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I’ve been looking at the Government of Canada portal and Prime Minister Harper’s website as well as the White House portal. The differences between the US and Canadian sites are dramatic.

In a word, the essence of the Canadian sites is political messaging, and the message is all about Stephen Harper. Both the Canada portal and the PM’s site have three columns, and the eye is drawn to the top of the middle column - the widest column - which contains news stories almost always featuring the photogenic (or not) Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister’s site has the news of the day dominating the central column, priorities and utilities in the left column and video and audio in the right column. Today, there are 7 - count ‘em 7 - photos of the Prime Minister on the site (including the banner and all three columns).

The left column of the Canada site includes links to services, other aspects of governance (Supreme Court, Parliament), and utilities, while the right column links to priorities (currently the Economic Action Plan, Haiti, the Olympics, and armed forces recruitment). Links to popular services are below the story of the day in the middle column.

The Canadian sites do not occupy the full screen width-wise, but have well-defined left and right borders and leave considerable space in the margins beyond the borders. The implicit message is of focus and concentration.

Now let’s shift over to whitehouse.gov. President Obama is at the top, with links to four rotating videos, today including the State of the Union address and the announcement of the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund. The weekly video address - the online successor of the Saturday radio address - is one of the four during weekends and early in the week.

The site also has three columns, but they play out very differently than those on the Canadian sites. The right column contains priorities (Haiti, economic recovery, and the flu) and the middle column legislative proposals, with Health Care now at the top. The bottom of the page contains five columns of links, including issues, the briefing room, and background about the President and the White House. The extensive links at the bottom drive the site to cover the entire screen width-wise. As a consequence, the three columns in the middle of the page have considerable space and don’t seem cluttered, even though they are full of content.

The most distinctive feature of the White House site is the blog, which occupies the left column. It deals with a variety of policy and management issues Videos are presented, and posts authored by, a variety of administration officials including department secretaries, agency heads, and White House and agency staff. The main White House blog expands to nine sub-blogs including the middle class task force, the office of citizen engagement, open government, and partnerships.

While the White House site itself does not host consultations, the posts on the blog take you outside it to numerous consultations hosted on social networking sites (the response to the State of the Union address on Facebook) or departmental websites (a consultation on high speed rail on the Department of Transportation site). The open government blog leads to the Administration’s path-breaking initiative (data.gov) to make government datasets available - gratis - for citizen users, including software developers.

In effect, whitehouse.gov has become the administration’s high profile consultation portal. In contrast, the federal government’s consultation portal (consultingcanadians.gc.ca) is somewhere out there in Government of Canada cyberspace, but lacks a high-profile link to the Canada portal.

Think of the rubric “Obama Administration.” Putting the emphasis on Obama calls up the image of the embattled President, winning some battles with Congress (Bernanke’s confirmation), losing others (the deficit reduction panel), and with others still in the balance (health care legislation). Putting the emphasis on Administration evokes an image of the departments launching a host of initiatives: a vision of widespread creativity in governance. On the White House site, the embattled President rests atop the creative Administration, with the latter launching many new initiatives and consulting widely about them. It’s a portal of many voices, and it is the diversity (and occasional cacophony) of voices that makes it a far more exciting place than its Canadian counterpart.

For the skeptics who claim that innovation in government is an oxymoron, the notion that a tax collection agency could be innovative seems even more oxymoronic. Yet my intuition tells me that the Canada Revenue Agency indeed has bragging rights to such a claim.

Historically, it has been a rapid adopter of information technology, using it to enhance service by providing for payment online or over the telephone and to enhance compliance through aggressive data mining. Its status as a special operating agency, discussed in David Brown’s article in the most recent issue of Canadian Public Administration, has likely facilitated its innovativeness.

More recently, the Harper Government has likely become a driver of innovation, because of its use of tax credits - rather than spending programs - to implement social and economic policy. This philosophy of government tends to leave the program departments sitting on their hands but puts the onus on CRA. Some recent examples that come to mind are tax credits for child care, child fitness, disabilities, public transit use, and now home renovations.

For each such initiative, CRA has to come up with a precise definition of what is creditable, communicate the ensuing rules to the public, and ensure compliance. The latter would involve requiring taxpayers, or their income tax preparers, to keep receipts and occasionally auditing. The home renovation tax credit will be an interesting case. It has been widely advertised and tremendously popular. As the end of the eligibility period and this year’s tax filing date approach, the question that comes to mind is what sort of auditing CRA will do to ensure that taxpayers have been following the rules. Given the populist nature of this program - with a maximum permissible claim of $ 9000 in expenditures - the standard practice of auditing the few biggest users won’t work. The possibility of the program being extended in the upcoming budget underlines the importance of effective administration.

