Business and Government in Canada

Introduction

INTRODUCTION This book examines five of the most critical thematic challenges confronting business and government in Canada, both separately and collectively, in today's increasingly networked governance environment. The five challenges, explained more fully below, are corporate governance, lobbying and influence, security and privacy, public-private partnerships, and geography and development. Underpinning all of these challenges is the following premise: the boundaries between business and government are increasingly fluid and often transcended. Yet it remains important to both acknowledge and make the appropriate usage of the fundamental differences between each sector, which dictate the need for boundaries in thefirst place. Established and maintained for different purposes, each sector features a unique set of structures and cultures that reflects its broad purpose and contribution to the stability and collective fortunes of a particular jurisdiction, most often but not exclusively a country. For government, this uniqueness stems from the pursuit of objectives and outcomes deemed to be in the "public interest/7 Typically, the public interest is defined as a collective agenda, involving various forms of actions or services that impact all members of a jurisdiction.Accountable to the citizenry as a whole, the public sector is a political arena in which competing interests clash and are then reconciled through mechanisms overseen by elected officials —acting as representatives of the people. 1 Business and Government in Canada Business, by contrast, is driven by a "private interest" of the owners of capital who have invested resources in an enterprise seeking to create and exploit opportunities in a competitive marketplace. Generating an economic return (a surplus or profit) is not only the primary objective but also the basis of sustaining what is ultimately a choice by owners to commit to operating their enterprise. Unlike the typically broad scope of government, businesses or companies can serve a very narrow customer base, although today the expansion ofmarkets both within and beyond national borders affords greater opportunities for growth and diversification as well. These characterizations do not always hold true, however, since each sector may at times confront countervailing pressures. For businesses, stakeholder capitalism in its various guises, such as corporate social responsibility and the balanced scorecard, seeks to widen the prism ofprivate sector accountability to issues and interests that might typically be viewed as the domain of government. The public sector, similarly, faces constant pressure to manage itself more efficiently and effectively, with the private sector often serving as a comparative model. Some governments even explicitlyaim to become more businesslike, while others are more subtle in importing managerial practices and governance models from the private realm. Such pressures for comparison and, at times, convergence stem from the increasingly demanding environments within which business and government operate. Be they from citizens and special interest groups in the political realm or consumers and investors in the marketplace, both private and public sector organizations face heightened demands for accountability. These demands often stem from governance failures that are both wider in impact and amplified in coverage by intensifying and often instantaneous media coverage. Private sector scandals such as Enron, WorldComm, and Nortel drive debates about the corporate governance regimes of companies, much as government mishaps such as the sponsorship scandal fuel questions and debates aboutdemocratic 2 Introduction governance. The operative word here across both is governance, suggesting that while each retains its distinctive purposes and features, there are also commonalities in creating mechanisms for accountabilityand control on the one hand and performance on the other. Governance may be defined as the means of coordination in a world where power and information are increasingly distributed (Paquet 1997, 2005). The latter part of this definition, a networked world, underlines the complexity of both decision making and accountability within and outside organizations, in an environment that some have termed the "age oftransparency" (Tapscott and Ticoll 2003). The explosion of a new digital infrastructure and the Internet in particular comprise a key distributive force in this regard. This generic definition of governance means that while it is useful as an umbrella term, it is also necessary to be more precise in its application in reference to the conduct of (1) a unique organization, private or public; (2) a specific sector(democracy and the realm of government or competitivemarkets, such as the business realm); or (3) a jurisdictional system, such as a city, a country, or even the world as a whole (i.e., global governance). Within the confines ofa country such...