Toward principled governance for Canada's immigration regime Canada has engaged in an immigration policy experiment of momentous importance over the last 25 years: it has almost doubled the flow of new immigrants. This has not only strained Canada s absorptive capacity and the common public culture, and increased the costs of immigration for Canadians, but it has also led the more recent cohorts of immigrants to experience much greater difficulty integrating into their new homeland, causing them to fall more and more below the level of income of the Canadian-born. Canadians have been disinformed by officials, the intelligentsia, and the media about the real impact of mass immigration on the economy and about its potential capacity to counter the effect of the aging of Canadian population. Canadians have been hoodwinked into accepting that maximum diversity is optimum diversity.

Moderato Cantabile - Toward Principled Governance for Canada’s Immigration Policy

This book revisits the tainted blood tragedy that Canada experienced in the latter part of the 20th century. It presents an argument in brief about the tragedy being the result of a cascade of pathologies of governance. Then it challenges the conventional wisdom and its explanation boiling down to four ill-founded accusations. After proposing a systemic reconstruction of the tragedy, it develops some responses to the systemic governance failures. The conclusion takes stock of the modest progress in the repairs of the toxic system in place, and the postface focuses on the demise of critical thinking as a fundamental source of the crisis and on a need to refurbish critical thinking if advances are to be expected in what remains a work in progress. This book revisits the tainted blood tragedy that Canada experienced in the latter part of the 20th century. It presents an argument in brief about the tragedy being the result of a cascade of pathologies of governance. Then it challenges the conventional wisdom and its explanation boiling down to four ill-founded accusations. After proposing a systemic reconstruction of the tragedy, it develops some responses to the systemic governance failures. The conclusion takes stock of the modest progress in the repairs of the toxic system in place, and the postface focuses on the demise of critical thinking as a fundamental source of the crisis and on a need to refurbish critical thinking if advances are to be expected in what remains a work in progress.

The Tainted-Blood Tragedy in Canada - A Cascade of Governance Failures

This short book throws some light on the modern-day pathologies that are crippling the productivity, resilience, innovation and survival of our private, public and social organizations, and therefore of our standard of living. It probes the proximate sources of dysfunction at five interfaces: between the organization and its employees (x-inefficiency), its value chain upstream (escaping fault), its socio-physical environment (externalities), its governance regime (hijacking by certain groups), and its ethical context (moral vacancy). Toxicities at these five interfaces are interrelated and moral vacancy is of central importance in this complex of relationships that may be the source of something like two-thirds to three-quarters of the observed waste. Our inquiry, built around the Detox Prism, gauges the toxicity at these five interfaces, probes their sources, and suggests useful families of design repairs based on a mix of mechanisms of practical use in the different sectors. This detox perspective is based on a systematic effort to lift both analysts and practitioners with the skyhook of a crane in order to broaden their outlook, to lengthen their time horizon, and to help them escape from mental prisons to inspire effective and practical design thinking.

Through the Detox Prism - Exploring Organizational Failures and Design Responses

This short book contributes to accelerating the process of recognition of governance studies as a heuristically powerful field of study in two distinct ways. In Part I, it shows first how the governance approach has emerged in response to the limitations of the two main cosmologies that have dominated the 20th century scene type-I liberalism rooted in the market and decentralization; and type-II liberalism rooted in statism and centralization. It proposes a better way to respond effectively to the challenges of effective coordination when power, resources and information are widely distributed into many hands and heads. This new approach has been criticized by the defenders of the ruling cosmologies, but it has evolved effective prototypes of inquiring systems capable of guiding the search for effective wayfinding and for the design of organizational arrangements ensuring effectiveness, resilience and innovation. In Part II, it explores how the governance approach may help in tackling wicked policy problems where ends are neither well known nor agreed upon, and means-ends relationships are either poorly understood or unstable. Three somewhat different cases are discussed: equality where a dominant ideology of egalitarianism in democratic societies is challenged with great difficulty by a cosmology of equability; diversity where, in Canada, maximum diversity would appear to be regarded as optimal diversity, and multiculturalism is propagandized as the nec plus ultra response even though it may be shown to be toxic; and sustainability, where the problem definition and the general direction in which a viable organizational learning regime will emerge are unclear. On both fronts, the book tries to bring a bit of subtlety, a taste for complexity, and some innovative ideas to debates that have wallowed, both at the conceptual and at the practical levels, in ideologically muddy waters.This short book contributes to accelerating the process of recognition of governance studies as a heuristically powerful field of study in two distinct ways. In Part I, it shows first how the governance approach has emerged in response to the limitations of the two main cosmologies that have dominated the 20th century scene type-I liberalism rooted in the market and decentralization; and type-II liberalism rooted in statism and centralization. It proposes a better way to respond effectively to the challenges of effective coordination when power, resources and information are widely distributed into many hands and heads. This new approach has been criticized by the defenders of the ruling cosmologies, but it has evolved effective prototypes of inquiring systems capable of guiding the search for effective wayfinding and for the design of organizational arrangements ensuring effectiveness, resilience and innovation. In Part II, it explores how the governance approach may help in tackling wicked policy problems where ends are neither well known nor agreed upon, and means-ends relationships are either poorly understood or unstable. Three somewhat different cases are discussed: equality where a dominant ideology of egalitarianism in democratic societies is challenged with great difficulty by a cosmology of equability; diversity where, in Canada, maximum diversity would appear to be regarded as optimal diversity, and multiculturalism is propagandized as the nec plus ultra response even though it may be shown to be toxic; and sustainability, where the problem definition and the general direction in which a viable organizational learning regime will emerge are unclear. On both fronts, the book tries to bring a bit of subtlety, a taste for complexity, and some innovative ideas to debates that have wallowed, both at the conceptual and at the practical levels, in ideologically muddy waters.

