University of Northern British Columbia: Open Journal Systems
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Making Biggest Bigger: Port Metro Vancouver’s 21st Century Re-Structuring – Global Meets Local at the Asia Pacific Gateway
Get PDFVancouver’s Port is Canada’s biggest. On January 1, 2008, it got bigger - restructuring the Port of Vancouver, the Fraser River Port Authority and the North Fraser Port Authority, into a single Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, marketed (as of June, 2008) as Port Metro Vancouver. This new entity was the culmination of a process of divestiture, re-organizational adjustment, shift to market orientation and consolidation that has played out over several decades across Canada’s ports. This article examines some of this recent history – both in terms of (i) divestiture and increased market orientation and (ii) more recently, major port consolidation - and governmental responses to ensure Vancouver remains Canada’s busiest port and a central part of the country’s Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative. (APGCI
Fiscal Federalism: An Unlikely Bridge between the West and Quebec
Get PDFIs there common ground in intergovernmental fiscal relations? This question is tackled by examining the ongoing federal-provincial debate about the most appropriate way to allocate resources among governments and the related issue of vertical and horizontal fiscal imbalance. It turns out that the provinces have found common ground with respect to vertical imbalance and the need to limit Ottawa’s spending power. The Equalization program, however, illuminates significant differences not only between Quebec and the western provinces but also among the four western provinces themselves. Fiscal federalism raises too many divisive issues for anyone to hope that these differences can all be settled in the foreseeable future
Policy and Politics on the Web: Virtual Policy Networks and Climate Change
No full textThis paper analyses policy information on the Web to understand how the hyperlinked organization of webpages, produced by real world, web-enabled policy communities, influences the structure and content of the Web’s information supply. These virtual networks of information will be referred to as virtual policy networks (VPN), which are defined as observable patterns of relations among web-enabled policy communities. The organization of virtual teams, social networks and online communities is well documented; however, similar considerations of real world policy communities that are fully established, and then become web-enabled are sparse. This project takes tentative steps towards addressing this dearth in the literature by examining the networked relations of the Canadian climate change VPN. The key research question addressed in this project is whether or not the Canadian climate change VPN is structurally and relationally analogous to the real world climate change policy community. As virtual policy works are produced by real world web-enabled policy communities it is hypothesized that the Canadian climate change VPN will mimic the real world policy community’s patterns of communication and organization
Leading from the Middle: Manitoba’s Role in the Intergovernmental Arena
Get PDFThis article uses the concepts of leadership, influence, political friendship and trust to examine the role and impacts of successive governments of Manitoba within Canada’s federal system. The place of regions – the West and the Atlantic provinces – is the focus of many studies. However, with the exception of Quebec and, to a lesser extent Ontario, there are not many case studies of how individual provinces approach and carry out their activities in federal-provincial and interprovincial forums across a variety of policy fields. In presenting a case study of the recent role of the province of Manitoba within various intergovernmental forums, this article hopes to encourage the development of a more province-specific approach to understanding the dynamics of intergovernmental relations based on the concepts of leadership, influences, political friendship and trust
Transformation, Transportation or Speculation? The Prince Rupert Container Port and its Impact on Northern British Columbia
Get PDFMuch of the discussion around the port development has focused on the positive impacts that the container port will have on the regional economy. As the opening quote suggests, the port is being hailed a piece of “transformational infrastructure”, creating numerous opportunities for economic diversification in northern British Columbia. In this sense, therefore, it is widely expected that the container port will help to move the northern economy beyond the type of traditional resource dependency outlined by scholars such as Harold Innis (Drache, 1995). We will argue, however, that there are at least two other potential outcomes or scenarios concerning the port’s development and its impact on northern British Columbia which call into question some of the assumptions made by the port’s proponents. First, the port might be a great success as a gateway to a transportation corridor that stretches across western Canada and into the United States, but have little or no positive impact on the northern British Columbia economy. Second, the port might not live up to the expectations that have been set nationally or locally neither as a transportation gateway nor as a piece of transformational infrastructur
The 2006 Provincial Election in Nova Scotia
