Canadian Public Administration-Administration Publique Du Canada最新文献

Government-based policy labs have established themselves across the Canadian policy landscape. This article argues these labs contribute to public value management. We begin by reviewing the public value management literature, followed by Canadian contributions to the policy lab literature. Then, our inventory of 35 current Canadian government-based policy labs is descriptively analyzed, including trends in spatial concentration, the tools and methods employed, their focus areas, the number of years in existence, and their primary role in the policy process. We randomly selected nine of these labs, provide more details of their activities, and present a preliminary public value management typology to analyze policy labs.

This study examines the development of collaborative governance regimes (CGRs) to solve the pressing issues of climate change between municipalities and Indigenous Peoples in present day Ontario, Canada. Drawing on a survey of Ontario municipalities and key informant interviews with municipal public servants, the article applies an anticolonial informed integrative framework of collaborative governance to examine the barriers and facilitators to those engagements. The analysis that follows draws on lessons learned to identify recommended practices for municipal staff moving forward, followed by the conclusion.

Public policy initiatives, opinion surveys, and public rhetoric in Canada suggest people wish to die at home. Discourse analysis of statements, policies, reports, and websites of municipal, provincial, and federal governments show how public policy narratives reflect specific understandings of dying at home. Dying is positioned as best kept within the private “home” space. Though frequently framed as a choice, subtle rhetoric also prioritizes home as the ideal place for care at the end of life, and death. Home death preferences are naturalized as common-sense. Along with more nuance in policy communications, transparency in how evidence informs policy is needed.

This article seeks to understand why deliberative civic engagement is chosen as a method of engagement by policymakers, using two jurisdictions as exploratory cases: the Nova Scotia Health Authority's Community Conversations about Collaborative Family Practice Teams and Algoma Ontario Health Team's Citizen Reference Panel on Integrated Care. The purpose is to interrogate a presumption that deliberative civic engagement is choice driven by an alignment between the goals of engagement and theories of deliberation. I find that in both instances, policymakers chose deliberative civic engagement largely because of situational factors, rather than through the theoretical claims of different methods of engagement and the goals of the engagement activity. I argue that for practitioners seeking to embed deliberative processes, greater consideration should be given to the contextual factors that enable or inhibit the commissioning of such activities.

Globally, the increased reliance on consultants and contract employees has raised many concerns vis-à-vis more traditional “in-house” provision. One such concern is the manner in which consultants have been displacing traditional advisors in important aspects of government business while others raise issues with the quality of services rendered and the (undue) influence of the advice tendered. This trend has fuelled research in political science, management, public administration, and public policy chronicling the possible rise of a “consultocracy” and leading to calls in many countries for better regulation of consultants, who currently exist almost everywhere in an unregulated “wild west.” We examine the Canadian situation, the current lack of regulation of policy and management consultants, and prospects for reform, drawing on contract data, interviews with consultants and government employers as well as comparisons with the situation in other countries like the UK. We argue that establishing a more professional licensing and credentialing system for the consulting industry through a regulatory intermediary would improve the efficiency of its services and allay many of the concerns raised.

The research reported here is a case study of mandated consolidation in the organization of Alberta's health care system. Informed by the concept of organizational context, this study illustrates the complexity of factors affecting outcomes of mandated change and draws implications for theory and practice. Consolidation of separate agencies was initiated in 2008. Data were obtained through 2020 via interviews of key informants, reviews of official documents, and searches of news media. Ultimately, the mandate appears to have succeeded, but at substantial and potentially avoidable cost. An understanding of multiple dimensions of context can contribute to successful strategies for change.

In 2020, the issue of racism in Canada moved to the forefront of public attention as systemic racial inequities were revealed and exacerbated by the pandemic and prominent deaths of Black individuals at the hands of the police in the United States and Canada. In Canada, much attention was focused on continued harm caused by existing policies and institutions to diverse populations (Cameron & Tedds, 2023). Thus, the conversation on racism in Canadian society, coupled with the exposure of societal inequities, intensified the scrutiny of systemic challenges and barriers faced by racialized Canadians in government and private sector workplaces, in particular public policies and public administration practices.

For example, Sostero et al. (2020) show that high paid white-collar workers were the main beneficiaries of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the pandemic disproportionately affected racialized communities because racialized workers are less likely to be in remote-friendly jobs (Samuel & Robertson, 2021). Governments as employers are no exception. In the federal Public Service of Canada (PSC), Indigenous and Black public servants are over-represented in lower-paying positions (TBS, 2023), and many of them continued going into office during the pandemic. Together with the existing issues in hiring and promotion and a lack of diversity in the public service executive positions, highlighted in the Call to Action on Anti-racism, Equity, and Inclusion in the Federal Public Service (Government of Canada, 2021), the impact of the pandemic on Indigenous, Black, and other racialized public servants in the federal government is yet to be fully understood.

As anti-racism initiatives across governments in Canada are further developed and implemented, it is important to consider a different approach to tackling racism in the PSC. This includes anti-racist considerations in decision-making as well as proactively engaging with Indigenous, Black, and other racialized public servants on potential solutions that are sensitive to their experience. For example, the most recent transformation initiative in the PSC—the transition to hybrid work—may further exacerbate inequities in access to flexible work arrangements by Indigenous, Black, and other racialized public servants, especially by those with intersecting identities, unless an anti-racism lens is applied.

What follows presents anti-racism initiatives and considerations in the PSC to demonstrate the value of applying critical race theory (CRT) in Canadian public administration. It starts with an overview of CRT as a framework and then provides a brief summary of the existing anti-racism initiatives in the Government of Canada. Finally, an emerging anti-racism research agenda is set out more generally for the field of Canadian public administration.

This article is based on the results of a survey carried out in 2019 to document health managers and professionals’ knowledge concerning their linguistic obligations and the tools promoting active offer in the field of mental health in French, in Ontario and Manitoba. The working hypothesis is that knowledge of the obligations and available tools can contribute to a successful offer of services in French. The more professionals and managers understand their obligations, the more tools they can use to fulfill them. The study shows that there is indeed a link between knowledge of obligations and the use of tools to provide an active offer of mental health services in French. It also highlights the key role of tools to provide French services actively.

We report the results of a survey of legal cannabis retail operators in the two largest urban centres of a Canadian province that uses a fully private model to determine the dimensions of competition between retail outlets. We find that, in addition to expected price and location competition, customer loyalty is central in the opinion of retailers. Firms also did not see the illicit market as their primary competition, instead identifying nearby legal retailers as their main competitors. Restrictions on advertising loomed large in the minds of retailers as a policy-based impediment to their success. These results are further supported by visual inspection of the exterior of all stores in one of the urban centres.