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A detailed account of one group’s attempt to determine who decides where and how taxpayers’ dollars get spent.
Governments in Canada today are facing a fiscal crisis. In recent years both Ottawa and many of the provinces have undertaken cost-cutting measures, such as reducing program spending and streamlining the public service, in an attempt to get their fiscal houses in order. Yet these efforts have barely even begun to address the problem. Governments still find themselves strapped for cash, struggling to find enough money to keep our most cherished social programs afloat while continuing to make payments on the billions of dollars in debt they owe to the rest of the world. How did we get to this point? The answer is that for more than thirty years the people we elected to office, and the public s...
J. Patrick Boyer draws together new patterns that help explain why Canadians who care deeply about our country nevertheless feel perplexed, angered, and even embarrassed by the way we now govern ourselves. Since the late 1700s "representative government" has been part of our Canadian birthright, and since the 1800s "responsible government" has additionally been a constitutional foundation of our country. That the forms of both endure, but not their substance, is the thesis of Boyer’s book. The result? An absence of accountability in Canadian government. Most of our country’s pressing concerns and complex problems - from regional economic disparities to the Quebec and Western Canadian separatist movements, from tax evasion to voter apathy - can be traced back to this fundamental lack of accountability. A citizen who understands this absence sees that it makes sense to step back from a dysfunctional system. Making this accountability connection is critical, Boyer concludes, because only when we clearly understand the root cause of the problems we face as a nation can we begin to develop workable, long-term solutions.
"Parliament, where the potential to defend ourselves ought to be debated and ultimately decided, has become irrelevant talk-shop ... The Chatter Box is essential reading." - Peter C. Newman, author and columnist
With a unique blend of candour and humour, Down the Road Never Travelled chronicles the arduous journey Brigitte Pellerin and her fellow researchers undertook in their attempts to track a tax dollar through one government spending program. Imagine coming home one evening and announcing to your significant other that the only way to truly understand how government worked was to study it from the ground up - to literally look into the sewer lines, leaking water mains, pothole-ridden roads and collapsing bridges of Canadian cities. This was Pellerin's goal when she embarked on an investigation of the Canada Infrastructure Works Program (CIWP), a government initiative that promised to repair the country's crumbling infrastructure and create jobs for Canadians. The task, Pellerin believed, would be relatively easy: to determine whether the government did what it said it would under this program. How hard could that be? As it turned out, it was nearly impossible.
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