Patrice Dutil

Rethinking Government-Public Relationships in a Digital World

Abstract Many have argued that new electronic technologies have the potential to transform how governments relate to users of public services. This article explores the limits of e-government as it is being conceived by testing it against three service recipient models: customer, client, and citizen. We argue that despite the opportunities that electronically-based service transformations present for enhancing democratic citizen engagement and the power of clients, the market-inspired customer image is likely to emerge as the most powerful way in which service recipients are characterized and addressed. The business architecture of e-government being installed today in the pursuit of better customer relationship management may also represent a decreasingly attractive medium for client empowerment and democratic interactions between service recipients and government.

POLICY ADRIFT: CANADIAN CROWN CORPORATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY: POLICY ADRIFT: CANADIAN CROWN CORPORATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Canada has had a strong tradition of using state‐owned enterprises for economic development. ‘Crown corporations’, as State‐owned enterprises are known in Canada, were created with a built‐in autonomy for their commercial activities on the condition that they also fulfil policy objectives. Of late, however, policy objectives have been articulated more through regulations and governance models and are issued far more from central agencies such as the Treasury Board Secretariat than from the ‘home department’ of the agency. This article explores the evolution of the use of Crowns from the glory days of their formation to the privatization era of the 1980s and 1990s to the modern day. It examines how governance and control mechanisms have replaced policy directives. The picture given of the Canadian experience could be relevant for the coming years when these enterprises become more international and thus challenge the present arrangement.

The Evolving Physiology of Government: Canadian Public Administration in Transition (review)

The strongest chapter is archivist Terry Cook and historian Bill Waiser’s engaging account of “the census wars,” the decade-long battle over nominal (name-identified) census records. In the late 1990s senior bureaucrats at Statistics Canada refused to transfer to Library and Archives Canada census returns for 1906 and 1911 after the customary 92year waiting period, based on their interpretation of a pledge of confidentiality given when those censuses were taken. Archivists joined thousands of genealogists and historians in a noisy campaign to overturn StatsCan’s decision and restore the status quo. A 2005 compromise allowed access to historical censuses as before, but introduced a consent question into future censuses—respondents have to agree to allow researchers access to their forms in 92 years. Only 56 percent did so in the 2006 census, and future quantitative scholarship will be weakened significantly by this change. Cook and Waiser’s piece is understandably polemical—they each played a leadership role in the struggle—but it succeeds in explaining why the compromise was probably the best deal possible.