Well, it is a few days after the end of the 2007 IPAC Annual Conference in friendly Winnipeg, Manitoba. As promised here is my post on the last day of the conference.
The day started out early again with a meeting of the Board of the IPAC Endowment Fund at 7:30 am. Maria-David Evans (DM in Alberta) was chosen as the President of the Endowment Fund and I was appointed Secretary/Treasurer. For those of you who don’t know (that would probably be most of you) the Endowment Fund is a registered charity that is utilized to fund the Pierre de Celles award, the Student Thought Leadership award and now the annual Galimberti lecture. With our new site we will be adding more about the Fund and be asking IPACers to donate to continue with these endeavors and a number of new ideas.
The 3rd day of the conference started with a re-cap of the previous days activities by the MC (me again, just in case you have not read the previous posts). After that erudite compilation of the events, the session heard from Gilles Paquet on “Accountability in a Fishbowl”. Gilles is my former dean when I was at the University of Ottawa @ the Faculty of Administration (now called the Telfer School of Management). He is also a prolific writer and commentator on television. What a speech – if you were not there you missed a very provocative, thought-provoking view of the ills that have gripped some of our accountability mechanisms, with the over reliance on rules, rules and more rules. In no way could I do justice to the arguments put forward by Prof Paquet. The talk left the room quite energized.
Following this performance, Maurice Boisvert, president of the Institute of Public Administration of Quebec invited delegates to the 2008 IPAC Conference that will take place in Quebec City. It will be the 60th annual IPAC conference (the first was held in Quebec City), the 100th anniversary of the Public Service Commission of Canada and the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec City!! There will be a lot to celebrate….book early!
The next session featured a panel on “Building Trustworthy, Accountable and Responsive Government”. The panel was moderated by David Zussman (also from the University of Ottawa and an IPAC Board member) and featured Peter Aucoin, Ruth Hubbard, Howard Pawley and Vice Chief Glen Pratt.
Then it was time for the closing banquet and the announcement of the winners of the 2007 IPAC Awards for Innovative Management that are sponsored by KPMG and IBM Canada. The audience tensed up as the moment arrived….the BRONZE award went to LearnNow BC (BC Education)…..the SILVER went to Nunavut Community Skills Information System (Nunavut Education)…..and the GOLD went to……wait for it……Provincial Wait Times Information System (Cancer Care Ontario). Congratulations to all the participants and to the three winning entries!! You can see a list of all the submissions by going to the awards page of this website and the press release is on the Media page. The presentations from the top three can be found on the Winnipeg conference website.
After lunch, Jacques Bourgault, Professor at UQAM and a past IPAC president gave the inaugural Galimberti lecture. The topic was the evolving role of Deputy Ministers. We will soon be posting the full speech by Prof Bourgault, so watch for it – it was a tour de force.
Sadly, we then turned to the closing remarks. We had a number of speakers addressing the delegates: Debra Woodgate, Carol Layton, Lloyd Axworthy and Jules Lavalee. And, Paul Thomas gave an insightful synopsis of the conference.
Then the MC took the stage…..see you next year in Quebec City!
I want to take this opportunity to publicly thank Debra Woodgate and her team for putting on an incredible conference. Putting on a conference of this magnitude and scope takes an incredible amount of time, energy, planning and caffeine! As a green conference it was great going to the cybercafé and down loading the presentations on the memory stick (you can go to the Conference Website as well) as opposed to lugging home the equivalent of a couple of trees of paper home. The sessions were informative and varied, the social activities were wonderful, the food was great, the organization was superb, the volunteers were friendly and helpful and I think that I speak for all the delegates when I say…..Job well done!
To Debra, Christina, Heather, Nick (my bodyguard!), Diana, Angie, Cheryl, Troy, Matt, Melanie, John, Joan, Kim, and everyone on the different committees and volunteers…thank you!
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