West Nipissing Looking to Regulate Backyard Chickens

Two-week online consultation is now live.

The municipality has officially launched their online public consultation for regulating backyard chickens.

Currently only rural and agricultural properties are allowed to keep chickens. But some residents have advocated that council change the bylaw to allow raising them in residential areas.

Last summer, council first had a discussion on backyard chickens and staff suggested a public consultation occur. At the time, Field councillor, Kaitlynn Nicol agreed that the city should be more lenient on allowing backyard chickens. She told council that “There are many properties within the urban areas that have adequate spacing”.

Last week, council asked for an update on this process and staff advised that their public consultation would begin immediately.

The online survey which asks four questions can be found at this link.

Most had hoped this would be a simple exercise in expanding the zoning bylaw but on the municipal website, they indicate that the city is looking to “regulate the keeping of chickens” implying some sort of licencing system.

The survey not only asks residents if they feel that chickens should be allowed in urban residential areas and shoreline residential areas but also asks if they should be even allowed in rural residential areas. This question might lead some to wonder if the city is also considering making backyard agricultural rules stricter rather than simply more flexible. Rural residential areas are already allowed to have backyard chickens without procuring a licence or permission from the municipality.

The last question of the survey asks residents to choose from a list of possible negative concerns for backyard chickens. Initially, respondents didn’t have a choice but to pick at least one concern leaving no option for “no concerns”. Making the survey bias to only receiving negative feedback.

In response to one resident who pointed out the flaw in the survey, the municipality apologized and announced they had fixed the problem allowing people to skip question 4.

But then in a deviation of proper statistical collection practices, staff advised that for this particular question, data would only be collected for those who answered “no” to the previous three questions.

In another apparent sign of the survey bias, it does not ask residents to choose from a list of why backyard chickens should be approved. The only option to provide comments is in regards to negative concerns.

Since being announced, over 60 comments have been made on the municipal Facebook page criticizing the bias of the survey or asking that the city stay out of the regulation of backyard chickens.

In a widely shared post on social media, West Nipissing resident and business owner, Luc Charles, summarized the issue with this consultation and relating it to a much wider problem at the municipal level. He called the latest survey “A Masterclass in Manipulation”. Charles criticized the survey as “less about gauging public opinion and more about engineering it” and said that “the council, it appears, has decided that when it comes to making decisions, the voices of its citizens are merely procedural hurdles to be navigated, not genuine inputs to be considered”

Charles called this latest exercise “Déjà Vu with a Side of Hypocrisy” while relating it to what happened with the AirBnB consultation that occured last year “If this strategy sounds familiar, it's because it's the same underhanded approach used in the council's AirBnB bylaw consultation”.

The online survey will be live until April 24th.

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