Tackling Wicked Policy Problems

A Plea for Bold Organizational Experimentation. The eighth book in the Collaborative Metagovernance series is an irreverent challenge to administrative conservatorship, and a case for bold organizational experimentation. It makes the case for effective new actors, new structural forms and new social technologies, while showing the perils of ill-conceived contraptions like super-bureaucracies, single-purpose agencies and failure to pay due attention to good management. This series of books is designed to define cumulatively the contours of collaborative decentered metagovernance. At this time, there is still no canonical version of this paradigm: it is en émergence. This series intends to be one of many construction sites to experiment with various dimensions of an effective and practical version of this new approach. Metagovernance is the art of combining different forms or styles of governance, experimented with in the private, public and social sectors, to ensure effective coordination when power, resources and information are widely distributed, and the governing is of necessity decentred and collaborative. A Plea for Bold Organizational Experimentation. The eighth book in the Collaborative Metagovernance series is an irreverent challenge to administrative conservatorship, and a case for bold organizational experimentation. It makes the case for effective new actors, new structural forms and new social technologies, while showing the perils of ill-conceived contraptions like super-bureaucracies, single-purpose agencies and failure to pay due attention to good management. This series of books is designed to define cumulatively the contours of collaborative decentered metagovernance. At this time, there is still no canonical version of this paradigm: it is en émergence. This series intends to be one of many construction sites to experiment with various dimensions of an effective and practical version of this new approach. Metagovernance is the art of combining different forms or styles of governance, experimented with in the private, public and social sectors, to ensure effective coordination when power, resources and information are widely distributed, and the governing is of necessity decentred and collaborative.

Irregular Governance - A Plea for Bold Organizational Experimentation

"La vocation de l'antimanuel est de faire le ménage sur. un terrain jonché de postulats naïfs, de raisonnements courts, de propositions dogmatiques et de recettes simplistes pour le décontaminer. Objectif : débronzer les dogmes, aider à prendre une vue d'ensemble des questions en suspens et faciliter le travail de la pensée critique. En combattant toute orthodoxie, l'antimanuel est donc une forme bien ajustée au contenu de l'approche de la gouvernance - qui est essentiellement subversive. Ce travail de déblayage part d'un besoin d'antidote et s'attaque d'abord au plus toxique : aux virus qui minent les discussions sur la gouvernance collaborative. Quant au travail de construction qui obligatoirement doit suivre, comme il est prématuré de penser à des traités formels dans le monde de la gouvernance collaborative pour le moment, l'antimanuel vise relativement bas : il veut seulement aider le lecteur à identifier les pathologies de gouvernance les plus importantes et à apprécier ce qui peut être fait pour améliorer la situation." (G. R)

Gouvernance colloborative - Un antimanuel

Scheming Virtuously: The Road to Collaborative Governance is an invitation to subversion, but also a somewhat personal account of the displacement of the dominant governing regime (Big-G centralized government) by small-g collaborative governance, in a world where power, resources, and information are widely distributed. In this new world, the citizen's burden of office is clear: to be a producer of governance. Scheming virtuously is the order of the day-active engagement, imaginative problem-reframing, astute organizational design, and effective action within the bounds of the appreciative systems in good currency and beyond. Scheming Virtuously: The Road to Collaborative Governance is an invitation to subversion, but also a somewhat personal account of the displacement of the dominant governing regime (Big-G centralized government) by small-g collaborative governance, in a world where power, resources, and information are widely distributed. In this new world, the citizen's burden of office is clear: to be a producer of governance. Scheming virtuously is the order of the day-active engagement, imaginative problem-reframing, astute organizational design, and effective action within the bounds of the appreciative systems in good currency and beyond.

