Policy Options

The year 2003 could well be named ”œThe Year of the Shocks.” There was the war in Iraq, which is still being played out. The worldwide outbreak of severe...

When George Washington Plunkett, boss of New York’s notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall political machine, was led off to prison, he is supposed to have shrugged and said: ”œI seen...

Amidst the controversy over former New York Stock Exchange Chairman Dick Grasso’s compensation package, the debate over corporate governance has once more returned to the front page. The sum...

In late 2001, Enron Corp. filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code. Following its application, a flood of questionable accounting practices of a...

”œYou can’t make people good by Act of Parliament” A Woman of No Importance, by Oscar Wilde As new rules are introduced into the capital markets by securities commissions...

In a thoughtful article in the December 2002 Harvard Business Review, Charles Handy wrote, ”œIn the wake of recent corporate scandals, it is again time to ask ourselves the...

Dans une économie mixte comme la nôtre, l’État administre des sommes extrêmement importantes. En 2001-02 par exemple, les dépenses totales du gouvernement du Québec, qui s’élevaient à près de...

The ombudsman is mainly known as an independent official who handles complaints from the public against government administration. But in recent years the ombudsman idea has been spreading rapidly...

Accountability is a word that is loaded with meaning that strikes fear in the heart and soul of our health care system. That’s because it has come to mean:...

When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, democratic leaders throughout the world correctly proclaimed history had taken an important shift. The first President Bush asserted we were...

While there is a widespread consensus that capitalism represents the only viable way of organizing a modern economy, popular reaction to the recent spate of corporate governance scandals has...

Ask the right questions of the right people at the right time and you stand a good chance of ending up with good policy. Advice as good today as...

In December 2002, in a report on advancing Canada’s relations with the United States and Mexico, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade recommended...

On March 24, 1989, I was in a smoky Montreal tavern with three friends discussing a news story that had made headlines around the world the previous day: Researchers...

En juin dernier, une étude de Statistique Canada sur le financement des universités révélait que les revenus et les dépenses des universités canadiennes avaient atteint des niveaux sans précédent...

The media coverage of the Iraq war was so perfectly adapted to television that it often seemed that the war had been turned into a television show, becom- ing...

As a complement to its June-July issue ranking Canadian prime ministers over the past half century, Policy Options decided to open the dialogue to its Internet audience via a...

Military futures matter in peacetime because that is when both weapons and warriors are developed. The American victory over the Japanese navy at Midway in 1942 depended on aircraft...

Over the past few years, the question of the role given to Canada’s armed forces has been raised with vigour and some urgency. Often in the wake of a...

Everybody says the Canadian constitution is hard to amend. Not impossible, but hard. Since giving ourselves an amending formula in 1982 we have managed to eliminate confessional schools in...