University of Northern British Columbia: Open Journal Systems
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The Nature of Regional Policy Work in Canada's Public Service
No full textThis paper compares rank-and-file policy-based Canadian federal
government employees both in the National Capital Region and in the
regions. Data was collected from an online survey, the results find a
number of significant differences between the two groups in terms of
demographics, tasks, and attitudes. We conclude that regional oriented
policy tasks are carried out by a relatively few number of people and this
group is, at best, on the margins of what could be considered to policy
work. These differences may have a significant impact on the federal
government’s overall policy capacity
The Media’s Role in Shaping Canadian Civic and Political Engagement
Get PDFThis article represents a modest attempt at establishing the role that the media plays in shaping political and civic engagement in Canada. The findings suggest that more focused attention to the media’s role would likely reap significant benefits in furthering our understanding of participation behaviour at the individual level. One of the questions framing this investigation is whether the media play a role in shaping the political and civic engagement of Canadians. The evidence suggests that they do. The media types employed by Canadians to follow politics and the frequency with which they follow such coverage each reveal an association to the number of activities in which respondents participate. Use of more traditional media – most notably television alone and in combination with newspapers – is associated with lower levels of engagement. Use of the Internet – most often employed in combination with more traditional media types – reveals an association with higher levels of engagement. Future research – more qualitative perhaps – ought to focus on addressing what it is about that these particular media type combinations that best addresses the needs and desires of those with more limited and more heightened engagement levels
Health Reform and Wait Times Policy in Alberta under the Klein Government
Get PDFPrecipitated by significant expenditure reductions in health care, wait times for surgical and diagnostic procedures in Alberta increased significantly during the 1990s. In turn, this made access to health services a major political concern. Within this context, the interplay of ideas, interests and institution led political decision makers to opt for the development of an Internet-based, voluntary wait times registry. Bureaucrats played a crucial role in assisting politicians to understand that the policy issue required a more nuanced response than simply throwing money at the problem
“‘A Moon Without Metaphors’: Memory, Wilderness, and the Nocturnal in the Poetry of Don McKay”
Get PDFThis article seeks to interrogate Don McKay’s body of poetry through the lens of his own critical writings, with a particular focus on poems linking representations of the nocturnal with his concept of “wilderness,” which he defines as the ability of all things to “elude the mind’s appropriations” (“Baler Twine” 21). In McKay’s poetry, night is variously the time of shape-shifting, de-materialization, memory, and non-empirical knowledge, all of which require a re-investigation of the division between inner and outer, memory and experience, and between naming and knowing. At the same time, the article highlights poetic strategies used by an artist who loves the natural world as much as, if not more than, the language in which he renders it. As such, the nuances that assert and describe “otherness” are sharpened; by the same token, the non-human wilderness and the one inherent in human systems of language are shown to imply one another. The uncomfortable space beyond empirical knowledge―and beyond the epistemological convenience of a dichotomy between self and other that such a mode of knowledge introduces—is one that the night forces upon the mind as the latter is reminded of “another gravity” that, even if unseen, remains at work. It is this explanation of the other as “another gravity” that informs much of McKay’s poetry, and that forms the basis for his critical writings about human relationships with the environment beyond mere relationships of utility
Government Communication as a Policy Tool: A Framework for Analysis
Get PDFGovernment communication is now a large growth industry in many countries. Exactly what is meant by the term, however, varies from author to author. In this paper government communication is conceived as a policy tool or instrument, that is, as a means to give effect to policy goals. Three key policy-relevant aspects of the term are examined: (1) the link between government communications and the ‘nodality’ or information resource set out by Hood in his study of policy instruments; (2) the role of government communications in the ‘front-end’ of the public policy and production processes related to agenda-setting, policy formulation and producer activities as opposed to the ‘back-end’ of policy implementation, policy evaluation,, consumption and distribution and (3) the general aims of network management and overcoming information asymmetries which help explain the range of procedural and substantive policy tools used in government communication efforts. A model of four basic types of government communications is developed and examples provided of each general category. The implications of this analysis for cross-national comparative policy analyses of government communication activities and the evaluation of accountability and policy efficacy in contemporary governance are then discussed
