Gilles Paquet – författare

Public administration in Canada needs to change. A handful of scholars across Canada have been sounding the alarm for years but to no avail. Talented young bureaucrats have been joining the public service with fresh ideas capable of creating real change, but the black hole consumes all. In The Black Hole of Public Administration, experienced public servant Ruth Hubbard and public administration iconoclast Gilles Paquet sound a wake-up call to the federal public service. They lament the lack of "serious play" going on in Canada's public administration today and map some possible escape plans. They look to a more participatory governance model - "open source" governing or "small g" governance - as a way to liberate our public service from antiquated styles and systems of governing. In their recognizably rebellious style, Hubbard and Paquet demand that public administration scholars and senior level bureaucrats pull their heads out of the sand and confront the problems of the current system and develop a new system that can address the needs of Canada today.

Much of the waste in public administration is ascribable to the displacement of the primary concern for performance and coordination by a primary concern for redistribution. In each sphere of activities, it has led to unreasonable rules inspired by egalitarianism that have triggered permanent allocational malefits. The failure to confront the progressivist ethos and culture has rendered any action on the managerial front ineffective. First, the authors underscore the seemingly unanimous diagnosis of waste and dysfunctions in Canada’s federal public service and show that efforts to correct the situation have failed. This failure is ascribable to a fundamental incapacity to deal concurrently with the ill-advised managerial decisions of governments and the perverse progressivist philosophy inspiring them. Second, an MRI of the human resource (HR) regimes has been sketched as a guide to the detoxing and modernization of the HR regimes. It was used to spell out some guidelines for the modification of management structures and competencies, and to probe the cultural underground of moral contracts that would need to underpin the new arrangements.

In an era of intense globalization, the critical role of the region as a centre for economic development has sometimes been overlooked. Moreover, innovation is increasingly being recognized as being a critical driver of economic growth and development. However, innovation is no longer being seen as a function of research and development; nor is R&D being seen as being sufficient for the creation of technology-intensive industries and the valuable economic spillovers that result in high value-added jobs and exports. Indeed, much more than ever before, it is the combination of factors that contributes to innovation - ranging over skills, finance, production, user-producer linkages, the capacity of organizations to learn, and multilayered government policies - that make local regions the favorites of fortune. Using an evolutionary economic perspective, and drawing on a range of disciplines, this text explores important issues at a conceptual, methodological and comparative level concerning how successful locations actually construct their comparative advantage.

"Information, Innovation and Impacts" - a joint project between the Program of Research in International Management and Economy (PRIME) at the University of Ottawa and Statistics Canada - brings together economic, social and statistical views of the impacts of the innovative uses of information. It examines the costs as well as the benefits of rapidly expanding availability of data, of information, and of codified knowledge, and it provides suggestions for future work and research. This project fits into an on-going research programme at Statistics Canada to develop indicators for science and technology (S&T) in a more coherent manner, and it fits into the research program of PRIME to better understand the dynamics of innovation in an information economy. Together, Statistics Canada and PRIME strive to tell the story of the activities in S&T systems, their interactions, and the outcomes as actors go about the generation, transmission, or mediation of knowledge, information, and of data, as part of the effective functioning of the system.

This study, first published in 1968, was one of the first books on Canada’s urban development, bringing together the viewpoints of professionals who had studied various aspects of city growth – economic, social, geographic, political. The book demonstrates the effectiveness and potential of the cross-disciplinary approach and will prove useful to all those interested in the future of our cities.

This study, first published in 1968, was one of the first books on Canada’s urban development, bringing together the viewpoints of professionals who had studied various aspects of city growth – economic, social, geographic, political. The book demonstrates the effectiveness and potential of the cross-disciplinary approach and will prove useful to all those interested in the future of our cities.

Information, Innovation and Impacts - a joint project between the Program of Research in International Management and Economy (PRIME) at the University of Ottawa and Statistics Canada - brings together economic, social and statistical views of the impacts of the innovative uses of information. It examines the costs as well as the benefits of rapidly expanding availability of data, of information, and of codified knowledge, and it provides suggestions for future work and research. This project fits into an on-going research program at Statistics Canada to develop indicators for science and technology (S&T) in a more coherent manner, and it fits into the research program of PRIME to better understand the dynamics of innovation in an information economy. Together, Statistics Canada and PRIME strive to tell the story of the activities in S&T systems, their interactions, and the outcomes as actors go about the generation, transmission, or mediation of knowledge, information, and of data, as part of the effective functioning of the system.