Deliberating for Resilience: Inside Canada's First Ongoing Climate Citizens' Assembly

The Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University recently facilitated a deliberative process with the City of New Westminster's Community Advisory Assembly, Canada's first ongoing deliberative mini-public tasked with advising municipal staff and Council. Working with 36 randomly selected members chosen to reflect the city's demographics, the Centre guided the Assembly through a structured learning-and-deliberation model to develop recommendations for New Westminster's first Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Plan. The process paired technical climate information from City staff with residents' lived experience, showing how facilitated dialogue can turn a complex, policy-heavy subject into actionable community guidance. By demonstrating that a demographically representative body can meaningfully shape climate policy, this work offers a replicable model for practitioners seeking to deepen public participation and strengthen deliberative democracy at the local level.

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Communities across Canada face mounting pressure from climate change, with extreme weather straining infrastructure, ecosystems, public health, and food security. Building resilience requires more than technical analysis of local risks. It also depends on inclusive, informed public engagement that captures how residents actually experience these disruptions. The Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University put this principle into practice through its recent work with the City of New Westminster's Community Advisory Assembly, Canada's first ongoing deliberative mini-public advising a municipal government. The Assembly's 36 members are randomly selected to mirror the city's demographic profile and meet monthly from September to June. For two consecutive years, members ranked climate change as their top concern, signaling both the urgency of the issue and residents' desire to help shape the response.

​Between February and April 2026, the Assembly worked to inform New Westminster's first Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Plan. The process followed a standard deliberative arc: a learning phase grounded in evidence, followed by facilitated deliberation toward consensus recommendations. City staff introduced seven climate hazard scenarios and remained available to answer questions throughout, while members focused their attention on the two hazards assessed as most likely and most consequential: extreme heat and heavy rainfall. In small groups facilitated by the Centre, members examined who is most affected and which solutions would best serve the most vulnerable, surfacing themes ranging from building retrofits and public cooling spaces to social supports and nature-based infrastructure. A multi-day format allowed staff to review member notes and return with constraints and clarifying questions, creating a two-way exchange that sharpened the recommendations into something actionable.

The Assembly ultimately approved 16 recommendations, each requiring support from at least 75 percent of members present, and presented them directly to the Mayor and Council. Council voted to have staff evaluate and, where possible, incorporate them into the plan, and the proposed CCARP framework now maps its strategies against all 16 recommendations. What makes this example valuable to practitioners is not only the outcome but the process it models: a demographically representative body, equipped with technical information and given space to deliberate, producing thoughtful guidance that officials found genuinely useful. It demonstrates that deliberative democracy is not merely aspirational but can shape real policy for the broader community. Practitioners interested in the full story of how this deliberation unfolded can read the Centre's account at https://www.sfu.ca/dialogue/news/2026/deliberating-on-climate-hazards--a-story-from-the-new-westminste.html.