The report and the missing limitation
The Municipality of Shelburne hired a firm called ASBB Economics and Research to look at two municipally owned properties along Highway 103 and figure out what it would take to get them ready for developers. Part of that job involved going out and asking people what they think the town needs. That's a good idea on paper. Ask the community, use what you hear, make better decisions. The first piece of that work to show up publicly is a set of slides called "What We Heard," and it's worth actually reading, not just skimming the highlights.
Here's the thing that really surprised me. There's a slide titled "Limitations of the Survey." You turn the page expecting, well, the limitations. Instead, you get "Consultation Methodology." No limitations section ever shows up. It's just gone, like someone forgot to write it, or decided not to.
That matters more than it might sound like at first. Every survey has limits. Small samples, self-selected respondents, questions that could be read a couple different ways. Naming those limits isn't a weakness, it's just good practice. Skipping that step doesn't make the data stronger. It just makes the report look more confident than it should. That is misleading.
Why the sample size matters
And speaking of small samples, the community survey got 34 responses. The staff and council one got 8. Shelburne has a population of over 4,000 people. You don't need a statistics degree to know that 34 responses, or 8, can't stand in for a whole town. But the report doesn't treat the numbers that way. It reports findings out to a decimal point, 85.3 percent this, 55.9 percent that, like those figures are locked in and precise. They're not. When your sample is that small, a decimal point is basically decoration. It makes a rough guess look like a measurement. That too is misleading.
Who answered the survey?
There's another detail buried in there that's honestly more interesting than the percentages. The report notes that over 90 percent of the people who responded said they're open to keep participating in future consultations. On the surface that sounds encouraging. Look again and it's kind of a warning sign. Think about who actually fills out a survey like this in the first place. It's usually people who are already paying attention, already showing up to meetings, already invested in how the town runs. That's not a knock on those people. But it does mean the sample is leaning toward the already-engaged crowd, not a fair cross-section of everyone who lives here. That's what self-selection looks like, and once you see it in the data, you can't unsee it.
What transparency should look like
None of this means the report is wrong or useless. It probably picked up on some real stuff, tourism, healthcare, grocery access, the kind of things people actually talk about. But before council starts pointing to this set of slides to justify spending, it seems fair to ask for two things: the actual limitations section that never made it into the slides, and the raw numbers behind those decimal points.
I actually tried asking for that second one. I requested the anonymized survey data straight from the municipality. The answer I got back leaned on FOIPOP (Freedom of Information) as the reason it couldn't be shared. Anonymized means no names, no way to trace an answer back to a person. So I'm not sure why a freedom of information request should even be the hoop you have to jump through to see it. Flip to the back page of the summer newsletter and you'll find the municipality's own 2026-2030 Strategic Plan, which lists "enhancing responsible governance" as one of the things that matters most to them. Sharing the numbers behind a public consultation seems like exactly the kind of thing that phrase is supposed to cover. Right now it's not happening - the municipality decided "enhance responsible governance" means hiding behind FOIPOP.
So I'll leave it to you. Do you see the same flaws here that I do, a blank limitations section, a sample too small to mean much, a self-selected group standing in for the whole town? And does it bother you that when a resident asked for the anonymized numbers behind it, the municipality's answer was to hide behind FOIPOP instead of just handing them over?