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Is our civil service fit for purpose? Michael Coolican takes John Reid's damning statement about the Home Office as his point of departure for a comprehensive overview and evaluation of the machinery behind the government and the people who make public services work on a daily basis. Beginning with Henry VIII's chief minister Thomas Cromwell, Michael Coolican takes us on an odyssey through the history of the British civil service, starting with a time when public positions were sold and traded through Royal Warrant. Coolican examines the radical reforms of the Victorian era which entrenched a culture of elitism, misogyny and distrust of high-quality data as a basis for decision making, that, in some areas, persists to this day. A former high-level civil servant with forty years of experience, Coolican has produced a pithy and, where necessary, ruthless analysis of the civil service and its relationship with government, especially at Cabinet level, bringing to bear detailed and extensive research informed by a true insider.
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On 28 February 2006, the Six Nations of the Grand River blocked workers from entering a half-built housing development in southern Ontario. They renamed the land Kanonhstaton, “the protected place.” The protest drew national and international attention to the issue of Aboriginal land rights and sparked a series of ongoing events known as the “Caledonia Crisis.” Laura DeVries’ powerful account of the dispute links the actions of police, governmental officials, and locals to entrenched non-Aboriginal discourses about law, landscape, and identity. It encourages non-Aboriginal Canadians to reconsider their assumptions – to view “facts” such as the rule of law as culturally specific notions that prevent truly equitable dialogue. DeVries not only reveals the conflicting visions of justice held by various parties to the dispute, she also seeks out possible solutions in alternative conceptualizations of sovereignty over land and law embedded in the Constitution.