Scheming Virtuously - The Road to Collaborative Governance

This book explores the thinking of Canadian federal public service senior executives through conversations. The transformation of the environment and of the institutional order has created quite a challenge: maintaining some sort of adequacy between these evolving realities and the frames of reference in use by public sector executives. Complexity is often nothing more than a name for a new order calling for a new frame of reference, and the reluctance to abandon old conceptual frameworks is often responsible for fundamental learning disabilities. 
Through a series of conversations with Canadian federal senior executives about more and more daunting problems - from coping with an evolving context, to engaging intelligently with a new modus operandi, to trying to nudge and tweak programs in order to correct toxic pathologies, to reframing perceptions and redesigning organizations to meet the new challenges-weaknesses of the capabilities of the Canadian federal executives to respond to current challenges were revealed, and suggestions made about ways to kick start a process of refurbishment of these capabilities.This book explores the thinking of Canadian federal public service senior executives through conversations. The transformation of the environment and of the institutional order has created quite a challenge: maintaining some sort of adequacy between these evolving realities and the frames of reference in use by public sector executives. Complexity is often nothing more than a name for a new order calling for a new frame of reference, and the reluctance to abandon old conceptual frameworks is often responsible for fundamental learning disabilities. 
Through a series of conversations with Canadian federal senior executives about more and more daunting problems - from coping with an evolving context, to engaging intelligently with a new modus operandi, to trying to nudge and tweak programs in order to correct toxic pathologies, to reframing perceptions and redesigning organizations to meet the new challenges-weaknesses of the capabilities of the Canadian federal executives to respond to current challenges were revealed, and suggestions made about ways to kick start a process of refurbishment of these capabilities.

Probing the Bureaucratic Mind

Pasquinade is a satire or critical comment traditionally posted in a public place in ancient Rome; in particular, on the statue of Pasquino. Pasquinades in E is Gilles Paquet's contribution to this waning tradition. These essays are exercises in critical thinking. They aim to exorcise a number of mental prisons about aspects of governing, and at denouncing pathologies in our ways of thinking and governing ourselves, by exposing their toxic nature. Silence on such matters connotes tacit agreement with toxic nonsense and, therefore, guilt by association for the ensuing mal-governance. Pasquinade is a satire or critical comment traditionally posted in a public place in ancient Rome; in particular, on the statue of Pasquino. Pasquinades in E is Gilles Paquet's contribution to this waning tradition. These essays are exercises in critical thinking. They aim to exorcise a number of mental prisons about aspects of governing, and at denouncing pathologies in our ways of thinking and governing ourselves, by exposing their toxic nature. Silence on such matters connotes tacit agreement with toxic nonsense and, therefore, guilt by association for the ensuing mal-governance.

Pasquinade in E - Slaughtering Some Sacred Cows

Too many stakeholders have neglected their duty of imagining an aspiring federal capital region for Canada. Under the auspices of the Forum of Federations, a number of persons interested in the fate of Canada's federal capital region came together to examine the challenges facing the region and to put forward suggestions to deal with them. In this report on the brainstorming exercise conducted in January 2011, professionals, academics, and elected officials take stock of the vast array of assets on which the federal capital region can build; probe the many sources of failures in coping as effectively and creatively as one would expect with the diversity, trans-border, financial, and governance challenges; and make suggestions to ensure that the federal capital region does not remain "unimagined" in the future. Too many stakeholders have neglected their duty of imagining an aspiring federal capital region for Canada. Under the auspices of the Forum of Federations, a number of persons interested in the fate of Canada's federal capital region came together to examine the challenges facing the region and to put forward suggestions to deal with them. In this report on the brainstorming exercise conducted in January 2011, professionals, academics, and elected officials take stock of the vast array of assets on which the federal capital region can build; probe the many sources of failures in coping as effectively and creatively as one would expect with the diversity, trans-border, financial, and governance challenges; and make suggestions to ensure that the federal capital region does not remain "unimagined" in the future.

