Christopher Wilson & Assoc.

Good news, bad news

2012-01-23T14:31:00.000-08:00

Good news! Global oil consumption fell 300,000 barrels/day in the fourth quarter of 2011. The bad news is that it did so on the back of growing economic weakness. However, the price of oil remained “stable” (meaning high) because of supply risks associated with civil unrest in Nigeria and Iraq as well as the impending oil embargo on Iran. So don’t expect help from a soft energy sector to stimulate world economies.

As ODAC reported last week of greater importance may be the longer term prospects associated with our window for action on climate beginning to close. For instance, they report on BP’s Energy Outlook to 2030. In it BP projects energy demand increasing 36% by 2030. Consumption of oil, gas and coal all continue to grow despite steady growth in renewables and increased energy efficiency. Oil's overall proportion of market share is set to decrease, owing to growth in other liquid fuel supplies. However, the report anticipates that CO₂ emissions will increase 28% over the period — from 382ppm today to approximately 500ppm, well above the 450 ppm cap advocated to keep global warming within 2 degreesCelsius and avoid run away climate change. This is definitely not so good news.

Creating a new metaphor for a new economy

2011-08-22T15:10:00.000-07:00

As David Korten writes in YES magazine

"Story power is the ultimate power. Authentic stories liberate the human consciousness, build immunity to cultural manipulation, and give us the courage and insight to create a world of peace and prosperity for all.

messages New Economy are spreading through countless conversations to challenge the false claims of the fabricated stories of the old economy culture that:

It is our inherent human nature to be individualistic, materialistic, greedy, competitive, and violent.
We live on an open frontier of endless resources that are free for the taking to grow the economy.
Money is wealth, money defines the value of life, making money is our highest human calling, and everything related to money is best left to the market.
Government is the problem and unregulated markets are the solution.

As pointed out in previous blogs by David Korten, the truth is that:

The human brain is wired to support creativity, cooperation, and life in community. That is our nature. The prevalence of materialism, greed, competition, and violence common in modern society is a symptom of severe cultural and institutional dysfunction.
We humans inhabit a wondrous but finite living planet with a self-organizing biosphere to which we must adapt our lives and economies.
Life, not money, is the true measure of value; money’s only legitimate use is in life’s service. An obsession with making money is a sign of psychological and social dysfunction.
Markets are essential to the function of a healthy democratic society. Their proper function, however, depends on proper rules implemented by democratic governments under the watchful eye of a strong and dynamic civil society. "

The choices we make as our guiding metaphors determine not only how we make sense of our world but also the logic of the decisions we make to shape it.

Raising the US Debt Ceiling - Don’t Start Cheering Yet

2011-08-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

The impasse over raising the US debt ceiling has been resolved. The US will continue to pay its creditors -- even though it now has to borrow more to do it. The public, the media, politicians, the markets and many economists are all now breathing a sigh of relief. The crisis is passed and they can get back to business as usual, which is the business of buying and spending to grow the economy.

On the other hand, I believe the US has already unknowingly suffered a profound blow from this recent crisis. Much like a computer virus that you might pick up and only later find it wreaking havoc on your system, in terms of the US and global financial systems what was once unthinkable is now thinkable and the future consequences of this shift will be severe.

Even a year ago, the thought that the US might default on its ever growing debt was never taken seriously. The idea that the US could fall prey to the same instabilities as Ireland, Greece or Italy was just silly. The US had the biggest, strongest, safest economy in the world. That’s why investors have continued to park their money in US denominated assets. US treasury bills have been considered the safest investment on the planet. Their return was essentially guaranteed.

No more. The specter of the US federal government defaulting on its debts was painted loud and bold for everyone to see. For the first time in over two hundred years, investors can envision uncertainty associated with lending to the US government. This new risk will soon see itself as a higher risk premium not only for US government debt but for the global financial system as a whole. Both have been anchored in the belief that the major economies of the world, but particularly the US, would never default on their debts and so there has been a greater willingness to lend to them than might otherwise be determined by economic fundamentals.

It’s an awful lot like the difference between a wealthy man who goes into to a bank to borrow a hundred million dollars and receives the best rate with little or no inspection of his books despite being many hundreds of millions in debt and a small businessman who tries to borrow $10,000 while being debt free and having a thriving business. The small businessman is given a gruelling audit and then told to come back when he can show more money on his books and, if he’s lucky, he’ll get a loan at prime plus ten. What lies at the bottom of this obvious discrimination is the perception that the wealthy man has made a lot of good decisions in the past to become wealthy and so he is a good bet to pay off a large amount of debt in the future. The small businessman has yet to prove himself and so the perception of his risk is a great deal higher – even though he may want to borrow only a small amount of money. In this way the lending of money, especially in large amounts, often comes down to the lender’s subjective assessment of the borrower’s potential to repay.

In the case of the recent US political circus, the world’s lenders have just had a ring side seat to the possibility that the risk free US government may not be so risk free. As a result, expect them to pay a lot more attention to financial fundamentals. For instance, the US federal debt to GDP ratio is now almost 1:1. By comparison Canada’s debt to GDP ratio is about 0.4:1 and Greece’s is 1.4:1. By this measure the US situation is closer to Greece than to Canada.

As the notion that the US could default (and that some of its leaders would be willing to allow it to default) begins to worm its way into the calculations of investors worldwide, investing will now become a whole lot more uncertain and risky. For if the US can default then any country can default, let alone any company. Lenders will subsequently want a higher premium to protect themselves against the vagaries of this potential default. And when this is coupled with the general tightness of capital that has resulted from the recent government spending binges to avert recession, it may well push us into the next phase of what is likely to be a long and drawn out recession.

Mechanisms of Health Care Reform

2011-07-09T17:18:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday June 7th, Maclean’s magazine, the Canadian Medical Association and CPAC hosted an open dialogue on health care at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. It was entitled: Health Care in Canada: Time to Rebuild Medicare.

The two-hour, video-taped conversation demonstrated how passionately many Canadians feel about health care and that the delivery of health care in Canada isn’t meeting their needs and ought to be changed. One participant referred to the health care budget in Ontario, for instance, that now represents 40% of the Province’s overall budget and is beginning to crowd out other concerns like education, social and correctional services. CIHI estimates that health care spending in Canada was $191 billion in 2010 or 12% of GDP and that by 2031 this should rise to 19% of total GDP -- a rate of growth that seems unsustainable. So the question was posed: what would a reformed health care system look like?

Despite the obvious lack of political appetite for change, participants at the Macleans event were much more pragmatic about the prospect of change and suggested that we focus on how to make things better given the existing legislation. “Could we make use of an amending formula to make adjustments to the Canada Health Act like they do with US Constitution?”, asked one participant. If the major outlines won’t change, then are there smaller, less controversial avenues we can pursue?

To this I would say that there are. In fact, there are several things that might be done to begin shifting the system in a new, more responsive and sustainable direction. I offer three such mechanisms for change below. They include adding a preamble to the Canada Health Act; moving to incentivize change through the application of flat fees for services; and the institution of individual health accounts. (more...)

Scandals piling up in world of Canadian business

2011-07-09T17:14:00.000-07:00

Source: Derek Abma, Postmedia News, 2 July 2011

This country has long benefited from a strong corporate reputation abroad — a "halo effect," as some call it, from being seen as a kinder, gentler version of our American neighbours. But some might question whether that's still the case, as the country gains attention, and sometimes notoriety, for everything from the oilsands pollution; to Bear Creek Mining Corp.’s loss of its mining rights in Peru; to Niko Resources Ltd.’s recent $9.5-million fine for influence peddling; and to the now re-jailed former media baron Conrad Black.

“… Christopher Wilson, a lecturer and researcher at the University of Ottawa's school of management, says some scandals involving Canadian business interests are indicative of a corporate culture that puts its emphasis on the immediate appeasement of shareholders, often at the expense of other stakeholders, such as workers, customers and affected communities.

"The orientation is to see the profits in the next quarter as opposed to the long-term health of the organization and the long-term value addition to society," he says. Wilson says English-speaking countries tend to have a business culture that emphasizes short-term needs of shareholders over other considerations. Canada, he says, is perhaps even more so this way than the United States, because the relatively small pool of significant shareholders in Canadian companies limits the diversity of opinion that goes into shaping corporate policies.

"It makes it really, really difficult for Canadian companies to make a change because everybody sort of thinks the same way," Wilson says. "Whereas in the more diverse, less closely held environment of the United States, there's so many other perspectives that come into play." (more..)

Identity Politics

2011-04-14T08:53:00.000-07:00

Re: Identity politics can get complicated, by Elizabeth Payne 14 April 2011

I just wanted to expand upon Ms. Payne’s important comments regarding identity politics.

There is a popular myth that people vote based on a party’s platform or the capability of a candidate. Study after study of voter behaviour over many years has show this just isn’t so. Voters don’t vote rationally like that. In fact, key election issues tend to be too complex and evolving for voters to understand them, let alone the solutions that might be offered by opposing candidates. Just ask Kim Campbell!

After decades of study in this area noted political scholar Daniel Kahneman recently commented to the New York Times that, “The fashion of political writing … is to suggest that people choose their candidate by their stand on the issues, but this strikes me as highly implausible.”

In contrast, what appears to happen is that voters vote subjectively for the candidate who is seen to be most like them as a proxy for assuring themselves how a candidate might vote in the future. Ronald Reagan, for instance, was so successful at pitching man over platform that people voted for him even though they disagreed with his policies.

Ms. Payne’s observation that politicians are “masters at using what they perceive as our differences to wedge us apart” just underscores this point. By emphasizing differences, politicians and political parties explicitly attempt to connect themselves to various groups in society. Given that the largest single group of voters has a family and a modest income, it’s no surprise the lengths party leaders are currently going to show they are just simple family types.

There are two problems with this approach to democracy: the first is, as Ms. Payne pointed out, that every Canadian wears many hats and that they are part of many different groups at the same time. The second is that any semblance of solidarity by candidates with any particular group evaporates as soon as the election is over. The election pretense of multiple personalities just can’t be maintained. Subsequently, elected politicians feel free to simply go their own way (since they can’t be everything to everybody in reality) focusing on selling down to the citizenry rather than representing citizens upwards to government.

This is unfortunate because our collective capacity is hobbled and our sense of belonging is greatly diminished. A generation ago, Joe Clark pitched Canada as a “community of communities”. For a while this notion seemed like it might actually represent where Canada was going. Today, however, we are becoming a collection of competing communities with apparently with fewer and fewer links between us – our differences being reinforced with every election. We are strangers today when we used to be neighbours. We behave as if we have nothing to gain or nothing to learn from anyone else. We behave as if we didn’t depend on anyone else. We have no shared purpose. Our national culture is increasingly self-serving -- to gain as much as we can from everyone else with minimum cost to ourselves.

On the other hand, a community is by definition a group of different people, with different knowledge, different skills and different perspectives. We are in fact “complex and Canadian”, says Ms. Payne. These differences are our nation’s strength. The recognition of our diversity and our inter-dependence is the basis of our security, our innovativeness and our resilience. But the success of any community requires the pooling of resources and knowledge, together with the learning made possible by the ‘mashup’ of all those differing views. The bedrock foundation of any community is, however, the ability to listen to one another honestly in an environment of mutual respect and trust.

Sadly as we have seen in the House of Commons and on the campaign trail, this is not the trend. It is identity politics or, to spin it another way, it is the politics of limiting Canadians that is being reinforced. The emphasis on differences leads to increased competition, and eventually fewer and fewer winners and more and more losers. It leads socially to the same inevitable outcome as a lack of diversity does in any ecological system – extinction! For example, the simplest explanation for the public’s growing disengagement with politics, is because they can no longer see themselves reflected in the few narrow, superficial and often irrelevant (to them) perspectives being offered. And so the impact of identity politics leads to a fundamental question of legitimacy when the public can no longer identify with their leaders.

Parliament is supposed to be the place where our most important conversations take place. It is supposed to be where all Canadian communities can be represented as a single community to hammer out their shared purpose and common agenda. Traditionally, the House was Canada’s premier forum for Canadians to listen to each other’s stories and to allow them to have a conversation together. It was in fact Canada’s foremost social learning vehicle. Although the potential for this type of learning remains with Parliament – fewer and fewer politicians bother to make use of it because no one cares to listen any more. Why listen when you can automatically tune out those who are not like you.

This week’s debate between tweedledee and tweddledum offered little hope that any of the candidates have the capacity to do what really needs doing – harnessing the power of all Canadians to collectively deal with the urgent issues that we all face. Where’s the real leadership to bring us together?

Wanted: New Political Party?

2011-03-26T12:23:00.000-07:00

So here we go again. For the fourth time in seven years we’re going back to the polls to elect a ‘new’ New Government of Canada. Excited?

The Government was defeated on an opposition motion of apparent principle that found it in contempt of Parliament. It lost the vote because the Government’s budget buy-off of the NDP wasn’t large enough. The NDP was a bit like the hooker claiming insult by an offer of $50 and saying, “do you think I’m a whore?” To which her potential client says, “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just negotiating on price.” It was a wonderful start to the silly season and a fitting end to one of Canada’s least remarkable and least productive Parliamentary sessions.

A fitting charge against the Government might have been its stunning ineffectiveness in terms of its ability to get Bills passed into legislation. Since 2006, when the Harper Government took power, only 42% of the bills introduced, 117 of 279, have been passed compared to Lester Pearson’s minority government which successfully passed 85% of its legislative agenda. A lot of that has to do with the Government’s political tactics including prorogation, fewer days in which Parliament sits, the poisonous partisanship, the subversion of the committee process, and its obsession with secrecy and information control. But even then, it is likely we’ll hear all sorts of criticism in the next six weeks of much of the legislation that was passed, despite the support it received from opposition parties to pass it. The level of duplicity present on all sides is staggering.

There has been widespread discussion of late of the dysfunction of Parliament. Some commentators like Macleans’ Andrew Coyne have floated the idea of a new political party that draws from the base of both conservatives and liberals. However, it is not a new party that is needed but a new political culture and a new organizing metaphor for governing this country. The Canadian Westminster system has outlived its usefulness. It’s way past its ‘best before date’, it’s in urgent need of replacement and it’s at serious risk of becoming a cancerous burden on Canadian democracy.

What should be obvious to all is that successive governments (both Liberal and Conservative) have felt less and less compulsion to represent all Canadians. They are increasingly content to represent small slices of the Canadian population and to cherry pick which ones as it suits them. I overheard one senior political operative exclaiming this past summer, his party is confident that they will receive support from at least 30% of the voting public (that’s roughly 18% of Canadians) on any given issue. As for the rest of Canadians – the other 82% -- they don’t really care. Their allegiance is to their supporters, period.

To even the casual observer Canada is a place of many diverse communities – urban and rural; westerners and east-coasters; French and English; rich and poor; aboriginal and non-aboriginal; immigrant and non-immigrant; young and old; gay and straight, religious and non-religious; etc.

Canada works because we are this diverse mix. Canada works because we all don’t think the same way or believe the same things. We are what Joe Clark long ago called a “community of communities”. This feeds our innovativeness, our adaptiveness, our sense of security and our rich sense of belonging. It also supports our sense of equity and fair play. Canada works because Canadians have largely chosen to be accommodating to each other’s differences. It has not worked by making us all the same. In full disclosure, however, I do not mean to equate this with the perverted notion of multiculturalism in common currency that decries the possibility of a Canadian culture and values in favour of the values of any non-Canadian culture.

That aside, I find it highly offensive when I see our governments and political parties trying to pit one group against another in their hopes of riding on the coattails of the largest minority or loudest interest group. Pearson’s Parliamentary success was based on his ability to achieve a large measure of consensus if not agreement.

In my humble opinion, elected governments are meant to represent all of us. They should not be permitted to pick and choose who they represent. Their legitimacy stems not from the meager 20% of the population that may have made an effort to vote for them, but from their ability to represent the interests of the whole population. This has its basis in the very formation of Canada which was not the result of solitary individuals or single groups but the consequence of what was done together. Canada was formed by large groups reaching out across the barriers which divided them – French-English, Protestant-Catholic, and East-West. Forgoing this characteristic, undermines the very authority of government and the willingness of citizens to follow the rules.

Unlike the democratic sham into which it has deteriorated, Parliament could be a wonderful space to encourage multi-party dialogue and learning to better represent the many facets of our Canadian-ness. Yet Parliament has been continuously diminished for the last half century -- its very role and relevance now become the subject of existential debate.

In the place of multilogue, the hucksters and spin-masters have asserted that only one view is possible, their view, and that Canadian-ness is somehow a one-dimensional phenomenon. In a very Orwellian way, every Canadian must look, think, speak and act like them. All others (amounting to 70-80% of the population) by implication are classified and treated as enemies, subject to whatever legal abuse as can be devised. Over time these anti-democrats have been stripping us of the skills and capacity for sustaining the greater Canadian commonwealth and pitting us against each other in endless rounds of fruitless competition.

Our legacy Westminster system has as its most basic tenet that someone is ‘in charge’. But if ever there was a place on earth that demanded a system of distributed, poly-centric it is Canada. What Canada needs is not another political party playing the same old games of rational self interest, what we need are parties (the current ones are quite sufficient) willing to play a different, more collaborative game.

To achieve this would require a willingness to embrace the diversity represented in Parliament and to rethink fundamentally the appropriateness of our top-down, adversarial Westminster system (if there truly was ever a time appropriate for it). In its place is needed a more partnership form of governance, one that seeks to harness our differences not eliminate them. We need facilitators of cooperation not commanders or leaders. We need those who can generate a sense of shared belonging and ownership both in and out of the House. We need those who can help us articulate a common possibility towards which we can all collectively live into. We need those willing to listen, to learn and to teach. We need those who will not presume to be ‘in charge’, or assume that success at governing is merely a product of political gamesmanship. We don’t need those who make fraudulent promises or try to bribe us with our own money but people who can take Canadians on a journey that never ends.

Don’t expect progress on this front from any of the current crop of so called ‘leaders’. My hope is that Canadian collective consciousness will mature sufficiently so that one day we will simply wake up and sweep away the self-serving, old guard, even as it is being swept away in the Middle East, reclaiming the collective ownership to our own governance in the process.

In the current election, there are serious issues to discuss with little hope of an adult conversation -- health care, two wars, national productivity, decaying infrastructure, climate change, energy sustainability, and a new risk of an economic hollowing out. We need all of our human and physical resources to tackle these challenges together. But if insanity is defined as doing the same things and expecting different outcomes, then what we may really need is something to shake us out of our collective dementia.

THE DECLINE OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

2011-03-05T10:52:00.000-08:00

On Friday February 18th Aaron Wherry wrote in Macleans about the sham the House of Commons has become. While observing the largely empty Chamber pass perfunctory law, Wherry reflected that “to witness such a moment is to see the House of Commons at both its most serious and least relevant, to understand the gravity of the institution and the sense of neglect that hangs over its proceedings. Indeed, of all the questions the House of Commons must consider on a daily basis, there is one that underlies everything: does this place still matter?”

I found the article quite a sad but unsurprising illustration of key issues related to a much needed rethink of the outdated form of Westminster democracy we use in Canada. Issues such as the irrelevance of MPs; the respect for citizens; the lack of learning; the superficiality of political debate; and the absence of a sense of community are all illustrated by this story.

As Jeff Simpson once observed, we have allowed our elected leaders to become “friendly dictators”. The people we elect to Parliament no longer represent us to government but they represent the government to us. Since the time of Trudeau, the House of Commons has been stripped of its primary authority for approving annual budgets by the imposition of time limits for debate and the process of ‘deeming’ budgets to ensure their approval should debate take too long. The practice of padding the budget with all sorts of extraneous legislation in omnibus bills demonstrates a further erosion of respect for Parliament and its authority. Governments no longer seem capable of representing even a majority of Canadians, let alone Canada as a whole. They are content to merely represent the largest special interest group. We have allowed Parliament to drift into irrelevancy at just the time when we need it the most as the country’s foremost forum for public dialogue.

For you see, the House is in decline because no one cares to listen any more. Wherry pointed out that “attendance is not necessary to follow what is said”. But attendance is not necessary because no one is paying attention to what is said -- in Parliament, or for that matter, elsewhere. No one really wants to listen to anything anybody else is saying. The House is therefore simply reflecting a major culture shift that has occurred in Canadian society in the last decades.

A generation ago, Joe Clark pitched Canada as a “community of communities”. For a while this notion even seemed like it actually represented Canadians and where they wanted to go. Today, however, we are a collection of competing communities with apparently fewer and fewer links between us. We are strangers today when we used to be neighbours. We behave as if we have nothing to learn from anyone else. We behave as if we didn’t depend on anyone else. We exhibit no shared purpose. Our relationship to others is basically self-serving -- to gain as much as we can from them with minimum cost to ourselves.

On the other hand, a community is by definition a group of different people, with different knowledge, different skills and different perspectives. These differences are the community’s strength. Its recognition of everyone’s inter-dependence is the basis of its security, its innovativeness and its resilience. But community is based on the pooling of each others resources and knowledge together with the learning made possible by the ‘mashup’ of differing views. The bedrock foundation of community remains, however, the ability to listen to one another honestly in an environment of mutual respect and trust.

Canadians have largely forgotten this, so why should it be such a surprise that the members of the House of Commons behave in much the same way. Instead of celebrating its differences, the House tries to eliminate them -- either through the force of party discipline or by the force of ridicule. There is only one possible view – the party leader’s – and all others must be stamped out. Unfortunately such an approach must lead politically to the same inevitable outcome as a lack of diversity does in any ecological system – extinction! If one wants an quick rationale for the public’s disengagement with politics, I would say it’s because they can no longer see themselves reflected in the few narrow, superficial and often irrelevant (to them) perspectives being offered.

Parliament is supposed to be the place where our most important conversations take place. It is supposed to be where all Canadian communities can be represented as a single community to hammer out their shared purpose and common agenda.

It is understandable that the House has declined as the premier place to get a message out to the public as more communication alternatives became available. And with more and more channels available through social media, we can expect further decline in the House’s capacity for information ‘push’. However, this is only a partial explanation for the House’s decline.

More importantly, the House has traditionally been Canada’s foremost forum for Canadians to listen to each others' stories and to encourage their conversation together. It was in fact Canada’s foremost social learning vehicle. But while the potential for this type of learning remains with Parliament -- few bother to make use of it because no one cares to listen any more. Why listen when you already know everything? You already have all the answers you need. The only goal is to dominate the group. Such shallow conceit is not be the basis of community. It is on the contrary the basis of its erosion.

The problem of Parliament is not just a matter of MPs feeling impotent or not caring enough to do something about it, as Paul Dewar suggested. It’s about Canadians relinquishing their ownership in Canadian democracy. We have so delegated our democratic obligations that we assume listening is someone else’s job. We want our entitlements and let someone else take care of the rest. And for all our talk about multiculturalism, we are afraid of diversity; terrified of opening up to someone who doesn’t think like we do; fearful of entertaining the thought that someone else’s perspective might be as valid as our own.

We are like the six blind men and the elephant, where each man argues for a view based on incomplete knowledge. One feels the elephant’s tail and claims it’s a pig. Another feels the leg and says it’s a tree. A third feels the elephant’s side and believes it’s a wall. The fourth feels the trunk and warns it’s a snake. The fifth feels the elephant’s ear and says it’s a fan. The last feels the tusk and believes it’s a spear.

Which of them is correct? The obvious answer is, of course, none of them. But such an answer is only possible from the perspective of seeing the whole picture. But from the different perspectives of men whose senses are not providing them with complete information, they are all correct -- at least partially.

