Rethinking E-Government:

Dilemmas of Public Service, Citizenship and Democracy in the Digital Age

By

Graham Longford

Assistant Professor

Department of Political Studies

Trent University

For presentation to the Canadian Political Science Association Annual General Meeting,

Laval University, Quebec City, P.Q., May 27-29, 2001

Ironically, just as the dot-com craze of the late 1990s fizzles and e-commerce begins to lose its lustre, a new buzzword has begun circulating among high tech seers, politicians, bureaucrats, business leaders, and a handful of academics in Canada: e-government. The concept of using new information and communications technologies (IT) - networked computers and the Internet in particular - to make government services more affordable, convenient and responsive, to “reengineer” internal administrative processes, and to enhance opportunities for citizens to engage with their governments, has moved to centre stage in governments’ efforts to restructure and reinvent themselves. Conceiving and implementing e-government in Canada now commands the attention of the Prime Minister, provincial Premiers, deputy ministers, public sector CIOs, legislators, and academics, not to mention IT hardware, software and services industries[1]. Despite the giddy rhetoric of “digital democracy” often associated with these discussions, however, the move toward e-government in some form is no mere passing fad. Indeed, while the federal government’s ambitious Government On-Line (GOL) project was only announced in 1999, governments in Canada have been leveraging IT to rationalize and restructure administrative systems and service delivery for well over a decade now, as we shall see. Egged on by technophilic legislators, think tanks, international organizations, and, of course, the IT industry[2]Thus, while it would be premature to pass final judgement on e-government in Canada at this stage, it is not too soon to begin to assess the fruits of public sector IT investment and IT-related restructuring over the last ten years in order to discern some of the trends, issues, and problems likely to rise to prominence as e-government becomes a reality.

The work of assessing the political implications and effects of e-government for state structures and citizen-government relations has scarcely begun in Canada. With a few exceptions[3], discussions of IT and its impact on government have been the preserve of public administration specialists for the most part[4]. However, if, as its advocates suggest, e-government entails the wholesale reinvention of government, then it should command the attention of all students of Canadian politics. The growing significance of the issue was signaled to the discipline by Roger Gibbins in his Presidential Address to the 2000 AGM of the Canadian Political Science Association in Quebec City, in which he considered the implications of IT for the future of Canadian federalism[5]. This paper strives to make a modest contribution to expanding the discussion.

The federal government’s commitment to implementing e-government in Canada was formally announced in the 1999 Speech from the Throne. In it, the government resolved to become “a model user of information technology and the Internet” by 2004, and to become “known around the world as the government most connected to its citizens, with Canadians able to access all government information and services on-line at the time and place of their choosing”[6]. In support of this plan, the GOL initiative was announced, allocating $160 million over two years for the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the on-line delivery of federal government information and services. Responsibility for overseeing the project rests with the Treasury Board Secretariat through its CIO, Michelle d`Auray. According to its proponents, the potential benefits of e-government to Canadian citizens are numerous, including: more efficient, affordable and convenient “citizen-centred” service; greater access to information regarding government services and programs; less confusing, horizontally integrated “seamless” access to all branches and levels of government via “single-window” access points such as web sites and 1-800 telephone centres; more transparent, accountable, and responsive government; and greater opportunity for direct citizen input into and engagement with the policy making process[7]. In part because numerous initiatives in electronic service delivery (ESD) predated the e-government plan, the federal government has achieved numerous successes already. For example, the Canada Site, an Internet portal to all federal web sites giving one-stop access to electronic directories, program information, and frequently requested forms, received 237 million hits for the year 1999-2000, with approximately 24,000 separate pages viewed[8]. The Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, meanwhile, received over five million electronically-filed T1 income tax returns in 2000, and a further 400,000 via the Internet. The latter transactions, part of the agency’s Netfile pilot project, are virtually paperless, and led to the reduction of the average return processing time to a mere two weeks. Finally, through the web site of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, it is now possible for individuals filing for patents to conduct the entire process on-line. The same is true for those seeking to incorporate a business[9].

