Fall/Winter 2006 - University of Toronto Press Publishing

P O LG I TE INC ES R A NL D I NPT OE RL EI CS YT
Rural Women’s Leadership
in Atlantic Canada
First-hand Perspectives on Local Public Life and
Participation in Electoral Politics
Louise Carbert
Most people are aware of the large and persistent
gender imbalance in elected office at all levels of
government in Canada, but few appreciate the far
greater imbalance that occurs outside of large cities.
This deficit arises not from rural voter bias, but
from low numbers of female candidates running
for winnable seats. The question of why there are so
few female candidates has been difficult to answer,
largely because we know so little about the pool of
potential candidates.
Rural Women’s Leadership in Atlantic Canada
presents results from a regional field-based study,
which confronted this challenge directly for the
first time. Louise Carbert gathered together small
groups of rural community leaders (126 women
in all) throughout the four Atlantic provinces, and
interviewed them about their experiences and perceptions
of leadership, public life, and running for
elected office. Their answers paint a vivid picture
of politics in rural communities, illustrating how it
intersects with family life, work, and the overall local
economy. Through discussion of their own reasoned
aversion to holding elected office, and of resistance
encountered by those who have put their names
forward, the interviewees shed much-needed light on
the pervasive barriers to the election of women.
Louise Carbert is an associate professor in the
Department of Political Science at Dalhousie
University.
E-Government in Canada
Transformation for the Digital Age
Jeffrey Roy
UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA PRESS
The rapid expansion of the Internet has fueled the
emergence of electronic government at all levels
in Canada. E-government’s first decade featured
online service underpinned by a technically secure
infrastructure. This service-security nexus entails
internal governance reforms aimed at realizing
more customer-centric delivery via integration and
coordination across departments and agencies. Yet,
as online networking has become more pervasive
and public demands for participation rise, pressures
for greater openness and accountability intensify.
The result is widening experimentation with online
democracy. The e-government focus is thus shifting
toward issues of transparency and trust – and
new possibilities for re-conceptualizing how power
is organized and deployed. In sum, the prospects
for digital transformation involve the interplay of
these for dimensions: service, security, transparency,
and trust.
This book identifies the main drivers of e-government,
assesses the responses of Canada’s public
sector to date, and sketches out the major challenges
and choices that lie ahead. The findings will be of
interest to those studying or working in the world
of public sector management and e-governance.
Jeffrey Roy is an associate professor in the School of
Management at the University of Ottawa.
Approx. 176 pp / 6 x 9 / December 2006
17 halftones
Cloth ISBN 0-8020-9125-3 / 978-0-8020-9125-3
£28.00 $45.00 E
398 pp / 6 x 9 / Available
Paper ISBN 0-7766-0617-4 / 978-0-7766-0617-0
£22.50 $35.00 C
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