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The rapid expansion of the Internet has fueled the emergence of electronic government at all levels in Canada. E-government's first decade featured online service underpinned by a technically secure infrastructure. This service-security nexus entails internal governance reforms aimed at realizing more customer-centric delivery via integration and coordination across departments and agencies. Yet, as online networking has become more pervasive and public demands for participation rise, pressures for greater openness and accountability intensify. The result is widening experimentation with online democracy. The e-governance focus is thus shifting toward issues of transparency and trust - and new possibilities for re-conceptualizing how power is organized and deployed. In sum, the prospects for digital transformation involve the interplay of these four dimensions: service, security, transparency and trust. This book identifies the main drivers of e-government, assesses the responses of Canada's public sector to date, and sketches out the major challenges and choices that lie ahead. The findings will be of interest to those studying or working in the world of public sector management and e-governance.

Public value creation is increasingly viewed as a central pivot of a government's digital transformation. The objective of this article is twofold: to better understand some of the major inhibitors of public value creation within a context of digital government, and to offer some fresh insight into how such inhibitors may be overcome in order to strengthen public value creation by leveraging digital governance innovation. In pursuing this objective, the author adopts the Government of Canada as a broad, qualitative and exploratory case study of digital government's capacities to generate public value. These findings reveal many structural and cultural inhibitors within the Government of Canada to innovation and public value creation across the inter-related realms of service, openness and engagement. How inhibitors can be addressed and eventually overcome is also discussed as a basis for future public sector reform and academic and applied research.

In a rapidly evolving online environment where the inter-relationship between information and innovation is evolving from primarily closed and inward structures to much more open and networked governance arrangements, the public sector faces growing pressures and new opportunities to reform and adapt. Open data and big data are now widely embraced initiatives to spur innovation both inside of and outside of the public sector. Their capacity to foster innovation is nonetheless shaped by critical tensions between traditional government structures and culture on the one hand and more open and participative notions of governance on the other hand. Within such a context, this article examines the current Government of Canada Open Government Action Plan and its three main dimensions: information, data, and dialogue. The analysis reveals that despite some progress in the realm of open data, information and dialogue are constrained by the aforementioned tensions and the need for wider reforms to various architectural facets of the public sector – administratively, technologically, politically, and socially. Across each of these layers, we consider the sorts of wider reforms required in order to facilitate systemic innovation within the government and across sectors.

As governments develop open data strategies, such efforts reflect the advent of the Internet, the digitization of government, and the emergence of meta-data as a wider socio-economic and societal transformational. Within this context the purpose of this article is twofold. First, we seek to both situate and examine the evolution and effectiveness of open data strategies in the Canadian public sector, with a particular focus on municipal governments that have led this movement. Secondly, we delve more deeply into—if and how, open data can facilitate more open and innovative forms of governance enjoining an outward-oriented public sector (across all government levels) with an empowered and participative society. This latter vantage point includes four main and inter-related dimensions: (i) conceptualizing public value and public engagement; (ii) media relations—across traditional intermediaries and channels and new social media; (iii) political culture and the politics of privacy in an increasingly data-centric world; and (iv) federated architectures and the alignment of localized, sub-national, and national strategies and governance mechanisms. This article demonstrates how each of these dimensions includes important determinants of not only open data’s immediate impacts but also its catalytic ability to forge wider and collective innovation and more holistic governance renewal.

Individuals who rely on public health payers to access new medicines can access fewer innovative medicines and must wait longer in Canada compared to major markets around the world. New medicines/indications approved by Health Canada and reviewed for eligibility for reimbursement by the Common Drug Review or the pan-Canadian Oncology Drug Review (CDR/pCODR) from the beginning of 2012 through to the end of December 2016 were analyzed, with data taken from the relevant bodies' websites and collected by IQVIA. This analysis investigated individual review segments - Notice of Compliance (NOC) to Health Technology Assessment (HTA) submission, HTA review time, pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance (pCPA) negotiation time, and public reimbursement decision time, and analyzed the trends of each over time and contributions to overall time to listing decisions. Average overall timelines for public reimbursement after NOC were long and most of this time is taken up by HTA and pCPA processes, at 236 and 273 days, respectively. This study confirms that Canadian public reimbursement delays from 2013-2014 to 2015-2016 lengthened from NOC to listing (Quebec + 53%, first provincial listing + 38%, and country-wide listing + 22%), reaching 499, 505, and 571 days, respectively. Over the same period, time from NOC to completion of HTA has increased by 33%, and time from post-HTA to first provincial listing by 44%. The pCPA process appears to be the main contributor to this increasing time trend, and although some provinces could be listing more quickly post-pCPA, they appear to be listing fewer products. Reasons for large delays in time to listing include the many-layered sequential process of reviews conducted before public drug plans decide whether to provide access to new innovative medicines. Although there has been some headway made in certain parts of the review processes (e.g., pre-NOC HTA), total time to listing continues to increase, seemingly due to the pCPA process and other additional review processes by drug plans. More clarity in the pCPA and provincial decision-making processes and better coordination between HTA, pCPA, and provincial decision-making processes is needed to increase predictability in the processes and reduce timelines for Canadian patients and manufacturers.

