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SHHH... it's a secret...

"Listen, do you want to know a secret...." Lennon/McCartney Of course you want to know. Doesn't everybody? Be honest now.
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"Listen, do you want to know a secret...."

Lennon/McCartney

Of course you want to know. Doesn't everybody? Be honest now. How excited do you get when a friend or colleague starts a conversation or segues off on a tangent with the words, "I've got a secret to tell you."  Just the hint of a secret sets off muted paroxysms - a social/emotional oxymoron - of salacious anticipation.

Sharing a secret, even one that fails to rise beyond prosaic, creates a deeper bond with a person, peeling back another layer of their personal onion, blurring the boundary between you and them. That's a large part of the power of secrets.

Knowing there's a secret others in your social sphere share that you don't creates tension and anticipation, a longing more aching than untracked powder on the other side of a "closed" boundary rope. "Why can't I know? Is it about, gasp, me?" That's also the power of secrets, the dark side if you will.

Those are the two cutting edges of secrets: shared, they create intimacy and strength; kept, they create suspicion, envy and alienation.

We all have secrets; it's part of being three-dimensional human beings. Some are benign, like the secrets we keep about a friend's surprise party. Some are malignant, like your friend's sobbing confession of spousal infidelity. Some you only share with yourself, shameful episodes from your past, fears of inadequacy. Some you share for mixed reasons - to include and exclude.

I shy away from secrets. I don't have a good enough memory to remember whether something's a secret or not. That's not to say people don't tell me secrets; they do. Their secrets usually start, "This is off the record...." Well of course it's off the record. Everything's off the record when you're a columnist and can state things without attribution. So what if I don't remember who told me one or the other of our councillors has his head so far up his posterior he doesn't know the difference between, say, an ambulance chaser and someone just doing their job. Heck, that hardly narrows down the field.

But secrets in the public domain are almost always poisonous. For starters, they usually have a pretty short half-life as secrets - especially in small towns - and once known, further erode the credibility of the secretkeepers. "I can't believe they wanted to keep that secret!"

Successfully kept public secrets, ironically, have an even more corrosive effect. They cast unshakable suspicions on the motives of the secretkeepers. When our elected leaders had to hinge their fight against ousting the Cheakamus Crossing asphalt plant - I promise, this isn't about that - on a secret so potentially damaging none could whisper it, they lost credibility and motivated some people, wrongly, to conclude they had something sinister to hide.

This is not a new or unknown problem. Several years ago Whistler was presented with the possible opportunity to share hosting of the World Economic Forum with Davos, Switzerland. But the preliminary talks were hush-hush, a secret... until they weren't anymore, at which point any rational public debate over whether hosting it semi-annually was good for Whistler or not was sidetracked by scandalous suspicion of the motives behind mayor and council of the day keeping it secret.

There are secrets the municipality has to keep. Personnel issues, contract negotiations, stuff like that. But it seems as time goes on, the balloon of secrecy is expanding and too many issues, public issues, take on the cachet of the formula for Coca-Cola - top secret. Secrets are anathema to open, transparent, democratic governance, qualities candidates for our public offices always tout as being their top priorities.

Having announced with some fanfare, and trumpeted as a very good thing, the engagement of a consultant to assess potential strategies for Whistler to be a contendah in cultural tourism, we found out just before the holidays that his report was a secret. Okay, on second consideration, some of it wasn't absolutely a secret and we could see it but much of the context driving the conclusions was secret.

Why? Well, it delved into our strengths and weaknesses, as all good strategies do, and we wouldn't want our competitors to know what those are, would we? No, we wouldn't. But it would also be naive to think they don't already have a pretty good handle on them and, more importantly, that they don't really care that much. They're going to keep doing what they do and mine the best ideas they glean from other places. It's no harder for Aspen to comprehend the success of the World Ski and Snowboard Festival or Crankworx and to try and mimic them than it is for Whistler to see the potential in the X-Games or the Aspen Institute. Knowing success when you see it and duplicating it are very different things.

And now we're undertaking a sweeping organizational review of the RMOW. Consultants are consulting, multiple phases are being phased in, the whole exercise will take a year and a hundred large. Setting aside the cost and accepting the desirability of such reviews, we've already been warned this is going to be another big secret, a public expenditure not available to the public.

Some of it has to be. It necessarily impacts on peoples' jobs. But lots of it doesn't. If the crux of the review is to evaluate the services the RMOW provides, the mechanisms for providing them and a determination of who the providers should be, wouldn't you like to know the answers to those first two questions? What services should the RMOW provide? That's the question I always ask wannabe councilors. What is the role of local government?

Sewer? Water? Roads? Meadow Park? Snow clearing? Garbage? No argument so far? Sustainability Centre? Village animation? Festivals and events? Retail strategy? I'm starting to get some argument.

If the first phase focused on administrative structures and senior managers' evaluation of staffing levels, wouldn't that presuppose agreement on what services to provide? If so, what were the consultant's terms of engagement on that crucial issue? Why should that be a secret? What, for example, is the appropriate governmental role in cultural tourism?

This year our municipal administrator is resigning. Along with council and the mayor, that position more than any other sets the culture at muni hall. Later in the year, mayor and council stand for re-election. It isn't too much of a stretch to imagine the makeup of those seven seats will change at least somewhat. This review will span those two major changes. Wouldn't it be nice to know what direction it's heading in?

It's a secret I'd sure like to know.