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I had two official responses to my blog post about the Canadian Air and Space Museum. Lisa Hastings, who I assume works for Downsview Park  in some sort of PR capacity and who likely was alerted to my post by her bot, and local MP Mark Adler, to whom I sent a message, both made the point that Downsview Park’s charter requires it to be self-financing, and not to accept government funding.

Whether the museum was behind in its rent, as Ms. Hastings maintains, or whether the park was using this as an excuse to oust the museum, as argued in a response to my post by Scott Boyd, is immaterial. Given this mandate, if hockey rinks can pay more than the museum, hockey rinks should get the space. Mr. Adler starts from the same premise of self-financing, accepts that the museum must go, and assures me that he is doing his all to find some other place(s) to take the museum’s collection.

The development plan on Downsview Park’s website envisages a mixture of profitable recreation facilities (hockey, soccer, beach volleyball, paintball), some greenspace, and residential development around the edges. It’s a classic case of “you get what you pay for.”

In contrast, let’s think about some of North America’s great urban parks: Central Park, Stanley Park, Mount Royal Park, the Plains of Abraham, even Toronto’s High Park. Their attractiveness comes from several sources: an inspiring physical setting (though the parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted involved some human effort to enhance nature), historical significance (in particular the Plains of Abraham), and the creation of vast open spaces for recreation.

While there may be some concessions in each of these parks that pay rent, none of these parks is in its entirety self-financing. They all represent lines in either the municipal or federal government’s budget. These cities have chosen to organize these parks as public goods for two reasons. First greenspace is at a premium in a city, and these cities value having greenspace accessible to all citizens and visitors. Second, a major park is part of a city’s charm, part of what makes it a desirable place to live or to visit.

Downsview Park does not have an inspiring natural setting. Its setting could be improved, as was the case with many of the parks Olmsted designed, but that would take funding Downsview Park does not and will never receive given the constraints of its charter. The park has one potential attraction, which is its historical significance as the location of Canada’s first and largest military and civilian aircraft factory. Preserving its historical significance would require preservation of the buildings, not just their façades. And it would require having people who are committed to their preservation, as the community associated with the Canadian Air and Space Museum is. But, to go in that direction would require a reversal of Downview Park’s decision and, unfortunately, the Harper Government does not appear willing to do that.

The Harper Government – to the extent that it thinks about cities – and the Ford administration both display a narrow counting-house mentality that privileges only those developments that can pay for themselves in the market. It is an approach that ignores our culture and our heritage. Ultimately, we as a society will be poorer, not wealthier, for it.

Building another hockey rink or preserving a unique aviation heritage site – which matters more to the Harper Government? In the federal government’s Downsview Park, the answer appears to be the additional hockey rink. Last September 20, Downsview Park gave a notice of eviction in six months to the Canadian Air and Space Museum. The historic 1929 de Havilland Aircraft of Canada building housing the museum is to be torn down to accommodate hockey rinks.

This decision flies in the face of the Harper Government’s ongoing initiative to build pride in our military heritage. While the government decided to restore the title “royal” to the navy and air force, it does not yet recognize that military heritage goes beyond titles to encompass the production of armaments. The Canadian Air and Space Museum is unique because it occupies the site of Canada’s most historically significant military (and civilian) aircraft production plant.

The public no longer remembers that during World War II Toronto was a veritable arsenal of democracy. Its major military production facilities included army materiel at the John Inglis factory near the Canadian National Exhibition, radar and optics at the top-secret Research Enterprises Ltd. facility in Leaside, and aircraft manufacturing in Downsview and Malton. Military production during World War II led to a major transformation of the Canadian economy to emphasize manufacturing. Unfortunately, there is no trace of the history of military production near the CNE or in Leaside, so the Downsview location alone remains – but, it appears, not for long.

The museum’s exhibits include the only full-size replica of the Avro Arrow (all the originals were destroyed by order of the Diefenbaker Government), a Silver Star jet trainer, a de Havilland Tiger Moth trainer, and a Lancaster bomber. The Lancaster was mounted on an outdoor plinth for several decades, and an army of volunteers is now painstakingly restoring its rusted body.

The Toronto museum’s collection is not as extensive as that of the federal government’s Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa, but it has a focus on production that the federal facility lacks. It is unfortunate that the Toronto museum’s title – Canadian Air and Space Museum – is confusingly close to the federal museum’s title. The Toronto museum could also emphasize the history of production, so as to differentiate its mission and perspective from that of the federal museum. Finally, the Toronto museum did not take advantage of the Economic Action Plan for additional funding. It should have an application ready in the event there is an EAP II.

In addition to its collections, the museum is the focal point of a community of aviation enthusiasts. This community includes the volunteers who staff the museum itself, the technically adept volunteers who are restoring the Lancaster bomber, two Russian pilots who run two modern flight simulators at the museum, and an 89-year old World War II Lancaster pilot who is at the museum most weekends selling copies of his memoirs.

