Archive for the ‘Governance Delivery System’ Category
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Native people forge municipal links
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011
Oct 23 2011
… while much ink has been spilled about the lack of significant aboriginal policy reform at the federal and provincial levels, important changes in the aboriginal-non-aboriginal relationship are occurring at the local level… Indeed, over the last several decades, municipalities and aboriginal governments across Canada have signed a variety of intergovernmental agreements. These agreements, which number in the thousands, address a variety of important issues for both communities.
Tags: Indigenous, participation, rights, standard of living
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The right to information
Sunday, October 23rd, 2011
Oct 22 2011
Canada’s Access to Information Act gives every Canadian citizen the right to access government records. Such information is not supposed to be kept secret. Too often, though, it is journalists who are singled out and thwarted in their efforts to get access to public information. As this year’s annual Newspapers Canada audit of our country’s freedom of information system found, in Ontario particularly, requests made by media and other groups that seek to hold government accountable were more likely to be flagged as contentious and take much longer than requests made for private reasons.
Tags: budget, ideology, participation, rights, standard of living
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Closing the innovation gap
Friday, October 21st, 2011
Oct 20 2011
Creutzberg, by contrast, proposes a drastic cut in federal tax incentives for research and development. The savings would be transferred to the provinces, allowing them to make strategic investments in emerging industries and in communities that have a critical mass of talent, a concentration of leading-edge firms in one field, and a strong research hub such as a university or teaching hospital… the role of the federal government would be to create a hospitable national environment for innovation… The role of the provinces would be to target subsidies at emerging industries… and regional clusters
Tags: economy, globalization, standard of living, tax
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Our tax code is pockmarked with costly exemptions
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
Oct. 19, 2011
… the Harper government has added many new tax expenditures to a tax system already overloaded with them. Program spending is much easier to understand, for parliamentarians, the media and the public… According to the OECD, Canada relies more on tax expenditures than almost any country… Tax expenditures also get short shrift from the Auditor-General, whose office is preoccupied with program spending rather than the “value for money” of the tax system.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, tax
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Queen’s Park frugal with information, audit reveals
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011
Sep 27 2011
The study found that requests in Ontario made by media and other groups that tend to hold government accountable were more likely to be flagged as contentious and take much longer than requests made for private reasons. While nearly four out of five requests filed by businesses, individuals and lawyers were completed within 60 days, only one in two filed by “accountability” requesters — such as reporters, politicians, academics and special interest groups — was completed in that time.
Tags: ideology, participation, rights
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Welcome upgrades to Canada’s democracy
Sunday, August 21st, 2011
Aug. 19, 2011
The Internet and social media tools that enable the instant electronic transmission of local results resulted in many absurdities in the recent election… When a law can be so easily flouted that it has literally become a joke, it’s time for that law to go… The willingness of Elections Canada to consider how to bring voting online is also welcome… a secure-voting system would do much to address the accessibility concerns of Canadians with disabilities and deployed members of the armed forces, and is a logical progression for a society where citizens are already comfortable using the Internet…
Tags: participation
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Dragging democracy into the 21st century
Friday, August 19th, 2011
Aug 18 2011
If (Canada’s chief electoral officer) gets his way, Canada’s federal voting system will be a modernized entity reflecting reality by Oct. 19, 2015, when Canadians next go to the polls… he believes the reality of social media means it is futile to try to outlaw the use of Twitter, YouTube and Facebook… on election night. Canadians are used to real-time information, never more so on election night, regardless of where they live. Mayrand wants to start dabbling in Internet voting, testing it in a byelection after 2013 and freeing up the Internet to allow citizens to advocate for candidates.
Tags: participation, rights, youth
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Government can work smarter
Wednesday, July 6th, 2011
July 5, 2011
A shortage of qualified change leaders is another critical constraint stemming from a number of factors: lack of executive development programs on transformation or innovation leadership in the public service; rotation of senior managers out of project management roles before they achieve success; a limited number of innovative projects to lead; and a reliance on external consultants to assume project management roles… Despite these gloomy observations, there is, in fact, a lot of scope for innovation in government.
Tags: ideology, participation, standard of living
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How civil servants serve a hated master
Monday, July 4th, 2011
June 30, 2011
the civil service is, in theory, a neutral administrative tool. In reality, of course, civil servants have scruples and ideologies just like the rest of us… Thus, when serving a government whose policies they personally dislike, senior civil servants can’t help but face a powerful ethical choice: lead with enthusiasm, secretly resist, or resign? Economist Albert Hirschman nicely laid out the choices in his classic text, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: keep one’s mouth shut (Loyalty); protest forcefully from within (Voice); or leave (Exit).
Tags: ideology, participation
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Why Ottawa is so big
Friday, May 20th, 2011
May 19, 2011
Since the 1960s, there has been a consistent erosion of the division of powers that has not only seen an unprecedented growth in the size of the federal government, but a fuzzification of where the jurisdictional boundaries lie. The growth of federal responsibility for health care is a good example of this… one has to question whether the objective of having a national minimum standard of universal access to health care means that the federal government requires a massive bureaucracy to do it.
Tags: budget, ideology, rights
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