This article examines the Canadian public sector's efforts to devise mobile service capacities predicated upon efficiency, engagement, and innovation, and how such capacities are intertwined with both the advent of Gov 2.0 and the inertia of traditional public administration. The author's primary focus is on the federal government (Government of Canada), with some additional consideration of provincial governments and inter-governmental dynamics as appropriate. Through three typologies of public sector governance (traditional public administration, new public management, and public value management), the author seeks to better understand these aforementioned tensions – and formulate fresh insights into how governments can pursue the leveraging of mobility as a basis for not only more efficient service delivery but also wider opportunities for public engagement and service innovation.

InAbolitionists Remember, Julie Roy Jeffrey illuminates a second, little-noted antislavery struggle as abolitionists in the postwar period attempted to counter the nation's growing inclination to forget why the war was fought, what slavery was really like, and why the abolitionist cause was so important.In the rush to mend fences after the Civil War, the memory of the past faded and turned romantic--slaves became quaint, owners kindly, and the war itself a noble struggle for the Union. Jeffrey examines the autobiographical writings of former abolitionists such as Laura Haviland, Frederick Douglass, Parker Pillsbury, and Samuel J. May, revealing that they wrote not only to counter the popular image of themselves as fanatics, but also to remind readers of the harsh reality of slavery and to advocate equal rights for African Americans in an era of growing racism, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan. These abolitionists, who went to great lengths to get their accounts published, challenged every important point of the reconciliation narrative, trying to salvage the nobility of their work for emancipation and African Americans and defending their own participation in the great events of their day.

This article seeks to dissect the evolution of digital governance within the Canadian public sector at an expansionary time for cloud computing and wider reforms often referred to as Gov 2.0. Beyond infrastructure, the notion of the cloud may also be viewed as a proxy for a wider societal transformation that, in turn, impacts government both administratively and politically. This wider transformational nonetheless faces tensions between traditional proprietary concepts and mindsets and newer emerging models of open source and shared openness. The future of the Canadian public sector requires a careful navigation and blending of these two worldviews. While some observers may prefer to decouple cloud computing from new governance capacities associated with Gov 2.0 (viewing the cloud instead strictly through a prism of internal architecture and infrastructure), the evidence presented in this article suggests that both directions are intimately related in shaping the public sector going forward.

This dissertation contains three essays in three chapters. Chapter 1 contributes to the literature on reference dependent preferences, chapter 2 introduces a new solution concept for games played by teams of players, and chapter 3 analyzes a model of biased beliefs in law enforcement.In Chapter 1, I study the role of reference dependent preferences in motivating effort in online chess. In online chess, players are assigned ratings that measure chess skill and update after every game. I find evidence of bunching above round numbers in the distribution of ratings, suggesting that players care about their rating and that round numbers serve as reference points. I estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of the decision to end a playing session that nests both loss aversion and an alternative ‘aspiration’ specification involving a discrete jump in utility at reference points. I reject loss aversion in favor of aspirational preferences. I show that higher skilled players are significantly more aspirational, and that aspiration does not diminish with experience.In Chapter 2, coauthored with Jeongbin Kim and Thomas R. Palfrey, we develop a general framework for the analysis of games where each player is a team and members of the same team all receive the same payoff. The framework combines standard non-cooperative game theory with collective choice theory, and is developed for both strategic form and extensive form games. We introduce the concept of team equilibriumand identify conditions under which it converges to Nash equilibrium with large teams. We identify conditions on the collective choice rules such that team decisions are stochastically optimal: the probability the team chooses an action is increasing in its equilibrium expected payoff. The theory is illustrated with some binary action games.In Chapter 3, I model a social welfare maximizing law enforcement agency that does not know the supply of crime, that may have incorrect beliefs about its ability to detect crime, and that only observes the quantity of crime that it detects. An equilibrium is defined in which the enforcement agency is not surprised by the crime data it observes, and believes itself to be maximizing social welfare. Sufficient conditions for existence are provided. The model is shown to capture the intuition of crime-policing “feedback loops\" in which inefficient overpolicing or underpolicing is supported in equilibrium.