Canadian Public Administration-Administration Publique Du Canada最新文献

The Canadian public service has adapted to many forces of change in recent years. What has not changed is the core structural software of how it is constructed and organized. Two dimensions of structural change are available to the next government, and they could choose to pursue both. One is the domain of "machinery of government" and the other is in the layered hierarchical pyramid of occupations and management. These are areas where change would involve rewiring of core legislation and would face considerable internal resistance. They are also areas where change can bring unintended consequences and generate new issues and tradeoffs. Nevertheless, it won't be possible to get to a public service fit for purpose on its current foundations and scaffolding.

Advances in ITCs features have been putting our institutions and organizations under sustained pressure for several years. Based on concrete examples, this article first recalls the nature of the issues at stake and raises the importance of reconsidering our ways of organizing our bureaucracies based on the central role of information. The main responses provided so far are analyzed in the light of this shortcoming in the processing of information, which is often overlooked. Then, democratic principles and values are discussed as guidelines to be respected to avoid a techno-centric drift. Finally, the importance of understanding the meaning and implications of the digital transformation, the need to consider the organization from the perspective of information processing, and the implementation of information governance are addressed as the three cornerstones of the digital transformation. The text concludes with a series of proposals to be considered to achieve this.

This article examines the experience with and potential application of artificial intelligence (AI) within the Canadian public service. Assessed are the ways in which AI is being applied to internal administration and operations, the bilingual requirements of Canada's federal government, public service delivery, policy analysis and advising, application adjudication, and monitoring and regulatory compliance. The response to date from the federal government on how to guide the use of AI in the public service is assessed, and options and prospects for the future are offered in conclusion.

This article explores the critical intersection of Access to Information (ATI) and Privacy in the context of public service reform. Drawing on contemporary challenges and opportunities, it provides practical strategies for enhancing transparency while safeguarding personal data. The discussion includes an examination of current legislative frameworks, best practices for managing information requests, and innovative approaches to privacy protection. By highlighting real-world examples, the article provides practical insights for policymakers and public administrators striving to balance openness with privacy in an increasingly digital environment. This contribution aims to support administrative reforms that enhance both accountability and trust in public institutions.

Conditions facing Canadian governments will be challenging for the remainder of this century. If dangers are managed poorly, Canada will not thrive, and in the worst case the Canadian state will not survive. Adaptability, the capacity to anticipate and manage threats, is a critical quality for state survival in turbulent conditions. Achieving adaptability is always difficult in decentralized polities because of tendencies toward short-sightedness, confusion, and miscoordination. Moreover, adaptability has declined in Canada in recent decades. This is partly attributable to socio-economic transformations, and partly due to choices that Canadian leaders have made about dismantling or redesigning government institutions. Four reforms are suggested to restore adaptability in Canada: more investment in long-term thinking, revival of national leadership summits, closer attention to the health of the Canadian public sphere, and independent review of Canada's public and political services.

In 1970, freshwater pollution concerns led to the introduction of the Clean Water Act (CWA), which signaled the federal government's shift towards cooperative federalism in the shared constitutional space of water governance. A unilateral environmental federalism approach supported the enactment of the CWA and reinforced the new two-prong regulatory strategy (i.e., CWA and the Fisheries Act) to manage water pollution. This article explores the historical enactment of the CWA through the lens of federalism and the views of parliamentarians. The legislative debates reveal how different modes of federalism play out in the legislation, beyond the dominant theme of cooperative federalism.

Artificial intelligence (AI) could be at the heart of a fourth revolution by significantly changing professional identity, relationships between individuals and resource management. To help public administration practitioners and researchers cope with changes anticipated by AI, this research note maps existing conceptual approaches on the opportunities and challenges of AI in public administration and proposes a conceptual framework and initiatives that can inform and support effective, public interest-oriented technology policymaking. This research note outlines a potential research agenda, with multi-level opportunities and challenges, to accelerate this critical work.

The Government of Canada has recently faced intense parliamentary and public scrutiny of the role played by private contractors in its information technology (IT) projects, most notably in the case of the ArriveCAN application. With these ongoing investigations as its backdrop, this article analyzes patterns in federal government IT procurement between 2017 and 2022, drawing on a comprehensive analysis of the federal contracting open dataset. We reveal that the federal government betrays accepted best practice in modern government IT procurement on several key dimensions, including on contract values and lengths; on the diversity of suppliers; on the source of IT expertise; and in the management of intellectual property. We argue that the Canadian approach to IT procurement is an historically overlooked but crucial driver of its failing digital reform efforts. We conclude by turning to IT procurement policy reforms gaining traction outside Canada that may help the Government of Canada improve how it buys and deploys IT going forward—a task we argue is essential if the government wants to avoid future IT contracting scandals and deliver on its long-standing promise of digital era modernization.

Despite their centrality to the success of government business, we know very little about political staff, including their contributions to the policy process, the ways in which they contribute to government decision-making or their career trajectories. This research note examines the experience that political staff bring to their positions and where they find employment after leaving ministerial offices, using archived staff directories across four governments (NDP, Liberal and two Progressive Conservative administrations) in Ontario, Canada and cross-referencing names using LinkedIn. In total, we explore career progression of 1,153 political staff who have employment information publicly available on LinkedIn. Many take these roles having remarkably diverse backgrounds, including finance, law, academia, business and, even, other roles in the public service. Upon leaving political service, some choose to join the non-partisan ranks of public servants. Many leaving government head towards government relations firms to use their skills and experience to advance their careers. Most of these experiences are consistent across all three political parties that have held office in Ontario.

The rise of evidence-based policymaking highlights the importance of evidence and how it is defined and utilized. It also uncovers the gaps in evidence and where lived experience stands to benefit policymaking. The rising level of encampments, homelessness, and housing unaffordability in Canada emphasize the need to consider how and where lived experiences of homelessness are included. This article interrogates the inclusion of lived experiences of homelessness in three specific domains: research, policy, and advocacy. Our findings from systematic reviews of each area reveal an evidence-policy gap in homelessness policy and governance. Across all three domains, scholars and practitioners alike often fail to explicitly include lived experience to inform their efforts. Enhanced coordination and policy learning across and between the domains can offer a pathway to measurably improve policy effectiveness.