Canadian Public Administration-Administration Publique Du Canada最新文献

This article examines ministers as policy actors through analysis of tasks in mandate letters. These tasks were coded as involving either policy initiation, supplementation, maintenance, coordination, engagement, or information. The 2021 mandate letters show that policy maintenance tasks are most common, initiation the least, suggesting that most ministers are constrained to passive policy management. Four distinctive ministerial types are also identified. Activists are distinguished by their dominance over policy initiation, advocates are characterized most by policy supplementation and maintenance, managers are mostly tasked with maintaining the policy status quo, and networkers are distinctive in their share of coordination and information tasks.

How do we apply a gender lens to the housing needs of vulnerable women? The YWCA Niagara Region (YWCA) asked this question. Brock University's Niagara Community Observatory (NCO) partnered with the YWCA to identify the barriers to accessing safe and affordable housing in Niagara, with priority placed on community engagement and inclusive access to housing. The article has a two-fold purpose. First, it provides an overview of community-engaged research, focusing on the key principles and practices involved in listening to stories of women with lived expertise of homelessness facing discrimination or disadvantage compounded by intersectional identities of Indigeneity, race, gender and ability. Second, it reports on the making of a policy brief and video clip designed as advocacy tools for increasing awareness of the need for increased equitable access to safe and affordable housing for women and gender diverse peoples in Niagara.

Public servants play a vital role as intermediaries between policymakers and the public, offering expert advice on public policy and implementing ministerial decisions for the common good. Given that most Canadians interact with non-partisan, professional bureaucrats, public sentiment towards public servants becomes a crucial indicator of the health of the country's democracy. Trust levels serve as a barometer: high trust aligns with a well-functioning system, while low trust may challenge government legitimacy and its ability to fulfill democratic mandates. This study explores confidence levels in the public service in Alberta amid the COVID-19 pandemic, using data from the April 2022 Viewpoint Alberta survey. Our findings illuminate diverse attitudes towards public servants amidst significant social, economic, and political upheaval.

The impact of the COVID-19 on the nature of work cannot be overstated. In Canada, following the largest and quickest transition to remote work ever, a significant number of public servants found themselves working from home for most of 2020 and 2021. As governments come out of the pandemic, they begin transitioning to hybrid work arrangements. This article analyzes attitudes and perspectives of public servants in the Public Service of Canada on return to office and transitioning to hybrid work. It also discusses how these can inform research and practice in Canadian public administration.

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.