In spite of these noteworthy, and highly publicized, success stories, there are grounds for reserving judgement on the extent to which e-government will deliver on its promise to reinvent government and reinvigorate the relationship between government and citizens in Canada. By looking at the previous ten years of government investment in IT, along with its relation to public sector restructuring, I will argue that government efforts to date at leveraging IT to renew itself have been narrowly focused on administrative rationalization, cost-cutting, and service reform. While laudable at some level, such efforts reflect a relatively narrow view of e-government which ignores IT’s potential to enhance opportunities for greater citizen engagement with government and the policy making process. Secondly, the story behind the putative gains in efficiency and service quality as a result of IT-related systems integration and service delivery is more complex and ambiguous than meets the eye. Self-congratulatory departmental studies and reports detailing service improvements as a result of ESD often fail to acknowledge or capture the degree to which other regulatory and legislative moves by government have left their clients substantively worse off. Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC) offers a case in point, as we shall see, where departmental claims of improved client service and satisfaction clearly failed to take into account the effect of EI reforms which reduced client benefits while increasing insurance premiums. Only on the basis of the narrowest possible definition of service quality can the claims of departments like HRDC by taken seriously. The case of IT-related restructuring at HRDC is significant for our purposes in so far as it was the locus of intensive IT-related restructuring in the mid-1990s and stands as a harbinger of the e-government to come in Canada. Furthermore, claims regarding the cost-savings achieved through IT investments need to regarded with a skeptical eye. While providing more cost-effective and affordable government is often touted as one of the key benefits of e-government, the true costs of IT investment are notoriously difficult to track and quantify, and IT projects are chronically prone to cost overruns, delays, and outright failure. While IT investment can be shown to produce certain kinds of cost-savings, particularly by reducing labour costs, large IT projects in both the public and private sector have not traditionally been aligned with fiscal prudence. Finally, the paper considers the degree to which the potential for e-government to enhance democratic engagement, transparency, and accountability within Canada is threatened or resisted by other features endemic to its political system, such as the institutional concentration of policy and decision making power in the executive, and by other trends associated with the reinvention of government, such as privatization and alternative service delivery. Unless measures are taken to address these other aspects of governance in Canada, e-government alone may produce little if any net gain for the quality of democracy. Finally, the persistence of the so-called “digital divide,” itself a reflection of historically recalcitrant cleavages within Canadian society, poses a significant problem for the inclusiveness of any future system of e-government. There will be no quick technological fix to this and other forms of inequality in Canada. The extent to which e-government will strengthen Canadian democracy depends less on putting computers and modems in the hands of every citizen and more on addressing the institutional, political, and socio-economic context in which these technologies are deployed. Let us now trace the genesis of e-government in Canada by examining the federal government`s investment in IT over the last decade.

The Origins of E-Government in Canada: IT and Public Service Restructuring from Electronic Service Delivery to Government as a “Model User”

In spite of the relative novelty of the concept of e-government, the Canadian government’s infatuation with IT dates back to the late 1980s. Indeed, rather than being seen as a sudden novel initiative, projects like GOL are best understood as continuous with a surge in IT investment by the federal government dating back to that time. The federal government in Canada has been an enthusiastic adopter of new ITs since the mid-1980s at least. A Treasury Board review of IT expenditure in the federal government between 1986-1992 revealed a strong upward trend. IT investment grew at an average annual rate of 8% during the period, reaching a sum exceeding $3 billion by 1993. This figure, which includes funds spent on goods, services, and salaries of IT personnel, represented more than 10% of the government’s total operating budget. The importance of IT investment is also reflected in procurement figures. Between 1986 and 1992 the federal government spent $11 billion on IT goods and services contracts. In 1989-90, data processing and computer equipment and services constituted the largest procurement category in government, and by 1993 four out of the twenty-five top suppliers to government were IT companies[10]. By 1993, these funds were being deployed across over 1200 programs and services[11]. In its 1994 Annual Report, the Office of the Auditor General suggested that if all government activity related to IT were consolidated into one department it would rank as the fourth largest by budget, behind Finance, Human Resources Development, and National Defense[12]. Since the time of the Treasury Board study, federal expenditures on ITs have ballooned to as much as $5 billion in 2000, according to the Treasury Board Secretariat’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) Michelle d’Auray[13]. Even this figure may be conservative in relation to the total cost of such investment. Every purchase of IT goods carries future costs in maintenance, training, and energy which can exceed initial outlays by up to 5 times, according to estimates[14]. Also omitted from the CIO’s official figure is the one-time cost of $1.9 billion related to the government’s response to the Y2K problem[15].

The main drivers behind this investment have been such imperatives as service enhancement, administrative streamlining, controlling labour costs, and improving productivity. To be more specific, the federal push to adopt and embrace IT across a wide range of programs, functions, and services came about as a result of efforts to reform and renew the public service of Canada in a manner consistent with the increasingly influential principles of the New Public Management (NPM). Beginning in the early 1990s, partly in response to increasing levels of public disaffection with governments in general, the federal government began to see the potential for IT to provide more efficient, convenient, and cost-effective “citizen-centred” services. Secondly, as levels of public indebtedness reached a peak in the same period, IT came increasingly to be seen as offering governments the means to cut or control labour costs without significantly reducing service. Such cost reduction was to be achieved, alongside other strategies like devolution, privatization, and alternative service delivery (ASD), through savings in labour costs due to automation, system integration, and the achievement of other efficiencies through better information management. A final impetus to the federal government’s rapid conversion to the use of IT came from the recommendations of Industry Canada’s Information Highway Advisory Council (IHAC) which encouraged the federal government to become a "model user" of IT in order to rationalize its own operations, stimulate innovation and investment, and shore up public confidence in the infrastructure of the emerging digital economy.

