: What decision changed because of it?
If it has heard the disability community: What did you hear?
And our favourite:
We continue to monitor the situation as our work is ongoing.
Excellent.
What did you monitor? What did you find? And what would have to happen before monitoring graduated into doing something? Perhaps we need a menu.
Today’s government word salads
The Stakeholder Caesar
Fresh meaningful engagement tossed with lived experience, ongoing dialogue and valued partners, topped with a generous sprinkling of we heard you.
No decisions included.
The Income Security Garden Salad
A healthy mixture of affordability, dignity, independence, opportunity and supporting those who need it most.
Incomes served separately a la carte.
The Disability Inclusion Cobb
Accessibility, inclusion, removing barriers, empowerment and nothing about us without us, served on a bed of consultations.
Item subject to availability while in season.
The Fiscal Responsibility Side Salad
A modest helping of targeted investments, accompanied by responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars and long-term sustainability.
Pairs particularly well with a benefit rate that hasn’t kept up with the cost of lunch.
The Listening Platter
We hear you. We see you. Your voices matter. Your experiences inform our work.
Please allow six to eight years for processing.
Glossary: A Devil’s Dictionary of Government Word Salad
CONSULTATION, n. A process by which government discovers what people have already told it.
LIVED EXPERIENCE, n. Experience highly valued by institutions, particularly when it confirms what they were planning to do anyway.
STAKEHOLDER, n. A person invited to the meeting after the important decisions have been made.
LISTENING, n. The governmental activity immediately preceding continued monitoring.
MONITORING, n. Watching a problem until someone else is responsible for it.
AFFORDABILITY, n. A condition government monitors in poor people.
ADEQUACY, n. A desirable characteristic of disability benefits, generally scheduled for a future fiscal year.
INCLUSION, n. The practice of ensuring everyone has a seat at the table, whether or not anything is being served.
DIGNITY, n. What government promises to preserve after determining it cannot afford to preserve your income.
INDEPENDENCE, n. The condition expected of a person whose means of achieving it have just been reduced.
BARRIER, n. Something government is committed to removing, provided its removal does not require changing a program.
MEANINGFUL ENGAGEMENT, n. Engagement distinguished from ordinary engagement chiefly by the adjective ‘meaningful’.
WHOLE-OF-GOVERNMENT APPROACH, n. A situation in which responsibility has been distributed so widely that it can no longer be located.
MOVING FORWARD, adv. The direction in which government is invariably travelling while remaining exactly where it is.
WE HEAR YOU. The official acknowledgement that a sound has occurred.
But the joke only works because the underlying problem isn’t funny.
Word salad isn’t simply bad writing. It performs a function. It creates the appearance of an answer without requiring the institution to provide one.
A good answer can be wrong. A word-salad answer has achieved something more sophisticated: it has arranged matters so that there is almost nothing there to be wrong about.
And that gives us a remarkably simple test for recognizing it.
Take the government’s statement and ask whether a government pursuing the opposite policy could issue exactly the same statement.
A government that raises disability benefits can say it is “committed to supporting people with disabilities.”
A government that freezes disability benefits can say it is “committed to supporting people with disabilities.”
A government that cuts them could probably find somebody to say it too.
If the words survive all three policies unchanged, the words haven’t told us anything about the policy.
So perhaps closing the Word Salad Bar requires one modest rule:
After every statement of values must come a statement capable of being proved wrong.
Not:
We are committed to improving income security for people with disabilities.
But:
We will increase the benefit by X dollars on this date.
Not:
We have heard the disability community.
But:
You asked us to change X. We have decided to do Y. Here is why.
Not:
We continue to monitor affordability pressures.
But:
Here is what happened to the cost of living. Here is what happened to the benefit. Here is what we intend to do about the difference.
Those are answers. We may like them or hate them. We may argue about them. They may turn out to be wrong.
But at least there is something on the plate.
The Word Salad Bar is closed.
Please order from the menu of facts.
| Sarah Bondy mini-bio: Hello, my name is Sarah Bondy and I’m a local disability advocate. I am Chair of the Client Advisory Committee at Assisted Living Southwestern Ontario. We are a group of local disability advocates dedicated to helping other people with disabilities within our Assisted Living sectors and within the community. I am also a member of WERA which is the Windsor- Essex Rainbow Alliance, which is a group of local 2SLGBTQA+ advocates dedicated to preserving 2SLGBTQA+ history within the Windsor Essex community. I am also a member of the Windsor Essex Ontario Health Team Patient and Family Advisory Committee, which is a group of people dedicated to making our local healthcare sectors more accessible and equal for everyone. I am also a member of the ODSP Action Coalition, which is a group of disability advocates throughout Ontario dedicated to fighting financial disparity within the social assistance system. As you can see, I am passionate about helping people and I am passionate about advocacy. I am hoping to make my community as accessible and equal as possible. |