A couple of random thoughts... (originally sent to one of the groups for which I'm an advisor which has been a government "client" for a very long time...
There is a widely expressed hope/prayer/wish/magical incantation in the chattering classes and particularly in "civil society" that the Conservatives, now that they have political power, will no longer have to be playing the "political" games that they have been playing (i.e. that those vicious anti-democratic and very unCanadian political moves aren't a manifestation of a deeply held and non-compromisable ideological or theological set of commitments). That is, they can stop playing "politics" and start "governing". Again the hope/prayer/wish/magical incantation is that governing by the Conservatives may not be totally ideological/theological but may in fact be "conservative" i.e moving away from Liberal soft social democratic clientalism to rather more robust competitive market based stakeholderism... i.e. those who have a stake get to compete in a policy bonspiel to see whose rock gets closest to the centre. The latter may in fact not be all that bad especially given the way the Liberal clientalist mode has declined and been corrupted over the last Chretien Martin years where you had few of the benefits of being a "client" (especially funding and privileged access) and all of the costs (inability to be overly critical, lack of a clear opportunity for outside funding and so on... A whole lot of people in Canada at the moment are holding their breath to see whether Mr. Harper, coming out of telephone booth will be wearing a 3 piece suit or the flowing robes of a latter day prophet. Mike _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
