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Recent Blogs



Post Secondary Education in Canada, 11 February 2010

Put a frog in boiling water and it jumps out immediately. Put a frog in cold water and gradually turn up the heat, and eventually it gets cooked.  In comparison to the breath taking nature of the recent economic freefall or fearfulness of the predictions of a climate change catastrophe, questions regarding the effectiveness or sustainability our system of postsecondary education (PSE) may seem positively straightforward, for clearly they have taken a back seat. However, the slow but relentless transition taking place seems destined to leave us in the same place as the frog -- cooked...

Please Mr. President, where’s the “we”? January 24, 2010


Looking For a Fresh Start in Ottawa,  January 7, 2010

Over the last two months, The Ottawa Citizen has published a number of stories, editorials and op-ed pieces that have underscored the dysfunctional nature of municipal government in Ottawa. In particular, with the onset of municipal election season, various writers have pointed to few mayoral and councilor candidates with truly leadership caliber.

My question is whether anyone has assembled any leadership criteria that could be used to assess candidates to lead Council and the municipal bureaucracy towards the kind of future the citizens of Ottawa think they might like have (leaving aside for the moment a legacy of complete absence of shared vision for the city). What kind of skills or competencies should we expect of these candidates? How will we judge one candidate from another? In any other hiring process we would begin by assessing a candidate’s skills and then judging whether the candidate can adjust to the needs of a new organizational context. So why, as Denley suggested November 19th, can’t we do the same with our municipal leaders? ...

Response to Sibley's "Trust Us On This", The Ottawa Citizen, April 11, 2009

Recently, the Ottawa Citizen ran a column entitled “Trust us on this”  written by Robert Sibley with assistance from David Mitchell of the Public Policy Forum. I was very appreciative that they raised the issue of an overall, system-wide lack of trust that has emerged as a distinguishing and worrisome feature of today’s economic recession. They suggested that in going into this recession, the leaders of today’s private, public and not-for-profit organizations do not enjoy the same degree of public confidence that leaders have in the past, making the climb out of this recession likely to be that much more difficult. However, in attempting to map a way forward, their analysis got it wrong! ...

P3s and Ottawa's Health Care: Resonse to "Audit on Royal Ottawa Sought”, The Ottawa Citizen, January 26, 2009

I would like to correct the one-sided story on public-private partnerships (P3s) and their use in Ontario hospitals (“Audit on Royal Ottawa Sought” by Mohammed Adam) published by The Ottawa Citizen, January 26, 2009. P3s are relatively new in Canada (compared to the US and the UK) and they provide an opportunity to make use of the best elements of private and public organizations to serve the health needs of Ontarians better. Therefore it was disturbing to see so many misleading statements made in the story and a reliance on “expert’ sources who are clearly biased and represent a hyper-ideological and political opposition to P3s under any and all circumstances...

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