Category Archives: Governance

Articles I Like: It’s 2022. What Does Life Look Like?

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
July 13 2020

The New York Times has a great article from David Leonhart where he tries to predict what life in 2022, a scant 18 months from now, will look like in America. He assumes no vaccine arrives this year, and that we continue to see waves of outbreaks and lockdowns.

From a business perspective, he talks about which business models will likely prove less than resilient in weathering the storm. Some likely casualties are those who were already vulnerable businesses…newspapers losing advertisers, traditional department stores (Eatons, Zellers, K-Mart, WoolCo, Target have all bit the dust in Canada long ago) losing out to Walmart and Amazon, and malls closing when they lose their department store anchors.

While universities in Canada are unlikely to fail, the same budget pressures are hitting them as they are in the U.S. — enrolment stability, cancelled summer programs, residence and food service fees gone, parking revenue gone, and provincial and federal budgets are taking huge beatings.  » Read the rest

Share

New featured images – Governance

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
April 18 2020

As part of an update to my website, I am revamping all my featured images (https://polywogg.ca/new-featured-images-astronomy/). Having already tackled a small one (astronomy) and a large one (website and computers), I am turning my attention to a different challenge — governance. I actually have multiple categories that fall into a “governance” theme, although in many ways, “government” might be a better term for some.

I have an actual category specifically called governance, and I tend to write about a variety of things related to running a government. Elections, public administration, audits. I have more of a technical bent to my topics, and if I was completely candid, it seems like public administration would be the more likely heading. Except from time to time I go above that and intersect with policy and politics. The running of a government at a level above. Not often, but occasionally, and usually related to how the two realms — politics and public administration — intersect.  » Read the rest

Share

Government working-from-home in the time of pandemics

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
March 15 2020

I’ve been following the TBS announcements, as most government employees have been, trying to figure out if and when they will tell us simply to work from home across the board. Right now, managers are told to be as supportive as possible for people wanting to work from home. Yet we can’t even call it telework as most of them will have no “tele” options at all — many don’t have a connection or app to connect remotely, and for those who do, most networks don’t have the bandwidth or server power to handle EVERYONE logging in remotely.

On Reddit, one user started a thread and included the phrase:

Let’s be honest – in many cases we actually can work from home and should absolutely be doing so.

Thread | Reddit

I don’t know if they are a manager who has ever managed telework employees or are an employee who has ever worked from home more than a day or two, but the level of assumptions in that statement suggests to me that the answer is neither.  » Read the rest

Share

I support teachers, not a strike – Part 4 / 5 – Public policy issues are not labour relations

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
March 5 2020

So at this point in my logic chain, I have:

  1. People should support education, which is mostly about teaching (a narrowing);
  2. The Government made a bad policy decision
  3. Teachers are willing to strike for the bad policy decision i.e., the issues

Except the issues aren’t really “strike worthy”. Funding levels are not significantly off from what they were — we’re not talking cuts like Alberta is seeing for health care. Larger class sizes have actually been more or less settled already with the latest offer, regardless of how few schools would actually see those theoretical limits. Layoffs will be done by attrition, local priority funding is going to school boards and has been increased, and violence in the classroom is based on faulty data.

Not exactly a strong rallying cry when you look at the substance. Which leaves only two other items — pay and benefits. The nuts and bolts of labour relations.  » Read the rest

Share

I support teachers, not a strike – Part 3 / 5 – Are the real policy issues “strike-worthy”

The Writing Life of a Tadpole
February 22 2020

So at this point in my logic chain, I have:

  1. People should support education –> People should support education, which is mostly about teaching (a narrowing);
  2. Teachers disagree with the government’s approach –> The Government made a bad policy decision

The next sub-element is that teachers believe the government made a bad policy decision.

Bad policy

In order for us to decide it was a bad policy, let’s first articulate what exactly the elements of that “policy” are that are irking the teachers:

  1. Education funding levels;
  2. Larger class-sizes;
  3. Firing teachers;
  4. Non-renewal of lapsing “local priorities” funding;
  5. Violence in the classroom; and,
  6. Salary increase of 1%.

I confess in advance that I’m going to fall off the logic chain pretty fast in this list. Let’s start with the overall heading — education funding.

Education funding

While the Government is claiming an increase in education funding of $1.2B, it’s a misleading figure, mainly as it includes a lot of money in there for child-care.  » Read the rest

Share