Opening the Government of Canada: The Federal Bureaucracy in the Digital Age Amanda Clarke, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019, pp. 312.

Abstract

Drawing on theoretical discussions and historical approaches to government reform, empirical findings from interviews with public servants, media reviews, Twitter conversations and a careful review of government documents, Clarke provides a compelling account of how Canada has approached opening government and outlines future possibilities within a digital context With respect to the latter, Clarke makes four central arguments: closed government provides more risk than benefit;closed government results in policy, program and operational failures;closed government poses significant human resource costs, hindering recruitment and retention;and closed government “exacerbate[s] existing crises of confidence in the state, suggesting to citizens that government is out of touch, ineffective, irrelevant, and democratically illegitimate” (25) [ ]Clarke also emphasizes that the bureaucracy cannot do this work on its own: “Without direct support from the political masters to whom bureaucrats must answer, public servant-led reform can go only so far, especially when one of the reform goals demands that the public service become more open to sharing information and treading the potentially failure-ridden territory of policy innovation, each of which might invite politically costly scrutiny of the minister in Question Period or unwelcome departmental coverage in a national newspaper” (151–52)