While the next federal budget is likely to involve expenditure cuts or constraints, I would be very surprised if the Harper Government didn’t extend its philosophy of populist tax credits in some other area, again calling upon CRA for implementation.

As a public management blogger and a taxpayer who has taken advantage of several of these programs (universal child care, child fitness, home renovation), what I see is the tip of the iceberg. Below the waterline is what CRA is doing to implement these initiatives. I think there is an interesting story here of innovative policy implementation for a public management researcher to explore.

I see a final exam as an opportunity to challenge students to demonstrate what they have learned by applying the course material to situations they have not encountered in the course. But because the examinations are never returned, the learning loop is not completed. To rectify this, today’s post will be about the final exam in Management C35 (Narratives on Management and Organization) given last month.

The first question highlighted the work of young adults: learning to perform their chosen trade effectively, finding and learning from a mentor, and defining the boundary between professional obligations and personal life. Students had little difficulty choosing characters in the course (for example, Erin Gruwell in Freedom Writers, Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men, and Kevin Calhoun in City Hall) and explaining how each dealt with each of the challenges. The most ambiguous of the challenges is finding a mentor. In some cases, such as City Hall, it turns out that the mentor has values his protégé, upon reflection, will reject. Therefore, if you are going to put all your eggs in one basket, choose that one mentor wisely. Another alternative, demonstrated by Erin Gruwell, is looking for a variety of partial mentors, each fulfilling a specific need.

The second question asked students to imagine any three of the characters in Twelve Angry Men being put through the Milgram Obedience Experiment and to predict how they would respond. Such a question has no definitive answers, only good explanations. I don’t know if Milgram or anyone subsequently replicating the experiment ever gathered data on the demographic and psychological characteristics of the subjects and used that data to explain their choices. It would seem to me that three crucial factors predicting the subject’s response would be deference to authority, willingness to inflict obvious pain on another human being for no good reason except that someone in a position of authority says so, and any personal experience that might provide a lens through which to see the experiment.

Applying those criteria, there are some jurors whose behaviour could readily be predicted. The architect (juror number 8) showed himself unwilling to inflict pain or defer to unreasonable authority and would not have administered the shocks. The European watchmaker (juror number 11), likely seeing the “scientist” in the experiment through the lens of his own escape from European authoritarianism and embrace of American democracy, would also refuse to administer electric shocks. The angry father (juror number 3) was certainly willing to inflict pain and would likely see the “learner” as his own recalcitrant son, and therefore would willingly shock the learner into unconsciousness.

The third question asked the students, in several cases, to distinguish between the narrator’s and creator’s point of view. In some, for example as a first-person memoir such as Graham Burnett’s A Trail by Jury, narrator and creator are identical. In others, such as Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day, and Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War, they are not. Both these narratives employ a misleading narrator, but it is from the creator’s point of view that the narrator is misleading.

Ishiguro uses irony to show us that the butler Stevens has wasted his life serving a misguided master and putting absurdly loyal service above a level of personal happiness to which any human should be entitled. Morris presents the forcefully articulate narrative of Robert McNamara, but Morris’s own questioning, choice of visuals to accompany McNamara’s voice, and ability to catch occasional disconnects between McNamara’s words and emotions, creates a point of view starkly different from McNamara’s.

The last question in the exam used John Kennedy’s June 1963 speech at The American University about world peace. I had read excerpts, but never the entire speech. It still remains a powerful and, for its time, radical denunciation of the nuclear arms race and search for an alternative. I asked students to interpret Kennedy’s rhetoric in light of the mid and late adult stages of Erik Erikson’s developmental model. I see the speech as strongly generative because Kennedy was searching for an alternative to the dead-end of nuclear warfare and doing so out of a concern for the lives of future generations, regardless of their nationality. He, of course, did not live to see late adulthood but - perhaps because of his seriously compromised health - was acutely aware of his own mortality. The line “and we are all mortal” strikes me as unusual on the lips of a world leader. And recognition of one’s own mortality relatively early in life would spur a concern for one’s legacy.

My students did well on the exam. I hope they learned from it. I know that I learned from reading their answers and thinking about it myself.