On 5 February 2024 we selected 45 Burnaby residents for the Burnaby Community Assembly. The Burnaby Community Assembly met for 7 full-day sessions and 1 half-day public workshop between February 24th – June 15th, 2024 to deliberate on the question:
How should Burnaby grow and change by 2050 to create a city where everyone can thrive?
Sortition Foundation was tasked with the recruitment of 45 panel members. We worked in collaboration with the Simon Fraser University’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue and the City of Burnaby. Below we briefly describe the details of this recruitment process; the process followed our standard two-stage sortition template in conformity with the OECD's good practice principles for deliberative processes for public decision making.
Stage 1
26,088 mail invitations (more than 575 invitations for every one of the needed 45 panel members) were sent to residents across the City of Burnaby in two batches; one of 13,500 on January 9th, and one of 12,588 on January 24th, 2024. These addresses were randomly selected by Canada Post, with extra invitations sent to postal codes with low socio-economic status based on the “situational vulnerability” of those areas according to the Canadian Index of Multiple Deprivation. Each of these addresses received a letter in the post inviting residents to sign up as potential members of the Burnaby Community Assembly.
The invitation packages included the following invitation card (as well as a letter and FAQ):
Honorariums up to $175 for each full-day meeting (based on living wage standards) were offered to Assembly Members who had to miss work to take part in the Assembly or faced other financial barriers. Invitations were open for 3 weeks and at the end of this time 579 people had signed up as potential panel members.
Stage 2
As part of the sign-up procedure, all potential participants were required to share some information about themselves. We asked them to share their address, their date of birth, their gender identity, the language they most often spoke at home, whether they owned or rented their home, and their highest level of education. We also asked about their immigration status and whether they identified as Indigenous or non-Indigenous.
We then used this information as input into a "sortition algorithm"; this is a process of randomly selecting our 45 Assembly Members from the pool of potential members in such a way that we have a representative sample (so, for instance, the age profile of the Burnaby Community Assembly is broadly similar to the age profile of the population of the City of Burnaby as a whole). We also set a minimum target of 3 Indigenous-identifying Assembly Members. Details of the specific algorithm we use, including information about the fairness of the algorithm, can be found here.
In addition, we also used the address of each respondent to hit a further target:
- Geography: We used information about the population distribution of the City of Burnaby to ensure that the people who were selected were drawn from all areas of the City of Burnaby in proportion to the population in those areas.
Details of the selection process for this panel are summarised using the following pie charts, with further information following.
The way to understand these pie charts is as follows:
- Column 1 (Target): These pie charts give information about the population of the City of Burnaby as a whole, using various publicly available statistics (via Statistics Canada). As an example, in the second row, you can see that 16% of the population in the City of Burnaby is aged between 50 and 59.
- Column 2 (Respondents): These pie charts summarise the information that was provided to us by the 579 people who signed up as potential participants for the Burnaby Community Assembly. There is some skewing in statistics here compared with our target: for instance, notice that a larger proportion of the respondents were classed as having a Bachelor’s degree or higher compared with what one might expect from the general population.
- Column 3 (Final Members): These pie charts summarise information about the 40 final Assembly Members (45 Members were initially confirmed to participate in the panel, but only 40 Members completed the process, after attrition). Notice that, thanks to our use of a sortition algorithm, the pie charts in this column are very similar to the target charts in the first column. As part of our recruitment process all of these people were contacted by telephone to confirm that they were still willing and able to participate - in the event that this was not the case, we used the sortition algorithm to replace people who dropped out with others who shared similar characteristics.
What happened next?
The Centre for Dialogue has a dedicated page where you can read about the results of the Burnaby Community Assembly. The City of Burnaby also hosts a dedicated page with details about the broader Official Community Plan development process, including the Burnaby Community Assembly. In early 2025 the City of Burnaby will release a draft of the Official Community Plan (OCP), and will respond to the Assembly’s recommendations. The Centre for Dialogue will be re-convening Assembly Members to develop feedback on that draft OCP and submit it to the City of Burnaby before it finalises the policy.