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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.

Earlier this week I was at former Saskatchewan premier Allan Blakeney’s Toronto launch of his new book An Honourable Calling: Political Memoirs, published by the University of Toronto Press. Blakeney and I were co-authors of an earlier book Political Management in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1998). Here are a few impressions from the evening.

Two of the guests were former Ontario Premier Bill Davis and Attorney-General Roy McMurtry. While Davis and McMurtry were and are Tories and Blakeney was and is a NDP’er, they were politicians during the same period, and were all deeply involved in the repatriation of the Canadian constitution in the early Eighties. This was clearly a significant life experience, and their mutual affection is far stronger than the differences in their political allegiances.

Rather than the traditional reading from his book, Blakeney and I continued the dialogue we initiated in Political Management in Canada. In Blakeney’s view, political campaigns should involve parties presenting their ideas in some detail, and providing opportunities for voters to meet the leader face-to-face and unscripted. We agreed that the American presidential primaries - particularly the early ones - live up to this ideal, but Blakeney decried the Canadian practice of leaders campaigning in a tightly-controlled cocoon, reciting a purposely vague message.

Looking back at Blakeney’s eleven years as premier (1971-1982), he was called upon to guide Saskatchewan’s transition from what the late sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset called “agrarian socialism” to a resource rich economy. In this, Blakeney’s challenge was to balance three priorities: prosperity for the province, efficiency in government, and equity for the entire society, in particular its large aboriginal population. I asked him to focus on current-day Saskatchewan, and one development of which he was particularly critical was the privatization of the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan and of Cameco Corporation. Both were crown corporations started during the Blakeney Government, and Blakeney believes that they should have remained as Crown corporations, which would have searched within Saskatchewan rather than outside for their leadership, and would have been more likely to allocate their earnings to benefit all the people of Saskatchewan.

I urge you to read Blakeney’s book. It is in part a history of the policies and programs of one of Canada’s most effective and creative provincial governments. It is also a personal narrative about how someone from a Nova Scotia Tory background - and Blakeney reminded us that none of his ancestors ever voted for the CCF - came to join the political left, embracing democratic socialism as an ideal and a program. Blakeney also writes about his post-political career of the last two decades, encompassing academe and numerous public causes such as world federalism, aboriginal development, and political institution-building in South Africa. Blakeney is very experienced and very wise and there is much we can learn from him. I recognized that two decades ago when we taught public management together and recognize it just as much today.

John Tory’s by-election defeat last week, and the predictable end of his political career, raise questions about the Ontario Liberal’s political strategy. Believing Tory to be a weak leader, the Liberals could have let him run unopposed, or with token opposition, to return to the Legislature, where the Liberals would kick him around before the 2011 election.

By campaigning hard to defeat him, the Liberals must be thinking that for the Ontario Conservatives, the process of choosing a new leader will be time-consuming and messy, and the likely new leader will be even less electable than Tory. The process will leave the Conservatives divided and leaderless for several months during a period of bleak economic performance. The Liberals expect that the Tories will turn to the right, likely to a younger veteran of Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution like Tim Hudak. Or perhaps an older CSR veteran like Jim Flaherty, John Baird, or Tony Clement, will renounce the moderation developed in the context of a recession-fighting federal government, to return to CSR theology in Ontario.

Either way, the Liberals must be salivating at the prospect of the Conservatives executing a turn to the right, which leaves them alone in the political middle for the next election. This will be even more so, if the NDP’s new leader Andrea Horwath moves to the left. Bad economic performance is a necessary but not sufficient condition for defeating a government; the opposition parties need credible plans. The Liberals are betting that the majority of voters in the political middle won’t see the hard-left NDP or hard-right Conservatives as credible, thereby making a McGuinty three-peat possible.

Now that both Canada and the US have adopted economic stimulus packages - the one in the broader context of a budget, the other part of a package involving both legislation and executive orders - I want to step back a moment and look at how these packages came about and think about their implications.