A better question than “who’s right?” is, “what can be a pig, a tree, a wall, a fan, a spear and a snake all at the same time?” What reality is it that allows all six blind men to be correct? This is the perennial challenge for our Canadian community, as much as it has traditionally been for the House. Of course, the only way an accurate and complete picture can emerge is through conversation with one another and through the confidence in each others' claims.

In truth, we elect 308 men and women to the House of Commons, all of whom are partially blind in one way or another. They know some things but not everything. While their collective strength and wisdom (and Canada’s) may be great, it rests on the ability to reconcile the differing truths which they collectively embody. If they can’t listen they can’t learn. If they can’t learn they will continue fighting the same old battles and making the same old mistakes. Unfortunately we don’t have a tin-pot bogeyman to throw out like Egypt and Libya. Our bogeyman is ourselves.

If we won’t spend the time to listen to each other, then how can we expect our elected representatives to do differently?

Rebuilding Trust with the OPS

2010-12-08T09:33:00.000-08:00

The Stacey Bonds story just doesn't seem to be going away. Yesterday, acting chief of police Gilles Larochelle,in announcing that he’d called in the OPP to investigate further allegations of mistreatment at the hands of Ottawa police said, “We have a problem, no doubt about it." And the problem seems increasingly like it's more than just a PR battle.

I would like to say that I have been a great admirer of Chief Vernon White and his seemingly relentless attempts to ensure that The Ottawa Police Service remains connected and in service to Ottawa’s communities. In that light, I believe that the Chief now has a very difficult choice to make as a result of the evidence being released regarding the Stacey Bonds case. That choice will either reaffirm that police officers are members of the community, in service to it; or that police officers hold themselves apart from the community, living under different rules than the rest of us. For White this will also be a personal choice – loyalty to the community or loyalty to the tribe of police officers.

I look at it this way: If I and some friends had roughed up Ms. Bonds in a Mac’s Milk store in the same way the officers did in the police station and the whole thing had been caught on video, the police would have eagerly sought me out, caught me, put me in jail and charged me with physical assault, sexual assault, unlawful confinement and probably a host of other things I can’t think of.

Now here we have several police officers doing the same thing to Bonds. Ah, but you say they were just doing their duty, using legally sanctioned methods to enforce an arrest. Besides, she gets her day in open court to challenge her arrest and the actions of the officers. While Bonds did ultimately have her day in court to contest the officers’ actions, even a cursory review of the video tape evidence presented in court suggests inappropriate behaviour on the part of police officers and charges against her should have been stayed long ago. It should never have gone to court.

That said, the facts aired in court were that she was neither drunk nor behaving inappropriately. In fact, Ontario Court Judge Richard Lajoie found there was no reason for her arrest and detainment in the first place. Further, she did not resist arrest. However, as the station video depicts she was clearly roughed up with several knees to the back, strip searched, and part of her clothing removed in a manner that would be considered sexual assault in any other situation. When she was finally released from jail, she had to suffer the final indignity of wearing only the clothes torn up by police officers.

I am the last person to say we should encumber police with a mountain of rules dictating how to do their job. Clearly we empower them to do nasty things to bad people in the course of keeping us safe and ensuring the public peace. My point is that we do not however, empower police officers to do nasty things to whomever they please, whenever they want. The legal shield officers operate under does not exist when they do not operate within the context of the law. Therefore, when the judge found that there was no basis for Bonds' arrest, that the charges officers brought forward were trumped up, then all of the actions of the officers subsequent to that – the physical assault, the sexual assault, the forcible confinement – were no longer shielded and the officers have no special rights or privileges beyond those of any citizen.

So will Chief White act towards his officers in the same way he would act towards an ordinary citizen in the same situation? In light of the clear video evidence, the officers should be charged with the offenses they so clearly perpetrated. And then they can have their day in court. We do not accept that officers can kill a spouse, rob a store, or deal drugs even if they do so under the cover of being a police officer. Why should we accept the treatment of Bonds as being in the course of duty? Otherwise just being an officer, regardless of whether one is acting in a legally sanctioned manner, puts one in a different category of citizenship – separate, special, and above the law.

And as many have asked, where was the Crown Attorney in all this? Either the Crown Attorney doesn’t look at evidence in the cases being pursued and is therefore grossly negligent and should be removed, OR the Crown Attorney is aware of the evidence and is complicit and an accessory to the charges that should be laid against the officers. Further, as much as I commend the judgment and comments of Justice Lajoie in the Bonds case, why did he not issue summary bench warrants for the officers whose activities were so clearly beyond the pale of their legal authority. He was so acutely aware of the offensive behaviour of the officers he summarily dismissed all charges against Bonds and yet he failed to take action against the officers who committed those actions.

As a citizen, when it comes to the people in the justice system that I empower to wear and use a gun, to employ violence, to suspend my rights at times, and curtail my freedoms, I want to know that these people are of high moral and ethical character. I expect that they are capable of using judgment and good sense, and that I can lay my trust with them. I expect that these people will behave, not as an average person, but in fact better than the average.

In my own experience, the police officers that I’ve had the fortune of knowing have overwhelmingly exhibited this. So it is simply unacceptable to me that there may be officers that are free to behave with the level of abusiveness, thuggery and basic meanness that have been observed in the Bonds case. I would have to consider such behaviour as a social threat. These officers may only represent one or two bad apples, but as a citizen how am I to know which are the good ones and which are the bad?

James Morton, in an op ed piece on November 26th said that “to fix the problems the Bonds case uncovered will be difficult.” I disagree. It will be difficult only if the culture of the legal system continues to see its members as special, separate from the rest of us and somewhat above the law.

If the officers involved were currently facing charges for their behaviour, it is unlikely that others would repeat the same offense. However, the debate so far has been whether the officers involved will be reprimanded or possibly fired as if this was simply an internal HR issue within the Ottawa Police Service. It is not.

Even now, the tribe of police officers is closing ranks around the involved officers to support them. The union is going forward with legal action against Judge Lajoie for airing the video. But such responses only demonstrate that bad behaviour is tolerated by the police culture in which these officers live. Instead, the other officers should be shunning them for tarnishing the reputations of all officers. If these officers are not charged, then what citizens to believe? My only conclusion can be that the law does not apply to them.

Chief White therefore has to make a choice, and soon. Apply the law or not. The more he waits, the more he feeds the perception that officers are separate from the community, above the law, and that their first loyalty is to themselves as a tribe and not to the public. Chief White has invested much time and effort in trying to bridge the gulf between the police and the public. Now it’s crunch time. Was all the previous effort by the Chief just PR? Or did he mean what he said?

The Face-to-Face Complexity of eHealth & Knowledge Exchange

2010-11-25T10:10:00.000-08:00

Blog post by Cameron Norman on Christopher's presentation to the Public Health Agency's Knowledge Exchange forum, November 24, 2010. The talk entitled "Finding the Middle Ground in a Spectrum of Collaboration" explored the challenges of collaborative initiatives which are larger than 25 (the size Lipnick and Stamps suggested [2000] would be the limit of effective small group collaboration) and mass collaborations (100,000+) that utilized stigmergic communication and Linus' Law -- "the more eyeballs the fewer bugs". The need to find the appropriate mix of social media and small group collaborative practices to align with the collaboration's complexity was discussed.

Cavoukian rightly warns but more privacy isn’t the solution

2010-08-23T12:02:00.000-07:00

Policy makers should take heed of the warning from the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner that personal information is already flowing so freely on the Internet and technology is advancing at such a pace that privacy rights legislation “can no longer keep up”.

Ann Cavoukian’s clarion call is, however, not new. Technology specialists and policy wonks have been saying the same thing for the better part of a decade but few legislators have offered much more than token measures of protection. Each time new steps appear to gain ground, newer technologies put privacy further at risk. It is an unwinnable game.

Can we shackle technology development to protect our privacy? No. Can policy makers be reasonably expected to be out in front of new technologies? No. Cavoukian’s response, embodied in Privacy by Design, would make everyone responsible for the privacy of everyone else. No matter how well intended, I believe this would ultimately lead to bad public policy.

I may be in the minority but nevertheless I’ll say it anyway. Privacy isn’t the solution. It is the problem.

Privacy isn’t a right like the right to air, water or food but a modern claim on the state by those who want to benefit from society but remain isolated from it. A lack of privacy in fact can contribute quite positively to community life. It can help develop social capital and knit us together.

If it’s a given, as Cavoukian suggests, that technologies will continue to evolve in ways that increasingly connect people to the world, then our current concept of privacy, which involves each of us living behind impenetrable walls that no one can see through, will inevitably become eroded. So what? Good riddance, I say.

Fifty years ago people had no such concept, let alone any such expectation. It was accepted that family, friends and neighbours would unavoidably learn about what went on in our lives even as we would learn about what went on in theirs. This had its downsides but also its upsides. The lack of privacy certainly had its embarrassing moments when things we’d rather have kept secret got out, but it was a good thing when we were in trouble and needed help. It was good for building friends and neighbours. So it was back then that a lack of complete privacy was simply the accepted price one paid for living together with other people. Absolute privacy was guaranteed only for hermits and recluses.

But, you say, what about all those nasty people who might invade our privacy and cause us harm – they could steal from us, defraud us, libel or slander us, assault us or our families and sometimes even direct hate at us? Don’t we have an expectation, a right even, that we will be protected from such invasions of our privacy?

The hard truth is no. No society, no government can guarantee that no harm will ever come to its citizens. What they can guarantee, however, is a fair system of consequences for those that do cause harm to others, the cornerstone of which is that someone has to be proven guilty of misconduct. Over many hundreds of years we have developed a complex system of laws to deter both those who may harm us and those who might make false accusations of wrongdoing. (For those uninformed of history, it was to seek protection from arbitrary accusation, arrest and seizure that much of our system of justice evolved.) Although we can convict specific people in abstentia, we can’t convict unidentified people.

In addition to our legal system, we have also created, in Canada at least, a system of dealing with convicted wrongdoers that is considered by and large to be fair and humane. Therefore, we need to keep in mind that both our legal and justice systems are already in place to deal with Internet crime regardless of what new technology gets created or how far computers can reach across cyber space.

If we don’t need new laws to combat online crime, why then is it that only 2% of online crimes ever reach a conviction ? The simple answer is privacy itself. In our modern obsession to create electronic walls around ourselves in the name of privacy, we have succeeded in creating an online space where individuals can act anonymously. This has occurred in part because of the cowboy legacy of the early Internet days but more recently it is because of government reluctance to alter policies that in effect provide huge incentives to commit crimes online. Governments have bought into the notion that perfect privacy is somehow achievable in our technology mediated society. And so they have contributed to the creation of risk-free spaces in which people can say anything and do anything without much fear of social consequences.

Added to this are the immense and tantalizing rewards dangled in front of criminals as a result of being able to reach out to billions of people. A .01% success rate in a global Internet scam might yield millions of dollars without ever having to raise a gun or worry about pursuit. It’s no wonder that classic criminal organizations and even nation states are turning to what in the past was considered “white collar crime”. For criminals the Internet is the new gold rush. According to the FBI, the worldwide cost of Internet crime in 2004 was $400B -- a figure that is growing dramatically. Last year in the US alone cyber crime was up 22% over 2008, according to the US Internet Crime Complaint Center, resulting in over half a billion dollars in financial losses.

Isn’t this an argument to strengthen the underpinnings of privacy even more? No. The more individual privacy is strengthened, the more the privacy and the anonymity of criminals are strengthened. Can’t we set up a system where only governments can have access to our information, presumably because we trust them, and criminals can not? Not really. Privacy is privacy. If you’re totally private then you’re not sharing information with friends and family, with the businesses you like, with doctors and hospitals, with your bank, etc. Any database can be hacked and the more concentrated with personal information a database becomes, the more attractive it becomes as a target. In the end, you can’t be partially private any more than you can be partially pregnant. And if you can have perfect privacy and anonymity, then so can criminals.

Besides, even if we could be partially private, a society where governments can know everything about us but we can’t know anything about anyone else, or about government itself for that matter, is not a society most of us would relish living in, as George Orwell so aptly described. Paradoxically, the solution to the privacy issue can only come from increasing individual transparency while complementing it with increases in government transparency. People must ultimately have an ability to see who has harmed them – whether they are criminals, organizations or governments – in order to apply existing legal remedies. This requires more transparency not more privacy.

If privacy is not necessarily a good thing and the lack of privacy is not always a bad thing, then where’s the problem? The problem lies with the harm that a lack of privacy can facilitate from people who can act anonymously. It’s the very asymmetry in the online relationship that is the problem. Criminals can know who we are without us knowing who they are. If, on the other hand, we can create a system in which online activity can not be conducted anonymously, then if someone does do something bad to us (and let’s face it there will always be such people) then the appropriate laws and punishments that are already in place and ready to be applied. Right now this is not the case. People can hide quite successfully online -- despite what popular crime dramas might suggest.

Is such a lack of online anonymity even possible? Absolutely! Every organization with a private intranet knows this. Every user is unambiguously identified and all their actions through their computer can always be traced back to them. In such environments, very few sane people are willing to roll the dice and hope that they won’t get caught. Can the intranet experience be applied more broadly? Yes. The only requirement is to link every person (no exceptions) to a unique online identifier, such as an online equivalent of a social insurance number, so that when you use any computer your actions can be traced back to you and only you.

“Therein lies the rub”, as the Bard would say. Many people like their anonymity. They like to pretend they are someone else online. They like to do things online that they wouldn’t do in the company of their family and friends. They may also fear social censure so they engage in make believe through online aliases and virtual personalities. And unfortunately, some people also like to take advantage of others. What this appears to add up to is that a significant segment of the population would still like to live their lives as irresponsible juveniles and not as mature adults behaving with a clear understanding of their obligations as members of a community. Unfortunately, to change this politicians would probably offend many people, something they are unlikely to do no matter how much good might come of it.

Besides requiring more individual maturity, a more transparent online experience would also require communities to step up their levels of tolerance so that the behaviours of some members, which might be considered unpopular but otherwise harmless, can be accommodated. Some societies, most notably the Japanese, have evolved a sort of polite social blindness when it comes to the behaviours of individual members. Why can’t we?

Cavoukian’s warning about privacy is neither the first nor the last. I believe we should heed it today rather than stick our heads in the sand and pretend everything will work out on its own. But if we choose to act, we shouldn’t get caught up believing the lack privacy is really the problem. The real problem is the harm generated by people who can act with impunity because of their online anonymity. To deal with this, requires more transparency not less, and less anonymity not more for every Internet user -- no matter where they might be located. Only then can we expect the rules of fairness and justice to apply.

Information Overload - Action Deficit

2010-07-24T12:21:00.000-07:00

Lloyd Nimetz, writes in the June 13, 2010 edition of Stanford Social Innovation Review about the gap between our growing access to information and our ability to apply that information to effective action. He says, “action is the next big thing to get changed by the Internet. We’re slowly going to enter another phase of the information revolution, the age of ‘intelligent and organized action’.

How’s it going to happen? ... We need to come up with much more enlightened ways (tools) to organize information to help people find the best actions for them. After reading an article in the newspaper, you should be able to click on an action button that gives you a customized list of the best actions you can do to help. An ever-expanding database of actions should exist as well as complex algorithms churning away in data warehouses to figure out which are the best actions for you based on where you live, the skills you have and the issues you care about.”

I find this is a fundamentally important question - how do you turn the terra bytes of information accessible on the web into useful action?

However, the problem is not quite as straightforward as it sounds because information is often packaged or isolated and it often needs to be contextualized for better understanding and incorporation into social discourse. Information also needs to be churned, ie exposed to multiple perspectives, to produce useful, comprehensive knowledge and hopefully even wisdom. Both contextualization and churn require dialogue -- among people, among organizations, among institutions and among communities. Further, translating that knowledge into needed action is rarely about just individual action and almost always involves collective action and cooperation.

That collective action may take the form of events like the SMS facilitated protests in the Philippines that ousted President Estrada in 2001, or last year's spontaneous protests of the rigged Iranian election results. However, the most significant and chronic problems of human society don't fall neatly into the profile of like/dislike events that these protests typify. Most chronic or 'wicked' problems require the messy coordination of many people with the knowledge, power and resources to contribute to a complex and shared solution. People need to learn together first before solutions become viable.

The notion that reading about an issue like crime or poverty or climate change can generate window popups that direct the reader to actions that feed into pre-established solutions is, well, naive. Complex solutions get generated as a result of shared understandings of a problem evolving, and as those solutions get jointly implemented that shared problem understanding continues to grow, modifying both the nature of the solution and its implementation in due course. It's a continuous learning loop.

If pre-established solutions existed and were effective, then we'd already be using them to solve these issues. If the solution to these problems was simply about throwing more money at it, then governments (which can tax at any level or even print money) would have dealt with them long ago. The problems continue largely because they require the willing cooperation of many people and organizations in a process of distributed governance. In essence, the real problem in translating information to action is that we really don't understand how to work together effectively. So how can the Internet help?

If we think Internet basics, then the Internet allows us to connect, to share information and to coordinate. Therefore, it seems as if there are two routes for translating information into effective action depending on the nature of the action under consideration (even though the exact nature of the action may not be clear at the outset requiring movement along both routes). Some actions are about changing shared understanding while others are more about shared doing.

The first route is the open source, wiki-like approach of stigmergic collaboration which invites large numbers people (tens of thousands to millions of people) to make contributions and then have others affirm, reject or modify those contributions. Stigmergic collaboration does not require prior relationships among the collaborators only simple rules for adding, deleting or changing contributions. This route may be particularly amenable to knowledge-oriented actions like policy formation, collective visioning, or evoling social and cultural norms. One could imagine, for instance, that in response to some undesirable situation, people might be asked to co-create online a different vision of possibility that could be shared among many stakeholders. That shared possibility could then be used as a means to coordinate the commitments, activities, results and mutual accountabilities among those same stakeholders in their offline actions that are directed towards the shared goal.

A second route uses the networking capacities of the Internet to augment more traditional methods of cooperation. Traditional cooperation involves smaller groups of up to 25 people (a limit established by Lipnack & Stamps, 2000) and is heavily relationship based. Typically it requires: trust to be built; understanding of problems and solutions to be shared; mutual commitments of knowledge, resources and authority to be made and verified; mechanisms for joint decision making established; performance feedback loops put in place -- all before collaborators ever undertake anything. This is why large groups do not yield effective cooperation (think Congress or Parliaments). Large groups simply have too many relationships that need to be maintained (n X n-1 relationships). With smaller groups there's time and resources to develop relationships through processes which foster authentic conversation and shared learning.

Here the Internet can be helpful in two ways: a) by catalyzing the human conversations required by connecting together those with knowledge and expertise with those interested in changing the status quo. For example, one might think of match-making services a la Amazon; and b) since effective learning does not occur in large groups and yet the involvement of large numbers of people may still be necessary for social change, the Internet could be helpful to network together many small conversations and dialogues and scale them into larger community-wide, national or international dialogues.

The real challenge I see in all of this is finding the right balance between the at-a-distance networking and sharing via web 2.0 tools and the very human need to reach out and touch someone - intellectually, emotionally and spiritually - as a condition for working together. Our communities are after all living evolving ecosystems and not linear systems like factories.

GovCamp 2010

2010-06-02T06:52:00.000-07:00

Great experience yesterday with Govcamp at the University of Ottawa. Co-hosted by Microsoft and CIPS the event explored the application of web 2.0 and other social media to government and the implications for government transformation, public service renewal, open data, government-business-citizen collaboration, citizen-centred service, public engagement and many other broad topics. This rich conversation, dubbed an 'unconference', was orchestrated by Mark Kuznicki and the team at Change Camp.

Some of the interesting stories emerging from those conversations included:

Seeing the adoption of social media tools as part of an ongoing and fundamental culture change in governments and how they organize themselves as organizations. As speaker David Eaves commented, current governments in Canada tend to operate like Kmart did, seeing itself as only a retailer (it's now defunct) when they should be operating like Walmart which sees itself as a data manger and partner facilitator. The biggest public asset of governments is usually the information they collect. Unfortunately they are neither good at managing that data internally or using it to stimulate public welfare. Speaker Marj Akerley from TBSC emphasized that that the web 2.0 was unquestionably a culture change and not a technology change. This culture change has now been given the formal go ahead with the encouragement of the Clerk of the Privy Council and will only gain ground as policy entrepreneurs across government experiment and share their experiences.

Governments know they do not have the resources to do everything that their citizens want even if politicians say otherwise. The logical consequence of this is to engage citizens and non-government organizations to partner in the work that needs doing, said Guy Michaud, CIO for the City of Ottawa. This is evident in the open data movement that is flourishing in some countries, especially the USA, and in some Canadian municipal governments like Ottawa and Vancouver.

The move to engage citizens more actively in the affairs of government will have significant consequences for rethinking the relationship between governments and their citizens. Engagement happens when there is access to information; when there is sufficient education for online citizenship; when there are multiple avenues for participation; when the conversation is two-way; and when citizens can have evidence that their participation matters. While from the perspective of government getting others to do work that would otherwise be done by government may seem like a great idea, there is a quid for that quo. People will demand greater and greater access to information -- unfiltered information, as is currently the practice, so they can come to their own decisions. That presents a huge risk in the context of our adversarial and some say quite dysfunctional system of governing. Unless greater access to information is also tied to an increased capacity for collective learning and shared accountability, don't expect radical changes, however, to the small and partisan displays of political behaviour.

But citizens will also want a place at the governance table. They will want to contribute to policy and not just be the object of policy formation by others. Power sharing with citizens ... citizens as partners. That may mean more participatory democracy which politicians in Canada have rejected on several occasions. It may mean redefining the role of elected representatives, encouraging them to take on a more convening, educating and facilitating role amongst their publics. It might also mean setting up a parallel system of online conversations to balance parliamentary debates which are increasingly unrepresentative of either Canadians or their learning and working together.

Lastly, a big underlying theme of the day centred on the idea of collaboration: collaborations within governments, across governments, with industry, with NGOs and community groups and with citizens. The non-news was that governments generally don't do collaboration well. However, it was evident that everyone seemed to have some story of successful collaboration and there was agreement that these stories needed to be re-told again and again as a tool for affecting culture change. It also seemed evident that more attention must be given to developing the skills and knowledge for the successful practice of collaboration rather than learning them on the fly.

If we want to make any kind of transformative change, then we have to do it together. And that working together begins like yesterday with a conversation exploring the possibilities and trying to understand our common ground. In that regard, yesterday was a well begun effort towards more collaborative government.

The proceedings yesterday were streamed online via FusedLogic TV. Hopefully they will archive it.

As a secondary resource you might enjoy the following documentary film on social media and mass collaboration, entitled UsNow.

The Necessary Revolution: How individuals and organizations are working together to create a sustainable world, by Peter Senge, et al.

2010-05-06T09:29:00.000-07:00

Don’t be fooled by the title. This isn’t another one of those ‘end of the world’ books on the need to avert climate-change, protect the environment, or fight the effects of peak oil.

The Necessary Revolution is about re-learning how to work together. It is about collaboration over competition, stewardship over leadership, knowledge sharing over information hoarding, empowering the local over coercing its compliance. Senge has used sustainability as a context for this frontal assault on our engrained leadership and management practices that stem from industrial age world views. He refers to the ‘Industrial Age Bubble’ that is fuelled by cheap energy and over abundant financial capital and that is increasing disconnected from Nature, the real world in which we truly live.

