PAPM September 17/13

Defining terms

Government: Comes from the Greek; means to steer> all about steering policies. It boils down to notion of purity. Gov’t is a body/a group of individuals that have the authority to make and enforce laws and they do so in a civil/corporate or religious organization. And in public law they do it in a fine jurisdiction. So in the broadest sense it is to govern/to administer/to supervise.

Public Administration: Social and political drive of gov’t. Factors that steer the steering within

-It is wrong to equate private with the public sector as they are completely different.

Private sector is driven by profit. It is about the money (fundamentally)

-It is a mechanism driven by profit

-There is a life cycle to any company and even the ones that last for 20 years come to an end

Public sector; what drives it is what is in the public’s interest

-It is not easily defined in government

-gov’t will always function even if it is not in accordance with the public interest

NTS: Governments provide public goods

-doing motives/things that are not for profit.

-government are accountable: Accountability, accountability, accountability whereas cooperation’s are not. For example: Nortell (company); before economic downturn... 15% of Canadian Wealth was lost. The CEO was not accountable.

When you are in gov’t you have to defend yourself all the time. In order to defend it, you need to well document it. And the public should demand that. Good analysis, documentation, justify decisions. In gov’t everything needs to be paper, there is a record of everything; emails, paperwork, approvals, everything- unlike a company. It is a very different standard. As policy makers you conduct your work in high publicity- everything you do is scrutinized. People within government (vlasi) will not say anything about his political views/ about confidential information in government because everything is scrutinized. There is zero tolerance for that in government that is the ultimate check in public administration.

Public Policy: very broad notion. It is a course of action and inaction (inaction is a policy) chosen by the public authorities to address a given problem or inter-related set of problems. (1) It’s a framework, tells you something about the framework thinking that will guide your actions. What is driving me to do this? Is the president of USA decided to take military action he will have to justify his framework. What is his framework of thinking in driving this policy? This is very important. You as the public have the right to ask questions and the government has to answer. (2) There is action and inaction: there has to be a problem or set of problems that you are trying to address. It could be a real problem or a perceived problem. Perception is important because at the end of the day, gov’t sis accountable to you. So if the public sees something, it is up to the government to address the perceived problem. There is this purposed notion of neutrality (no biases in this notion) and secondly that you have the expertise to make that decision. You require experts in order to catch the public up to speed. Policy is a guide to action; it’s a map/framework.

In any type of policy statement there is a [problem] (real or perceived). If you can’t put your arm around it, the scope for area is high. Ex: This causes that…are action against terrorism, deter terrorism.. you need to be able to explain the causes.

-to be able to say something like ‘stats tell us the rate of abortions have gone up by 10% and the rate of crime went up by 10% and that’s a relationship’… all sort of things go up by 10%... you cannot equate that. You hear these things in the news all the time… the public needs to learn to question government officials all the time.

-Just because it is a perceived problem does not mean that you do nothing.

-Getting/understanding the problem is very important. To build your