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The article presents the author's comment on the article "Punching below its weight: Canadian public administration scholarship on the world stage." Topics discussed include study of Canadian public administration, analysis of articles published in Canadian periodicals, government policies on article publishing, political science of Canada and citations in articles.

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The use of external policy and management consultants in government has been receiving increasing attention in many countries, including Canada. We explore new data on management consulting compiled from information released since the creation of the Federal Accountability Act to address the supply side of contracting. We find several large multi-year contracts have taken up a larger percentage of contracting activity while the number of smaller contracts has declined. The data suggest a pattern of oligopsonic demand concentrated mostly in a handful of very heavy users and an increasingly oligopolistic supply pattern where less than 5% of companies accounted for 80% of total contract values and where repeat contracts are the norm. Measures of accountability and transparency need to extend to the 'invisible' public service of contract consultants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy consultants are external analysts who provide paid policy-related advice to governments on a contractual basis. Previous research on policy work has examined the work done within governments and by policy consultants separately but has not systematically compared and contrasted the two. A key question regarding the nature of policy advisory practices and policy advice systems in general, however, is whether consultants are duplicating the work of government officials in order to help “triangulate” internal advice or whether there is more of a complementary approach in which consultants supplement the work of internal analysts. This article explores the differences among the two groups using data collected over the past five years in two sets of surveys into internal and external policy work in Canada. The analysis finds a “complementary” relationship to exist, contrary to the conventional wisdom that outside or external advice is sought mainly in order to avoid biases in internal advice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite all the attention paid to the topic of policy analysis as a conceptual endeavour, empirically, the actual work of policy analysts is little investigated and little known. This is true generally of most countries and jurisdictions but it is most acute at the subnational level of government in multilevel states. Recent work in Canada, however, based on comprehensive surveys of analysts of provincial and territorial policy, on the one hand, and regionally and Ottawa-based federal policy workers on the other, has found many similarities with national-level work but also significant differences. This work has highlighted differences in the distribution of tasks across jurisdictions—mainly the extent to which policy work involves implementation as well as formulation-related activities—as key distinctions found in policy work across levels of the Canadian multilevel system. This article uses frequency and principal components analysis (PCA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) to probe these dimensions of policy work. It shows provincial and territorial analysts to be similar to regionally based federal workers in task allocation, undermining a straightforward depiction of differences in policy work by level of government. The extent of autonomy enjoyed by policy workers in different jurisdictional venues, both from internal actors and those outside of government, is shown to be the key driver of differences in policy work across levels of government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focuses on a study of Canadian political life, with emphasis on the applicability of the theory of agenda-setting by John Kingdon. Examination of the extent to which agenda-setting in Canadian governments; Methodology of the study; Details on the study.

This article examines the process of constitutional change surrounding the enactment of the natural-resource amendment (Section 92A) to the Canadian Constitution Act (1982). It traces the motivations behind the adoption of the clause to a combination of long-term exogenous factors originating in the OPEC-inspired price rises of the 1970s, and short-term endogenous factors particular to Canada's political and institutional arrangements, including unpredictable patterns of judicial arbitration of constitutional issues. The presence of endogenous and exogenous "shocks" to long-established constitutional modus vivendi allows some predictions to be made about the general nature and direction of future constitutional change. However, the workings of short-term political and institutional variables make it impossible to predict the exact content of the constitutional response to such influences. This finding supports Ban- ting and Simeon's hypothesis that constitutional change is political process subject to political forces in society and that constitutional change, like constitution-making, remains an art and not a science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]