The Bush administration’s lump-sum tax rebates ended up stimulating more saving than spending. This isn’t a bad thing, as one necessity for ending the recession will be an increase in consumer savings so that, at some point down the road, consumers will be willing to spend again, especially on big-ticket items. The next round of tax cuts are intended to increase permanent income through small increases in take-home pay. Both the Canadian and US governments believe more of these income increases will be spent than saved, and they’re likely right, but the spending will go to small items, like food, restaurant meals, health care, home renovations, and entertainment. All this is fine for Loblaw’s, McDonalds, Shoppers Drug Mart, and Home Depot but won’t do much for the hard-hit housing, auto, or consumer electronics industries.

One noteworthy policy choice of the Harper Government is its use of leverage, hoping that, for example, provinces will spend 50-cent dollars on infrastructure, colleges and universities will spend 50 cent dollars on facilities, and that homeowners will spend 85 cent dollars on renovations. It will likely work to shift provincial government priorities from stimulus projects that cost 100 cent dollars, but the question is whether all the other players will be able to put enough money on the table to take advantage of the temporary subsidies.

The budget has lots of evidence of interest group lobbying, for example the expensing of hardware and software bought over the next two years, which looks like it came directly from the wish list of the Information Technology Association of Canada. Good on ITAC and other lobbyists.

There is also lots of regional politics in play. Help for the computer industry is clearly aimed at its employees, many of whom live in the 905-land constituencies where the Conservatives have begun to make inroads into the Liberal’s Fortress GTA. Who knows what the Southern Ontario Development Agency will do, but it shows a recognition that this region - in which the depressed auto industry is such a key employee - is another Conservative target for the next election.

Finally, there are lots of instances of solutions in search of a problem, spending projects on the wish lists of Parks Canada, Transport Canada, and other agencies. Again, good on them. A deputy minister who is doing his/her job should have a long wish list of projects that contribute to the public welfare that can be rolled out when - even with a Conservative government - the Department of Finance is looking for fiscal stimulus.

When the recession finally ends, the interesting question will be what to do about the deficit and the accumulated debt. Some of the deficit will disappear automatically, but to get rid of the rest and then to start paying down debt will require spending cuts, tax increases, or both. The policy choices then will depend on the political colour of our next government or two. But that’s another story.

Toronto has long measured its cultural scene against New York City. If Queen’s Park measures our governance against New York City, we’ll find that in one key area that impacts all others - performance management - we don’t measure up.

Beginning in 1997, New York City has been posting the annual Mayor’s Management Report on its website (www.nyc.gov). For every area of government, the report lists critical objectives, provides detailed statistics on performance in achieving objectives, sets out next year’s targets, and shows agency resources. The 2008 report is 234 pages long. The report displays where performance has been improving and where it’s been deteriorating. These reports are an outgrowth of former Mayor Giulinani’s CompStat initiative that used timely and rigorous data analysis to drive crime reduction.

Does Ontario have anything comparable? Queen’s Park has been publishing an annual progress report, this year posted on the premier’s website. This year’s report is all of 21 pages. It does discuss progress in terms of certain key indicators such as class size in elementary school, student performance on provincial exams, and waiting times for certain medical services. But most of the report simply outlines spending initiatives. It isn’t comprehensive and doesn’t set out critical objectives for, or resources used, in all areas of government.

I asked my public management students to evaluate New York City’s Mayor’s Management Report and Ontario’s Progress Report. New York City got an A, Ontario somewhere between C+ and B-.

When it took office in 2003, the McGuinty Government resolved to undo the Tories’ Common Sense Revolution by putting money back into public services, and to set some targets to measure progress. The Progress Reports, published since 2004, do reflect this. The Government intended that its achievements would be the centre of discussion in the 2007 election campaign. Unfortunately, John Tory’s position on support for faith-based schools became the focal issue, generating much more short-term heat than long-term light.

As it works on a new budget to meet the challenges of a tough economy - particularly given Ontario’s dependence on the faltering auto sector - the McGuinty Government should look at the New York City Mayor’s Management Report - the leading edge in public sector performance management - and emulate it.