I suspect, on the other hand, that one could remove the word ‘sustainable’ and substitute ‘prosperous’, ‘healthy’, ‘peaceful’, or ‘happy’ and still produce essentially the same book, although it would arguably lack some of the energy currently associated with sustainability. The thing is that there are many chronic and complex social problems that have been stymied by our industrial age management practices that demand a revolution, or more appropriately an evolution, in the way human beings cooperate towards their common good.

Our commitment to the Bubble has weakened our resolve to see these problems as anything other than collateral damage on our way to the ‘good life’ and not as the accumulating results of the choices we make daily. Senge demonstrates this in the simulation results obtained from various groups attempting to understand their responses to a shared resource like the fishery. Almost invariably the resource was depleted and the industry died. We’ve forgotten how to cooperate.

Yet in choosing to frame The Necessary Revolution in terms of sustainability, Senge and his co-authors have demonstrated that the needed leadership and management changes can work and are working today -- even in this most contentious and contested field. They show that sustainability, climate change, peak oil are in fact becoming drivers of organizational strategy and renewal in an already august group of companies. And that those drivers demand a different approach.

They have drawn on rich assortment of case stories from Alcoa, Coke, Nike, the US Green Business Council (developers of the new LEED standards), Unilever, Costco, Xerox, BP, Wal-Mart, BMW, Seventh Generation, and many others to show that not only are these new collaborative practices being applied, but they are being done so as core innovative practices to position these companies for new products, new processes and entirely new markets. Senge quotes the dramatically successful USGBC to say that “how we make our decisions is as important as the decisions themselves”. And because increasingly no one organization or person can be said to be in charge, those decisions are being made collaboratively.

At 400 pages the book is moderately long, but over 2/3 of it is focused on how to make those collective decisions that bridge not only departments in a single organization, but also different companies, NGOs, governments -- even low level suppliers in different countries. The book is a treasure trove of ideas and experiences that can be added to anyone’s tool box and brought out as needed in a process of heuristic learning. I highly recommend it.

Economic Development in Ottawa

2010-02-16T12:22:00.000-08:00

In reading Randall Denley’s recent comments[i] about Ottawa's economic development strategy being no strategy at all, I was once again struck by the fact the City just doesn’t seem to get it. It just doesn’t seem to understand that economic development in today’s globalized marketplace is primarily about intra-regional cooperation. That cooperation is essential to create a base of regional competitive advantage that can not be easily imitated by firms elsewhere. To create that regional advantage the City, as economic developer, must act primarily as a facilitator and broker to bring about the cooperation of others. It is not about divining the perfect plan or imposing it on local businesses and institutions.

Ottawa has no major resources of consequence to offer -- no oil, no iron, no timber, etc.. Ottawa is not a major port or transportation hub. Ottawa’s population ranks as the 483^rd largest in the world -- not a particularly compelling size for a stand-alone market. Yet for its small size it does have a comparative advantage from a lot of well educated people. These people have also had a history of producing some good ideas, interesting technology and on occasion some very profitable businesses. However, these days talent, ideas, technologies, even business models can be easily duplicated or reverse engineered in 6-12 months. What that means is that there is nothing in Ottawa (aside from the federal government) that can provide even a modicum of lasting comparative or competitive advantage.

Nothing that is except the complex system in which we choose to organize ourselves as a community to deliver value. That system, technically referred to as a regional innovation system, includes:

how we develop, attract and retain talent,
our culture of entrepreneurship, of risk taking and of sharing resources and knowledge,
the incentives and/or disincentives we apply to businesses that may be tax or non-tax related,
the formal and informal links between our postsecondary institutions and businesses,
the quality and affordability of our homes,
our access to recreational opportunities and the attractiveness of our natural environment,
the safety of our streets, and
the overall quality of our life.

Such a multi-faceted system requires the orchestration of many activities and many interests. The City, unfortunately, has become confused in its development role. It has relinquished its brokering and stewardship role to facilitate development, in favour of assuming a leadership mantle to try and direct development. But in so doing, it often presents itself not as a partner in local economic development but as a competitor or sometimes even as an obstacle.

That some “industry leaders haven't been asked to help” should be of no surprise given Denley’s observation that “councilors seem to fancy themselves experts” in economic development. The thing about experts is that they have tin ears. You can’t tell them anything because they feel they have nothing to learn. And to experts stakeholders are a big nuisance. They are complainers, advocates, whiners, obstructionists and time wasters -- people who should just get out of the way and let the experts get on with implementing solutions. The idea that both councilors and bureaucrats style themselves as experts is fanciful. But that they then forget that they are supposed to be agents working in the interest of these same “stakeholders” is inexcusable.

As a consequence, stakeholders are generally not considered as real partners or potential co-creators of Ottawa’s economic possibilities. In all fairness, however, it is an attitude encouraged by many business leaders themselves who are of the view that the payment of taxes absolves them of any responsibility for attending to the future of Ottawa’s economy or community. But regardless of the cause, this attitude constrains innovation and effectiveness by limiting the understanding and the resources that can be directed at any given problem or opportunity.

The City does have a history with economic development partnerships, although not always a good one. In that history it is easy to point to partner disagreements, lack of trust, unproductive committee meetings, and stalled action and say piously “no more inefficiency”. But rather than improving its collaborative process so that common ground can be found among legitimate claims in conflict, the City seems to prefer conflict free zones and pabulum solutions.

For instance, to avoid potential conflicts in economic development, the City has been “seeking the advice” from exactly five people! While five people represents a workable management team, they can hardly be expected to represent the economic development aspirations of half a million workers and businesses in Ottawa. Nor can they be expected to make commitments on behalf of those same workers and businesses. Thus I suspect Rob Jellett was being a bit sardonic in suggesting that the developers’ recent complaints can be resolved by consulting them as "stakeholders". What difference will that mean? My guess is not much.

As we saw play out in the consultations around the Lansdowne Park development, this typically means that the City pretends to listen and the public pretends that their input will have an impact. Where stakeholders are involved, they are encouraged to act as advocates rather than as contributors to a shared solution, the better for the City to be seen negotiating tradeoffs in a zero sum game rather than in promoting local ownership, stakeholder learning, and shared commitment to synergistic outcomes.

On the other hand, if the City was honest about engaging people they might determine why, how, and under what circumstances business leaders and community groups might be willing to be engaged. Otherwise, the City will be unable to deliver the fundamentals of good engagement practice, which are:

ensuring adequate access to relevant information;
providing multiple avenues for people to engage in;
ensuring dialogue and a two-way conversation; and
demonstrating to citizens that they are actually being listened to.

Denley suggests that “There is no excuse not to listen”, but there is also no excuse to pretend to listen either. Why would anyone voluntarily waste their time in such an effort?

To really engage its stakeholders and the public, the City needs to believe that its business and institutional leaders have something valuable to contribute and it must be willing to treat them as authentic partners. It has been a while now since that sort of thing has happened in Ottawa.

As Denley described, Ottawa’s existing "strategy" is “a bunch of useless generalities”. Why? Because a targeted strategy requires a sense of future possibility, of where the community wants to go. No such vision has been in evidence in Ottawa for quite some time. We create visions and then disregard them. We establish principles and then ignore them. The City’s policy seems to be, “never let visions get in the way of expediency”. And this happens again and again because the only one making a commitment is the City or at least that’s how it is perceived.

What is truly absent in Ottawa’s economic development strategy is a sense of the shared possibility that must of necessity animate an effective economic development strategy. Such a vision is grounded in mutual understanding and implemented by the mutual commitments made among those who choose to live into that shared future. Such understanding, commitments and vision, only emerge from culturing a sense of belonging not from exclusion; from fostering ongoing dialogue among stakeholders not from shutting it down.

From this perspective, the City’s core economic development focus has to be grounded in efforts towards building a community -- because in the end it’s the community that will create the future. But as Caroline Andrew recently pointed out,[ii] "the leadership that makes other cities work is bigger than the public sector. It is a coalition with the private sector and civil society, which Ottawa doesn't have." The sense of togetherness is sorely lacking.

Diversification away from the federal government and developing an economic base founded on clean energy and environmental friendly technologies is a development choice and probably a reasonable one. But it will be a choice made by the people and businesses of Ottawa (if it is made at all) not by City councilors or bureaucrats. What the City can and should do, however, is invest more in the conversations between people that bring them together. Yes it may messy and it may take time. But it’s a necessary investment if you’re going to build a community rather than an infrastructure.

[i] Randall Denley, “Ottawa's economic development strategy is no strategy at all”, The Ottawa Citizen, Feb. 14, 2010

[ii] Mohammed Adam, “What's wrong with this city and how it can be fixed”, The Ottawa Citizen, November 16, 2009

Post Secondary Education in Canada

2010-02-11T13:54:00.000-08:00

Put a frog in boiling water and it jumps out immediately. Put a frog in cold water and gradually turn up the heat, and eventually it gets cooked.

In comparison to the breath taking nature of the recent economic freefall or fearfulness of the predictions of a climate change catastrophe, questions regarding the effectiveness or sustainability our system of postsecondary education (PSE) may seem positively straightforward for clearly they have taken a back seat. However, the slow but relentless transition taking place seems destined to leave us in the same place as the frog -- cooked.

In Saskatchewan, for instance, the Province has pulled funding from the First Nations University over concerns about governance at the school, including allegations of political interference from the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations. Repercussions from the provincial move have now resulted in a withdrawal of funding from the federal government due to their clear lack of mandate to pursue matters of education independently.

The federal government has also axed two prominent national education bodies, reflecting a similar attitude of strict adherence to constitutionally allocated powers and withdrawal from matters deemed provincial or local – regardless of whether or not a national interest exists. Together the moves lessen the possibility of achieving a national voice on education, just at a time when a national voice seems to be most needed.

The most recent of these was the termination of funding for the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), which since 2004 had tried to present a pan-Canadian view of Canada’s patchwork of provincial education systems through national programs of data collection and analysis. Not surprisingly, in one of its final reports, the CCL suggested that Canada lacked a national standard by which to judge post-secondary education because Canadians don't understand what "quality post-secondary education'" should be.

Earlier the government terminated the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation (CMSF) established by the previous Liberal government. Long criticized by the provinces for its unilateral implementation, it provided grants to low-income students and researchers. It will be replaced with a new (read non-Liberal) Conservative programme for low-income Canadians only.

Last fall many of Canada’s universities and colleges were upset by a proposal from five of the country's largest universities to concentrate funding for research and graduate studies with the biggest of Canada’s universities in order to make better use of public resources. Given that faculty at Canadian universities are expected be both researchers and teachers, it was felt that such a diversion of public monies to the already large institutions would weaken the quality of education for the majority of students who attend Canada’s many smaller universities and colleges. Some universities, like those in Atlantic Canada, felt that their entire region could be shut out of graduate studies if research dollars were not more evenly spent.

All of this of course is taking place on the background of a precarious economic recovery that is having important effects on both revenues and expenditures in the postsecondary sector, according to a recent report by the Educational Policy Institute[i].

The report, entitled On the Brink, warns that post-secondary education in Canada is about to lose significant ground in terms of universal access and affordability together with its pursuit of excellence. The report identifies four major concerns:

"The collapse in equities affects institutions' endowments and pension liabilities thus reducing income and increasing expenditure in the short-term.
Two or three years out, significant cuts in government operating grants to institutions can be expected as governments try to bring budgets out of deficit which, in turn, will result in a number of challenging financial years ahead for universities and colleges.
The worsening of labour market conditions will affect student income and cause student aid budgets [and student debt] to balloon.
The real-economy recession will create new patterns of post-secondary attendance (rising college and graduate school enrolment; falling apprenticeship registrations) which will both raise institutional costs."

Consequently, PSE institutions will be faced with rising costs and shrinking budgets. They will "need help in the short-term to reduce their cost-base and diversify their revenues", according to the EPI. Without it postsecondary institutions are likely to see:

Hiring freezes for full time staff;
An increased use of part time and sessional staff, which already dominates baccalaureate education;
Larger class sizes;
Reductions in graduate scholarships;
Cuts to library spending; and
Deferred maintenance on buildings and equipment.

That’s not all, however. The recent recession’s impact will only be the opening salvo in a longer term squeeze on PSE institutions, because of the broader socio-economic shifts that will accompany the retirement of a large cadre of baby boomers – a shift that will further tighten government budgets, budgets that are in hock for at least a decade as result of spending their way out of the recession.

Proportionally fewer fulltime workers will be paying taxes and more retired people will be claiming higher health care and pension benefits, a combination that is very likely constrain governments from re-investing in post-secondary education. Education may well become a second tier priority. In fact, the EPI suggests that we are now entering an “era of permanently declining per-student revenues”.

Postsecondary education has become what Rittel and Webber referred to as a ‘wicked problem’[ii], as there is no clear understanding of the nature of the PSE problem, how its contributing factors all fit together, or even the end state that PSE should deliver to us. Nor is there a clear understanding of the means by which PSE can deliver what we might want. Both the problem and its potential solution are constantly evolving and consequently both means and ends must be learned simultaneously.

This is ultimately and ironically the challenge of Canada’s post secondary institutions – how to shift them and the network that they collectively comprise into a learning system.

How do you do that? How do you entice or compel organizations which by nature are competitive in their pursuit of public and private resources? How do you align their individual organizational interests with those of students, communities and Canadian society as a whole? How do you encourage their cooperation to achieve a greater collective benefit while discouraging the self-interested, rational action and the social traps that that type of behaviour may produce?

The recent Ontario report, Academic Transformation[iii] by Clark et al., is clear in its assessment that the combined PSE focus on accessibility, national productivity, limited resources and quality education is fundamentally “not sustainable”. Paquet, in his treatment of the Ontario situation as a governance failure[iv], suggests that to accommodate the diversity of expectations regarding post secondary education, governments must let go of their adherence to a formulaic delivery model – ie. all universities are the same, all colleges are the same – in favour of a more variegated and localized system that is capable of making best use of local advantages of resources, talent, needs, and knowledge. What both say must ultimately give way is the concept of autonomy for PSE institutions in favour of “government action to ensure appropriate capacity, structures and processes”.

While the governments of BC and Alberta seem to be making small steps towards fostering the requisite variety in PSE, Ontario and the other provinces remain securely in thrall of that bureaucratic mindset that mistakenly presumes universal access and equality of inputs are the same as the equity of outcomes – the latter being so much harder to regulate. Yet even granting the progress in BC and Alberta, is the solution of PSE reform simply a matter of finding the ‘right’ leadership to see the wisdom of additional intervention in PSE, and the willingness to impose a redesign of the system on recalcitrant institutions? In my mind, that puts a lot of faith in government to do the right thing, something the vast majority of Canadians seem to lack[v].

As it is there is no national public strategy around education and, as the CCL has reported, no clear definition of what quality education is or how it should serve the public interest. The voices and interests of students, citizens and communities remain peripheral to the focus of policy formation which itself remains dominated by budgetary concerns, ideology and the educational flavour of the month. Where stakeholders are involved, they are encouraged to act as advocates rather than as contributors to a shared solution, the better for governments to be seen negotiating tradeoffs in a zero sum game rather than in promoting stakeholder learning, local ownership and synergistic outcomes.

I would suggest that confidence among PSE leaders that governments can make the right choices in this regard is not high, to say the least. Political agendas are purely political and dominated by political positioning. They are not about solving problems, educational or otherwise. Political elites no longer speak out for public education but for the narrow interests that elect them. The public sector, obsessed as it is with top-down consultation and the manipulation of public opinion, demonstrates little capacity to authentically engage people and institutions across diverse and often competing interests. Even when governments are seen to act, it is generally for the short term. And unless you are one of the handful of Canadians that belief in government infallibility, the general perception is that governments are incapable of continuous learning or even to recognize honest mistakes, making the possibility of incremental progress on PSE almost unrealizable.

Our traditional system of Westminster democracy has proven to be inadequate for the type of complex challenge represented by reform in the PSE sector. Due to its adversarial nature, governments refuse to establish priorities or to make choices for fear of providing hard targets for the opposition. In addition, the stewardship role of public servants, long seen as the last bastion for the protection of the public’s interest, is increasingly being eroded and the provision of service to citizens is rarely a priority. Said one college executive recently, “I have never heard in any discussion among public servants the idea that citizen interests should be foremost”. Instead, careerism has become the predominant public sector ethos.

While many people in big governmental bureaucracies may claim to be in control, especially at election time, there is no one who is really in charge[vi]. And if no one is in charge, who is it then that can impose systemic change on PSE in a way that can make the best use of resources to pursue the shared goals of society? It would seem that even though Clark et al. have accurately identified the key problems in the PSE sector and even the necessary reforms, their reliance on governments to provide the vital leadership seems a bit of wishful thinking.

However, the corollary of the “no one is in charge “view is that everyone is. Let me say this again to let it sink in. If nobody is in charge of the PSE sector – that is, not politicians, ministry bureaucrats, college and university presidents, faculty, business nor community groups – then they all are. Since they are all contributing in some way or other to the status quo, they can all begin to contribute to a solution. To rephrase a popular slogan from the 60s, “if you’re not part of the problem, then how can you expect to be part of the solution”. This means a solution, if it is to be found, can begin with any of them. They don’t have to wait for someone else to fix things for them. All they have to do is start.

As simple as it sounds starting begins with a conversation. Given that a community fundamentally takes its shape from the conversations that take place within it among its citizens and residents[vii], if you want to change any aspect of a community you need to change the nature of those conversations. The critical question for PSE reform, therefore, lies in the ability to foster an authentic dialogue across many communities on the role, value and nature of quality education.

In this regard PSE institutions have a distinct, initial advantage over governments, businesses and even not-for-profits because they retain significantly higher levels of social trust. They are more readily accepted as neutral brokers and as social conveners. But most importantly, it is in their very nature. Just as water wets, PSE institutions are places where ideas may discussed, debated, challenged, and even turned on their head.

So while Clark et al may be right in assuming that post secondary institutions will not change of themselves, given the incentives of the system and the very intense competition for resources, they may very well be in a position to foster the necessary dialogue to shift conversations to a level where supportive governmental action can then become possible.

That process must of necessity be a collaborative one, one that inspires joint ownership and shared possibility. It must also be able to envision a future for PSE institutions that they, students, parents and communities would want to live into. And with that process governments would have no option but provide support for PSE reform for fear of losing their own legitimacy.

As one provincial Deputy Minister commented to me, “What holds us back as a society are the people at the margins – the poor, the uneducated or illiterate, the people with ill health. If we can develop local solutions that are more effective and cheaper at reaching those on the margins our society will benefit immensely.” But my sense is that responsibility for that challenge rests primarily with PSE institutions and their ability to catalyze the conversations that can reshape what we think is possible.

This week

Canada

is open to the world as host of the 2010 Winter Olympics. For the next few weeks we will be inundated with the experiences of those who have pursued excellence to its limits. It is an attitude we urgently need among all our post secondary institutions. Bronze is not good enough in today’s world. We need to go for the Gold!

[i] Alex Usher and Ryan Dunn, On the Brink: How the recession of 2009 will affect post-secondary education, Educational Policy Institute – Canada, February 2009

[ii] Rittel, Horst, and Melvin Webber; "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning," pp. 155-169, Policy Sciences, Vol. 4, Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Inc., Amsterdam, 1973.

[iii] Clark Ian D., Moran, Greg, Skolnik, MichaelL., Trick, David, “Academic Transformation: The Forces Reshaping Higher Education in Ontario” McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal/Kingston, 2009

[iv] Paquet, Gilles, “Ontario Higher Education as Governance Failures”, Optimum Online, March 2010

[v] EKOS Research, Trust in Government, 2008

[vi] Cleveland, Harlan, Nobody in Charge, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2002

[vii] Block, Peter. Community: The Structure of Belonging, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, 2008

Please Mr. President, where’s the “we”?

2010-01-24T10:15:00.000-08:00

This week the American public sent a strong rebuke to their President. The Senate seat that has been both Democratic and Kennedy since 1952 was lost to Republican Scott Brown. To the conservative press this is vindication that Americans were hoodwinked into making the wrong choice in 2008. For the Democrats the shock of a 30% vote swing in the bluest of blue states has yet to wear off, but the question each of them must be wondering is why?

Democratic Senator Bob Casey suggested in an interview with Fox News yesterday that the main message from the Massachusetts election is the need to focus on the economy, the frustrations about job growth, and the perception that Washington isn't listening.

My sense is that the frustration goes much deeper than that. The frustration is more akin to a sense of betrayal on the President’s main election platform. This may be intentional, but I doubt it. I suspect it is due more to a lack of appreciation about the nature of the very profound bargain Obama actually made with the American people. To be sure he made promises about the war in Iraq; about health care; about getting the US out of its economic mess; and about getting people back to work. To be honest he really can’t be faulted for his aggressive pursuit of this agenda from day one, in stark contrast to the laissez-faire approach to problems adopted by his predecessor. So why the discontent?

Since assuming the Presidency, the economic and international policies of his Administration have not differed greatly from his predecessor. Sone might suggest his health care reforms do, except that they have become so watered down as to become mere incrementalism at best. Groups from the left or right debate his strategies and his successes, but honestly one year is hardly sufficient to make much of a dent in the issues he has been grappling with. So why the headlong flight from the President’s tent?

All this does not come close to explaining what has the President in trouble with his own constituency. The previous President, for instance, was duplicitous and subject to course reversals on many fronts, without his core constituency beginning to desert him. So again why is Obama apparently being abandoned?

To answer this one needs to keep in mind that the promises about the war, health care, the economy -- these were not the ones that got the President elected. Barrack Obama was elected on the basis of three words. “Yes we can”. In so many ways these three words resonated deeply in the consciousness of Americans and people all around the world.

Yes we can: be reassured you’re not alone.

Yes we can: don’t be afraid. No problem is too big that we can not tackle it together.

Yes we can: because the problem is not for someone else to solve for us but for us to solve together.

Yes we can: because we don’t have to wait. We can begin to make changes from today.

Yes we can: because each and every one of us can contribute ideas, energy and resources.

Yes we can: because the government doesn’t have all the answers, it is not per se “in charge”. In fact the government is dependent on every one of us to assume a level of leadership.

Yes we can: because we are all decision makers and owners in this collective enterprise.

Yes we can: because while the solution may begin with us, we can trust that the government will be by our side.

Yes we can: because we as a people have a long history of working out our differences so that together we can build a better future.

Yes we can: because we are not special interests but we all of us together: men and women, young and old, rich and poor, tenth generation and new immigrant, First Nations people and all who have come afterwards.

Yes we can: because we are all willing to share in the burden of creating a new future and assume a commitment to each other for that future.

Yes we can: because we are not trying to fix the problems of and in the past but we are working towards constructing a new American future.

Yes we can: because we are filled with hope – a hope founded on the strength of our togetherness.

At the time, Barrack Obama may have only meant “we” the Democratic Party or his future administration. He may only have meant a small cadre of advisors and leaders. Whatever his meaning, that was certainlky not what the American people heard. Among those long accustomed to leaders who sought power for themselves, who led for some and not others, who showed little concern for the problems of the people, who showed no remorse for their lies and their tactics of manipulation over people they had promised to represent, “yes we can” was received as nothing less than an offer for a new moral contract between the citizenry and their government. “Yes we can” was an offer of partnership over patriarchy; stewardship over leadership; and an offer to return to democratic principles over the mutated version that democracy has become.

Americans were thirsty for this change. The new social contract Obama offered seemed like water in the desert. They willingly embraced him as the vehicle for re-assuming the power of their own citizenship.

Consequently, the very fact that the process of governance has not perceptibly changed since the Bush Administration may seem to some as evidence that Americans may voted for the right idea but the wrong person.