The Unimagined Canadian Capital - Challenges for the Federal Capital Region

Epistémologie et économie de la relation

La gouvernance est à la fois une manière de voir, un cadre d'analyse, un langage de définition de problèmes, un appareil d'examen clinique pour remonter à la source de mauvaises performances et, enfin, un outillage mental pour le designer organisationnel à qui on demandera de faire les radoubs qui s'imposent. Ce texte présente quelques concepts-leviers dans ce genre de travail (collaboration, réseau, stewardship, etc.) ainsi que certains principes et mécanismes s'étant avérés utiles dans le design d'une gouvernance porteuse d'une super-vision à saveur confédérale. Cette gouvernance assure un cadre d'apprentissage collectif, d'expérimentation et d'innovation susceptible d'assurer la pérennité des organisations.

Gouvernance

This book looks into the forces at work that have undermined critical thinking and sound intellectual inquiry in the world of public affairs in Canada, have fostered reductive perspectives and destructive blockages to collaborative governance to emerge, and have succeeded in blinding observers to the real sources of the present Canadian malaise, blocking the road to imaginative repairs.    
Part I deals frontally with the twilight of critical thinking that has led to a dramatic weakening of the critical examination of issues, and the process of inquiry that has been significantly weakened by ever narrower perspectives.
Part II focuses on two mental prisons: the obsessive and reductive insistence on a quantophrenic twist (only that which can be quantified counts); and the failure by crucial partners to live up to the requirements of their burden of office in circumstances when disloyalty considerably enfeebles the possibility of effective collaborative governance and the chance for  organizations to succeed.
Part III suggests that it is not impossible to get rid of the blinders preventing the adoption of more synoptic approaches, and the exploration of more imaginative designs to repair our organizations and institutions. Ways to deal with the challenges facing the Canadian socio-economy are hinted at, and the work of a successful social architect showcased.   
The conclusion makes the case for an approach that is both synoptic and guided by reasonableness - against the dogmas of disciplines and skimpy rationality.This book looks into the forces at work that have undermined critical thinking and sound intellectual inquiry in the world of public affairs in Canada, have fostered reductive perspectives and destructive blockages to collaborative governance to emerge, and have succeeded in blinding observers to the real sources of the present Canadian malaise, blocking the road to imaginative repairs.  
Part I deals frontally with the twilight of critical thinking that has led to a dramatic weakening of the critical examination of issues, and the process of inquiry that has been significantly weakened by ever narrower perspectives.
Part II focuses on two mental prisons: the obsessive and reductive insistence on a quantophrenic twist (only that which can be quantified counts); and the failure by crucial partners to live up to the requirements of their burden of office in circumstances when disloyalty considerably enfeebles the possibility of effective collaborative governance and the chance for organizations to succeed.
Part III suggests that it is not impossible to get rid of the blinders preventing the adoption of more synoptic approaches, and the exploration of more imaginative designs to repair our organizations and institutions. Ways to deal with the challenges facing the Canadian socio-economy are hinted at, and the work of a successful social architect showcased.  
The conclusion makes the case for an approach that is both synoptic and guided by reasonableness - against the dogmas of disciplines and skimpy rationality.

Unusual Suspects

" Les citoyens comme les investisseurs et les parties prenantes ont été immergés pendant si longtemps dans un univers de gouvernement -c'est à dire une situation où au sommet se trouvait un potentat ayant réussi à faire croire qu'il avait toute la connaissance, tout le pouvoir et toute l'information pour assurer la gouverne- qu'ils en sont arrivés à croire qu'ils avaient une " vocation de gouvernés " et à perdre eux-mêmes la notion qu'ils étaient des producteurs de gouvernance eux-mêmes. Cette paresse, cette indolence et ce refus de se prendre en main sont encore omniprésents. Voilà qui explique le blocage mental auquel fait face la notion de gouvernance. Ce blocage n'est pas innocent. Il révèle un état d'esprit, une sorte de servitude volontaire dans laquelle on se complaît. Le caractère subversif de la notion de gouvernance vient du fait qu'elle sonne le réveil, qu'elle est un appel aux armes, si l'on peut dire. Pas moyen de penser gouvernance sans penser au fardeau de la charge, à l'obligation de s'impliquer et de participer, aux devoirs que chacun a d'être un producteur de gouvernance, de contribuer à la gouverne de l'entreprise, de l'organisation, du pays. " Cet ouvrage est donc un appel à l'engagement, à la responsabilité, à la participation au " multilogue " social, requis par une socioéconomie dont la structure hiérarchisée et centralisée s'est effritée au fur et à mesure que le monde s'est ouvert, que l'information s'est diffusée et que les compétences se sont multipliées. Illustrant ces processus par plusieurs exemples empruntés à divers domaines de l'histoire canadienne récente, l'auteur montre à la fois la gouvernance distribuée qui est à l'œuvre dans le monde où nous vivons et les résistances que nos façons de penser traditionnelles lui opposent.

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