Gilles Paquet

Roger A. Perrault

Canada experienced a tainted-blood crisis in the latter part of the 20th century. It left a number of Canadians dead, and a large number incapacitated or seriously handicapped. It has been established by the court that there was no criminal negligence at the source of this event, but there were most certainly governance failures. This latter aspect of the tragedy has not received the attention it deserves. These governance failures have transformed the crisis into a tragedy, and the tragedy generated a miscarriage of justice – if justice delayed for decades may be regarded as justice denied. This book has been written by a specialist on governance, and a medical doctor and scientist, who managed the Canadian blood transfusion system for 17 years. It challenges the conventional wisdom that underpinned the four ill-founded accusations against a few persons levied by interest groups, the media, and the Office of the Solicitor General of Ontario, and it argues that the tragedy was the result of a cascade of pathologies of governance. A systemic reconstruction of the tragedy is proposed, the administrative processes that we argue were responsible for the pathologies of governance are exposed, and suggestions are made to neutralize such malefits in the future. The full-text of the judgment and reasons provided by Justice Benotto, when one of the ill-founded accusations was brought to court, is enclosed. This led the Crown to drop the other three ill-founded accusations. A postface underlines the lack of critical thinking that has allowed such a tragedy to follow its course.

A Cascade of Governance Failures

The Tainted-Blood Tragedy in Canada

John de la Mothe

In an era of intense globalization, the critical role of the region as a center for economic development has sometimes been overlooked. Moreover, innovation is increasingly being recognized as being a critical driver of economic growth and development. However, innovation is no longer being seen as a function of research and development; nor is R&D being seen as being sufficient for the creation of technology-intensive industries and the valuable economic spillovers that result in high value-added jobs and exports. Indeed, much more than ever before, it is the combination of factors that contributes to innovation - ranging over skills, finance, production, user-producer linkages, the capacity of organizations to learn, and multilayered government policies - that make local regions the favorites of fortune. Using an evolutionary economic perspective, and drawing on a range of disciplines and accomplished scholars, Local and Regional Systems of Innovation explores important issues at a conceptual, methodological and comparative level concerning how successful locations actually construct their comparative advantage.

Local and Regional Systems of Innovation

In Crippling Epistemologies and Governance Failures, Gilles Paquet criticizes the prevailing practices of the social sciences on the basis of their inadequate concepts of knowledge, evidence and inquiry, concepts he claims have become methodological “mental prisons”. Paquet describes the prevailing policy development process in Canada in terms of its weak information infrastructure, poor accountability, and inflexible organization design. In contrast, he suggests that social science and public policy should promote forms of “serious play” that would allow organizations to experiment with new structures. Paquet engages with numerous foundationalist programs in the social sciences in order to show their inadequacy and suggests important and unexplored directions in policy areas as diverse as education, science, health, intergovernmental and foreign policy. He closes the work with a plea for experimentalism in academic research, policy development, and organization design.

A Plea for Experimentalism

Crippling Epistemologies and Governance Failures

Christopher Wilson

Ruth Hubbard

This book is the first in a series of books is designed to define cumulatively the contours of collaborative decentred 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 volunteer sectors, to ensure effective coordination when power, resources and information are widely distributed, and the governing is of necessity decentred and collaborative. The series invites conceptual and practical contributions focused on different issue domains, policy fields, causes célébres, functional processes, etc. to the extent that they contribute to sharpening the new apparatus associated with collaborative decentred metagovernance. In the last few decades, there has been a need felt for a more sophisticated understanding of the governing of the private, public and social sectors: for less compartmentalization among sectors that have much in common; and for new conceptual tools to suggest new relevant questions and new ways to carry out the business of governing, by creatively recombining the tools of governance that have proved successful in all these sectors. These efforts have generated experiments that have been sufficiently rich and wide-ranging in the various laboratories of life to warrant efforts to pull together what we know at this stage. This first volume in the series attempts to scope out, in a provisional way, the sort of general terrain we are going to explore. It is not meant to impose boundaries or orthodoxies, but only to loosely identify the horizons and the frontiers, as we perceive them at the time of launching this journey. Horizons and frontiers are to us not ways to limit the inquiries, but rather invitations to all forms of transgression.

Collaborative Decentred Metagovernance and Inquiring Systems

Stewardship

N. H. Lithwick

This study, first published in 1968, was one of the first books on Canada’s urban development, bringing together the viewpoints of professionals who had studied various aspects of city growth – economic, social, geographic, political. The book demonstrates the effectiveness and potential of the cross-disciplinary approach and will prove useful to all those interested in the future of our cities.

A Canadian Perspective

Urban Studies

Governance connotes the way an organization, an economy, or a social system co-ordinates and steers itself. Some insist that governing is strictly a top-down process guided by authority and coercion, while others emphasize that it emerges bottom-up through the workings of the free market. This book rejects these simplistic views in favour of a more distributed view of governance based on a mix of coercion, quid pro quo market exchange and reciprocity, on a division of labour among the private, public, and civic sectors, and on the co-evolution of these different integration mechanisms. This book is for both practitioners confronted with governance issues and for citizens trying to make sense of the world around them. Published in English.

Governance Through Social Learning

Over the last few decades, the Westphalian nation-state has lost its hegemonic position in the system of geo-governance. A dispersive revolution has led to the emergence of powerful new networked business organizations, new subsidiarity-focused governments, and increasingly virtual, elective, and malleable communities. This in turn has led to the crystallization of distributed governance regimes, based on a wider variety of more fluid and always evolving groups of stakeholders. In The New Global Governance, Gilles Paquet develops a general conceptual framework to deal with the new evolving reality of global governance. He uses this framework to critically examine the evolving territorial governance (hemispheric governance, meso-innovation systems, smart city-regions) and tackles the more complex governance challenges raised by sustainability and common-property resources like oceans. Paquet further explores the implications of this emerging baroque polycentric geo-governance on the new forms of stewardship and its impact on citizenship, federalism, and other technologies of coordination, and reflects on the sort of subversive bricolage required if the missing mechanisms for effective coordination are to be put in place. The New Global Governance will be of great interest to students and scholars interested in governance, organizational design, international affairs, and political studies.

A Baroque Approach

The New Geo-governance

In 2004, Paul Martin asked Justice John Gomery to lead a public inquiry into potential misspending in the federal Sponsorship Program, a relatively small investment of taxpayers' money to try to convince Quebeckers of the benefits of Canadian federalism in the aftermath of the 1995 referendum on Quebec separation. The Gomery inquiry chose to focus exclusively on the sordid details of the money laundering and paid no attention to the deeper causes and sources of the problem: the dysfunctions of an existing centralized governing apparatus that is tearing the fabric of the country apart and the collusion of centralizing groups defending the status quo.

Gilles Paquet

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