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"Toward principled governance for Canada's immigration regime Canada has engaged in an immigration policy experiment of momentous importance over the last 25 years: it has almost doubled the flow of new immigrants. This has not only strained Canada s absorptive capacity and the common public culture, and increased the costs of immigration for Canadians, but it has also led the more recent cohorts of immigrants to experience much greater difficulty integrating into their new homeland, causing them to fall more and more below the level of income of the Canadian-born. Canadians have been disinformed by officials, the intelligentsia and the media about the real impact of mass immigration on the economy and about its potential capacity to counter the effect of the aging of Canadian population. Canadians have been hoodwinked into accepting that maximum diversity is optimum diversity."--

"This book looks into the forces at work that have undermined critical thinking and sound intellectual inquiry in the world of public affairs in Canada, have fostered reductive perspectives and destructive blockages to collaborative governance to emerge, and have succeeded in blinding observers to the real sources of the present Canadian malaise, blocking the road to imaginative repairs. Part I deals frontally with the twilight of critical thinking that has led to a dramatic weakening of the critical examination of issues, and the process of inquiry that has been significantly weakened by ever narrower perspectives. Part II focuses on two mental prisons: the obsessive and reductive insistence on a quantophrenic twist (only that which can be quantified counts); and the failure by crucial partners to live up to the requirements of their burden of office in circumstances when disloyalty considerably enfeebles the possibility of effective collaborative governance and the chance for organizations to succeed. Part III suggests that it is not impossible to get rid of the blinders preventing the adoption of more synoptic approaches, and the exploration of more imaginative designs to repair our organizations and institutions. Ways to deal with the challenges facing the Canadian socio-economy are hinted at, and the work of a successful social architect showcased. The conclusion makes the case for an approach that is both synoptic and guided by reasonableness--against the dogmas of disciplines and skimpy rationality."--

"Scheming Virtuously is an invitation to subversion, but also a somewhat personal account of the displacement of the dominant governing regime (Big-G centralized government) by small-g collaborative governance, in a world where power, resources and information are widely distributed. In this new world, the citizen's burden of office is clear: to be a producer of governance. Scheming virtuously is the order of the day--active engagement, imaginative problem-reforming, astute organizational design, and effective action within the bounds of the appreciative systems in good currency and beyond."--

Pasquinade is a satire or critical comment traditionally posted in a public place in ancient Rome; in particular, on the statue of Pasquino. Pasquinades in E is my contribution to this waning tradition. These essays are exercises in critical thinking. They aim at exorcising a number of mental prisons about aspects of governing, and at denouncing pathologies in our ways of thinking and governing ourselves, by exposing their toxic nature. Silence on such matters connotes tacit agreement with toxic nonsense and, therefore, guilt by association for the ensuing mal-governance. Four ensembles of pathologies are considered. First, institutional pathologies: the toxic effect of the Charter of Rights, of certain special commissions of inquiry, of the creeping power of super-technocracy, and of the rampant invasion of legal corruption. Second, impostures and sophistry that have derailed the democratic conversation: weasel words, academism, fundamentalisms, demonization and psychosis. Third, toxic trends that are crippling the democratic process: the rhetoric of promiscuity, oikophobia, hyper-toleration and the politics of guilt. Fourth, a sample of redesign challenges difficult to meet because of social blindness and powerful interest groups standing in the way: the National Capital Region, higher education in Ontario, the Armed Forces, the RCMP, the Office of the Auditor General, the culture of the federal public service, and the notion of stationary population policy as fata morgana. I will be delighted if the reader is provoked and amused by this attack on doxacracy – a democracy dependent on ill-founded opinions – and saddened if the reader is not

Intro -- | Introduction -- Part I State of Play -- Chapter 1 | Slouching Toward a Relatively Stateless State -- Introduction -- Two reference points -- The rise and evolution of the notion of governance -- Experiments at the Centre on Governance -- Conclusion -- Chapter 2 | Governance as Mythbuster -- Introduction -- The governance approach -- Four key notions transformed in the -- small 'g' world -- Persiflage about the governance approach -- Some conjectures about the future -- of governance studies -- Conclusion -- Chapter 3 | Wicked Problems and Social Learning -- Introduction -- The social learning response to the wicked problems challenge -- The engine of social learning and wayfinding -- Scoping design thinking -- Design attitude: why, what and how -- Shifting attitude -- Conclusion -- Part II Wicked Trans-scientific Policy Challenges -- Chapter 4 | Equality -- Introduction -- The Tocqueville mechanism -- The dynamics of the entitlement revolution -- Impacts of the entitlement revolution -- The toxicity of the entitlement epidemic -- The governance of equability -- Modest general propositions -- Conclusion -- Chapter 5 | Diversity -- Introduction -- The issue domain: a few stylized facts -- The manufactured Canadian consensus -- A fragile social fabric and its dilemmas -- A primer on the governance of diversity -- Intermediate cosmopolitanism as the way out -- The journey to transculturalism -- Conclusion -- | Annex -- Joseph Heath's Golden Rule -- Chapter 6 | Sustainability -- Introduction -- Sustainability as a weaselword -- Governance -- Blending, complex adaptive systems and bricolage -- A plea for polycentric governance -- Conclusion -- | Conclusion -- Issues -- Polyphonic organizations and hybrid -- forms of governance -- Issue domains and wayfinding: -- mechanisms and representations -- Two murky frontiers -- In conclusion.

In Crippling Epistemologies and Governance Failures Gilles Paquet attacks the dominant practices of the social sciences and their reliance on inadequate concepts of knowledge, evidence, and inquiry, which have become methodological and ideological "mental prisons". He argues that governance and social arrangements based on these platforms result in weak information infrastructure, poor accountability, and inadequate organizational design, and that these arrangements ultimately fail. He rejects borrowing approaches from the physical sciences and suggests that a richer perspective less

Political commentator and public policy analyst Gilles Paquet examines the benefits and drawbacks of Canada's multiculturalism policy. He rejects the current policy which perpetuates difference and articulates a model for Canadian transculturalism, a more fluid understanding of multiculturalism based on the philosophy of cosmopolitanism which would strengthen moral contracts and encourage the social engagement of all Canadians.

Over the last few decades, the Westphalian nation-state has lost its hegemonic position in the system of geo-governance. A dispersive revolution has led to the emergence of powerful newly networked business organizations, new subsidiary-focused governments, and increasingly virtual, elective, and malleable communities. This in turn has led to the crystallization of distributed governance regimes, based on a wider variety of more fluid and always evolving groups of stakeholders. In The New Geo-Governance, Gilles Paquet develops a general conceptual framework to deal with the new evolving rea

Governance connotes the way an organization, an economy, or a social system co-ordinates and steers itself. Some insist that governing is strictly a top-down process guided by authority and coercion, while others emphasize that it emerges bottom-up through the workings of the free market. This book rejects these simplistic views in favour of a more distributed view of governance based on a mix of coercion, quid pro quo market exchange and reciprocity, on a division of labour among the private, public, and civic sectors, and on the co-evolution of these different integration mechanisms. This book is for both practitioners confronted with governance issues and for citizens trying to make sense of the world around them.