I would suggest that this amounts to breaking the profound but subtle moral contract he made with Americans during his election. Where is the “we” in his speeches and remarks today that was so ubiquitous and inclusive on the campaign trail? Mr. Obama became President Obama, the leader of the free world, and leaders must of a sense take the bull by the horns and lead, yes? That’s unfortunately where the problem lies.

He didn’t get elected on the basis of taking charge. He got elected on the basis of an expectation that he could facilitate everyone else taking charge. The President may have been overcome by the great demands of each day and found it easier to fit in with long established traditions. He may have been seduced by leadership power offered by the Presidency. Yet his contract with Americans positioned him as a collaborative leader and champion of the significant cultural change – the social learning, the new attitudes, arrangements, and conventions -- that were implied by “yes we can”.

Instead, the president seems increasingly identified with the traditional role of leadership which Americans so obviously wanted to change. In doing so, he knowingly or unknowingly steals the right of ownership, the right to make a difference, from everyone who elected him. In his administration it is not “yes we can” but “yes I can”.

I’m in no position to judge whether this breach was accidental or intentional. I am willing to give the President the benefit of the doubt. Power is after all very seductive especially when it is willingly offered. But if he is to avoid being judged harshly in future polls and by history, he needs to begin using his position to demonstrate the truth and power of “yes we can”. In a sense he needs to stop trying to have all the answers, and have faith that the answers he needs can and will be found among the many Americans willing to step forward and share his burden. Whether he realizes it or not the American project has become fundamentally more participatory.

Americans every day are doing incredible things together to better their children, their economy, their environment, their communities and for each other. The Office of the Presidency has a power like no other to showcase these collaborative actions to the nation and to the world. To do so would reaffirm the power of “yes we can”. Alternatively, if Americans are resisting what appears to many to be a top down implementation of health care, then he should walk away in favour of facilitating a process in which all Americans can see that they have the opportunity to shape a system of health care bottom up. Why impose a system and prove that Americans can’t? Of what use is winning the Senate battle on health care, if you lose the trust of the nation?

Whatever he does, he needs to recognize the need for restoring trust. The President made a fundamental contract for change, “yes we can”, and then apparently reneged. In his campaign he successfully called forth the spirit of all the things that make America and Americans great but in his recent actions he has tried to put that spirit back in a box. But it just won’t go. Americans want to realize the truth of it, “yes we can”.

Christopher Wilson, January 23, 2010

Looking For a Fresh Start in Ottawa

2010-01-07T07:56:00.000-08:00

Over the last two months, The Ottawa Citizen has published a number of stories, editorials and op-ed pieces that have underscored the dysfunctional nature of municipal government in Ottawa. In particular, with the onset of municipal election season, various writers have pointed to few mayoral and councilor candidates with truly leadership caliber.

My question is whether anyone has assembled any leadership criteria that could be used to assess candidates to lead Council and the municipal bureaucracy towards the kind of future the citizens of Ottawa think they might like have (leaving aside for the moment a legacy of complete absence of shared vision for the city). What kind of skills or competencies should we expect of these candidates? How will we judge one candidate from another? In any other hiring process we would begin by assessing a candidate’s skills and then judging whether the candidate can adjust to the needs of a new organizational context. So why, as Denley suggested November 19th, can’t we do the same with our municipal leaders?

If readers will allow, let me make a first attempt. Right off we should, as Gray warned January 6th, avoid those would-be “politicians with simple solutions [who] are charlatans treating the electorate as fools. If solutions were simple, the problems would already be solved.”

Equally offensive in my mind are those that claim to have all the answers. Typically these are the big appendage swinging leaders who claim to be “in-charge” and whose leadership style usually consists of some combination of patriarchy, exerting dominance, finding fault but avoiding blame, promoting division and fear, and exacting retribution. On December 23rd, Gray said that “Council needs compromise, not division.” But coherence in Council will not come by electing a bunch of aspiring Napoleons.

Those Napoleons are the romanticized “white-knight” leaders who we believe will save us from ourselves. When we are unwilling to make hard choices (which is often), then we call upon the white knights to make them for us so we can stay in our perpetual dream-state of entitlement. In reality, however, anyone claiming they can “take charge” of the municipality is either woefully ignorant of the complexity of many local issues or a petty tyrant waiting to prey upon a rather naïve citizenry. If we are truly looking for new leaders, we should see if any candidates in a moment of honesty come forward publicly and say they don’t have all the answers … but they’d work with people in the community to try and find them and continually report on their progress in doing so.

In my mind, we don’t need “serious leaders”. We need an entirely new kind of leader – a collaborative leader capable of guiding – not directing or managing -- our diverse community through a long list of complex issues. I think Roy Thomas was on the right track when he said on November 30th that “the required leadership at the municipal level is not authoritative or dictatorial but persuasive.” So here is my list of competencies that I would expect from more “persuasive” candidates in the next election.

To begin with they would need to be effective listeners and learners. Our most common way of listening is not listening to others at all but listening to our own internal dialogue. We need leaders who in listening are open to what is possible; to what is may be different but true for someone else; to what they and others contribute to a problem; and to that perspective which is whole and common to each. Such leaders can detect reason in all claims in conflict, recognize the particular legitimacy of each, sense where the grounds of concord are, and bring competitors into a shared sense of what is possible. We don’t need to elect more experts. Experts have nothing to learn so their expertise turns into a serious learning disability.

The people we need should be more stewards than traditional leaders because they would recognize the distributed nature of the power, knowledge and resources in council, within the municipal bureaucracy and across the community. Stewards support the decision making of others and since most of the major decisions this community faces require some form of willing cooperation, the quality of stewardship is much more in demand than any ability to dictate or coerce.

These leaders should be committed democrats willing to encourage local residents to take ownership and accept responsibility for their own conditions and actions. To paraphrase a popular 60s slogan, “if you’re not part of the problem, then how can you expect to be part of the solution”. Denley suggested (January 5th) the leaders we need should help to restore the public's faith in our own self governance, but to do so they will need to put more information, resources, and decision making in the hands of those closest to an issue or problem. They need to see themselves as agents of the people not their master.

We need to elect placed-based, collaborative leaders who have a powerful commitment to Ottawa not to specific causes or problems; not to specific ideologies or political parties; and certainly not to narrow interest groups. They won’t be expected to provide us with a readymade vision, but they would be expected to act as animateurs capable of facilitating its collective emergence.

They must be conveners. They should be able to use the various forms of their own power (authority, reward, coercive, expert or referent) to bring people together in as many ways as possible, but they should also not be afraid to use the power of others to bring people together as well. This community is made of many people with many talents.

The people we need to elect should be boundary-crossers, willing to work across traditional organizational boundaries, who are not bound or intimidated by ‘turf’ struggles and whose commitment to end results can be shared with others as a kind of partnership glue. "The leadership that makes other cities work is bigger than the public sector,” said Caroline Andrew in a November 16th article. “It is a coalition of the private sector and civil society, which Ottawa doesn't have." We desperately need someone to bridge this gap.

As a consequence, the leaders we elect should also be coalition builders able to enunciate a bigger picture and regional possibility, one that has the power to draw in the commitments of others in the pursuit of a different community future. They would also need to be masters of 360 degree accountability up, down and across the community.

We need people who are integrators and systems thinkers, who can see the interdependence among the many issues, organizations and sectors of the community. Transportation, economic development, social inequity, cultural vitality are all interdependent phenomena. Our new leaders need to be more than simple, problem solving, fix-it men, taking the knowledge of the past to recreate it in the future. They need to be facilitators and communicators of a community possibility that would allow us all to begin living into it even from today.

There is no doubt that the people we need should be risk takers, innovators, and entrepreneurs, willing to apply the same entrepreneurial spirit that we have seen time and again in our native start-up companies but applying it instead to the betterment of Ottawa. They would not be, as Denley suggested on January 5th, the type of risk-averse, careerists who put their own interest above the community. They would, however, embrace partnerships, citizen empowerment and innovative service over patriarchy, dependence and entitlement.

They would also need to be champions of change, not it’s directors or micro-managers. They should be able promote collaboration among groups of stakeholders through ongoing dialogues and local forums. They would not, as Denley described December 27th, “reduce their colleagues to props” but raise them up as the co-creators of change that they are. Such leaders would not take credit for the efforts of groups, but they would repeatedly benefit from their willingness to give credit where credit is due.

They would be process designers, designing cooperative processes without prejudicing their outcomes, because they understand that it only through the authentic ownership by community partners that effective solutions will be invented, implemented and achieved.

The people we need to elect should see themselves as leaders of cultural change within the City administration and within the community at large. They need to be able to model in their own behaviour and actions the same kind of cooperation, social learning, attitudes, and conventions that will be needed by citizens and organizations of all stripes in this community.

Lastly, they would have to be effective educators because the collaborative capacities and partnership skills we so urgently require are just not in common currency. In our modern condition, we have lost much of our knowledge of how to work together. We have adopted autonomy over community; indulgence over service; entitlement over ownership. We have come to expect our leaders should be more than human and that as citizens it is our God given right to have something for nothing. We have generally forgotten that as a community it is our mutual commitments that ultimately sustain us, provide us with homes and a future to build towards.

The big questions for the next election remain, as Mohammed Adam noted December 28th, “where are the dynamic new leaders going to come from and, [even] if they emerge, will voters back them?” What’s our level of deserving? Do we as citizens still want the snake-oil messiahs to come and pretend to relieve us of the responsibilities for our lives and community? Or will we accept our own contribution to this city’s dysfunction, its lack of creativity, its indecisiveness, and its mediocrity and choose a group of leaders who will listen to us, work with us, prod us, and even chasten us in order to help find a path out of our mess? My cynical bet is on the former but I’m eager to be proved wrong.

An Elephant in the Room?

2009-08-19T08:53:00.000-07:00

Having followed the Ottawa Citizen throughout the summer, I have been surprised by the absence of what would appear to be one the bigger stories of the year, that is, if you consider civilization altering stories significant.

According to Abdalla Salem El-Badri [1], Secretary General of OPEC, world demand for oil in 2030 is likely to increase 25% to 106 million bpd from 84.2 million bpd in 2009 (a demand estimate that was revised downwards from last year). At the same time Dr Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the respected and conservative International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, warns [2] that production from existing oil wells is declining at a rate of 6.7% per year. If you do the math, then by 2030 today’s wells will be producing over 60 million bpd less. This demand-supply gap is huge -- potentially as large as the global total of this year’s oil consumption!

Since 1984 oil production has continually surpassed new oil discovery. As a result, “even if demand remained steady, the world would have to find the equivalent of four Saudi Arabias to maintain production, and six Saudi Arabias if it is to keep up with the expected increase in demand between now and 2030,” cautioned Dr. Birol. As per the US Energy Information Administration (EIA)[3], Saudi oil production was 11 million bpd in 2008 or approximately 10 times the amount of oil being produced from Alberta’s oilsands. The likelihood of suddenly finding six new Saudi Arabias worth of oil in the next few years and bringing them online at full capacity is “almost certainly impossible”, says the UK government’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil (APPGOPO).

The good news is that this demand for energy is likely to drive major global efforts towards the development of renewables and other alternative, clean energy sources. As a consequence, we could potentially see Canada’s contribution to GHGs and climate change reduced. However, experts like David Hughes of Canadian Geological Survey[4], suggest the scale of the energy required to replace oil is so large “renewable energy technologies cannot hope to fill the energy-demand void left by hydrocarbons,” especially in Canada given the minor position they currently hold, roughly 5% of our total energy supply [5].

To facilitate an appreciation of the scale of oil energy being consumed annually around the world, consider 1 cubic mile of oil (cmo). At today's rates, oil consumption is approximately 1.3 cmo. One cubic mile of oil is the equivalent of any of the following operating for 50 years: 4 Three Gorges dams; or 104 coal fired electricity plants; or 32,850 wind turbines; or 52 nuclear power plants; or 91,250,000 solar panels. Alternatively, to completely replace 1 cmo with roof top solar panels, for instance, would require 4,562,500,000 panels at an estimated cost of $68 trillion and an area of 64,000 sq. km[6] -- roughly the area of New Brunswick.

The bad news is that this demand-supply gap is just as likely to trigger massive use of high intensity carbon-based energy such as coal-to-liquids, shale oil, oilsands, and ethanol – in fact anything we can get our hands on to burn. It is already evident that when the economy is hurting governments will ignore everything else, including climate change and environmental degradation, to ease the immediate economic pain of their citizens. Our own Canadian government is just getting used to the language of climate change and its commitment to it is untested. Should the economy once again falter, it is likely the government would do anything to alleviate concerns for economic stability, including massive federal infusions to the Alberta oilsands project, regardless of the climatic repercussions.

Why can’t we just invest more money to find new oil and gas reserves and bring them online? Well in truth that’s what every energy company the world over has been trying to do. However, from a global perspective oil discovery peaked in 1965 and has been on a steady downward trend ever since. We’re using hydrocarbon energy far faster than we can pull it out of the ground. Canada, for instance, has been drilling for gas like crazy in recent years but our gas reserves have been on a steadily declining treadmill nonetheless.

The most likely consequence of a supply shortfall will be the destruction of oil demand. If demand greatly exceeds supply, then oil prices will go through the roof, even more so than they did in 2008. This will, of course, have ramifications on the costs of food, transportation, manufacturing, tourism, and just about every other area of economic activity. The global economy, which at the moment has been pumped up on the steroids of public bailouts, will once again stall from a lack of cheap energy. Given that just about every government in the world has just put itself in hoc for decades to try and climb out of the current recession, when the next decline hits, maybe within five years, there will be no money for bailouts and it is likely to be quite painful. It will also slow oil investment and further strangle the future flow of oil from new sources.

However, any economic contraction will only partially dampen oil demand, as most of the demand growth is coming from increasingly prosperous and populous countries like Brazil, China and India. As these countries become more affluent, they naturally want the same energy consuming goods and services we have in Canada. We along with other western countries will be hard pressed to refuse them. If demand continues to grow and supply continues to contract as the IEA suggests, then at some point, the stage will be set for high prices, oil rationing or even major national conflicts over the remaining oil supplies.

We can expect therefore crash programs around coal and oilsands. These will be the cheapest and quickest to undertake in the short term. Nuclear is too expensive, as the Ontario government concluded this summer, wind and solar just aren't scalable, and big hydro projects take too long to complete. Canada can expect intense pressure from its southern neighbour to rapidly ramp up oilsands production, no matter how much natural gas is re-directed from eastern Canadian homes in winter or how dry the Athabasca river becomes. And don't expect Russia to back down from any face-off in the Arctic when the absence of ice makes oil drilling there feasible. Control of oil and gas is real power, and the Russians have already demonstrated both their understanding of that power and their willingness to use it.

Our economy, our food supply, our very civilization depends on access to vast amounts of energy which we have largely obtained from oil. The era of cheap oil and all that depends on cheap oil will soon be over. Just to reiterate, based on current IEA production estimates from existing wells, the supply gap will be larger than all the oil the world consumed in 2008. Think about it. Is it really rational to think that we can quickly develop a production capacity from new sources of oil or oil substitutes greater than today’s total – a capacity that took a century to put in place? Are we likely to find the trillions upon trillions of investment dollars needed? And can we do it in such an uncertain economy to boot?

In Canada, there is a growing chorus of prominent voices warning of peak oil, people like David Hughes, Thomas Homer-Dixon, and Jeffrey Rubin, the former chief economist for the CIBC, but there remains an eerie silence from politicians of all stripes in Canada, as well as from the media on the subject. In contrast to climate change this seems like the elephant in the room.

In the UK, it’s quite the opposite. The APPGOPO has recommended the Government put in place safeguards not only against energy price increases, but also against outright scarcity of fuels, while simultaneously creating an energy rationing system and reducing national dependence on fossil fuels. It also recommended that all these strategies be in place and be tested well in advance of energy shortages. Describing the need as “urgent”, “essential” and “non-negotiable”, the APPGOPO exhorted “Governments and other institutions to move beyond research and into development of effective frameworks to achieve a rapid phase-down in emissions, while reducing demand for fossil fuels and ensuring fair entitlements to energy as the economy moves into deepening energy scarcity.” Says Malcolm Wicks, the UK Prime Minister’s Special Representative on International Energy, “there is no room for complacency”[7].

So why are we so complacent? What are our options and why aren’t we talking about this? If the probability exists that in the near term Canadians could not only be saddled with sky high oil and gas prices, but also with no oil and gas at all, then isn’t this topic worthy of national debate?

^{^[1]}Sarah Arnott, “Demand for oil in the OECD will not recover until 2013, says OPEC”, The Independent, 9 July 2009 accessed at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/demand-for-oil-in-the-oecd-will-not-recover-until-2013-says-opec-1738086.html

^{^[2]} Steve Connor, “Warning: Oil supplies are running out fast” The Independent, 3 August 2009 accessed at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/warning-oil-supplies-are-running-out-fast-1766585.html

[3] US Energy Information Administration-Saudi Arabia-Oil Accessed at http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/Saudi_Arabia/Oil.html

[4] David Hughes, “The Energy Issue: A More Urgent Issue Than Climate Change”, in Thomas Homer-Dixon, Carbon Shift, Random House, Toronto, 2009

[5] Natural Resources Canada: Renewable Energy, accessed at http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/eneene/renren/aboaprren-eng.php

[6] Wikipedia, Cubic Mile of Oil accessed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil

[7] Malcolm Wicks, Energy Security: A national challenge in a changing world, UK Department of Energy & Climate Change, London, August 2009

Response to Sibley's "Trust Us On This", The Ottawa Citizen, April 11, 2009

2009-06-26T07:34:00.000-07:00

Recently, the Ottawa Citizen ran a column entitled “Trust us on this” (1) written by Robert Sibley with assistance from David Mitchell of the Public Policy Forum. I was very appreciative that they raised the issue of an overall, system-wide lack of trust that has emerged as a distinguishing and worrisome feature of today’s economic recession. They suggested that in going into this recession, the leaders of today’s private, public and not-for-profit organizations do not enjoy the same degree of public confidence that leaders have in the past, making the climb out of this recession likely to be that much more difficult. However, in attempting to map a way forward, their analysis got it wrong.

Just think, for instance, of the shocks that have been faced almost simultaneously by the citizens of Detroit who have been devastated by the dual bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler, were sent reeling from the perjury and sex scandal that saw its mayor removed from office, and then lurching from the collapse of the city’s Board of Education. But for the grace of God go we …! There, as elsewhere, leadership confidence, already at record low levels, is being battered daily.

To whom, therefore, should citizens turn with an expectation that their trust will be rewarded? Sibley suggests that without this underlying confidence, any economic improvement will remain fragile -- at risk from even the smallest hint of insecurity.

But, while I agree this is an important issue, I do not believe trust is the basic problem – it is merely a side effect of a deeper dilemma. As I see it, the problem is our society’s misplaced and deeply ingrained assumption that someone must be ‘in-charge’.

It is an assumption that even corporate icons today are beginning to challenge, as Jeffrey Immelt did recently when he commented to the Financial Times on the success of his predecessor, Jack Welch, as CEO of General Electric in the 1990s. Immelt said that, “anyone could have run GE and done well in the 1990s. A dog could have run GE.”(2) Why? Because there were so many good people in the middle of the organization that did the job of running and coordinating the company for him. Being in-charge was irrelevant. It was a figurehead position. A decade later the coordination challenge is even greater and the CEO even less in control. Again as Immelt sees it, “the most important thing is context. It’s how your company fits into the world and how you respond to it.” How does a CEO of a single organization hope to coordinate with the whole world?

This someone must be in-charge assumption proliferates throughout our public, private and civic institutions. It is a cornerstone of our management mythology that periodically a white knight swoops in to restructure and set right the great ship of organization. The current crisis of confidence challenges that view because it exposes the lack of influence that CEOs actually have. Concern arises not from what we know leaders actually did or did not do but from the difference between a) our over inflated expectations of them that were fuelled by their own hyped sense of importance; and b) our perceptions of their performance -- between what they promised to deliver and what we see them providing. Confidence is low because this organizational performance gap is large, regardless of the influence leaders may really have on that performance (3).

When things went well, as they did over the last decade, our leaders were quick to point out the impact of their wisdom and decisiveness. Now as fortunes fall, the chorus of leaders has changed its tune, suddenly claiming it’s not them but the system that’s been responsible all along. Having previously been persuaded of their crucial importance, we are now confronted with an overwhelming organizational performance gap (4). They were in-charge and so they must be responsible.

But today’s recession is the consequence of multiple policy and market decisions made in many places, many of which were well meaning in their intent. When combined, however, they created a house of cards which eventually collapsed last fall in a global cascade. It may be argued that these unintended consequences were beyond the ability of any individual leader to control so one should be cautious about falling prey to a leadership blame game. Yet if they didn’t get us into the mess are they equally incapable of leading us out? Consequently, we should give ourselves pause to question not just these contradictory claims of individual leaders but also the assumptions and systems under which they have operated.

“Large corporations are vast and complex entities, with customs and attitudes that are hard for any one leader to change. So why do we talk as if the CEOs are truly in charge... ”(5) The cycle of leadership mistrust ends, not by whitewashing our faith in leaders as Sibley suggests, but in evolving a more mature confidence in ourselves as the principal actors in our own lives and organizations. Without enlivening this sense of shared ownership, good stewardship will remain elusive, and we will fail to make the collective commitments necessary to close the gap between our expectations of our organizations and the shared outcomes we observe.

1. Sibley, Robert. “Trust us on this”, The Ottawa Citizen, April 11, 2009
2. Guerrera, Francesco. “A need to reconnect”, Financial Times, New York, March 12, 2009
3. A study of "superstar CEOs", for instance, found that companies run by top executives who won awards from the business press between 1975 and 2002 consistently underperformed the market after their honor. Fox, Justin. “Are Today’s CEOs batting a Thousand?, Fortune, October 20, 2006a
4. Collingwood, Harris. “Do CEOs Matter?”, The Atlantic, June 2009: 54-60
5. Fox, Justin. “The Limited (but real) Impact of CEOs”, Time Magazine, October 20 2006b, accessed at http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2006/10/20/the_limited_but_real_impact_of/

Ottawa in still life

2009-02-09T09:34:00.000-08:00

TOCI-final3.indd

Andrew Cohen's reflections on Ottawa's recent bus strike and and what that says about the quality of local citizenship. "The bus strike demonstrated that the people who live in the capital aren't really citizens -- their indifference has created our political malaise..." The Citizen, February 9, 2009, 9:01 AM

more…

Response to "Audit on Royal Ottawa Sought",The Ottawa Citizen, Jan. 26, 2009

2009-02-01T09:25:00.000-08:00

I would like to correct the rather one-sided story on public-private partnerships (P3s) and their use in Ontario hospitals (“Audit on Royal Ottawa Sought” by Mohammed Adam) published by The Ottawa Citizen, January 26, 2009. The use of P3s is relatively new in Canada (compared to the US and the UK). They provide an opportunity to make use of the best elements of private and public organizations to serve the needs of Canadians better. Therefore it was disturbing to see so many misleading statements made in the story and a reliance on “expert’ sources who are clearly biased and represent a hyper-ideological and political opposition to P3s under any and all circumstances.

Lewis Auerbach, for instance, is a consultant given to scare mongering. His specialty is auditing not partnerships but he has also produced several reports published by unions across the country about the perils of P3s. In one such report that found cost savings at the Abbotsford hospital P3 in BC, Auerbach but is quoted as saying, “This may not really be a savings overall – it may even be more expensive – but rather a transfer of costs from the P3 parties to patients”. He calls white black and plays to the fears of the most vulnerable.