The museum also has a strong focus on children’s activities, and is the site of many birthday parties at which the Russian pilots provide hands-on tutorials on the simulator as well as an introductory aviation course during March break and Air Cadets training. (Personal disclosure: one of our kids had a birthday party at the museum and took the aviation course, and greatly enjoyed both.) If the museum closes its doors, this community of interest will lose its focal point and likely disappear. Our city will have lost an aspect of the cultural – in the broadest sense – diversity that makes it such an exciting place.

Finally, this eviction is entirely unnecessary. Downsview Park has a great deal of unused land and hockey rinks could be built elsewhere without destroying the heritage building and the Air and Space Museum.

I urge my readers to visit the Museum’s website, www.casmuseum.org, sign its petition, and write their elected representatives. I hope we can educate them about the historical and cultural significance of the museum and reverse this short-sighted decision.

In this post, I’m taking a break from following the federal election campaign to discuss an ongoing function of government – service delivery. It happened that that my passport, health card, driver’s license, and vehicle registration were all due for renewal this spring, which provided a good opportunity to see how both the federal and provincial governments are doing.

With the passport renewal, I learned on the Passport Canada website (ppt.gc.ca) that I was eligible to use the simplified renewal process. Essentially I could mail in my expiring passport along with the names of two non-related references. The process no longer required sending my birth certificate and two other identity documents as well as finding a guarantor. While Passport Canada promised delivery with 20 business days, I had by new passport in 10. So the process was both simpler and faster than in the past.

For the health card, I visited the Service Ontario website (serviceontario.ca) and booked an appointment – an option not previously available. When I arrived at the Service Ontario office, I was given a number, and it was called before I even sat down to wait. The service was being provided by a trainee (Richard) and trainer (Joanne). Richard noticed that my driver’s license – one of the identity documents I provided for the health card – was expiring, and asked if I wanted to renew it as well. I recalled that I needed to renew my license plate, which Joanne and Richard could also do. Thus I was able to complete the three transactions in less than 10 minutes. While Joanne and Richard were doing training, they were not inconveniencing me at all. The only inefficiency I noticed in the process was that one photo was required for the health card and another for the driver’s license, rather than a single photo that could have been used for both.

To sum up, I was very satisfied with both Passport Canada and Service Ontario. Evidently, both agencies are using up-to-date service methodologies. Passport Canada is reusing data it previously gathered and is also applying the 80-20 rule to speed up and simplify the easy transactions. Service Ontario now uses appointments to reduce waiting and applies single counter service.

It is noteworthy that these are areas of public service that do not appear to be politically contentious or that require extensive political oversight. Passport Canada appears to have convinced the politicians that it can speed up and simplify its processes without compromising public security. In the case of Service Ontario, the recent Ontario budget cites increases in customer satisfaction it has achieved. The budget sets a goal of saving $200 million over the next 3 years through increasing efficiencies in major agencies. Service Ontario is expected to be part of the solution, either through increased internal efficiencies or by taking over additional areas of service delivery on behalf of other agencies.

In my opinion, a measure of the effectiveness of a democracy is the liveliness, even raucousness, of the debate in its election campaigns. Both sharp debate about policy proposals and searching examination of the character of those who have the audacity to lead are desirable. But it’s also important to tell the good news stories of public servants who are quietly striving to improve performance on government’s front lines.

My article “Making Narrative Count: A Narratological Approach to Public Management Innovation” has now been published by the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, the top-ranked public administration journal. Here is an abstract of the article:

Though the use of narrative has become widespread through many disciplines, it has yet to establish a strong footing in public administration. The article first explains why narrative analysis has not been incorporated into mainstream public administration as the latter has become increasingly empirical, quantitative, and hypothesis-driven. It then discusses a number of previous attempts to introduce narrative into public administration.

Next, the article outlines a number of key narratological concepts that could readily be applied to the field. These include the distinction between fable, narrative, and text; narrative polyphony; and dominant and counter-fables. Demonstrating the possibilities they offer, the concepts are applied to the analysis of the 31 finalists in the 2008 and 2009 Innovations in American Government Awards to identify a dominant innovation fable incorporating incremental problem-solving and inter-organizational cooperation. This innovation fable is contrasted to those identified in previous research, such as the organization turnaround or the front-line innovation.

Because the Awards application process results in three distinct narratives – a detailed paper application, a site visit report, and an oral presentation to the selection panel – the analysis focuses on the differences among them, with the application form representing an insider’s story written by experts for an expert audience, the site visit report often incorporating a counter-narrative that points out the innovation’s unresolved conflicts or uncertainties, and the oral presentation functioning as an advocacy narrative directed at a generalist audience. This analysis is applied to one of the award winners, the US Intelligence Community Civilian Joint Duty Program.

