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Part Three. Looking Ahead
- University of Ottawa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Part Three Looking Ahead he first decade of e-government in Canada has not been without considerable effort. At all levels, governments have devoted substantial resources and attention to making use ofdigital technologies and online connectivity in ways that would have been unthinkable for the most part in the early 1990s. The Canadian assessment of such efforts, however, reveals only modest and incremental progress in specific aspects ofreform,notably service improvement, a pace and scale out of step with the rhetoric of digital renewal and a widening schism between the citizenry and their public institutions. What is missing is a sense that a new governing style or real institutional innovation has occurred. Although some early signs of democratic reform are gathering force at the provincial level, they are doing so in a relatively cautious and timid manner, overshadowed in many cases by health care debates, federal scandals and minority politics, and the various crises that come and go over the course of governing. Such a contextlends credenceto the views ofthose e-skeptics who claim that the impacts ofany forthcomingdigital revolution are greatly exaggerated and that, instead, the pace of change will be modest and incremental, safeguarding —for some —the inherent stability of the public sector that is one of its defining traits. Yetit would be a mistake to subscribeto such a view outright for two reasons. First,the nature of the scandals emerging in Ottawa as of late are, ifnot driven by, at least indicative of a set of pressures associated with the painful imposition of a new culture of openness and transparency.This new culture has much to do with an underlying and expanding digital infrastructure of both traditional and new media channels for communication and information sharing. Second, the precise contoursof e-government are becoming harder to pin down in terms of specific initiatives (such as GOL), but they are also becoming more subversively engrained in most aspects of publicsector operations—ranging from nationalsecurity and health care to environment protection and economic development. T 198 E-GOVERNMENT IN CANADA Thefirst point suggests that much ofwhat is transpiring in Ottawa (and to a similar degree in many provincial capitals) is an inability by existing institutions to easily adapt to the new realities presenting themselves. There is thus much about the recent agenda that is worrisome, especially in terms ofits reactionary form. The implications of this point will be explored more fully in Chapter 8. The main focus of Part Three, however, is to look ahead and contrast what is unfolding in the Canadian public sector at present with what could and should be transpiring. In doing so, three sets of transversal issues emerge that build on the four e-government dimensions adopted throughout this book but also gobeyond them in seeking to pinpoint the main determinants ofpublic sector governance reform, both internally and externally. Here it is useful to return to the definition of e-government provided at the outset of this investigation: continuous innovation in the delivery ofservices, citizen participation, and governance through the transformation of external and internal relationships by the use of information technology, especially the Internet. Whereas service security denotes dimensions of relational fluidity internally, focusing primarily on the organizational machinery ofgovernment, transparency and trust are more centred on the institutional rolesand relationships of democracy and how they are shifting due to the advent ofthe Internet as a new digital, socio-economic,and political infrastructure. The first set of issues, examined in Chapter 8, is organization and accountability. Although accountabilityissues permeate all aspectsof democratic politics and public sector management, their invocation here is primarily from the perspective of the public service, the roles and responsibilities of public servants and their relationships with elected officials, particularly ministers of the executive branch. The increasingly horizontal nature of service and security agendas is a key driver here, and the 2005 creationofServiceCanada is a casestudy that merits closer attention in terms of how it is evolving at present —at its inception—and some of the main lessons that can be drawn from the preceding analysis as well as some important parallel experiences of other countries. Essentially,this chapter argues that Service Canada's success rests on resolving some key accountabilityquandaries shaping how individual departments and ministers operate separately and collectively in pursuing the objectives of service integration and transformation. [54.172.169.199] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:19 GMT) PART THREE: LOOKING AHEAD 199 This discussion ofthe internal organizational dynamics ofthe public sector cannot be sufficient without...