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This paper explores an emerging public service issue that was first popularized by the then Canadian Federal Clerk of the Privy Council, Jocelyn Bourgon, in her 1997 Report to the Prime Minister. In this report Bourgon asserted that the federal public service was confronting a "quiet crisis" with respect to its human resources management brought on by years of budget cuts, hiring freezes, early retirement policy, and other restraint initiatives. The fear was that this crisis would result in a public service with a depleted management cadre that could not replenish and rejuvenate itself over the following decade. We begin by highlighting Bourgon's statement within the scope of past and subsequent reports, other speeches and statements. A statistical picture is then developed to ascertain whether or not a crisis existed in terms of public service deviations from the norm. We then examine major "Quiet Crisis" based initiatives such as La Releve, and the policies, which were designed to promote renewal, recruitment, New Professionalism, retention and leadership. A series of questions follow. Was there ever really a crisis in the Public Service from the standpoint of the recruitment and retention of "new professionals," the training of "new professionals", accelerated promotion of entry and middle-level management personnel, and the mentoring of these "new" managers. Were the tensions and challenges facing the public service such as to merit the terminology of a crisis? Or was the "Quiet Crisis" simply a managerial technique designed for political and rhetorical reasons, to highlight a problem, to indicate severity, and to energize the government and public service to deal with this by promoting certain reform initiatives favoured by the Clerk? Did the use of "Quiet Crisis" language in the 1997 report aid the Clerk in the short-run, but harm the credibility of the Clerk, and the efficacy of such reports over the future? Was this the best way to build support for this policy initiative? Was there any other alternative, for dealing with a large, cumbersome bureaucratic entity? The paper concludes with a discussion of the longer-term problems such as employee succession and intergenerational change, which the 1997 Report, however imperfectly, gave, rise to. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia, Canada, and the United States share a number of important attributes. They are all English speaking former British colonies. They are continent sized countries with substantial portions of their economies devoted to natural resource extraction and processing. In relationship to climate change, they are also substantial emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, and all three have faced political struggles related to domestic and international climate policy. The United States and Australia are alone among the developed states in refusing to be bound by the Kyoto Protocol. Canada has ratified the Protocol, but its emissions have continued to rise precipitously, and it will be unable to meet its Kyoto commitments without generous use of the flexibility mechanisms contained in the Kyoto Protocol. Given the similarities in the situations of these three states, how do we explain the variation in domestic and foreign policy responses to climate change? This paper will argue that the interaction between international norms and domestic norms fundamentally shaped the domestic framing of climate change as a political problem. The paper will explore the initial framing of climate change as a political problem in each country and will emphasize the role of international and domestic actors in defining the problem and its political significance. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States and Canada are heralded as exemplars of the possibility of cooperative engagement in an anarchical system. Whatever the public declarations of the two countries, the evidence of the popular imagination would seem to indicate that discomfort with the hegemonic status of the United States is central to Canadian identity. Through an examination of several fictional representations, this paper will investigate the commonplaces that represent this unease, including those of terrorist and international threat, on both sides of the border. Despite the American declarations of "with us or against us" that greeted the twenty-first century, Canadian notions of threat remained little changed from their pre-September 11 definitions. The threat of the cultural and political domination of the United States remains a central concern of popular and political culture. American popular representations of Canada, in contrast, represent the nation as either an ally or a non-threat. Canada (and Canadian identity) is relegated to a peripheral role as either Greek chorus or bumbling idealist needing American guidance in a realist world.Television and film present fictional opportunities for debating the uneasy dynamic of bilateral relations. In tracing the competing discourses of American and Canadian popular culture it is evident that, given the Canadian understanding of the international positionings and stakes, American assumptions of support may be unwarranted. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]