"Doing politics differently" has become a hackneyed, even comical, slogan to all but the most optimistic of government-watchers. But the campaign to bring it about continues. Only now the battle's frontlines are more digital than political.
Parliamentarians, their staff, the bureaucrats, even journalists are heralding a new era of democratic accountability. "Cheaper and easier ways to communicate, such as the Internet, are changing the political habits of democracies," said The Economist in a recent issue. The Christian Science Monitor calls the wired revolution an "indispensable vehicle in the expanding universe of political communication." The new South African government recently announced the Internet would play a key role in the writing of its first democratic constitution, hoping to make the process "one of the most transparent and open in history."
Skeptics still prowl the highest offices in Canada, but their protests are falling on the ears of cost-conscious party leaders who see massive savings in printing costs - and on what one House of Commons official calls the most technically-sophisticated crowd of MPs in history.
A few MPs have been making use of the Internet, the World Wide Web and local-area e-mail networks for more than a year. But with the recent installation of a fibre-optic backbone for the telecommunications network that links the 11 buildings in Ottawa's Parliamentary Precinct (the Hill), both the demand for and the supply of electronic documentation and office connectivity have grown fast.
Earlier this year, Hill technicians put the finishing touches on the fibre-optic lines and the unshield twisted-pair lines and ethernets that connect offices and workstations within each House of Commons and Senate building. They replace the OASIS coaxial-cable network, originally designed to supply video-on-demand but incapable of meeting the high-bandwidth needs of its digitally-savvy users. Eventually, one 486 PC in each office will become a Windows NT server on that network for the rest of the office.
The whole project, including the purchase of software licence and two Pentium servers, came to less than $240,000 and involved the hiring of no extra personnel.
Perhaps the most telling sign of the new environment on the Hill is Michael Barbour, a 20-year-old newcomer to the political scene hired this spring by Alberta Senator Dan Hays. How important was his Internet knowledge? "It was the sole reason," admits Barbour.
Although Hays is more complementary, it is clear knowing how to design a World Wide Web page was more than a little helpful. Barbour has yet to complete his political science degree at Carleton and his only previous Hill job was with a Conservative senator, Jack Marshall. Not exactly sterling qualifications for a post with the president of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Hays is the first senator to sport an e-mail address on his letterhead, but it's only a matter of months before every parliamentarian follows suit. At least, that's the prediction of Reg Alcock, the Winnipeg MP who wins the award for most wired gadgets in a Hill office.
His IBM Thinkpad runs at 100 MHz. On one wrist is a Microsoft Office-compatible watch that serves as a scheduling daybook. He spends a half-hour on the Internet each morning scanning e-mail, most of which comes from the 5,000-plus constituents in his address file. His was the first Web site established by an MP. (The only other one to go public as of this summer is fellow Liberal John English.) His next project: a Pentium upgrade for his Hill staff and constituency office. Other MPs are more than a little curious.
E-mail and the World Wide Web should improve both the MP's ability to stay on top of the political agenda and the citizen's ability to keep on top what their elected representatives are doing, says Alcock. Already, he claims about 60 "hits" a day at his Web site. Not every politician will welcome the new degree of accountability that will come with that kind of access, but Alcock says they should be in the minority.
"Government as a whole tends to be small-c conservative in its tendency to move," he says. "But politicians are different. Their jobs are about change."
Whether Alcock's faith in his own profession is warranted, many on the Hill, Barbour among them, agree with his assessment of the bureaucracy. Complaints about the slow pace of technological change on the Hill have been around for years. Barbour, for example, points out that most senators still can't share e-mail with MPs on the new network. "That should have been fixed long ago," he says. Alcock refers to unwarranted paranoia about security, concerns he says are no longer valid
The bureaucrats in question, however, are convinced the complaints will subside soon. They have two reasons to be confident. One is called PUBNET, a wide-area network on the Hill that supplies online access to all Parliamentary publications, from Hansard to the day's Order Paper. It beats the printed copy by two or three hours, giving executive assistants preparing for that day's Question Period a reason to get to the office even earlier.
Elaine Diguer, chief of Parliamentary Publications, is proud of PUBNET. She and her team calls themselves innovators in the field, her office has registered the name as a trademark and even had logo-emblazoned mugs made. PUBNET uses Interleaf's publishing system and the familiar Worldview distribution software, another Interleaf product, to allow users to read the publications in the two-column format common to most parliamentary documents.
Robert Logan, president of Interleaf Canada, applauds the Hill team for its use of his company's product, saying "some of the things they are doing are in the forefront in terms of implementation." He adds, however, that there is nothing particularly new about using Worldview to distribute documents over a network. That's what it was designed for, after all.
So far, Alcock and others have nothing but praise for PUBNET.
The other reason for optimism is a new Web and gopher site designed to offer much of the same to the public at large through the Internet.
Diguer, technical manager Michel Roy and Publications and Broadcasting director Tony Dambrauskas officially launched the site June 19, although it had already been operating in pilot mode for several months.
Aside from a few hypertext markup errors and unnecessarily large graphics bound to frustrate Web purists, the site is clean and efficient. Searchable Commons committee minutes are already available and complete editions of Hansard are scheduled to be online by the end of the year.
Diguer says a few details have yet to be worked out, including what time of day Hansard will be available, since the same information is now online through a separate dial-up BBS run by Canada Communications Group - and CCG charges clients $12,000 a year for access to Hansard first thing in the morning. Though they want to avoid competing with CCG, the general consensus appears to be that, as a matter of policy, Parliamentary documents will be available free of charge to the public via the Internet. It's a decision that comes as a relief to information-access advocates, librarians and journalists across the country.
Access advocates and information-hungry MPs weren't the driving force behind the move to electronic publishing, though. As with almost every other policy decision in Ottawa these days, the motive is financial. "There were some sound business decisions involved," says Diguer, adding that the political forces behind the changes - the House of Commons Board of Internal Economy, a nine-member, all-party panel of MPs chaired by the House Speaker - is looking to save money wherever it can.
The Parliamentary Publications office produced 105 million printed pages of reports, papers and minutes in 1993-94. By 1996-97, that volume will have fallen to 40 million, says Dambrauskas. So far, that's been possible without the hiring a single new employee. And that must make the Board very happy.
Sen. Dan Hays e-mail address: bd439@freenet.carleton.ca
MP Reg Alcock web site: http://www.mbnet.mb.ca/wpgsth/
MP John English web site: http://tdg.uoguelph.ca/~jenglish/
Parliamentary Internet web site: http://www.parl.gc.ca
Parliamentary Internet gopher site: gopher://gopher.parl.gc.ca
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