Enthusiasm for IT within government began to grow in the late 1980s as a result, in part, of the increasing influence among senior bureaucrats of the concepts, principles, and norms associated with the New Public Management. NPM has become the dominant intellectual paradigm among public administration professionals in Canada. As a departure from the terms of traditional public administration, NPM entails a variety of conceptual, value, cultural, and structural shifts, only a few of which we need touch on here. NPM reconceives the focus of the public service from that of meeting the needs of citizens and their communities to one of satisfying the demands of individual clients and customers. This new focus is reflected in the changing vocabulary of the public service. Core commitments to the public interest, democracy, social equity, and due process under the previous administrative philosophy have been displaced by a neo-liberal and highly individualistic discourse which stresses service quality and “value-added” for the customer, which in turn reflects a broader rethinking of government along the lines of running a business. In general, the work of public servants under the NPM paradigm is carried out within a frugal, streamlined, and increasingly marketized and decentralized organization which sees itself as a business enterprise devoted to providing quality services to customers at the lowest possible cost[16]. The rise of NPM thinking coincided with dramatic developments in the field of IT, including the microcomputer, the ATM, and the Internet, and the latter were rapidly assimilated to its agenda for civil service reform and restructuring.

The growing importance of IT to restructuring plans in the federal government was also reflected in the government reorganization initiated by Prime Minister Kim Campbell in 1993, which marked a watershed in the influence of NPM in public administration in Canada. As a part of this larger effort to reorganize government departments, the position of Chief Informatics Officer (CIO), later renamed the Chief Information Officer, was created within the Treasury Board Secretariat and assigned the task of promoting the use of IT government-wide, particularly in service delivery. With this new position, and the elevation of the CIO function to separate Branch status within the Secretariat in 1996, the Treasury Board has since become the central agency focal point for the use of IT in government restructuring to increase productivity and reduce administration costs[17]. In 1994, the CIO committed to delivering $2 billion in savings and cost avoidance by improving efficiency and reducing administrative overheads. One of its more important government-wide projects, Shared Systems, was an initiative to promote shared administrative and information systems across departments, functions, and levels of government. The potential for cost-savings through a shared systems approach was recognized before the 1993 restructuring, but the creating of the CIO office and supporting committees and increasing awareness of the IM potential of computer networking breathed new life into the project. Small wonder, given that at the time there existed dozens of administrative systems across the federal government, including 60 personnel, 30 financial, and 30 materiel systems[18]. Treasury Board also took responsibility for ensuring departments made strategic use of IT to streamline the delivery of programmes and services. Within a few years the Treasury Board would take the lead in implementing more ambitious and complex projects, including Government On-Line and its accompanying Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) initiative, as we shall see. Treasury Board enthusiasm for IT as a lever for implementing organizational change along the lines of NPM philosophy has been expressed quite explicitly by senior officials. Writing in 1997, for example, David Brown, executive director of Information Policy at the Secretariat acknowledged that:

“[t]he introduction of new information technologies in government has been closely linked

to the growing adoption of new public management. Distributed computing fits well with

efforts to de-layer organizations […] the new telecommunications environment, epitomized

by the Internet, has facilitated the move towards client-oriented service delivery, building

from call centres to the ‘electronic commerce’ vision of on-line, menu driven, self-service

by the public of government information and programmes.”[19]

The degree of fit between NPM and new ITs was recognized early on, and has remained a constant theme in public service reform in Canada throughout the 1990s. In a key Treasury Board policy document from 1994, entitled Blueprint For Enhancing Governmment Services Using Information Technology, IT was seen as the key to providing both better quality services by offering more convenient access to them through a mix of delivery channels such as call centres, self-serve kiosks, and Internet websites, and greater cost-effectiveness by cutting or avoiding labour costs through automation and systems integration to eliminate duplication of such tasks as data collection, storage, and retrieval[20]. Service quality and client satisfaction are equated with such factors as convenience, reduced waiting and response times, and accuracy of information received, all of which are amenable to IT enhancement. Finally, in so far as IT can be used in various ways to streamline government operations and service delivery, thereby reducing or avoiding overhead costs associated with more traditional channels, it follows that an IT-enhanced public service will also be a smaller and leaner one. While few government documents make such an explicit connection, NPM enthusiasm for IT must certainly be related to the prospect of reducing the overall size of the public service and its associated costs by replacing human infrastructures with technological ones. A very close fit, then, between the concepts, values, and principles of NPM and the qualities of speed and accuracy intrinsic to IT help explain the rapid adoption of the latter by governments under pressure to maintain and improve performance while curtailing spending.