2024-10-03

Dossier: Jocelyne Bourgon: Clerk of Privy Council (1994-1999)

  • Appointed by Jean Chretien Liberals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyne_Bourgon
  • She launched the Deputy Ministers Task Force on strengthening our policy capacity. This was chaired by Canadas Chief Statistician Ivan Fellegi. The Fellegi Report (1996) recommended long-term strategies for policy development, the need to promote interdepartmental networks within government, and recommended that the Privy Council Office (PCO) be the focal point for this “Whole of Government” approach. (FYI: At the same time, Tony Blairs Labour Party in the UK wrote the “White Paper” making similar recommendations) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319064172_9_Policy_Analysis_in_the_Federal_Government_Building_the_Forward-_Looking_Policy_Research_Capacity
  • As a result, in 1996 the government launched PRI (Policy Research Initiative) as a joint effort between the PCO Clerk (Jocelyne Bourgon) and Deputy Ministers of different governmental departments to look at government policy development.
  • Served in dept. of Industry, cabinet secretary for Federal-Provincial Relations (later merges with PCO) president of CIDA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyne_Bourgon
  • When she as Deputy Minister of Transport Canada she helped organize the Canada-Free Trade, lead constitutional negotiations, helped prepare reform that lead to the privatization of our rail and airports. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyne_Bourgon
  • Leads the “New Synthesis Project” a program that aspires to transform the way people think about the role of government in the post-industrial era. A New Synthesis in Public Administration sets out a theoretical framework that takes this new reality into account. It reveals how government forms part of a co-evolving system between people and society.

This project was written and financed by PGI (Public Governance International) a corporation dedicated to helping transform governmental services to meet the global needs of the 21st century. Mrs. Bourgon is the founding President of PGI http://www.pgionline.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120907105534/http:/nsworld.org/sites/nsworld.org/files/New_Frontiers_of_Public_Administration.pdf

We have not heard from former clerks of the Privy Council, like Jocelyne Bourgon or Mel Cappe, who could tell us what the Privy Council knew and when it knew, and what directions they gave. Whether for instance, did an official from the Federal-Provincial Relations Office of the PCO call Chuck Guité in 1995 and instruct him to bend the rules, if necessary, in the government’s advertising program? We would like to hear them testify to that question.”

  • Workers Versus Austerity the modern state apparatus: In the summer of 2009, two figures from that eras Liberal administration former top bureaucrat Jocelyne Bourgon and former cabinet minister Marcel Massé flew across the Atlantic and met with leading British Conservatives including Philip Hammond, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury. We are not privy to the discussions which took place at these meetings. But it might not be a coincidence that the Conservatives in Britain, now in office, have embarked upon a serious austerity offensive that has many similarities with Canada s experience in the 1990s. One of the principle mechanisms used by the Liberals to slash spending was to change the rules by which tax money was shipped out to the provinces. The effect was to reduce by billions of dollars the amount of money given to the provinces and this was critical, because it is the provinces in Canada which fund health care, education and social assistance. These central components of the welfare state, while delivered provincially, are extremely dependent on transfer payments from the senior level of government. To deal with debts accumulated during years of Tory rule, the federal liberals had redefined the way in which transfer payments were to be delivered to the provinces, the net effect of which would be to reduce those payments by billions. Chart 1 (Department of Finance Canada 2010) captures this starkly. From until, transfer payments stagnated at around the thirty five billion dollar mark, in fact a long slow cut in per capita terms. But from until, transfer payments plunged by seven billion dollars, and then by another two billion dollars between and This is the picture of the austerity measures behind the construction of the neoliberal state, one aspect of which was the threatened doubling of tuition fees.” http://docplayer.net/51287077-Workers-versus-austerity-the-origins-of-ontario-s-days-of-action.html

Finish Reviewing these:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canada-school-of-public-service-under-scrutiny/article12898126/

http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan027362.pdf

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