Natalie Mehra is the Director of the Ontario Health Coalition, a thinly veiled arm of provincial labour unions opposed to P3s. It is her claim that “P3s are just another form of privatization” and this is nonsense. P3s exist on a spectrum between full public ownership and full private ownership. P3s exist in the middle of these two extremes because they are “partnerships” and consequently they include aspects of both. Therefore they generate both profits and public goods as befitting their hybrid nature and that’s why they are called “private-public partnerships”.

The Citizen article claims P3s are overly secretive. Such a claim is hard to believe when each year my students interview stakeholders on all sides of the P3 equation. The Royal Ottawa Hospital and the William Osler Health Centre have been among them. The people in these institutions have been very generous with their time to help explain their history, their challenges, their responses to those challenges and their future prospects. If my students can do this, then why couldn’t the reporter or MPP France Gelinas?

While I wouldn’t impugn the reputation of the Ontario Auditor General, but when he says he found evidence hospital construction estimates were inflated for the William Osler Health Centre in Brampton between the 2000 and 2004 in ways not accounted for by higher material prices and inflation, might this be an incomplete cost analysis? He does not apparently factor in changes in market demand during a booming real estate period. The price of real estate and therefore construction moves primarily with market demand and the opportunity cost of not doing something else. Construction costs do not move solely with inflation.

Further, his evidence of poor financial management focuses on hospital costs being more with a P3 than if the Government built it themselves. Even if this was true, it is an incomplete cost-benefit analysis. Building hospitals with P3s is in some ways like leasing a car only on a grander scale. One of the many benefits of P3s is that citizens get the hospital sooner than if they had to wait until the Province saved enough money to build it on its own. It may have taken a decade for the Province to set aside the $150-200 million to build the Brampton or Ottawa hospitals and then another decade for them to be built. The Auditor General knows better than most that Ontario governments have traditionally been extremely neglectful of contributing to capital budgets. So why did he not assign a value to the 10-20 years of lost health care that would have occurred if the Province had waited to do it themselves? To say that the Royal Ottawa Hospital would have cost millions of dollars less if it would have been built publicly misses the point. The point is whether it would have ever been built at all! This is not a reflection of P3s but of the public choices being made -- increasing taxes, increasing indebtedness (neither of which was politically viable at the time) or using a P3 model.

As far the Royal Ottawa Hospital (ROH) P3 is concerned, the 2001 announcement for the project called for 284 beds at an estimated construction cost of $95 million. When the project went to the RFP stage in 2003 the government itself had reduced the number of beds to 188, increased its capital cost estimate to $100 million and set the construction time estimate to 2 years. Then the project was delayed by almost two years for administrative and political reasons. When the actual deal was struck between The Healthcare Infrastructure Company of Canada (the private consortium) and the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group (the public partner) it was for $142 million and 188 beds. These changes are frequently cited by critics like Mehra and Auerbach as proof the ROH private partners were over time, over budget and under delivering -- despite these decisions being made by the government. Similar deceptiveness appears in the numbers used at the end of the Citizen article. To the contrary, after construction finally began in December 2004, the new facility was completed early and $6 million under budget.

What the article does not say is that the monthly leasing payments are contingent on the ROH partners adhering to strict service standards and if not met those payments may be reduced. Who decides? The public partner. In addition, while it is the practice to let hospitals deteriorate until they need to be abandoned, when the ROH is returned to the public partners in 20 years it must be in essentially new condition. In fact the private partners will leave it in better than new condition having added at their expense all the technology that emerges over the next 20 years.

Is the ROH problem free? No, but no more than any institution its size. Claiming that the existence of problems is proof P3s don’t work is both misleading and disingenuous. If you want to really assess the ROH P3 it may be better to look at how the partners deal with those problems. The ROH stakeholders have invested heavily in good communication and the cultivation of positive healthy relationships to guide and steer the organization towards a shared vision. The hospital staff was fully engaged in designing the facility which they would ultimately use. Regular performance reporting is used and shared equally between the public and private partners. Effective dispute resolution mechanisms are in place. A climate of trust and mutual respect exists that allows the partners to amicably adapt to issues not dealt with in the original contract. Can they do it better? Probably, yes. And this goes to the point of Professor Angus. We do need to know more about what works and what doesn’t in these types of projects so we can learn from them. But we don’t need the type of posturing and ideological blather that has so often typified the public debate around P3s.

Ottawa's OC Transpo Strike

2009-01-21T13:37:00.000-08:00

It is almost two months now since the OC Transpo strike began and any hope I had of a reasonable accommodation is now gone. What remains is strange sense of the complacency in an Ottawa public which is so willing to endure the strike at such a high human and economic cost to themselves and their community and over so little potential gain. Last week estimates were published that suggested the cost of the strike over the first month approximated $280 million, and which by now must surely have surpassed $300 million. City Council says it could save $3 million a year by clawing back scheduling responsibility from the union. At this implied rate of return, my grandchildren will be dead before the strike cost is repaid. Of course, this does not include the immense human costs of lost jobs, poorer job performance, strained family life, failed businesses, lost school years for students who take buses, poorer health for those most in need, and a poisoned work relationship between striking workers and City Hall that will persist for years to come.

These current costs guarantee any future ‘victory’ from this strike to be Pyrrhic. That said, who is paying for these cost? True the union has depleted its strike fund and its members have lost millions of dollars in wages. City Hall, however, is actually making millions of dollars on those same unpaid wages. Primarily, however, it is residents and taxpayers who are collectively paying for this seven-week old strike in orders of magnitude far greater than either City Hall or the union.

We have arrived essentially at a contest over who controls the bus service – a pissing contest to be crude. This is no longer about value for citizens. It is no longer about serving the public. If it were, the strike would be long over. It is about control and the collateral damage be dammed. In as much, what we have here is a failure of leadership at City Hall. They have broken their fiduciary trust with citizens whom they so callously and fraudulently say they represent. Equally, we have a failure among union leaders who purport to be looking out for the interests of riders and members yet who have so blatantly put their interests above the many, many residents of the community who have become ensnarled in their selfishness. These two groups would have done less harm to the City of Ottawa if they had walked into a local bank and stolen $300 million. Yet surprisingly we continue to tolerate their destructive behaviour as if it didn’t matter. And that behaviour continues because for them there are no consequences.

In my mind, both groups have made decisions that have caused irreparable harm to many people. Those decisions were made intentionally and with the full awareness of the potential costs, and pain and suffering to be caused to their fellow citizens. In most circumstances such decisions would make these individuals personally liable for the damages and harm they caused. Yet here we are, complacent as ever, worried how we will endure but seemingly unconcerned about how we got here. Did anyone say “class-action suit”?

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN CANADA’S MIDDLE-EARTH

2009-01-15T12:13:00.000-08:00

The recent coverage by the Ottawa Citizen of the layoffs affecting the community around Smiths Falls and the issue of economic development in smaller Canadian towns and villages more generally, has painted a rather bleak picture. That pessimism may be warranted if the communities do what is traditionally done, which is to say, try and stave off change and cry loudly until either the provincial or federal government bails them out. Yet having observed for a number of years how communities can create new prospects for themselves, I believe there is a more optimistic future in store when communities are prepared to take the lead in realizing new possibilities for themselves. Indeed, the evidence suggests that much can be done by communities on their own, and that when local strategies and commitments are generated, senior governments may actually seek out them out as targets of funding.

Economic development is far from a uniform phenomenon. It is led by creative individuals and companies, working in supportive environments that are distinctly suited to their success, allowing for the formation of clusters and regional hubs that drag the rest of society along with them. In tackling local development there is a range of options for community leaders to consider - from “place-based” to “people-based” strategies - but there remains much uncertainty about what may work in any given locale. Traditionally, regional economic development strategies are constructed to support the development of physical and social capital that underpins economic and community progress in a given area. These strategies can involve investments in assets and capacities by various levels of government but frequently by private and civic groups as well, such as the Chambers of Commerce or the United Way.

However, economic development is often unplanned, evolving in fits and starts in response to broad macro economic conditions, the fashions of public sector philosophy and entrepreneurial enthusiasm. Where direction is consistently applied, it has often taken the form of “placed-based” strategies that try either to mitigate the effects of economic decline or to catalyze new economic growth with supportive infrastructures, cluster strategies, or sector investments (the picking of future economic winners).

Placed-based policies can work – but only indirectly. Such strategies have been used for years by governments to try and causally address the conditions that give rise to local poverty and economic sluggishness. They are often politically popular, but they have received mixed reviews by researchers. Some claim that place-based policies reduce the incentive of disadvantaged people to migrate to other places that offer better opportunities and therefore contribute to the formation of regional ghettos of dependency. Other researchers suggest the logic of placed-based strategies is rarely adhered to in real life. Yet despite these short-comings they can be effective, especially when conditions of workforce isolation or low worker mobility allow for more of the benefits of place-based strategies to be retained locally.

On the other hand, traditional “people-based” policies put public resources directly into the hands of distressed individuals in the form of income augmentation, training, assisted housing, relocation subsidies, etc. They reduce pain in the short term, however, there is little evidence that they are anything other than palliative, often proving costly for society in the long run because they do little to change the conditions that gave rise to the socio-economic distress in the first place and therefore fail to reduce the demand for support.

Regional development strategies are further complicated by the increasingly distributed nature of the decision making required to coordinate the local knowledge, resources and authorities that may be involved in addressing local challenges. Given that each community has a varying mix of contributors and capacities, this coordination challenge also necessitates effective processes of learning-while-doing and a strong emphasis on experimentation, social learning and unique patterns of collaborative governance. Unfortunately these processes and capacities are not always in place.

The OECD has observed, for instance, that in Canada, “there is a tendency for performance gaps to widen between regions, and the cost of maintaining cohesion is increasing. On the other hand, rapid technological change, extended markets and greater use of knowledge are offering greater opportunities for local and regional development but demand further investment from enterprises, reorganization of labour and production, skills upgrading and improvements in the local environment”. In other words, to benefit from the global knowledge economy and close the performance gaps between regions, greater attention is needed [in Canada] to help regions self-mobilize to provide better coordination of people, capacities and assets. The OECD also observed that it in the rural, non-major-metro adjacent towns, where roughly 1/3 of Canadians reside, only limited capacity and few sponsors exist to effect this community mobilization.

The OECD assumes this is due to scant attention from federal or provincial governments. And while it is true that senior governments tend to be fixated on either major metropolitan or northern regions, this assumption presumes it is the responsibility of those senior governments to “fix things” in small-town Canada – despite the fact that the necessary resources and capacities are most likely locally rooted. Not surprisingly we hear, as we have in the Citizen over the past month, the cries of concern about the futures of these towns and villages.

Yet I would suggest the key barrier to the adaptiveness of rural towns is not so much that no one is listening but the erroneous assumption that someone should be listening, that someone should be “in charge” and can make things better. Couple this paternal expectation with similar claims being made to the same authorities by hundreds of small communities across the country, then it is no wonder senior governments appear deaf.

The true development challenge for this middle region is two-fold – ownership and differentiation. Ownership accepts that the future belongs to the residents of the community: that the primary responsibility rests with them to marshal local resources, talent and capacities to realize their common future: and to do so sufficiently and in such a manner that it attracts the attention of non-residents – workers, companies or governments – who can see in their commitments to place an opportunity. Differentiation identifies the unique possibilities, contributions and leadership that distinguish one community from another and make it worthy of the engagement of non-residents as co-creators of a shared possibility.

Here the capacity to sustain community dialogue proves to be a fundamental development competence. The history, buildings, economy, infrastructure and culture of any community are essentially artifacts of the conversations that occur within it. To change the community, change the conversation. This is confirmed in results from the federal government’s Action for Neighbourhood Change program and from the Vibrant Communities Initiative, led by McConnell Foundation and the Caledon and Tamarack institutes. Through specific processes of conversation, residents assume ownership of both problems and solutions, often providing essential direction or assets that allow place- or people-based solutions to take root.

No one disputes that communities like Smiths Falls, Cornwall or Renfrew are not without attractors but they will prosper on the basis of the strength of their community – the very thing the mega-urban centres often have in short supply. In some small towns, effective community dialogue will generate clear ideas of who they are and what want they want to become. In others, it will foster shared ownership and creative contributions that enable new possibilities to unfold. Some communities will find better ways of coordinating their capacities and resources. Some will devise new ways of collaborating and governing together. Yet all of these conversations will demonstrate the power of community itself, of being together, and where, at the end of the day, creative enterprising individuals can find that they and their families are not alone.

Thus here in this middle-earth between mega and northern communities, economic and community development will hinge less on grand schemes and romanticized leadership and more on shared stories and local commitments. Facilitating these interactions will be of prime concern as it will serve to distinguish these communities from the larger centres. As a result, Canada’s rural communities should invest not only in marketing to persuade others of the fairness of their towns, but also in generating the kinds of conversations that can identify and engage residents and newcomers in possibilities that both can fully live into. For it is not an area’s past that newcomers typically seek -- it is its future and its promise of belonging.

Ten Criteria for Selecting Candidates

2008-09-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

Since my post in May, I’ve spent much of the summer reflecting on the characteristics of community leadership and the collective capacities required to move a pluralistic society such as ours forward on any issue of consequence.

1. One of the tidbits I encountered along the way, was in a talk given by Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, in his closing remarks to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum on January 27, 2008 (click here to see his presentation). He describes his epiphany when he realized that as a conductor he created no music. Yet by empowering his musicians to do great things together they produced great music. This led him to the conclusion that “a powerful leader depends for his power on making other people powerful."

Such an empowering sense of leadership stands in complete contrast to the current notions of romanticized leadership that permeate both our political and management discourse. In fact, if the juvenile behaviour on display in Canada’s current election is any indication, then our practice of democracy would likely fail to win the fifth grader test currently popularized on TV. Therefore, my first selection criterion is whether through their speech and actions a candidate is an enabler, making all Canadians, not just their partisan followers, more powerful. The message I want to hear is what the candidate is willing to do to help me achieve what I want, not do something ostensibly on by behalf and then stick me with the result and the bill.

2. Obviously, the ability of the candidate to foster serious dialogue about policies or issues is a must-have criterion…

3. But so also is how that candidate conducts that conversation. Is its purpose to advocate for an established position; to find fault with others; to meet out retribution; to market fear; to marginalize hope; to devalue the contributions that each and everyone one of us could potentially make? Does that conversation just seek to add to an already bloated and ineffectual system of rules and oversight?

Or, does that conversation direct us to those possibilities which we as citizens can potentially create together; does it empower us to take ownership of ourselves, our families and our communities; does it make us all accountable to each other for both problems and solutions; does it invite us to be generous and contribute what we can; does it discourage dependence and foster the self-reliance borne of a rich fabric of community life; and finally is that conversation about citizens rather than leaders? Therefore what kind of public conversation are they willing to create?

4. Elections are momentous times. Not just because of their potential to unseat a government, but because of their capability to renew our faith in ourselves, to celebrate the progress we have made together and to reflect on how things could be better still. They are a democracy’s primary tool for social learning. And if we’re not learning together then we’re not moving forward together either, as the latest edition of the Conference Board’s report, How Canada Performs, clearly suggests. So for my vote I want to see which candidate is contributing to our collective learning and presenting a narrative of the collective possibility we can all aspire to.

5. Democracy is about advanced citizenship. It requires informed and engaged citizens. But it is founded on the notion of voters as owners. As much as elections are about selecting representatives they must also be about re-affirming the individual and collective responsibility we all hold for the issues that confront us. It is ultimately the citizen who creates the future and who is accountable for society’s well being. If we did not somewhere believe this then for what purpose do we elect “representatives” to undertake our will? If they are not representing us, then who are they representing – themselves, their sponsors, an oligarchy of special interests?

Rather than re-affirming citizenship, however, the usual mix of sound bites and bribes proffered during an election campaign tend do just the opposite. They absolve citizens of their personal responsibility (it’s someone else’s fault); they obscure the need of citizens to make choices (we can cut taxes and increase services); and they steal the rights of citizens to act as owners of their own life, including the right to the consequences of their actions (behaviour must be controlled, the future can be legislated and morality mandated).

Imagine a parent who permits their child no independence, no mistakes, no risks, no challenges, no consequences to their actions? Such a parent does not permit their child to have a life only an existence. Similarly a candidate who creates no space for either collective decision making or consequences creates no ground for their community to have a life in common. Therefore, my fifth criterion considers: does the candidate affirm my ownership rights as a citizen and facilitate my coming together with other citizens to deal with the issues we share.

6. Asking questions is more important than giving answers. Why? Because in questions there is the space for creating something new. Despite Canada’s recent languid performance on many fronts compared to its OECD peers, it remains a country whose quality of life is desired by most countries in the world. However, to be better than we are we must be innovative. But that is not a problem to be solved with ready made answers. It is a possibility that must be collectively lived into. Stock answers will only serve to recreate the past in the present and the future. Questions create space for possibility. So are the candidates asking questions, or they just giving the same old tired answers?

7. In a pluralistic democracy such as Canada, learning to value our different perspectives and building on that diversity to create something truly transformative is not only an opportunity but an essential requirement for a small country like ours to retain its standard of living and position in the world. The accomplishment of this task does not rest with someone who pits us against each other in strategies of ‘divide and conquer’. It necessitates someone who can catalyze a dialogue that binds us all together and who is continually building bridges from one community to the next.

Such a candidate is a true partner, helping where they can, giving honest advice where asked, but they neither usurp the right of any community to be unique nor permit any community to usurp the rights of others. Such a candidate detects reason in conflicting claims, recognizes where each may be valid, senses where common ground exists, and brings competing communities into harmony. Therefore, I look for the candidate who is a good partner.

8. In a period where leadership has become thoroughly romanticized it can be tough to find an alternative view. Yet one has existed for much, much longer than the current notion of leadership. It is the idea of stewardship, that very traditional notion of holding something in trust for another. My childhood exposure to the principles of democracy usually took the form of stewardship with elected representatives acting as stewards on behalf of citizens. When this modern idea of leadership emerged I do not know but it has done little to strengthen my sense of democracy.

Taking Peter Block’s definition, “stewardship is the choice to preside over the orderly distribution of power”. This means giving people choices, it means empowering them in the pursuit of their choices and operating in service to rather than in control of others. Good stewards balance power; encourage ownership; inspire commitment to a larger community; engage participation and a willingness to be accountable; and ensures that rewards are equitably distributed. My vote belongs to the candidate who is a good steward not a good patriarch.

9. A good friend suggested that we need to find the candidate who in a crunch can be relied upon to take charge. I know this is how many people think but all evidence points to the fallacy of this believe. Good governance is not about having the greatest capacity for being the biggest control freak in exceptional times. Day to day governance is primarily about learning, about teasing out common ground, about making the other guys powerful so that you can draw on their strength as well as your own. And in exceptional circumstances, having mutually rewarding relationships already established is the only recipe that will provide you what you need when you need it. If they are not there, it's likely you'll find yourself in a bun fight among competing organizations all of whom may share the idea that they alone are in charge.

Voting for the fiction of someone “in charge” is a waste, a non starter, since no one has been “in charge” for a long time. Governance now is so extensively distributed among different levels of government, among government, business and the voluntary sectors; and among nations that the person who images themselves “in charge” is likely to be a major roadblock to institutional collaboration. The candidate therefore should be a facilitator, a networker, a broker, a champion who has the honesty to know that being “in charge” is a trap that lets many people off the hook. So my next to last criterion seeks a candidate who recognizes they are not “in charge”, and has the courage to demand that I be.

10. I want a candidate who has a strong commitment to democracy not to the trappings of leadership and a friendly dictatorship. I want a candidate who will inspire collective ownership and commitment. I want a good steward who I can count on to support my efforts and those of my neighbours in our efforts to better our community.

I am one of those that believe that Canada is not our geography, our history, our tall buildings or our roads and railroads. Canada is not the churches we attend, the schools we go to or the faces we present to the world. These are all the results of Canada. Canada itself is the conversation we hold among ourselves. So lastly, who among these candidates carries that conversation to new heights of possibility?

That's my ten criteria for selecting a candidate! Looking at the current roster though, I think I’m setting my self up for a great disappointment.

The Anti-Democrats

2008-09-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

I am saddened by the tenor of the current Canadian election. Since 1993 when voters slapped Kim Campbell for the temerity to suggest that elections were not forums for the discussion of anything of consequence, the course of politics has increasingly affirmed the ultimate truth of her comment. Elections in general and this one in particular, have become all about personality. The today's election campaign shows no inclination towards serious debate about policies or issues. It shows no concern about collective learning among Canadians. It shows no concern about building bridges between Canada's many communities. Granted it is early yet, but there seems to be little interest in presenting any sort of narrative of the collective possibility we can all aspire to.

Unfortunately we only have ourselves to blame for this sorry state. We continually make much of our democratic right to elect "our representatives" to steer the course of this great country, deluding ourselves with the fantasy that we tell them what to do, when in fact the opposite occurs. We presume the relationship that exists with elected officials is that they are our agents. But how can we tell them what to do if we don’t understand the issues because there has been no serious discussion of them? If the campaign continues to hinge on real or imagined slights to the leaders, then we have wasted our time and deserve all the puffer doo-doo we get. If there is no collective debate on issues, then we are as much a “mark” as those who naively take advice from a smooth talking stock broker without doing their due diligence.

Democracy is about advanced citizenship. It requires informed and engaged citizens. It should be about voters as owners. It should be about individually and collectively becoming responsible for both the issues we are confronted with and the communities that we live in. It should be about creating a dialogue which binds us all together not about ‘divide and conquer’ strategies that pit us against each other. Democracy is about learning to value our different perspectives and building on that diversity to create something that can truly transform our condition.

Instead I find we are electing people whose avowed goal is not to engage us but to tell us what to do. We seem to want to be saved from ourselves. We want to avoid the inconvenience of taking responsibility for ourselves, our families, and our communities. As we all know, once the election is over these “representatives” will cease their pretense of being our agents and assume a position of lordship, what Jeffrey Simpson once called the “friendly dictator”. They will not feel obligated to act as good stewards on our behalf because they fundamentally do not believe in citizens. They do not believe that citizens can appreciate collective interest. They do not believe that citizens can understand complex problems, or that they can cooperate amongst themselves to achieve common goals. “Just trust us,” they whisper. And while we are mesmerized by the antics of celebrity players, and trifling public gaffes they steal our rights as owners and citizens.

How else can we understand this incessant pursuit of personality? If they are a nice person, we can trust them to look after us. If they are seen to be like us, we don’t have to trouble ourselves with our rights and obligations as citizens. “Don’t worry about those messy issues”, the election messages purr, “our wise leader will take care of you”. This is not democracy but the path to totalitarianism or least the scam of a good con artist. So I am saddened that in the end we seemed trapped in an electoral process which will only allow us to choose the "Father of the Country", which might sound nice until we remember it was a favourite label of Stalin.

The failure of citizenship

2008-08-05T11:28:00.000-07:00

Re: The failure of government, Ottawa Citizen Friday August 1, 2008

In Friday’s Citizen, Ken Gray suggests that governments are failing in the expectations we set for them. I would agree but from the glass is half full perspective. Despite some very significant problems that governments are unable to deal with, we need to remember that Canada enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world. Canadian governments have done much and contributed much as they are currently constructed.

On the other hand, there is evidence that Canada is beginning to fall behind when it comes to the quality of government services, the quality of public infrastructure and assets, the innovativeness of our economy and the health of our citizens and environment (see the Conference Board’s latest report on How Canada Performs). There is very clear evidence that Canadian governments do not have, nor have they had for some time, all the resources, knowledge or power to adequately address today’s most important concerns. Issues have become more complex and the capacity to deal with them more distributed. But does that mean that governments are failing?