The article concludes with suggestions for further narratological research about public management innovation, taking advantage of the new application form to the Innovation Awards which was designed to elicit more explicit narratives. More generally, it raises possibilities for public administration scholars to incorporate narratological concepts and methods into their research.

If you are interested in reading the article online, it’s doi (digital object identifier) is 10.1093/jopart/muq088. You can enter it at www.doi.org and it will take you to the article. You can also access it from JPART’s website. If you have any difficulty finding it, email me and I’ll email you the article.

I admire Jeffrey Skoll and Participant Media, the company he founded. They have a clear vision: hire name directors to make aesthetically compelling political films that show heroic individuals fighting corporate or government bureaucracies and conclude with an actionable message to the audience. Sometimes this formula works well, on other occasions not so well, and here are two of each.

George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck employed an early Fifties black and white palette to recount broadcaster Edward R. Murrow’s battle against Senator McCarthy. Charlie Wilson’s War used Aaron Sorkin’s hyper-articulate walk-and-talk style to tell the story of the Congressman’s struggle to build support for arming the Afghan mujahideen in their ultimately successful war against the Soviets. Both movies made clear that the victory was ambiguous. Morrow helped drive McCarthy from the Senate but lost his prime time show. The Afghan mujahideen became the Taliban. While both movies supported a cause, neither told the viewer how to sign up after leaving the theater.

Niki Caro’s North Country oversimplified a long legal fight against sexual harassment (Jensen vs. Eveleth Taconite), turning it into one courtroom scene where a Perry Masonesque lawyer by breaking down a hostile witness redeems the protagonist, proving that she was not a teenage slut but rather a victim of rape. Conversely, Davis Guggenheim’s documentary Waiting for Superman spun too complicated a tale about charter schools and educational reformers. Both movies encouraged the viewer to visit a web site and join the cause: opposition to harassment in one, educational reform in the other.

So is the latest Participant Media offering, director Doug Liman’s Fair Game a hit or a miss? The terrain the movie covers is the relationship between politicians and professional public servants. Two episodes are at the heart of the movie.

Former ambassador Joseph Wilson was employed as a consultant to the CIA to determine whether Saddam Hussain’s regime was importing uranium fuel from Africa to produce weapons of mass destruction. When his finding that no such importing had happened was ignored by the Bush Administration, he spoke his truth publicly in an op ed in the New York Times.

The Bush Administration exacted revenge on Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, an undercover CIA agent, by leaking information that blew her cover and effectively terminated her career. The CIA reacted, appropriately, with damage control to salvage or cancel Plame’s operations. However, it failed to confront the White House on the destruction of its organizational capital. A contrast that comes to mind is Dominion Statistician Munir Sheikh’s resignation in protest against the Harper Government’s scrapping the long form census, a similar instance of destroying organizational capital.

As a student of public management, I wanted to know what constraints there were on Wilson going public (for instance, the terms of his consulting contract) and what was done with his report between the time he submitted it and the Administration ignored it. Fair Game didn’t adequately answer either question.

More broadly, Fair Game gave a considerable amount of attention to Valerie Plame’s dramatic career as a CIA agent before her cover was blown, but too little time and attention to the story of how she and her husband both used the media and the legal system to fight back. A contrast is All the President’s Men, which gave a full accounting of the journalistic craft Woodward and Bernstein used to trace the Watergate conspiracy back to the Oval Office.

That the White House attempted only to destroy the Wilsons’ careers is at least testimony to the robustness of American democracy. In other countries, for example Russia, a similar incident would have led to the whistleblowers paying with their lives. Plame would have died first, in the line of duty of course, and then Wilson, while on the run. In actual fact, the career most damaged by this episode was that of White House adviser Scooter Libby, who did prison time.

My final criticism is that I found Liman’s cinematic vision very unappealing. He filmed most of the movie through heavy filters (gauze and Vaseline?), giving it a muddy grey appearance, and shot stiflingly close to the actors.

On the other side of the ledger, what Fair Game did well was allow Sean Penn and Naomi Watts to portray a marriage of professional opposites – he, expansive and extroverted, she guarded and secretive – that was almost destroyed under pressure.

Finally, I must praise Sam Shepherd’s cameo as Plame’s father. On Plame’s visit to her parents to seek their support when the situation looked bleakest, in just a few sentences he communicated two key messages: good marriages survive storms and she had been a fighter, not a quitter, all her life. Perhaps that scene was an example of truthiness, not truthfulness, but it still worked, and the messages resonate beyond the movie.

Moving from the depiction of the events to the events, ultimately the Wilsons should derive three sources of satisfaction from this tumultuous episode in their lives. First, their marriage survived, and, by going public, they turned the attempt to destroy their careers into new careers as writers and advocates. Second, they cast doubt on the rationale for the war in Iraq and thereby contributed to undermining it. Third, they helped, literally, to take down George Bush’s reputation. American presidents remain moral guides, either to emulate or avoid, long after their terms of office are over, so their ranking in the annals of the presidency matters.