Clients, citizens and federalism: A critical appraisal of integrated service delivery in Canada.

Making government services more responsive to the needs of citizens is an ongoing preoccupation of public administration. Doing so in a federal system presents particular challenges and has led to efforts to integrate service delivery across two or more orders of government or into what some have called “citizen-centred federalism.” This article offers a critical evaluation of this concept by emphasizing the need to distinguish between instrumental and organic conceptions of both citizenship and federalism. Doing so reveals that much of what has been done to date by way of service integration deals only with a limited subset of all the services that governments provide. It also suggests that some Canadians may be willing to sacrifice efficiency in order to preserve or strengthen local autonomy and identity and that Canadians who hold an instrumental conception of federalism may well be willing to entertain quite dramatic changes as to who does what if this means more effective delivery of public goods. Finally, this analysis suggests that, for some citizens, the key criterion for evaluating any given proposal to provide public goods is much less one of efficiency and much more (or at least equally) one of federalism and strengthening the institutions and practices of federation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]