When Ken asks whether “are we asking too much of government”, he is rightly asking about the need to reassess our relationship with government. However, I believe the question itself is the wrong one to ask for it is implies both cynicism and entitlement. It is cynical in the sense that it presumes that governments can only be as we have come to know them. Since they cannot change, it is not worthwhile to invest in making things different. The only thing to do is to lower our expectations.

The question also implies a sense of entitlement in that it absolves the author/reader/citizen of any responsibility towards the major issues of the day. It presumes none of us has any obligation towards finding or contributing to important community or societal issues and it reflects a view of government that is profoundly anti-democratic and patriarchal while compounding this with an unhealthy self-serving attitude.

A better starting point is to ask, “are we expecting too much for ourselves?” Better health care, more vibrant cities and economies, cleaner and more sustainable environments – are these things really too much to imagine? Are these aspirations for ourselves and our children too selfish? I think not and I suspect many others feel the same way.

So if we can all rightly imagine these better possibilities, then the issue is not whether governments should or should not deliver them to us but, but how do we discover what needs to change for that future possibility to become a reality and what are we going to do about it? The involvement of government is a much secondary consideration.

First to change must be our belief that we bear no responsibility for either the problem or the solution. It may seem heresy to suggest but as citizens of this democracy called Canada we are in fact its owners and shareholders -- although we certainly don’t act like it. We elect a few people to act as our collective agents and they in turn hire a lot more people to do some (although not all) of the work of managing our collective affairs. Over the years, however, this agency relationship has been turned on its head. Governments now presume mastery and citizens have adopted a role that is little more than serfdom. Beyond tithing, their ability to influence or direct government is minimal.

While this topsy-turvy relationship has often been benign in a Canadian context, the “friendly dictatorship”, as Jeffrey Simpson recently referred to it, is worrisome. Worrisome, because at a time when the biggest citizen concerns cry out for some form of grand, citizen partnership, we are instead bombarded with soothing patriarchal messages of “don’t worry”, “we’re in control”, “just trust us”.

Both politicians and public servants dogmatically assume that the state knows best and that they alone have the moral authority to determine the public interest. We acquiesce to this theft of our right of citizenship because it appears more convenient, more certain, and less risky. We don’t want to trouble ourselves. Yet as Ken and many other modern commentators have so clearly depicted -- governments are not in control. They are not ‘in charge’ as we would all like to believe. In most instances, they are but one member of a changing group of stakeholders -- each of whom is endowed with some knowledge, some power, and some resources and therefore invested with the power to say ‘no’. Even with a public mandate and the power of coercion, if the support or acquiescence of multiple parties is required then getting everyone to say ‘yes’ and sustaining their commitment becomes an almost impossible task.

To overcome the many ways to say ‘no’ we need to rebuild our sense of togetherness and our practice of community. We begin that process by reasserting who is the agent and who is the owner. We don’t need to wait for government to climb out of its chronic gridlock to tell us what to do. We just need to believe that our future is in our hands and those of our neighbours.

Every community already has within it the seeds of its own transformation. As citizens if we can collectively take ownership of current conditions, it is then possible to transform the present into a new possibility that we create for ourselves in cooperation with our neighbours. Otherwise nothing changes, as Ken described in his column. Changing leaders, changing parties, changing initiatives, it always ends up the same. We just bring the past into the future.

Transformative change only happens when we change the tenor of the conversation that empowers our assumptions and institutions. But that conversation must first begin with us. When we continue to believe that only governments are responsible, that they alone can fix things, that we can demand more of government while we contribute less (the free lunch argument), then we can expect more of the same. This leads me to conclude that when we observe this inability to solve the same old problems year after year, rather than a failure of government as Ken suggests, what we have is a failure of citizenship.

It is, however, not a total failure. There are many examples both here in Ottawa and elsewhere where citizens have found ways to work together to transform their community, examples like Pathways to Education, the Vibrant Communities initiative and Action for Neighbourhood Change. These stories need to be told for they are compelling tales of democracy in action. We can all learn from them. And while creating space for more democracy may not mean less government, it surely will mean different government. That too is an important conversation Ken’s article has begun and one which ought to be continued.

Co-Creative Power: Collective Learning & Co-Creative Engagement

2008-07-21T09:59:00.000-07:00

Co-Creative Power: Collective Learning & Co-Creative Engagement

Selection Criteria for Choosing Candidates in Canada’s Next Election

2008-05-25T09:49:00.000-07:00

In the next federal election (coming sometime in the next 18 months to a neighbourhood near you), each of us will faced with the task of assessing which party / candidate is most worthy of our vote. Despite the fact that fewer and fewer of us do vote (65% in the last federal election allowing 23% of eligible voters to determine the government), this task remains our primary civic duty. For those that do not see this task as something that is either an automatic choice or a bothersome one, choosing where to place your vote can become confusing, subjective, ad hoc and subject to the momentary winds of the media. My feeling is that if we want to make the ‘best’ choice in the voters’ booth then we have to be objective and dispassionate. Therefore it is now, in this pre-election period, that we should be thinking of how we will make that decision.

Assuming any party could essentially be the recipient of our vote, what criteria should be used to evaluate the various candidates and political parties in the next election?

Here’s a short list of the areas most political parties are likely to campaign on:

Lower taxes,
More services,
Leadership,
Past record,
Fiscal prudence,
Future promises, and
Trustability.

These are the most common dimensions that parties like to compete on, although they should not necessarily be the criteria used by voters to evaluate their choices. Why? Because the interests of the political parties are not the same as the interests of voters! The main interest of political parties, for instance, is the attainment and exercise governing power. The main interest of voters is usually to achieve some improvement in their quality of life. Ideally in a democracy these two interests overlap. However, in the dysfunctional type of democracy we have in Canada they overlap only coincidentally, as I have talked about before in my blog.

Let’s take the seven campaign dimensions above, which obviously play out in different ways in different elections. The goal for political parties is to find those dimensions in which they may exhibit a competitive advantage and make the election all about that. What I suggest is that campaigns run on these dimensions are not helpful to voters. They are all about the parties in an extremely narcissistic way and not about voters concerns, problems or issues at all. When Kim Campbell said in 1993 that campaigns are not the time to be talking about serious issues, she was only telling the truth. Yet she and the conservative party were eviscerated in the ensuing election not on the basis of her proposed plans or policies but because her statement was used to fuel Liberal attacks against her leadership and trustability, thus proving her point Q.E.D.

Lower taxes

For instance, most parties (save the NDP) compete on how they will lower the tax burden. But aren’t lower taxes good for voters? Maybe, it depends. My view is, why should a political party be rewarded for something they should be already doing as a matter of course as stewards of the public purse. It’s my money in the first place and I entrust it to government because I believe there is a collective benefit to be reaped from doing so. If the money is not needed then it should automatically be returned to me. They are not doing me a favour by returning it. It is not the government’s money to distribute largesse. They would simply be fulfilling their most basic responsibility as public stewards.

The larger question around lower taxes is what is being done with those taxes. As poll after poll has indicated, most Canadians would rather see improved health care, a better environment, a more vital economy, or a properly equipped military before lowering taxes. However, since the federal government under the leadership of any party seems impotent to address these chronic voter concerns, governments are more than willing to bribe people with their own money. If Canadians are willing to pay, then the question voters should be asking of politicians is why the government or any party is so incompetent to fix problems.

If lower taxes were by themselves a public good, then least taxes, or no government, and no public services or benefits would be best. Most rational people would say some government is needed to coordinate the many, many different interests of Canada’s citizens. But where do you draw the line between enough taxation to fix problems and too much taxation? This is an important social conversation that requires airing but which all parties remain silent on. Have governments taken too much or not? If so, return it thank you very much. If not, then get on with the public’s business. However, it seems much better politically for the parties to continue bribing people with their own money.

New Services

Some parties like to emphasize all the new services you’ll get by voting for them. It goes without saying, though, that rarely will you ever get a realistic tax impact along with these promises. So you want more day care, that’ll be $50 extra on your tax bill, whether you have kids or not. So you want to upgrade Canada’s military equipment, that’ll be $500 extra. But if you want good health care, where you don’t have to wait and every service is covered, that’ll really cost you, maybe $5,000 additional.

Instead, what we get are promises for services as if they were cost free. Health care will be paid by someone – either a private health insurer or a public one. We will pay for it out of one pocket or another. The question to be asked is, where is the best value for money? How can we increase the quality of healthcare without increasing the costs? All evidence points to situations where prevention and the promotion of health take centre stage, where there’s a mix of public and private insurance and services, where the payment model is contractual not “fee for service”, and where the citizen takes responsibility for their own health agenda. Yet what we hear is not a reasoned debate but exhortations about the horrors or wonders of private care (depending on your position), self laudatory expressions of being defenders of the sick and the poor, and ideological bullshit that suggests something like the Health Canada Act was delivered by Moses and is therefore the unchallengeable word of God. So much for discussing big issues!

Without some idea of the tax impact of any new initiative, parties intentionally foster the perception that people can get something for nothing. Free day care, why not? Free security, I’m for that. Free health care, let’s sign up tomorrow for that tummy tuck. So rather than having voters make the kind of informed trade offs they might make in their own household budgets, voters are encouraged to sign up for a smorgasbord of services they might never need. And on top of that, they are told that they’ll get lower taxes to boot (ie won’t cost them anything)! So we can have our expensive healthcare but, since resources are limited, our bridges and roads can collapse from lack of maintenance or climate change can turn the Prairies into a dustbowl. Without some discussion of these trade offs we end up buying at best a “pig-in-a-poke”.

Leadership

Leadership is probably the dimension most often used in a political campaign. He or she has a nice face, has a strong voice, can order people around, knows what they’re doing and can make decisions. The positioning of leadership is show which candidate is best able to be ‘in charge’. Sometimes leadership competitions become quite nasty and mean spirited, with negative campaigns focused on how incapable the other guy is for the job of being ‘in charge’.

But being ‘in charge’ implies that others are not and if someone is ‘in charge’ then I don’t have to be. I can forget about certain things because someone else is looking after them. This is a very comfortable belief among voters because it invites irresponsibility and inaction. It also makes for a convenient target should things not go as planned. However, the idea of someone being ‘in charge’ of any issue of significance to the public these days (if ever) is complete and utter nonsense. Believing someone is ‘in charge’ is like believing those spam emails everyone gets that say you’ve just one the great online lottery if only you provide your bank account and PIN number. We believe it because we want to believe it because life would be so much easier if it were true, just as life would be easier if the online lottery scam was true. The truth is nobody is completely ‘in charge’ – not the PM, not government ministers, not deputy ministers, not the House of Commons, and certainly not the ‘all-knowing’ press.

Any significant issue requires the willing cooperation of many different people and organizations to create a change, often between different levels of government and among the different sectors like government, business, education and civil society. Any one of those actors might be able to prevent a collective effort from being comprehensive or effective. Or, any of them might even mount a campaign of resistance to stop change from happening at all. Therefore, whenever I hear election rhetoric starting to drift to the issue of leadership and who’s the best person to be ‘in charge’ I know that it’s all spin and they’re all whistling out their asses.

By the way, the corollary of nobody in charge is that we all are. How can we all be in charge, you might ask? That I would say is an election issue well worth debating. This is, after all, supposed to be a functioning democracy!

Past Record

With regard to a government’s past record, I would say it is largely unimportant because there isn’t any record. Most governments work very hard so that they can not be called to account for any action or inaction they may have done. As a result initiatives are poorly measured, evaluations are quickly filed away so no one ever knows what happened and if someone ever gets curious and tries to use Access to Information laws, well there’s the automatic one year delay most departments act on such requests these days and the perennial under funding of Access to Information requests such that most people lose interest before any information ever gets released[i].

On the other hand, politicians are rather fond of making announcements (as if the announcement is a fait accompli) and in doing so take credit for other people’s work in the future. This last comment might seem harsh but what else do MPs actually do? It’s the bureaucrats that do most of thinking and policy work. It’s the private and not-for-profit partners that deliver most of the services these days. Wasn’t it Prime Minister Trudeau who remarked that MPs are “nobodies” and that they’re only job was to get elected. When was the last time you heard an MP not take credit for something when all they did was…

I was going to say when all they did was vote on spending somebody else’s money. In fact this would be incorrect. The one real job of MPs over the last several centuries and the one record they could arguably point to is their record of decisions related to their approval of departmental expenditures. However, for over a generation now MPs have abdicated that responsibility through a slight of hand called ‘deeming’. Beyond this, try and find a record of how your elected member of the House of Commons voted on anything. Unless you are extremely persistent and willing to spend a lot of time, there is little chance you’ll discover the voting record of your MP[ii].

Then again records and evidence don’t matter that much anyway, according to the PM. In explaining his approach to crime, for instance, Mr. Harper suggested facts were not important. It is only what you believe that’s important. "Some try to pacify Canadians with statistics. Your personal experiences and impressions are wrong, they say; crime is really not a problem. These apologists remind me of the scene from The Wizard of Oz when the wizard says, 'Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.' But Canadians can see behind the curtain. They know there's a problem."[iii] The problem with clear facts is that it is difficult to argue against them. However, if facts don’t matter, then securing support becomes a matter of playing on (or preying on) people’s beliefs and fears.

Fiscal Prudence

What about a party’s fiscal prudence – their ability to manage the money? Some are supposed to be big spenders and others tight wads. But which is which? The largest budget and the largest federal workforce in Canadian history was presided over by (wait for it) – not the NDP, not the Liberals but the current Conservative party.

Then again where is a government’s fiscal prudence when after a certain date in May or June departmental expenditures are just ‘deemed’ to be acceptable to the House until such times as the Auditor General makes a fuss about them. This ‘deeming’ process began in Trudeau’s time when line by line evaluations of departmental budgets became too cumbersome and time consuming for MPs eagerly awaiting their summer recess. Former Treasury Board President Reg Alcock often chafed at this emasculation of MP responsibility, but in the end could do little to reverse it. Certain aspects of the Budget may be held up on political grounds, ie what’s good for a particular party, but rarely would this happen on the basis of what might be good for Canadian citizens. If there is any fiscal prudence it is exercised at the DM level where staffers may be encouraged (or not) to show restraint in keeping within a certainty budgetary target. And if they don’t, who’s going to go back and check all those numbers?

The fact that there is next to no fiscal prudence being exercised means that no one (aside from the periodic pot shots of the Auditor General and she isn’t elected) is asking whether a given expenditure is worth it, let alone cost efficient. It’s how the federal government, for instance, with approximately 320,000 desktop computers for its employees also has approximately 120,000 servers for a ratio of 3:1. For any large multinational that ratio would be 60:1. How can this happen? No one’s paying attention. This isn’t fiscal prudence it’s just plain sloppiness.

Future Promises

One of the best shell games in politics is the one parties make promises about the future (often futures which they can not control) while claiming credit for that future action today. Current and previous Canadian governments, for instance, have claimed huge credit for dealing with the environment and climate change in the future only to do nothing at all. And since there is little in the way of performance measurement, who’s to say? The Chretien government for example, claimed credit for his government’s $3 billion proposal to spend on the environment as part of the Kyoto accord and then when the money wasn’t spent it then claimed credit for fiscal prudence. The Martin government claimed budgetary savings from a new procurement program and actually booked the estimated lifetime savings of the program before any were realized and before the program was even operational. Today’s government is claiming credit for a $30 billion program of retrofitting Canada’s military over the next 20 years[iv]. Nothing like claiming credit today for someone else’s actions in the future. Therefore my view is that anything that’s being promised beyond the government tenure currently being sought should be considered entirely bogus. Any future government can change the plan.

Trustability

A lot of campaign rhetoric and advertising dollars go into trying to convince voters that one party is more trustable than another. What this amounts to is a debate over whether one party’s spin is more credible than the other party’s spin. This is an area of campaigning that is particularly narcissistic and what I consider a perversion of democracy. It presumes that political debate is about politicians. What it fails to show is how elected representatives will actually represent their constituents – all of them, both those that elected them and those that did not. It fails to show how citizen concerns will be addressed in any realistic terms. Like the old purveyors of 'snake oil', what we hear is "just trust us" with the idea that if we hear that message often enough or frequent enough we'll believe it.

It is why increasing numbers of voters have become cynical and disengaged in the political process. It has nothing to do with them. It’s also why trust in politicians and in government as an institution continues to decline. According to a 2008 EKOS Research survey, only 28% of Canadians trust their governments to do the right thing. But rather than using political campaigns to build trust among voters, linking evidence of problems to complex but realistic analysis to potential responses and frameworks of assessing progress, parties tend to continue to stretch the truth[v], while emphasizing simplistic partisan drivel and Newspeak. Trust is built by linking words and actions. Do the words of a candidate suggest they are capable of fostering a solution? Do their words illustrate how they may bring together the people, knowledge and resources to generate a response? If not, they’re just contributing to climate change.

What other criteria could be used?

In the coming months I’ll present ten alternative criteria which might be used. They include dimensions like: transparency, honesty, good behaviour and solid commitment; being a good representative, a good facilitator, a good steward, and a good partner; and not using spin and ‘BS’, or being overly interventionist. And I would like to hear your thoughts as well.

[i] Jack Aubry, “Access program overwhelmed, report says: Department's employees blame inadequate resources, bureaucratic attitudes”, The Ottawa Citizen, Friday, March 28, 2008

[ii] Glen McGregor, “Finding out how your MP voted can be an exercise in futility: Records on individual members buried in confusing parliamentary documents”, The Ottawa Citizen, Friday, March 28, 2008

[iii] Aaron Wherry, “A Version Of The Truth: Forget The Hidden Agenda. The Tories Are Getting A Name For Playing With The Facts”, .Macleans Magazine, May 14, 2008

[iv] David Pugliese , “Conservatives won't commit defence strategy to paper”, The Ottawa Citizen, Monday, May 12, 2008

[v] Aaron Wherry, “A Version Of The Truth: Forget The Hidden Agenda. The Tories Are Getting A Name For Playing With The Facts”, .Macleans Magazine, May 14, 2008

What We Need is More Democracy Not Less

2008-05-09T08:10:00.000-07:00

Re: “Time to Stop Prime Ministers From Ruling Like Kings”, Kathryn May, The Ottawa Citizen, Monday, May 05, 2008

As is often the case with Donald Savoie he has got it both right and wrong at the same time. His identification issues facing government today is smack on. When he says government is increasingly centralized in the executive he’s on target. When he speaks of the breakdown of the relationship between politicians and what was meant to be a professional, non-partisan public service is smack on too. The ideas of Cabinet solidarity and single ministerial accountability have clearly gone by the wayside and the belief in an anonymous public servant fearlessly offering advice to an elected government is also more legend than fact.

Yet Savoie’s analysis is incomplete and his solutions reflective of his backward looking fascination with restoring ‘the golden years’ of government in Canada when the practices of government were designed for simpler times.

Savoie omits as a factor that Canadians are more educated and better informed on almost every issue than their predecessors a century ago. Citizens can access just about any kind of information they want, when they want it over the Internet. This leads to a populace that is more judgmental but also more desirous of being engaged. Their expectations of government are higher as are their expectations of behaviour public servants and politicians.

Sadly, one of these new expectations is that government should be responsible for just about anything citizens don’t want to be bothered with -- not just the old basics of safety, the economy, trade and international relations. Today we have factory run education, health care, child care, elder care, immigrant care, culture care, poor people care, community care, industry care and many other government activities where citizens have bit by bit abdicated their traditional personal responsibilities to the State.

Savoie also ignores that issues today are more complex -- not because they weren’t complex in the past but because we’ve already done the easy work, creating a social safety net and producing a standard of living and quality of life that are the envy of much of the world. We’ve already picked the low hanging fruit. To keep society improving, as citizens expect, governments have to be more responsive, better learners and more capable of productively building upon the human, social and physical capital that already exists. These roles are there embedded in the nature of Canadian federalism yet they need to be cultivated and drawn out like a good wine out of grape juice.

More than anything the realities of modern life have destroyed the possibility, although not the belief, that “someone is in charge”. Savoie should know that in an organization like the federal government nobody’s really in charge -- not the PM, not the ministers, not the DMs. The belief that some is in charge is an illusion that is in constant need of buttressing. ‘Nobody in charge’ means that no one has the ability to ensure that a decision at one end will entirely determine the outcome at the other end. Most issues cut across several departments, so that in addition to aligning politicians and DMs, different departments must agree to cooperate as well as the different staffs in the different departments. And, if the issue is sufficiently complex, as most federal issues are, it must be coordinated with 10 provinces, three territories, 100s of municipal and county organizations, and probably private, not-for-profit and international organizations as well. If the government takes a stand, for instance, on the protection of Canada’s critical infrastructure it requires the willing buy-in of all these players to deliver on it. Yet sometimes some or anyone of them can say “no”. In fact Natural Resources Canada did just this recently in saying “no” to a cross sector forum on the protection of critical infrastructure for “budgetary” reasons, embarrassing the Minister of Public Safety (another department) and the Government. So while it is true that there has been increased centralization towards the PMO, that centralization has been more than offset by a distribution of governance that is probably orders of magnitude greater.

What Savoie seems to offer as a remedy for this discomfiture within Canada’s federal institutions is a series of patches in an attempt to restore those institutions to their historical balance. Forget the fact they were designed for another time. He believes it is possible to just shoe today’s reality into those old worn, comfortable shoes. His ideas of using unelected ‘external experts’ to watch over the public servants and politicians represents just such a patch. I wonder which ‘saints’ he was thinking about using? Maybe it was those senior public servants who Savoie himself suggests have become so politicized for over a generation; or maybe he was thinking of retired or out of office politicians to provide oversight of the current crop; or maybe he was thinking of a group of politically correct academics? At least elected politicians are elected.

What Savoie and others like him should be thinking about is creating a new pair of shoes. What we need is more democracy not less of it. We need new avenues for those more educated and better informed citizens to become engaged and take more ownership and responsibility for themselves and their communities. In doing so, we need new structures to foster more self-reliance, partnership and collaboration not more dependency. We need better mechanisms to share information and encourage more transparency not less. We need to find ways to have more conversations and dialogue with more people at all levels of Canadian society not just those farcical consultations where both governments and citizens pretend to listen.

More democracy not only means less centralization but it also means both citizens and public servants have to let go their addiction to the paternalistic idea that ‘someone is in charge’. Citizens need to give up their adherence to the ‘nanny state’ and that government is there to look after their every need as an entitlement of citizenship. If no one is in charge then everyone is in charge. This means that citizens need to think less like children and more like adults, adults who accept both the freedom to choose and risk of doing so as the twin companions of adulthood. They also need to recognize their obligation to each other to build better communities. On the other hand, public servants, from the lowest ranks on upwards, need to embrace the true idea of service – the idea that their primary responsibility is to serve the citizen and not their boss or their boss’s boss. Their boss’s role should be to help them to serve citizens better!

In this context politicians actually have an opportunity to enhance their currently low levels of legitimacy and public esteem by becoming the pre-eminent facilitators, networkers, champions, educators and stewards of Canadian society. Theirs is not to steal responsibility for the lives of their citizens but to provide opportunities for each citizen to take ownership of their life, making the most (or least) of it as they choose. As every parent comes to learn eventually, children make better choices by making choices. Politicians need to learn the same lesson.

Savoie doesn’t get this and he wants to wrap the current nanny state within another blanket of paternalism. Although well intentioned, his proposals are nonetheless futile ones that will inevitably create only more of the same. The only established antidote for kings and tyrants is democracy. Strange, how Savoie seemed to forget that history lesson?

