[someone123]

The median age in Halifax is something like 35 but I recall seeing a Herald picture of a public consultation and the median age looked more like 65. Pointing out that there is a problem with this doesn't make you anti-senior.

It's even stranger when you realize most of these older people won't be around in 20 or 30 years when the full weight of our current collective planning decisions is felt.

More generally there's also the "lobbying" problem. Those with more time and money get a greater voice, and the acute concerns of a few will always outweigh the diffuse concerns of a much greater number of people. For this reason these town hall style consultations will always be limited in their usefulness if they are unstructured. They can be a bit more useful if they're more like workshops built around the idea of trade-offs or compromise and understanding everyone's underlying motivations.