Blog

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.

This post may seem like academic inside baseball, but after reading it, I hope you’ll see that the dilemmas are real.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council just announced that it is eliminating release time stipends for its grants. Release time stipends, given only to the top half-dozen or so applications in any competition, provide a teaching reduction of a one-semester course for three years. I assume the reason SSHRC has abolished them is that it is trying to stretch its resources to fund a few more proposals. Doing away with the release time supplement will slow the progress of the researchers who submitted the best proposals, but will enable SSHRC to go a bit farther down the list of ranked proposals.

I declare a personal interest here. My most recent SSHRC proposal, to support the book on public sector narrative that I referred to in last week’s post, was ranked 7th out of 142 applications and I received release time. In my next application, I will not be able to ask for release time. Putting on what moral philosopher John Rawls called “the veil of ignorance” and ignoring their own situations, most academics would likely agree that it is preferable to expand the number of grants, even if those that are most highly ranked receive fewer resources.

Now consider a second case. Each year, the Canada Council’s Killam program gives five prizes of $100,000 for distinguished career contributions in health sciences, natural sciences, engineering, humanities, and social science. It also awards a handful of research fellowships that give the fellows release time from all teaching and administrative responsibilities for two years. The fellow’s university receives $70,000 per year to hire a replacement instructor.

The Killam Program is funded from an endowment that, like every other endowment I know of, sustained major losses last year. The program so far has left the $100,000 prizes untouched and reduced the number of fellows to approximately five.

Is that the best use of the Killam program’s endowment? Both the prizes and the fellowships reward Canada’s best researchers, but the prizes look back to career achievement in the past, while the fellowships look forward to new research projects. If, for instance, the five prizes were reduced from $100,000 to $30,000, each would free up $70,000, and two or three additional fellowships could be funded.

If scholars in this case were asked to put on the veil of ignorance what would they decide: to deal with the diminished income from the endowment by reducing the number of fellowships or by reducing the value of the prizes? My guess is that most would say - as in the previous case - that it is better to have more scholarship, and would vote to reduce the prizes and fund more fellowships.

These are tough, uncomfortable, choices. SSHRC chose to spread its limited resources more widely. Will the Killam Program do likewise?

This entry marks a major turn in the theme of this blog. Hitherto, my main focus has been the nexus between IT and government, defined to include both politics and public service. Now I will be shifting to narrative, and I’ll explain why.

I began the blog in April 2007, a few months after the publication of Digital State at the Leading Edge, and was using it to observe, on a week by week basis, the continuing transformational impact of IT on politics and government. A lot has happened, particularly in the political arena (especially the Obama campaign) and in Web 2.0 applications to politics. I brought together my conclusions after almost three years of commenting and observing in a paper entitled Digital State 2.0, which will be published in a festschrift in honour of Carleton University public administration scholar Bruce Doern. When the manuscript has completed editorial review and before its official publication, I will post it on this website. It marks, at least for now, the end-point of a line of research that I’ve been working on since early in the decade.

As I was finishing Digital State, I applied for and received funding from SSHRC for a new and radically different research project on narrative and government. The research intends to show how the analysis, creation, and manipulation of narratives is a valuable skill for managers in both the public and private sectors. The research project grew out of courses on narrative and management that I have been teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The courses started out some years ago, rather naively in retrospect, along the lines of “management lessons from the movies and books.” This approach was naïve first because movies and books are instances of the broader phenomenon of narrative and second because I now see the narrative project as a management skill in itself. The research is of sufficient breadth that I’ve decided to break it into two parts, first narratives dealing with the public sector, which I’m working on now, and then narratives dealing with the private sector, which will come later.

My main project now is a book on narrative and government. I’m mid-way through, with a target completion date of the end of the calendar year. What will be the relationship between the blog and the book? Previously, I was using the blog to continue observing the phenomenon that was the subject of the book. Now, the book is in progress, not a finished product.

In my view, a blog should consist of posts that are short, self-contained, and of general interest. The alternative - theory - can be dreary. Therefore, I’ll post comments about some of the narratives I am writing about in book. They might come out as mini-reviews. (Tangentially, my monthly page view totals indicated that my review of the film “Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29″ last September received lots of visits for several months thereafter). They might also come out as comments about forgotten classics that I encourage the reader to read or see. So that’s the narrative turn I’ll be taking.

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.

After three weeks, here is my initial assessment of the Obama administration online.
Where they’ve made progress:

• The President keeping his BlackBerry
• Moving the weekly address to YouTube
• Introducing a more modern look and feel and more transparent whitehouse.gov
• Continuing to use mybarackobama.com and barackobama.com (now retitled Organizing for America and linked to the Democratic Party) to contact his followers

Next steps we’re awaiting:

• The White House Office of Public Liaison establishing some sort of Web 2.0 capacity for dialogue on whitehouse.gov, comparable to what exists on mybarackobama.com and what existed on change.gov
• Launching the website for the economic recovery program, recovery.gov

Big question for the future:

• Will the Obama constituency, using the tools on Organizing for America, be able to move the center in American politics? To do so, it will have to start changing the votes of moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats. The vote on the recovery package - no Republican support in the House and only three (Snowe, Collins, Specter) in the Senate - suggests this hasn’t happened yet.

Some questions about the public management implications:

• Now that Obama has cleared the way, will other senior administration officials go online?
• Will the departments copy the new look and feel of whitehouse.gov and begin using Web 2.0 approaches with their constituents? (One of the difficulties the sprawling US administration has had is adopting a common look and feel for its websites. The Government of Canada has been more successful here.)
• Are a host of new media positions being created in the departments as well as the White House to bring in IT-savvy members of the Net Generation to manage the Obama Administration’s new Internet and, increasingly, Web 2.0 infrastructure?