Symposium in Honour of Peter Aucoin

On November 12th and 13th, I had the pleasure of attending a symposium in honour of Peter Aucoin held at Dalhousie University in Halifax. This symposium was to recognize Peter’s tremendous and prolific body of work in the field of public administration and public policy. The title of the Symposium was: From ‘New Public Management’ to 'New Political Governance’.

Anybody who has studied or read about public administration in Canada would be familiar with Peter’s writings on a diverse range of topics. You can view a selected bibliography here.

The Symposium included presentations from a who’s who of scholars in public administration from across Canada and some international guests as well on topics that reflect Peter’s interests, including Democratic governance; electoral reform; Public Management and Reform; and Accountability. I had the privilege of moderating the first session on “Bridging the Gap between Government and Academia”. The panel was composed of Mel Cappe, President of the Institute for Research on Public Policy and past Federal Clerk of the Privy Council and Rick Williams, Deputy Minister of the Office of Policy and Priorities of the Government of Nova Scotia.

Mel spoke about how Peter has played the role of the bridge between government and academia and how the elegance of scholarly work intersects with the chaos that is the life of the practitioner. According to Mel, only academia can help practitioners to sit back and reflect on issues and help draw lessons and academia can provide fearless advice to the “fearless advisors” in the public service. He sees academia as a translator of the practitioners work and as a useful interface between the public service and the political level as it is always helpful to say to the political level that there exists a body of literature on a particular topic. Mel also spoke of the increased centralization in government, which he sees as evolutionary in nature. He also spoke about the different skills needed for operations versus policy and the lack of policy capacity (i.e.: ideas generation) that he sees in government these days. Part of the reason for this is the lack of demand for new ideas from the political level.

Rick Williams spoke about the need to enhance the capacity of government to implement core policy. As a new DM reporting the Premier (from outside government) he thanked Peter for providing sage advice during the transition process. He spoke about the complexity of issues facing governments today that require “joined up solutions”. He underscored the need for a professional public service and the critical role of Deputy Ministers in achieving governmental objectives. The majority of his talk was on the upcoming release of the report of the NS Panel of Economic Advisors being released the next day that would address the transformation in health, education and public service that the government of Nova Scotia needed to do to address the structural deficit.

The presentations were followed by a robust round of Questions & Answers that I will write about shortly as well as give you some of the other highlights from the symposium.