Chalk River: How to Turn a Victory for Democracy into a Tawdry Political Episode

2008-01-28T13:14:00.000-08:00

While the temporary closure of the Chalk River nuclear facility last month still seems to garner political debate, one has to ask how it is that a perfectly reasonable demonstration of democracy in action can be turned into such a political albatross. If the esteeemed Minister of Natural Resources is accepting advice on the management of the issue, then he should fire his advisors.

The issue was a classic case of how legitimate but competing concerns crop up in political life. On the one hand Canada's nuclear safety agency acting in a probably overly obsessive manner about the need for nuclear safety (not that that is at all bad in the area of nuclear safety) and on the other hand the healthy diagnostic needs of Canadians and others worldwide.

The question here is whether Linda Keen was being responsible in not authorizing a resatart of the isotope facility at Chalk River once it became apparent that the health need was becoming critical. One has to realize that public servants operating in a single job are not usually manadated to look out for the broad spectrum interests of Canadians, let alone foreign nationals. They tend to have a very narrow specialist orientation. Keen was manadated to look after nuclear safety and on that issue to accept essentially zero levels of risk. This is in my mind is essential to ensure that a nuclear accident never occurs. Keen from all accounts was particularly suited to this task -- a real pain for following the rules.

Yet in following the rules as she saw them she came in conflict with the health needs of Canadians. Was she wrong in failing to accomodate those needs? No. Her sphere of concern was nuclear safety and the tolerance of zero risk. In her job, bending the rules is not something that is done. Yet in real life we all know that sometimes the judicious bending of the rules can sometimes be done without ill effect. But she decided that bending wasn't possible and that was that. I may disagree with her but it was her call to make that decision with regard to nuclear safety.

This however, is not the end of the story. As everyone knows the issue was raised in Parliament and Parliament unanimously overturned Keen, reopened the Chalk River plant and restarted isotope production. This was a brilliant stroke of democracy because Parliament is the final arbiter of competing interests in our democracy. Parliament was fully within its right to overturn Keen's decision as a means of balancing the infintesimally small risk of a meltdown at Chalk River with the very real posssibility of harm coming from not producing those isotopes. It was not the task of the Executive to overturn Keen, but it was the right of Parliament to do so.

This should have ended the whole affair as a wonderful demonstration of democracy in action. Instead the circumstances have been muddled by accusations by the Government about Keen's motivations and then her enventual firing on the eve of her testimony before a House committee. Now the Minister and the Government look like a bunch of partisan hacks whose own motivation seems to be a degree of petulance that Keen didn't ask how high when asked to jump.

A better way would have been to praise Keen for her vigilance on nuclear safety but underscore Parliament's right to balance the interests of Canadians. The Government could have made great hay about the unanimous, non-partisan agreement they secured to re-open the facility. Further, federal bureaucrats would have been comforted that they could indeed "speak truth to power", as our Westminster tradtion suggests they should, while leaving the ultimate trade-off decisions in the hands of Canada's elected representatives. Such an approach would have left everyone thinking the right thing had been done. Instead the Government has shot itself in the foot.

Canadians are a well educated lot and they appreciate the difference between acting in their interest and acting in partisan interest. The Minister of Natural Resources seems to have chosen the latter over the former and now the issue will be remembered not as an example of how the system is meant to work but as a crass political act.

Another Strike to Downtown

2008-01-28T13:08:00.000-08:00

Re: Ottawa Citizen Editorial, January 24, 2008, Another Strike to Downtown

This editorial has to be one of the lamest printed by the Citizen. While reaffirming that schools are an essential part of community life and that the choice of where to live is in part a decision about where can the kids go to school, the editors excuse indecision with “neither the school boards nor the cities are exactly flush with cash” as if that makes it alright that a bumbling City Council can’t make up its collective mind or take action on just about anything. And instead of praising the school boards for thinking of the entire community context when making their decisions, the editors deride them for not being “in the urban planning business”. My opinion is that at least somebody is thinking of the whole community.

As the Citizen editors are well aware, good urban planning is much less about laying out roads and sewers and largely about systems of interlocking incentives. Those incentives motivate people and businesses to locate in or move from one area or another. Those incentives, including: the cost of land, the cost of building, the cost of infrastructure, the cost of taxes, the availability of food and retail outlets, access to quality education, public safety, local employment opportunities, the cost and convenience of public transportation, access to healthcare, the presence of recreation and entertainment facilities, as well as the sense of neighbourhood identity, can attract or discourage people from living in an area. By themselves, none of these is likely to determine a location decision, however, a combination likely will. The absence of a neighbourhood school sends a clear negative message to families with children, which StatsCan reports is almost 1/3 of Ottawa households. Thus when local school boards consider school closures it is only good stewardship to consider their broader impact on the neighbourhood because once closed a replacement school is unlikely.

The Citizen editors should also be aware that the absence of such stewardship has been a major contributing factor in the distress experienced by some US cities over the last couple of decades. There instead looking at the broad health of the community narrow planning and lax development attitudes prevailed that tolerated urban sprawl; that refused to acknowledge the priority of cheap, efficient urban transit; that allowed downtown schools to close; that encouraged business development away from the city’s core; that enacted road building and parking policies that subsidized vehicular traffic in the suburbs; and that disregarded the human impact of their planning decisions. But most of all, their decisions assumed that each aspect of community could be dealt with independently.

With their “too bad” attitude regarding the closing of downtown schools, the Citizen editors demonstrate a similar ignorance of the highly interdependent nature of community life. A disincentive to the city’s largest demographic group to locate downtown will ultimately have only negative consequences for the economy and vitality of downtown neighbourhoods as it has in US cities. Instead of criticizing the School Boards, the Citizen editors should be seizing on the closure issue as a clear demonstration of the failure of so-called local leaders to advance an integrated community development strategy.

Supposedly, members of City Council are elected to look out for the whole community and to try and balance the incessant changes that occur across the region so as to avoid the type of ‘doughnut-style’ metropolis that has occurred in many US cities. There inner cities have been emptied of wealth, beauty and hope and their outer city rings have become devoid of vitality, history, and community. Local development requires cooperative planning across many interests and a willingness by local decision makers to discard their sector blinders and look towards the broader community interest. While Council should be a forum for this type of dialogue, it remains too unfocused and too inconsistent to display such coherent leadership. Therefore, if not them then who? The school boards have stepped up and they are trying to initiate a public debate on further school closures and the future of downtown Ottawa. But if they can’t get people to think about the community as a whole who will? Certainly not City Council. And sad to say, apparently neither will the Citizen.

Schools & Faith May Not Mix, But Apparently Politics and Learning Assuredly Do Not

2007-09-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

At this time of the Ontario provincial election, the issue of faith based schools has been put front and centre into the campaign. The Conservative Leader of the Opposition has offered his support to faith based schools in an attempt to wean away voter support in urban areas from the incumbent Liberals. It was a bit of crafty politicking that has put the Premier in the unenviable position of defending an archaic mix of faith based and public systems in Ontario. The Premier must rail against the very type of system in which he and his children were so well educated and to proclaim that the Province can be ‘half pregnant’ on this issue for historical, need I say hysterical, reasons.

In reviewing the media and comments by citizens, opinion clearly seems to favour a single public system in order to be fair to everyone and to provide an opportunity for all children from whatever background to bridge the silos that we can often erect between us in our communities. This is an argument that is both thoughtful and shows the concern of citizens for their neighbours. However, the Premier’s scare mongering that the quality of education will suffer or that the Province can not evolve beyond historical precedent are entirely bogus. He must think little of the intelligence of voters. Maybe this reflects his same assessment of voters that his multiple reversals on prior promises implies?

A larger issue which this debate inspires is the issue of parental choice in education, not just around faith but around all kinds of different contexts in which our children’s’ education could potentially be delivered -- whether this be an added emphasis on faith, or music, or sports, or trades, or arts, or whatever. What the Province assumes is that it alone has the wisdom to determine what is good for our children -- an assertion I find wholly troubling. Excellence in education is not achieved by treating every child the same (as has been well documented in research) as if they were a widget in a manufacturing line, but in providing them with the educational supports that can inspire and encourage their individual strengths. If the premier’s comments on faith based schools and the Ministry of Education’s attitude to choice are so accurate, then why hasn’t Alberta’s educational system been crushed under the weight of added parental choice offered there? Instead, Alberta’s educational system has flourished with innovation, effectiveness and legitimacy in ways Ontario’s has not.

Should we have faith based schools? A better question is to ask why we can not have a school system that can change as we change, both in demographics and in knowledge, and as the economy and world conditions change. Why must we be stuck with a system constructed people who are long dead -- no matter how well meaning they were? My question to the Premier is why he and the government can’t learn?

On Being Prepared

2007-07-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

Re: Be Prepared, Ottawa Citizen, City Editorial, D4, July 4, 2007

Wednesday’s Citizen article on the preparedness of local authorities in the event of a ‘dirty bomb’ gives pause for serious thought. Within a one kilometre radius of the Parliament Buildings are the offices of the Privy Council and the Prime Minister, the Supreme Court, Treasury Board, Public Safety & Emergency Management Canada, DND Headquarters, the Bank of Canada, Place du Portage (home to HRSDC, Service Canada and others), Ottawa City Hall, Gatineau City Hall, the Ontario Courthouse, the University of Ottawa, the CBC, the Library and Archives Canada, NavCan, the Museum of Civilization, the National Gallery, the Rideau Centre, the World Exchange Centre and most of the City’s major office towers. Should a strong wind be blowing most of the City’s embassies as far east as the Ottawa River would likely become contaminated as well.

Make no mistake a ‘dirty bomb’ in Ottawa would be almost as disastrous as a real nuclear blast without the physical destruction. It would effectively cut off the head of the federal and municipal governments. Not so much in any immediate loss of life but in the fact that workers in buildings in the contaminated area would have to don hazmat suits on the way to work in the morning. The information systems contained in these buildings would also be surrounded by radiological ‘hot zones’ which would likely make them inaccessible (For cost saving reasons a lot of the federal government’s data is not backed up in other locations.) The City would likely be without water for some time because fallout would contaminate the river and the City’s water supply is primarily downstream of Parliament Hill. Ottawa’s economy would be destroyed. Tourism would cease. Property values would disappear. And many of those who wouldn’t just immediately pack up and leave would be those in the most at risk Lowertown area, exacerbating a health emergency that would already be over stretched.

This leaves the editor’s comments regarding cooperation among federal, provincial and municipal authorities being like “herding cats” as being particularly troubling. In the event of such a catastrophe are citizens just supposed to roll over and die because these authorities can’t play nice? I’m all for preventive measures but stuff does happen. And in the end it’s frequently not the things you plan for that are the real problem but the things you don’t plan for. The only way to deal with these types of uncertainties is by having the capacity to create responses 'on the fly' and that means cooperative governance mechanisms must already be in place. Whoever is left to clean up the mess must already be in the habitat of talking to and trusting their counterparts in other agencies and levels of government, businesses and community organizations. If not, while a ‘dirty bomb’ might damage the City, institutional gridlock, a.k.a. “difficult negotiations”, could certainly kill it.

Chris Wilson

Ottawa

Be prepared, The Ottawa Citizen, Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Facilitating Contingent Cooperation: What are the mechanisms?

2006-09-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

In my work, I keep bumping up against the same big issues time and again, including:

the difficulties people have in sustaining multi-stakeholder, cooperative initiatives for any length of time;
the difficulty in achieving horizontal coordination within any level of government (let alone between levels!) even with apparent political will and resources available;
the difficulty P3s have in achieving goals that may be more complex than simple vendor-supplier relationships (here in Canada, almost all relationships between government and the private or civic sectors have been redefined as ‘partnerships’ even when no partner relation exists); and
the huge gap between stakeholder positioning on issues and their willingness to resolve problems.

In all of these you will most likely recognize the thread of the collective action problem (also known as social traps, prisoners’ dilemma, etc.) – i.e. how to get people/organizations to act in their collective interest when their individual interest may suggest less fruitful actions or actions that are even collectively harmful. This collective action issue has come up again and again in my own work as I’ve explored how groups of stakeholders try to accomplish together what they could not do alone. I know that the starting place for cooperation is the “can’t do it alone” realization and that this should lead the participants to undergo some form of collective learning. I know that champions are essential, that trust building is necessary, and that ongoing assessment was important as well. Technology could be helpful but was not in itself sufficient. What I was missing, until recently, was a key that put all these pieces together.

The key seemed to appear in an interview I did with a regional development officer in Windsor, Ontario last winter who was a leader with a collaborative community portal initiative. The person indicated that they would not have taken on the leadership of a certain taskforce without knowing that others like him were doing similar tasks which would also benefit his organization. He knew the other prominent leaders were contributing from his involvement in the steering committee and from frequent conversations with the project facilitator.

I don’t know how many times I had heard a similar story before, but that time his comments connected to something Howard Rheingold said in Smart Mobs a few years back, about contingent cooperation and monitoring. Suddenly, many of the coordination activities I had observed in various partnerships and collaborations over the years (what most funders consider as overhead) made a lot more sense. These were all ways for the contingent co-operators to reaffirm their commitments by verifying the ongoing contributions of the other partners. In retrospect, when partnerships got into serious trust problems, it was because these tit-for-tat contributions could no longer be confirmed or they became unclear, a consequence of ineffective monitoring. (more thoughts on contingent cooperation on my blog)

One of the most puzzling and sometimes troubling things I’ve observed is seeing a group of dedicated, knowledgeable, well-meaning people get together for a specific purpose only to find in the end that they will not do the things they know need to be done. Now I can understand that this was not some sort of esoteric aberration of human nature but the mundane consequence of ineffective monitoring. As you yourselves have probably observed, good intent is never enough.

So I’ve been on a bit of a hunt of late for mechanisms that can help move groups beyond their well-meaningness into sustained collective action. I drafted a template of some things groups could do and posted to my website. The angle of contingent cooperation and its requirement for monitoring suggests that the tools/ techniques that are needed should increase information flow among the partners but in a trusted way.

This is a long winded way of getting around to asking -- has anyone thought to prepare or know of any kind of inventory for the mechanisms groups use to satisfy their contingent cooperation? I keep wondering if I’m forgetting about something. I’m talking about things like:

the use of facilitated meetings that involve joint activities like learning, reframing, or prioritizing;
the use of a partner coordinator/ facilitator/ trusted broker who constantly goes around talking to people;
the undertaking of joint research or assessment to identify and share the knowledge of benefits;
the use of online forums/ groups/ threaded discussions to share knowledge and expertise;
the use of social gatherings to strengthen trust;
the use of annual MOUs to define contributions and gauge progress;
the use of email newsletters for quick updates;
the use of media announcements to celebrate success and strengthen moral contracts; and
From one partnership I learned that they secured a group price discount on Billberry’s and then directed it to the mangers in their partner organizations to encourage them to comply in a more timely way with their partnership reporting needs.
Other creative ideas??

I know this may sound like pretty basic stuff but most practitioners are only vaguely aware of the information obligation imposed on them by cooperation. They know they have to do certain things with certain budgets and certain timeframes but they don’t know they need to keep telling everyone about their progress. And they are usually only marginally interested in what others are doing, until, of course, the trust starts to break down. Partnerships may do some information sharing in ad hoc ways in response to events, or even just out of politeness, but rarely by design from the outset. Nonetheless, information sharing is crucial to maintaining partner trust.

I feel that the more these types of mechanisms can become a credible part of a practitioner’s toolbox, the more likely it will be that they are seen as a central function of maintaining healthy partnerships and receive the resourcing they deserve. Also, the more they can be understood as integral parts of the job description for partner management, the more they’ll be used routinely.

You can email me at chris@christopherwilson.ca

Additional Links:
Synergize Workflows by Sam Rose at Social Synergy Wiki

Public Service Renewal is not just Re-Branding

2006-09-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

Responding to the Clerk’s call for higher levels recruitment in the public service

September 18, 2006

On September 15, 2006 Kevin Lynch, the Clerk of the Privy Council, addressed the Dalhousie School of Public Administration with a presentation entitled "Why Public Service Renewal Matters". In it he discussed the direction of the Government’s latest round of public service renewal and the need to ensure that the public service reflected excellence and leadership.

However, the federal government’s recruitment challenge goes way beyond trying to brand the government as a nice place to work. When talented creative people have many opportunities open to them, the government not only needs to pay reasonably well, but it also needs to be a place where people’s skills and decision making abilities are respected and where their abilities can be seen to make a difference. To solve the government’s recruiting problem, Mr. Lynch will have to have to fundamentally reform the way the government does its business and its relationship to citizens. The scope of this work has been identified in each of the 30+ PS renewal initiatives that have occurred in the last forty years but avoided in practice, so from an historical standpoint the odds are against him of making much of a difference.

Mr. Lynch suggested that technology is fundamentally altering how government does things. I think the best response to this that technology is and isn’t changing things. It may be altering some things – how information is stored or how it is transmitted -- but in many other instances technology appears to be having little impact. In particular, the government doesn’t seem to be able to handle the requirements for the business process reform and organizational change that the new technologies demand. Take the previous ‘Government On Line’ initiative. Rather than deal with setting new rules for the exchange of information between departments and with citizens, the deputy ministers opted for the much easier ‘Common Look and Feel’ and then declared success. The latest effort to provide integrated e-services is floundering for the same reason – there is no mechanism to resolve the competing interests of the departments.

The Clerk pointed to a shift in public expectations for public service. This is quite true. Canadians are becoming more sophisticated and less willing to defer to governments when they are self serving. For routine types of interactions most citizens want at least the same quality of service delivery from the government as they receive from the private sector. In times of need, however, they want government services that are quick to respond, helpful and efficacious. The sort of stuff we saw with the SARS outbreak is just not acceptable.

I think most people would perceive that the visible public services -- things like the reliable delivery of pension and insurance cheques, the provision of policing and border patrol, and the collection of taxes -- are well handled. Do citizens passionately care whether their monthly pension cheque comes reliably in the mail or by direct deposit? I think not. (My dad would but that’s a different story!) The big service issue occurs when someone has a problem and when there is a divergence from the government’s service script. Either the citizen can’t find the person they need, or no one will respond to them, or they need to supply details in quadruplicate to many departments, or worst of all they are regarded as guilty felons.

Take tax collection, for example. I admit some people do try to evade paying their taxes but many people just make mistakes in filling out a tax form or have new information come to them later. Being an honest citizen doesn’t pay. I hear the CRA has a quota system and since it’s much easier for them to 'catch' the people who turn themselves in than it is to look for the bad guys who don’t want to be found,they’ll make your life hellish if you bring a ‘mistake’ to their attention. One accountant I know of is horrified by the recent increase in the number of people who are being harassed by the CRA and the equally large number of honest citizens who are being encouraged to be less than forthcoming by CRA’s tactics. These tactics are, in effect, breaking down the level of trust and willing compliance in the payment of taxes. In this kind of environment, why would any normal person with options want to work there?

In a recent Fortune edition, an article described a bank where someone came in asking for something the bank didn’t offer. The bank’s response – “we don’t do this but we’ll take care of you anyway.” The bank’s policy was to own the customer and that started with whomever was in front of an employee. Can you imagine asking someone in government to do something that wasn’t explicitly in their job description? Can you imagine them adopting an attitude of trying to use every opportunity for personal contact as an exercise of citizen building? The Canadian public service is not typically a helping environment. Therefore, for anyone who really wants to help others the kind of service style typical of government is profoundly discouraging. I remember talking to a former ADM who at one time was considered ‘one of the best and brightest’ but left the PS despairing of ever being able to make a difference. He thought he just needed to get higher in the ranks until he got to the top and realized the mistake of his assumption.

Canadians do want more accountability, as Mr. Lynch suggested, but more importantly they want results. It’s only when those results are not forthcoming, that they want those people who were making the decisions to be accountable -- that is, to explain to them in clear, common sense language why the anticipated results did not appear. This is not the same as the childish finger pointing and ‘blame-games’ that are typically engaged in politically and bureaucratically. That’s not the kind of accountability Canadians want. Where no school would tolerate the type of behaviour demonstrated in Question Period, why should citizens? And this has contributed to a PS culture that is fundamentally afraid of being exposed to its citizens. Over the last few years, we have seen ever more restrictions to Access to Information, more outright obfuscation, and more avoidance of direct accountability. When was the last time you saw a Minister take responsibility for his department’s actions and resign? (Actually it was Sinclair Stevens in the Mulroney Government in 1986. It’s been even longer since we’ve seen a Deputy Minister stand up and resign over a conflict between public and political interests). Addressing better accountability will require the Clerk to do more than prepare a good ad campaign that says ‘it isn’t so’.

The Clerk said that Canadians want better management of tax dollars. I disagree. I think that Canadians aren’t as concerned about the better management of revenues as they are about paying fewer taxes, largely because they don’t perceive sufficient value for the money they contribute and because of what they may perceive as others not paying their fair share. “Increase the number of tax collectors,” you might say. Not so. Tax collection depends on the willingness of the governed to contribute their fair share. And as the Russian experience illustrates, where only 25% of citizens pay their taxes, no amount of tax collectors can fix the problem when the population as whole has lost faith in its moral contract with the State. When people begin to feel that there is a disconnect between the taxes they pay and the services they receive, they will at first complain and then later stop complaining altogether as they also stop paying and go underground. By all indications, the underground economy in Canada is growing suggesting a declining trend among Canadians in their faith in government. If Mr. Lynch wants to renew government, increase recruitment, retain existing employees and create a culture of excellence in the PS, then this declining faith in government needs to be addressed head on.

Similarly most people that I talk to don’t think much about core public services. I mean they assume that those services are already being responsibly carried out and they are generally happy with their delivery. What they are more concerned about are the non core service areas – such as the ability to coordinate across multiple authorities on any number of issues including, employment and training, creating safe, coherent communities, dealing with climate change and potential pandemics, and timely access to health care. There are also a host of issues connected to any number of interest groups seeking funding for this or that. But while the complexity of the big problems discourages serious action and investment by government, the government is often willing to buy political support with quick contributions to interest groups.

Interestingly no one in the PS seems to take notice of the inherent contradiction in the desire of citizens’ to pay less for more services. Resources aren’t limitless even though the avenues for spending may be. Where are the trade-off debates? Since politicians are rewarded equally for cutting taxes and fixing problems, the former being so much easier to accomplish than the latter, this puts the PS in the unenviable situation of trying to fix problems with fewer real resources, in an environment of increased risk avoidance, with higher reporting and accounting costs, and with a shrinking windows of political commitment. Is the Clerk prepared to stand up publicly and say “get real” (as it somewhere suggests is part of his job description)?

And if this 'something for nothing' attitude becomes the characteristic dynamic between the citizen and the State, then why should we be surprised when employees (also citizens) want more pay for less work, or when they demonstrate a weak commitment to helping citizens solve their problems. You just can’t build an organization of excellence where acceptance of ‘quick fixes’, ‘risk-free solutions’, CYA, the ‘easy way out’, the ‘cheapest solution’, and ‘flaccid commitment’ abound.

As you can see, the Clerk has a much bigger job to do than he was willing to admit to the students at Dalhousie.

In a follow up note I’ll examine the government’s recruiting position from a SWOT perspective.

My mistake, I thought the Public Service was working for Canadians

2006-09-05T12:15:00.000-07:00

July 4, 2006

It’s nice that Canada Day comes around every year to remind us to think about the country we live in and how it meets our expectations. Canada truly is one of the best places in the world to live. On Canada Day we can take a breath and enjoy the large degree of balance we have achieved together.

