Recently, in need of a certain Revenue Canada tax form, my wife and I drew straws to see who would make the trip. Having lost the draw, my wife bundled herself off to the nearest Revenue Canada Taxation office on a cold November day. There, she patiently waited for over an hour and a half to get the forms that we needed. Her frustration with the amount of time that this simple exercise took — over 2 1/2 hours with travel — was quite evident on her return. I made the comment that it would be wonderful if we had the capability to get a tax form from the Internet — think of the time we could have saved.
As I thought about it further, I began to realize that the technology emerging in the Internet, particularly through the part known as the World Wide Web, offers a new opportunity for the delivery of government services. And to many, it has never been mor e evident that government needs some innovative thinking in the delivery of services, particularly in these days of deficits and cutbacks.
Certainly, by making it easier to access government information, the Internet could ease a lot of frustrations Canadians have when it comes to dealing with the government. And as more and more Canadians plug into the network, it will begin to offer an unp aralleled opportunity for the reshaping of government services. A simple example is found in our case — it would certainly have been more straightforward and definitely cost effective if we could have just traveled to a Revenue Canada sponsored Internet site, browsed through a database of forms, retrieved the ones we wanted, and printed them on our own laser printer.
Given that the Internet is simply a communications tool, there are tremendous opportunities for many of the day to day interactions between the governed and the government to occur through the network. This point is gaining some recognition. Across Canada , we are seeing an explosion in the number of Internet activities by federal, provincial and municipal government.
Many federal departments — ranging from Health and Welfare to Energy Mines and Resources to the Department of Industry, Trade and Commerce, are experimenting with use of the Internet as a service delivery tool. The Supreme Court of Canada is involved in a trial project with the University of Montreal, in which all rulings from the court since 1993 are available on the Internet for public viewing. Most of the federal government activities can be accessed through the World Wide Web on the Internet through the ‘Open Government Pilot’, a test project to encourage the use of the Internet by all federal government departments.
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