The Nova Scotia Provincial Election of 2009
Get PDFWith over 45% of the popular vote in the provincial election of 2009, the New Democratic Party elected members in 31 of Nova Scotia’s 52 constituencies – enough to form a majority government in the House of Assembly. For the first time in Nova Scotia’s history, neither the Liberals nor the Progressive Conservatives hold power. Given the growing convergence among the parties’ policy platforms, the change in government does not indicate an ideological shift in the province. Instead, it is a signal of general frustration with the two traditional governing parties and a consequent willingness to try something new
Engineering Others, Engineering Ourselves:
No full textThe concept of terraforming, the engineered transformation of alien planets into habitats suitable for human settlement, has taken on new meaning in science fiction and contemporary culture as climate change has indicated that human beings are currently transforming this planet but without a clear plan for sustaining inhabitability. Literary depictions by Kim Stanley Robinson of both climate change and terraforming raise ethical questions about the engineering of this and other planets, while the science fiction novels of Joan Slonczewski raise ethical questions about engineering human beings to adapt to alien environments. Together, they provide ways of thinking about the intertwined ethical questions of engineering the biosphere and engineering the species in the context of human and environmental sustainability. In particular, some works, such as the novels of Karen Traviss, raise the issue of how much the human species might have to engineer itself to pay the price of its unplanned engineering of planet Earth
"Wallowing in the “Great Dark Lake of Male Rage:" The Masculine Ecology of Don DeLillo's White Noise
Get PDFThis essay explores Don DeLillo’s White Noise in terms of Jack Gladney’s crisis of masculinity, which is bound up in a longing for the protagonist to return to nature, which figures in the novel as the last bastion of authentic masculinity. As critics of White Noise have clearly established, Jack suffers from a discernible cultural malaise--a sense of profound dislocation in the midst of technological hypermediations of self and reality. I extend this reading of the novel by arguing that this cultural malaise prompts in Jack nostalgia for an imaginary moment when masculine subjectivity was constituted by and through an intimate relation to pre-technological nature. This conception of nature as the site of pristine masculinity, as is indicated by Jack's preoccupation with pre-modern warriors like Attila the Hun and Genghis Kahn, draws on a host of conceptual affiliations between nature and masculinity--immediacy, authenticity, corporeality, essence—that have long been mobilized in the recapitulation of American masculinity. Ironically, the novel enacts Jack’s refusal of a culturally-mediated (even technologically-mediated) sense of self through his reliance on cultural nostalgia for a more “authentic,” more “natural” reality. This nostalgia ultimately incites violence as Jack retreats into essentialist conceptions of masculinity that appear, to the main character at least, as his only defense against the artifice and uncertainty of postmodernity
“Seamus Heaney’s Elemental Ecopoetics: Earth, Water, Air and Fire”
Get PDFThis paper endeavours to prove the centrality of the ecoweb formed by earth, water, air and fire in the verse of the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney. The bridge between Nature (rural ancestry) and culture (literary consciousness), the intimate relationship between locus and language, or the outstanding sense of movement and balance between earthy root and airy imagination are just some of the ideas to be discussed in Heaney’s ecopoetics. Together with this, the outstanding role of the four elements among Heaney critics will be emphasized, in order to show that we can certainly talk about some kind of ecocritical framework emerging from within the discourse about Heaney’s literary evolution: the four elements, especially earth and air, are explicitly or implicitly used by a large number of critics in order to differentiate between a first stage (or earthy phase), characterized by its rootedness in Northern Irish people, history and culture, and a second stage (or airy phase) in which the poet allegedly liberates himself from earthy bounds to accomplish visionary poetic freedom. It is contended here that, for several reasons, reading Heaney’s poetry in binary terms—earth versus air—is not precisely a satisfactory enough critical response. In our opinion, a more adequate and clarifying reading is encapsulated in the complementary terms—earth and air. It is the outstanding nuance of tension and permanent search for balance that keeps both symbols in a fruitful encounter. From a much more conscious ecocritical point of view, this may well embody the search for a possible site of reconciliation between Nature and Culture