That’s why it’s doubly frustrating when you see a problem and it seems to absolutely resist being fixed. Of course I’m not talking about things like the violence in Iraq or Afghanistan or AIDS in Africa. I’m talking about those chronic Canadian problems like healthcare, literacy and lifelong learning, immigration, productivity, the environment, or the ongoing saga of federal-provincial relations. If we’ve come so far, then why can’t we resolve these issues?

In my naiveté, I have always assumed that fixing these things was what our public sector leaders were hired to do. Isn’t that why we vote for them? You can therefore imagine my surprise when I was informed by a senior federal ADM that “governments don’t fix problems. They only take positions.” From a political perspective, what’s really important is being on the right side of the issue. As it turns out actually resolving an issue is largely immaterial and just a “coincidence” if it is in fact settled.

Said another federal official, “the big problem in doing business with government is that there is no leader, no one person who is really in charge. Government is a multi headed thing. If you’re dealing with government you’re likely to be dealing with several different departments who don’t talk to one another and are usually off in different directions.” It’s even worse, he said, if you’re dealing with some federal-provincial file. It’s like signing an agreement with a CEO who has no control over his company. Whatever anyone says it’s an empty promise because you don’t know who’s making the agreement? You can make a deal with one part of government and another part of government contravenes your agreement. This is why government is typically experienced as such a bad faith partner. The different parts act so independently of each other that there is no semblance of coherence.

Consequently, leadership in the public sector is all about spin and has very little substance. The former Liberal government is still milking the billions of dollars it budgeted for reducing green house gas emissions but then they actually only spent a few hundred million as reimbursements for energy retro-fitting. They then get double credit for supporting climate change but not spending too much money and delivering a steady stream of budget surpluses. The Conservatives have done away pretty much with environmental spending and also seem willing to walk away from Kyoto, claiming credit for honesty without any viable national or international plan in its stead. Is this honest or is this stupid? You decide (but hint the problem of green house gases hasn’t gone away). See also my blog on Kyoto.

One of the primary contributors to this situation is the bureaucratic structure of government itself. In federal and provincial governments, legislation defines that the activities that are undertaken by government departments in silos (as does funding) but this results in a huge need for cross collaborative work among public servants. “Ministers within a single jurisdiction don’t know how to work together or how to achieve policies that align.” This gap exists at a time when most issues tend to cut across ministerial responsibilities. For example, on the subject of immigration there are several federal departments that deal with aspects of immigration, including: Foreign Affairs and International Trade, HRSDC, Health Canada, Industry Canada, etc.. Not only has the federal public service not figured out the pathways, mechanisms or models to allow themselves to effectively work together but neither has it figured out how to deal with the municipal or provincial orders of government.

There may be a committee of deputy ministers assigned the responsibility of coordination but once the task is assigned to a departmental lead, the other departments essentially forget about it. One deputy minister I spoke with agreed, “there is lots of work to be done here.” But making changes is always resisted as Machiavelli reminds us, “innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those would prosper under the new.”[1]

The other major contributor to this powerlessness to solve problems is the attitude of citizens themselves. A senior academic official recently told me that “as citizens, there is a big disconnect between our personal and public interests. We don’t want government to raise taxes but we don’t want them to reduce any our services either -- in fact we want more services.” We all want a free ride while someone else pays the piper.

In the end, we offer our politicians a choice – you can fix our problems which are difficult and complex to resolve or you can reduce our taxes which is simple to do, despite the negative repercussions that this may have on the collective problems we face. As citizens we will reward you equally. Small wonder then that we are blithely told by politicians that they will fix a problem and it will cost us less. Does anyone forget that image of McGuinty promising in writing not to raise taxes? And we buy that garbage! We have only ourselves to blame because we have not stood up to say what we want or to tell our governments to get real.

So despite these ongoing frustrations, I will choose to take solace this Canada Day from all that we have accomplished, that we have succeeded reasonably well in spite of ourselves and that there is hope that we will once again find some pragmatic means to overcome the challenges that face us today.

[1] Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, second edition, W. W. Norton publishers, London: 1992: pg. 17

Book Review: Presence by Peter Senge et.al.

2006-09-05T12:11:00.000-07:00

August 2, 2006

As part of my summer reading, I just finished this 2005 book called Presence by four of the world’s most eminent management theorists Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty-Sue Flowers. It has one of those odd academic titles that makes you wonder just what the heck it means. And when the authors initially do define presencing as “seeing from the deepest source and becoming a vehicle for that source” one might be excused to think they are simply trying to add a ‘New Age’ flavour to the stable of management theories. Yet a full read of the book reveals some uncommon insights into a profoundly different approach to problem-solving.

As someone who has spent the last decade conducting active research involving new models of governance and collaboration, I take my hat off to them for their rich appreciation of human behaviour and the potential for collective change they have identified from paying attention to their own inner experiences. On the other hand, as a long time practitioner and student of the dynamics of consciousness I can only say that it’s about time. It’s about time that the people studying human organizations paid more attention to the human part of those phenomena -- the most central part of which is conscious awareness. Senge and his collaborators have proved themselves yet again to be pathfinders simply by following the truth of their own experiences. I must say reading Presence was like suddenly feeling a torrent of fresh air poring down a musty, old academic hallway.

This is obviously a very personal book for the authors, prepared over time and drawn from a series of their ongoing conversations about the nature of organizations and the future of human society. But it is also about their various intimate experiences of transcendence, the circumstances under which they occurred, the impact those experiences had on the world views of the authors and the transformative power with which that transcendence could reshape people and events.

Senge et. al. suggest a new type of learning is required to effectively deal with the complex problems being imposed upon today’s organizations. They offer a model that comprises sensing (immersing yourself in the situation until you become one with it), moving to presencing (experiencing the interconnectedness of that alert wholeness within human experience) and then moving into realizing or the spontaneous, natural flow of action that is supported by that wholeness as a vehicle for its manifestation. This sensing-presencing-realizing model is less about matching solutions to problems than it is about ‘co-creating’ new futures among individuals, human collectivities and the larger, natural world.

Back in the day (and it seems like yesterday) I heard the same story described in Presence from one most profound spiritual teachers of this or the last century -- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (although for me it was presented as a quick synopsis of the entire anthology of Vedic literature). It was the story of ‘nivardhatvam’. In Sanskrit nivardhatvam means to retire or to transcend. The story of nivardhatvam began with the need of a king to deal with all the trials and tribulations of his life, the heartaches and losses, the threats, the confounding challenges, the many things so out of his control. He goes to a great Vedic master pleading for advice and expecting to have to lead a life of denial and austerity. Instead the master, unwilling to be drawn out of his own contemplations of reality, responded with only one word ‘nivardhatvam’.

What the seer meant was for the man to retire -- not as a recluse from the world of events but to retire from the confused world of objective reality, to transcend it and experience the knowingness of his own inner consciousness. Then when drenched with that consciousness, the king was to retire from this transcending and be in the world once more. He was then to continue to transcend again and again into and out of this primal consciousness. The seer’s message also suggested that this pattern of transcending and action also had to be retired from, implying that the person’s actions became so fully imbued with consciousness that the king’s inner Self was fully realized 24X7. Retiring from this Self would then be impossible although he would experience his actions as if they were going on ‘almost by themselves’.

But the seer also meant that this clearly defined state of subject-object duality should also be retired from. The regular experience of the wholeness of consciousness would open a door through which he could begin to view a similar wholeness present in every grain of existence and every object of experience. Eventually, the king’s experience of duality would transform into a unified one where the “alien self” would become the predominant experience of both his subjective and objective realities. Here the practice of nivardhatvam came to an end for there was no non-Self place to retire to – all would be seen as wholeness. From that infinitely correlated source of the natural world the king’s every desire would emerge as a vehicle for the ‘source’ to emerge into the world, bringing him freedom from the bondage of events and the pains of his own limited understanding. Thus my teacher told me that within this one word, nivardhatvam, is encompassed the practical message of all of the books of the Veda and all their commentaries. Presence was a refreshing reminder of this.

“Learning based on the past suffices when the past is a good guide to the future. But it leaves us blind to profound shifts when whole new forces shaping change arise.” Therefore when the future is uncertain and unknowable and the potential paths forward are numerous and complex, the authors suggest a reliance on “primary knowing”, on nature’s “wholeness”, and the “source” of human experience in order to create an integrated and spontaneous response that can guide us into an emerging future. Sensing-presencing-realizing the authors suggest is a way of tapping that wholeness.

In a way the model presented by the authors is like the old way of dyeing cloth. You take some cloth and immerse it in dye. Then you take it and put it in the sun. (Old dyes were not particularly strong so the sun always faded the colour.) Then you would put the cloth back in the dye and then back in the sun. You would then repeat the process as many times as it took until the colour in the cloth was fast and didn’t fade. This same process is evident in the sensing-presencing-realizing model of Senge et. al. Yet the descriptions their experiences of this “second type of learning” while they resonate with familiarity they also suggest a certain impracticality. In one instance it resulted from a week-long vision quest, in another it resulted from seeing your house burn down, and for a third it resulted from the culmination of a long process of national reconciliation after a bitter civil war. None of the authors seemed to achieve it on a regular, on-demand basis. In fact, the authors acknowledged that that the kind of openness involved in this process was “rare in adults”, although their experiences confirm that the process is a natural one and one that anyone can have.

Yet if the need to resolve the many conflicts that collectively bring about the “requiem scenario” is as great as they suggest (and I personally have no doubt of that) then there is also a great need to democratize this “second type of learning” so that in each and every instance where people are making choices that impact the future, their decisions may be guided by that awareness of the whole rather the interests of a part. I would suggest that there are many more practical means of fostering that “primary knowing”, of transcending, that can be pursued on a daily basis – the most direct of which I have found is Transcendental Mediation. Yet the responsibility to be part of a solution in an emerging future clearly rests with each person. It can not be commanded or imposed.

The real value of Presence is that it gives real hope that positive alternatives to the requiem scenario may be found. Yet as I read it I am reminded of the ‘collective action problem’ so eloquently described in Joseph Heath’s “The Efficient Society”. Will we continue to shirk our individual responsibilities (in this case for experiencing presencing) hoping to ‘free-ride’ on the efforts of others? If so we are likely to continue down the path we are on, making quick decisions of convenience, using partial knowledge, blindly following the past paradigms that assume an independence from our environment and an ability to control people and events that are by now wholly discredited. As the authors of Presence have so plainly described, the answer to the ‘requiem scenario’ does not lie ‘out there’ but it lies in the heart and soul of each and every one of us. We will choose to embrace a new way or we will not. But the consequences of our individual choice will be found like ripples extending throughout humanity and the planet. Need I say, “choose well”?

Recognizing Contingent Co-operation

2006-09-05T12:07:00.000-07:00

August 21, 2006

It is increasingly apparent from the experiences of many community networks that many diverse, local stakeholders can effectively work together even if they do not normally interact. This was clearly evident in the large majority of the cases I reviewed in the context of Ontario’s Connect Ontario program (Wilson & Foster, 2006), as it has been in many of the other cases of successful collaboration I have examined as part of research conducted at the Centre on Governance at the University of Ottawa since the late 1990s.

Yet successful collaboration is far from the norm in business, in government or in the third sector. “In the case of organizational theory and practice, the problem that has proved most intractable has been the coordination of people and resources.” (Sarason & Lorentz, 1998:13)

In business, where research has been more extensive, it is held that approximately 90% of partnerships, joint ventures, alliances fail -- with failure being defined as early termination or failure to deliver on targeted objectives. While the idea of P3s is becoming commonplace in public sector circles, government involvement is frequently criticized, often in terms of its arbitrariness and top down approach, its inability to align its own goals with the goals of participating partners, its inability to be responsive in the light of evolving conditions, and its unnecessary bureaucracy. As I observed in Connect Ontario, these types of criticisms could emerge even when it was the government’s specific intent to avoid them.

It has also been observed by many commentators that even within a single level of government, effective cooperation between departments and agencies can be elusive in spite of high level agreement on the need to do so. As a former deputy minister once explained to me, “Government is a multi headed thing. There is no one who is really in charge. If you’re dealing with government you can be dealing with different departments who don’t talk to one another and are usually off in different directions.” Enabling government to coordinate people and resources around a common policy objective thus remains a chronic problem.

It has been my experience in examining various types of collaboration and interviewing key public sector decision makers that while many people understand the need to cooperate, the requirements for delivering on successful cooperation are not well understood -- in part because they may not fit the ‘business as usual’ patterns of government or because it is erroneously assumed that a commitment to cooperate by senior managers is itself sufficient to sustain collaboration. In the private sector this latter assumption has been one of the major stumbling blocks of successful cooperation because the organizational needs (as opposed to leadership needs) imposed by cooperative activities end up being under-resourced and under-attended to.

My experience also suggests that there are three stages of collaboration, each having its own requirements that need to be addressed in order for the partnership to succeed. The first is the rationale for cooperation that involves getting people to the table with a willingness and openness to at least to try to work with others. This is usually driven by a strong belief among potential partners that they can not achieve their goals alone. This is the stage that most people ‘get’. The third stage involves a period of self referral and reflection on the part of the partners that includes celebrating their success, collecting the organizational memory (lessons learned, best practice, etc.) of the partnership, and reassessing any future role for the partnership and other opportunities for the partners. This post partnership reflection is rarely attended to effectively because most collaborative initiatives are time limited hence there is little incentive to capture the social and intellectual capital generated from a partnership for future use.

The second stage is the working stage of the partnership that begins by building trust, continues through a period of social learning and joint decision making, and finally on to the undertaking of joint action. These steps are well recognized.

However, what is often overlooked and not well recognized, is that participating partners are usually ‘contingent co-operators’, that is, they are willing to contribute as long as others do as well. They do not participate out of coercion or out of some sense of altruism. Their voluntary participation is wholly practical, based on the assumption that the participation of others will benefit them more than the cost of their contribution. Typically, organizations will continue to participate in a partnership only so long as the costs of participation are outweighed by the contributions by other organizations. For instance, one interviewee in a Connect Ontario project commented, “I would not have taken on the leadership of a project taskforce without knowing that other community leaders were doing similar tasks in other areas which would also benefit us.” The consequence of this prevalence of this ‘contingent cooperation’ among collaborating partners underscores a strong need for transparency and monitoring so that everyone can be reassured about the levels of cooperation and commitment of their partners.

Howard Rheingold commented in his book Smart Mobs (Rheingold, 2002:176) that “monitoring and sanctioning are important not simply as a way of punishing rule breakers but also as a way of assuring members that others are using common resources wisely. That is, many people are contingent cooperators, willing to cooperate as long as most others do (what Ostrom has referred to as the ‘commitment problem’). Thus monitoring and sanctioning serve the important [and I would say essential] function of providing information about others’ actions and levels of commitment.”

The fact that partners are 'contingent' means that if insufficient resources are dedicated to the function of monitoring and sharing project information, the partners will likely lose confidence in the commitment of others. In this scenario, each partner may know their own real-time costs but be uncertain about the real-time benefits being contributed by others. This uncertainty will in turn jeopardize an initiative's continuity due to fears of being on the losing side of 'shirking'. Thus a level of resourcing sufficient to keep all the partners adequately informed becomes not just a 'nice to have' element of any partnership but an absolutely essential component.

This monitoring function can take several forms. The most successful of which is the funding of a partnership networker, someone who is constantly talking to partners, sharing information and news, listening to their concerns, resolving their conflicts, and asking their advice. This function is often performed by the project champion but rarely is it one that is sufficiently resourced. Frequently the same champion is also loaded with project management duties, project marketing, project administration, as well as with technical responsibilities. However, if the person’s networking activities are insufficient, then the partnership as a whole is put in jeopardy.

As Sarason and Lorentz observed (1998:37), while better coordination may remain the fundamental focus of most organizational reforms, there is scant attention, if ever, paid to the need for someone to do the actual coordination, as if coordination emerges by itself spontaneously from the different pieces of the organization properly juxtaposed. Yet “when we engage in meaningful conversations people develop new levels of trust, they become more cooperative and forgiving. People stop being so arbitrary and demanding when they are part of the process”(Wheatley, 2005:70). The reason why the partnership networker role works so well is that their conversations contribute to an ongoing process of information exchange and collective learning, one that corroborates partner commitments and validates their continued participation.

There are other mechanisms that can help to sustain coordination among partners including, the generation of common knowledge resources, facilitated partner meetings, the use of MOUs and other tools for establishing progress markers, story telling and case reviews, opportunities for regular feedback and direct information exchange, and governance modelling characterized by low entry and exit barriers. Some of this monitoring activity (the more routine and codifiable information) can be provided by secure online solutions but much of it requires people talking to people. In an environment where knowledge, resources and power are increasingly distributed, this ability to effectively address the needs of ‘contingent co-operators’ is gaining critical importance.

References:

H. Rheingold, (2002). Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Perseus Publishing, Cambrige, MA

S. Sarason & E. Lorentz (1998). Crossing Boundaries: Collaboration, coordination, and the redefinition of resources, Josey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco.

M. Wheatley (2005). Finding Our Way: Leadership for an uncertain time, Berrett Koehler Publishers, San Francisco.

C. Wilson and W. Foster, (2006). Reviewing COPSC: 11 Case Studies of Ontario Community Portals, supplementary report for “Reviewing COPSC: Building on the lessons of community portals”, Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, Toronto, May.

Avoiding the False Choice: Either Kyoto or not Kyoto

2006-09-05T12:02:00.000-07:00

June 28, 2006

Preston Manning’s op-ed piece in the June 28^th edition of the Globe and Mail entitled “Either Kyoto or not Kyoto”, once again demonstrated that you can take a man out of politics but you can’t take the politics out of the man. His comments confuse the issue with jibes at the previous government while ignoring the fundamental fact that Kyoto is not about what we can do for ourselves but what others can do for us.

I agree with Mr. Manning that “Kyoto or not Kyoto” is not the real issue. The real issue is the extent to which we and other members of the global community continue to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. While there can be no doubt that better means may exist than those employed by the previous Liberal regime at reducing greenhouse gases, the planet’s atmosphere is a globally shared resource, one upon which the collective action of others have a much, much greater impact on us than anything we can do. In his current role as eminence grise for the Government, Mr. Manning should be aware that this situation is a classic case of a ‘tragedy of the commons’ where the externalized costs of burning fossil fuels can not be fully priced into the market for fuel and therefore those costs are off-loaded onto others.

The Canadian dilemma is quite simple. There are four scenarios. As individuals, organizations or as a nation we can choose to do little or nothing about greenhouse gases in the belief that we contribute so little to the problem (Canada as a whole contributes only about 2% to global emissions). We might expect that other countries who contribute more to the overall problem will reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as is ‘fair’. This scenario is clearly advantageous to us, because someone else is largely paying for fixing the problem. However, our non-action benefits no one. This can be referred to as a ‘free-rider’ scenario.

Being the international do-gooder we profess to be, we could also choose to lower our emissions while everyone else chooses not to. This may be altruistic but it is also referred to as the ‘sucker’ scenario because our actions benefit others while we derive no benefit from them. In the third scenario, we all work to fix the problem, sharing the costs and the benefits. We say “sharing the benefits” although this is not quite true. In the end the benefits we derive from the collective actions of others are much greater by far than the benefits we contribute. We can’t possibly reduce carbon emissions beyond 2%, whereas the rest of the world can reduce them by 98%. The fourth and final scenario is one where none of us work to reduce greenhouse gases and everyone ultimately suffers from catastrophic climate change.

From a collective and global welfare perspective, scenario three is obviously the best choice while scenario four is the most disastrous. However, the ‘best’ choice for any individual, organization or country is scenario number one because a benefit is obtained at the expense of others. Therefore individuals, organizations and countries will tend to choose this strategy over the others, especially since they will also be afraid of being caught as ‘suckers’. Unfortunately, if every individual and nation chooses scenario one (excepting those few altruists), we end up collectively choosing scenario four. We have a situation where a choice which is in our best interest individually ends up trapping us in the worst case scenario globally. Mr. Manning will no doubt recognize the form of these four choices as the classical ‘prisoners’ dilemma’ problem associated with collective action.

This brings me back to Kyoto. Canada’s participation in Kyoto is not about our internal policies related to our small possible contribution to reducing global greenhouse gases. Whatever we do or don’t do will have very limited impact on the global problem. However, Canada’s participation in the Kyoto Protocol, along with the other 145 countries who signed on to reduce greenhouse gases, is part of an attempt to reduce the ‘free-rider’ tendency that all nations have on this issue. If by treaty nations can be constrained from choosing the ‘free-rider’ option, then Canadians can capture the much more significant benefits from the collective efforts of other countries as they reduce their emissions. What we do in Canada is in effect the means by which we secure the cooperation of other nations by demonstrating to them that we are indeed choosing scenario three and not scenario one.

The real risk of walking away from Kyoto in favour of a ‘made in Canada solution’ is that Canada’s action would precipitate more ‘free-rider’-ism within the community of nations. Even in the most optimistic case of a ‘made in Canada solution’, Canada may reap the slim benefits of an effective national environmental solution at the cost of far greater benefits derivable from collective global action. This is very much the case of being “penny-wise but pound-foolish.” What is needed is to remain with Kyoto -- in fact Canada should continue to work to strengthen Kyoto – in order to reduce the potential for ‘free-rider’-ism.

That said, Canada’s national record at achieving its own Kyoto targets (for which the previous Liberal government must accept responsibility) is nothing less than deplorable. Within Canada, as Mr. Manning suggests, we can and must do better.

However, doing better will not occur by fiat from the PMO. As one Deputy Minister described to me once, on the issue of climate change “no one is in charge’. While the PM may determine a Canadian position regarding greenhouse gases, it is the responsibility of each federal ministry involved (Environment, Natural Resources, Industry, and Intergovernmental Affairs, not to mention TBS and PCO) to implement that decision. The problem is that these ministries do not themselves agree on what should be done. Therefore the commitment of the PMO or any single ministry will not necessarily be accompanied by the commitments of other departments. This more than anything else was the problem of the Chrétien government. Mr. Chrétien did make a commitment, but the multiple positions of his ministries made it impossible for his government as a whole to come up with any coherent position. The ministries were constantly fighting with one another, what to say of their relationships with the provinces? In such circumstances, who was any province supposed to be dealing on the subject of environment with when there was no single authoritative voice? And by the way, the provinces were no less incoherent than the federal government was for the same reasons.

Therefore, finding a solution to Canada’s greenhouse gas challenge can not simply involve “going back to the fork in the road” as Mr. Manning suggests and following a different path just because it is different. In reality the “fork in the road” is actually a nexus of many possible alternative solutions that can be applied with some degree of effectiveness or other. In fact there seems to be no lack of innovative ideas that may contribute to the lessening of green house gas emissions. The difficulty Canada has is in developing a coherent, comprehensive approach that can provide our international partners with evidence that we are not simply ‘shirking’ our global responsibilities. If we want to call that a ‘made in Canada solution’ then so be it. But this must not be done at the expense of our commitment to the Kyoto process which right now is the only viable vehicle we have to ensure that ‘free-rider’ trends do not take hold internationally. An ‘every nation for themselves’ solution is no solution at all. Only by encouraging as broad a base of international cooperation as possible can Canadians be assured that they will benefit from the work that must be done in other countries to target that other 98% of greenhouse gases that are emitted every year. Without trying to be too cute, to achieve this is more about governing than it is about politics.

Therefore as the Government moves forward on the Kyoto file they should consider embracing both options, Kyoto and a ‘made in Canada solution’, not as a matter of weakness or indecisiveness but as a reflection of the wisdom that has been repeatedly and successfully exhibited by Canadian governments of all stripes over time.