Get PDFRodney MacDonald, the youngest premier in Nova Scotia’s history, made an election call on May 13, 2006. He had been the leader of the Progressive Conservative party for only three months, but was certainly no rookie politician. He was elected to the legislature first in 1999 and went on to hold several cabinet portfolios in John Hamm’s government, including immigration and tourism. Not quite three years had passed since the last provincial election in 2003, but MacDonald was eager to try to upgrade the PC minority government to a majority and to establish a mandate for himself as leader of the province. When all was said and done exactly one month later, MacDonald ended up with two seats fewer than he had at dissolution. The New Democrats were the clear winners, picking up five seats, while the Liberals slipped by one. The results were no surprise to political pundits and seemed to confirm the durability of Nova Scotia’s three-party system. In this brief article, I review the events and issues that defined the 2006 campaign
The Post Natural Wilderness & Its Writers
Get PDFMany nature writers over the past half century have conveyed the news that nature is dead; the titles alone, from Silent Spring to The End of Nature inform us that the “old verities” (including belief in nature’s essential purity, stability, abundance, and ability to rejuvenate and heal) have given way to an era when the turn of the seasons and even the kind of weather we experience are no longer certain. Humans have entered an anthropogenic stage when all of nature appears to bear the mark of human activity. Salmon swimming to the remotest lakes in Northern British Columbia have contaminated those lakes with dioxins from their bodies; DDT sprayed in southern Asia to fight malaria ends up in the flesh of humans in the far north. Even stranger is the fact that new wildlife refuges have spontaneously arisen in the most contaminated and dangerous sites in the world: Chernobyl now has a flourishing animal population and the Korean DMZ is alive with animal and bird life. How do contemporary nature writers respond to this new Post Natural Wilderness? What does this landscape tell us about the natural world and our ability to live with it? Using the works of several contemporary writers who have investigated the Post Natural Wilderness, this paper examines the strategies used by contemporary writers to chronicle their encounters with this strange new landscape, along with the surprises and occasional bitter ironies that emerge from it
The Political Economy of Canadian Hydro-Electricity: Between Old “Provincial Hydros” and Neoliberal Regional Energy Regimes
Get PDFThe “quasi-staples” status of hydro has to be reflected in any summation of its “post-staples” trajectory. Staples analysis has always focussed on the creation and redistribution of economic rents, technological change, and trade issues. Each of these features has been prominent in each of the three regimes of hydro-electricity which have characterized the Canadian industry. In the formative period, the key rent-related issues were the distribution of rents to subsidize industrialization, and the process of urban electrification. In the second, mature staples, period, rents were distributed through “cheap rates” to subsidize and facilitate the development of mass production and mass consumption. In the third, post-staples, period rents and linkages are oriented towards sustainable development. Hence ‘smart’ consumption has replaced ‘mass’ consumption and “demand side management” has replaced the “cheap power” policy
Multi-level Governance: Getting the Job Done and Respecting Community Difference – Three Winnipeg Cases
Get PDFMulti-level governance is seen by different commentators as addressing a varied array of concerns. Some see it as a means of fulfilling the norms of the new public management, and thereby of freeing the administration of government programs from the constraints imposed by centralized bureaucracy. Some assess it in terms of dealing with policy problems so complex that they can only be addressed by concerted and co-ordinated efforts of more than one level of government and, often, a variety of agencies. At the same time, multi-level governance is also associated with the attempt to introduce a greater degree of flexibility into federal policy-making, in order to ensure that federal policies respect the unique characteristics of different communities. In this study, we bring all of these concerns to bear on three case studies of the multi-level governance of federal properties in Winnipeg, the James A. Richardson International Airport, the Kapyong Barracks and The Forks. The three properties are all administered by agencies at least one step removed from direct government supervision. We posed two research questions: 1) Are the operations of these agencies, and the character of their relations with federal and municipal governments, appropriate to the ends they are meant to serve? 2) Do they respect community difference? In all three cases, we find that the objective of effective management is reasonably or very well served, but respect for community difference is much less evident
Introduction to Special Issue on Canada's Staples Industries
No full textNo longer tied exclusively to the original staples industries, Canada has become an advanced economy but one which remains different from the typical model of advanced manufacturing and services found in Europe, the US and Japan. The base of the Canadian economy retains its roots in early staples industries but with many new activities grafted into, and onto, those traditional sector. This transformation of the old staples political economy has ushered in some elements of a new political and social order at the same time that it as exacerbated or worsened many elements of the old. The contributors to this volume provide an overview of these changes in the political economy of Canada’s contemporary primary sector