Consultants, Reports, and the Fog of Modern Governments
There was a time when you could judge whether a city was doing well without a consultant’s slide deck, a coloured dashboard, or a glossy report full of carefully chosen words.
People had jobs. Streets were safe. Roads got fixed. Water ran. Taxes were reasonable. Businesses could breathe. Seniors could stay in their homes. Families could buy groceries without reaching for the credit card.
Today, we are told things are far more “complex.”
So complex, in fact, that city hall now needs endless studies, frameworks, strategies, visions, consultations, monitoring systems, and expert analysis just to explain why ordinary people feel worse off while paying more.
At some point, common sense has to break through the fog.
A city is not a graduate seminar. It is not a branding exercise. It is not a social experiment dressed up in polished language. A city exists to do certain basic things well: provide core services, protect public order, maintain infrastructure, and create the conditions where people can live, work, and raise families without being taxed into the ground.
When those basics are slipping, another report does not fix the problem. It often just buys time, spreads responsibility around, and gives politicians something to point at while the real results keep moving in the wrong direction.
That is the dirty little secret of modern governance: complexity can be useful, but it can also be camouflage.
The more layers of language you build between the public and reality, the easier it becomes to avoid simple accountability. Instead of answering whether housing is affordable, whether public disorder is worsening, or whether taxes are rising faster than incomes, officials retreat into abstract talk about frameworks, indicators, alignment, stakeholder engagement, and long-term visioning.
Meanwhile, the taxpayer is left asking a very basic question: am I getting better value for what I am being forced to pay?
That question matters more than any report.
Consultants and studies can have a place. Sometimes they do help identify waste, expose blind spots, or guide major decisions. But when reports become a substitute for results, they stop being tools and start being cover.
And that may be where we are now.
Because a city that truly works does not need endless explanation. Its success is visible in daily life. People can feel it. They can afford to live there. They can walk safely. They can see the roads maintained, the services delivered, and the bills kept within reason.
When city hall needs a mountain of analysis to prove things are going well while the public increasingly feels the opposite, maybe the analysis is not revealing reality.
Maybe it is hiding it.
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