It was so important that Paul Martin took an hour and a half out of his current job hunt to be there. NDP Leader Jack Layton gave a speech and stayed for a leisurely lunch. And some of the top civil servants from across the country flew to Ottawa for it. The occasion was a think-tank session on the blazingly hot subject of e-government.
Now, most people plan to kill the next computer sales person who comes through the door putting “e” in front of a perfectly good word. But according to Treasury Board President Lucienne Robillard, e-government will be either “the killer app or the Achilles heel of government.” She says that 70 per cent of Canadians are online and that 48 per cent of us have used government online services in the last 12 months. Of course, that includes everything from looking up a government phone number to Netfiling your income tax. And she predicts that, some time in the near future, e-government will become as natural for Canadians as e-banking. She sees major benefits to this change, and not just in reduced service costs.
Robillard asked, rhetorically, how many in the audience knew that the Government of Canada has a “Department of Seniors” which brings together all information of interest to them. Luckily, no-one was foolish to put up a hand, since this department does not exist, at least not in the real world. But there is a virtual “Seniors Canada Online” link right off the Government of Canada’s home page. Web-savvy seniors can access definitive information on cheerful topics like Dying in Canada.
This “life events” orientation is the hot new thing in government web pages. The Alberta government has it on their website. You can access a package of services such as Finding a Job, Getting Married, Becoming a Parent and Getting Divorced. You don’t need to figure out which government department issues marriage licences or divorce decrees, you just click and there’s your information.
The other goal of these sites seems to be to change the image of government from a stodgy bureaucracy that takes your tax money to your online best buddy.
The City of Calgary recently unveiled its new website. Andy Blenkarn, vice-president of global information technology provider EDS, sang its praises at a national conference of information professionals last week.
He noted that the 18-month project had achieved its objective of “providing easier access to information and services for citizens of Calgary” and also its goal of re-branding the city as a place that is “young, vibrant and exciting.”
His colleague Diane McDonald, who managed the project for EDS, says the new site has actually been live since October 2002, and that visits are up 36 per cent since then.
Well it’s certainly better than it was. But Calgary’s new website suffers from some high-tech goofiness such as the Flash-animated “Portal Introduction”, which doesn’t tell you much, and has an audio track that would even give a teenager a headache. At least it’s optional. Somebody had too much time on their hands if they needed to create this little show. And while it has service bundles such as “Getting Around Calgary,” in my opinion it still lags behind the provincial site in looking logically at life events.
But hey, it’s a work in progress, and you can get cool things like an interactive online map of Calgary’s great bike pathways. That puts us a notch above Edmonton’s site, which makes you download its bike path map as a PDF file. Calgary’s site is also graced with an online store. You can buy items like a Water Saver Kit ($18.69) and the Calgary Transit LRT Design Guidelines book ($500). You can even create your own view of the website, adding your favorite services to a “personal portal.” So, if you see a lot of graffiti you can be taken direct to the “Report Graffiti” online form.
Back at the Ottawa “Crossing Boundaries” conference, the politicos were saying that we need to move beyond delivering government services online to true e-democracy with online debate and maybe even e-voting.
Paul Martin plugged his website, saying that it’s getting 7,500 hits a day and that his wife didn’t think there were 7,500 people in Canada who were interested in talking with him. Martin’s site also suffers from cutesy trendiness. We have “Paul’s Blog,” a kind of personal online diary. He’s over a week behind in his entries! A real blogger records every meal and bowel movement promptly in their online journal.
Jack Layton probably had the best e-democracy stories, including the tale of how the Internet helped citizens of Kirkland Lake fight the trucking of Toronto’s garbage to an abandoned quarry near their community. Kirkland Lake residents were able to influence the opinions of Toronto city councillors by hooking up, electronically, with environmental activities in the city. Layton also noted that the most accurate and comprehensive site on this issue was created by a group of Kirkland Lake region high school students.
He called for a program of universal access to both home computers and the Internet, saying that we are “getting to the point where getting people online makes sense as a public good.” Of course, every few minutes he put in a plug for the NDP’s website.
Much of the conference centred on the nuts and bolts of making e-democracy work. Dr. Stephen Coleman, who carries the lofty title “Cisco Visiting Professor of e-Democracy” at Oxford University’s Internet Institute, described a series of 10 consultations held by the U.K. government over issues as diverse as services for seniors and domestic violence.
He said the key lessons were that you had to work hard to make sure the right stakeholders were brought online, and that they had to believe that what they said online would be heeded. It was also noted that some of the biggest opponents of this process were NGO advocacy groups that felt that they spoke on behalf of a constituency such as blind people, and risked becoming irrelevant.
Calgary already has examples of e-democracy at work. The City of Calgary website is currently hosting its first online discussion on the future of McKnight Boulevard. Alana DeLong, MLA for Calgary Bow, says she received many individual, well crafted e-mails around the issue of closing the Parkdale School. She also says she was besieged with 650 e-mails from homeless people about the possible closing of a homeless shelter.
Perhaps, before the clients were given their “hot meal,” they were asked to stop at “hotmail.”
We can expect exciting, and sometimes controversial, times ahead on the rocky road to e-government!
(Tom Keenan is dean of the Faculty of Continuing Education at the U of C. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
