What Is to Be Done? (the Nonprofit Sector in Canada: Roles and Relationships; Room to Manoeuvre? Globalization and Policy Convergence; Restructuring Societies: Insights from the Social Sciences)

A review of Keith G. Banting, editor, The Nonprofit Sector in Canada: Roles and Relationships. Kingston, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, 2000; Thomas J. Courchene, editor, Room to Manoeuvre? Globalization and Policy Convergence, Montreal and Kingston, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University and McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999; David B. Knight and Alun E. Joseph, editors, Restructuring Societies: Insights from Social Sciences, Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1999. All three of edited collections under review here are informed by idea that environment of Canadian public policy has changed in important ways. The elements of change are globalization, technology, and political emergence of something called the right. These changes in environment have to restructuring and may lead to even more. This raises several questions. First, given globalization and changes in technology, do governments have choices with respect to policies? If is choice, what policies should be chosen? Finally, might it be sensible to select policies consequence of which is to limit future choices? This latter issue is often central in discussions with respect to desirability of free trade treaties. Room to Manoeuvre? is set of careful examinations of effects of globalization and on Canadian policy options. It contains most direct consideration of issue of constraint on policy. The editors' introduction to Restructuring Societies asserts importance of globalization. It is followed by set of essays that vary considerably in their attention to globalization but several of which seem to be unsympathetic to new right. The Nonprofit Sector assumes changes in policy environment that have both to growth in importance of sector and changes in its organization. In what follows I will consider each collection separately and then, briefly, return to broader questions sketched above. Writing introductory essay to their collection must have been something of challenge to Knight and Joseph. The contents of essays are all over place. Bob Rae seeks inspiration in Edmund Burke and George Orwell. Each, it turns out, was opposed to extremism. Neither, he thinks, would have been enthused by libertarian excesses (p. 30) of right as embodied in current Progressive Conservative government of Ontario. Moran attempts to draw lessons for Canada from right-inspired changes that began in New Zealand in 1980s. While according to most macroeconomic criteria, reforms would be considered success (p. 51), Moran seems to think that this would be less case in terms of satisfaction of health care and education employees (p. 53). Barling assembles set of conventional indicators (working hours, incidence of involuntary part time work and self-employment, duration of unemployment, sense of ambient insecurity) to make case to effect that has been decrease in quality of employment relations in Canada. He further claims that rise in insecurity has been bad for profits and productivity. Leach and Winson show that most workers who were laid off when their plants closed were subsequently worse off. The collection finishes with two essays on aboriginals (Dickason, Wolfe-Keddie) that are quite interesting but have little to do with other essays. Knight and Joseph are bit ambiguous on issue of choice. On one hand they argue that a form of capitalism characterized by increased mobility of capital and rise of transnational corporations, facilitated by rapid evolution of world-wide digital communications technology holds sway and presents challenge to (p. 3) -- which rather suggests increasing constraint. On other hand, there is no single path along which states are being forced or led (p. …

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