In New Brunswick, Premier Frank McKenna has been a heavy supporter of use of the Internet in the delivery of government services. The Economic, Development and Tourism Department supports a site that details information on why companies might want to relo cate in New Brunswick, and has a bunch of tourism related stuff on-line. Through this site, you can even obtain a listing of the companies in New Brunswick which sponsor whale watching tours.
The government of British Columbia has taken it one step further — with legislation that makes it mandatory for certain records of the legislature — including committee reports, parliamentary proceedings and other information – to be made available to a ll citizens through the Internet. British Columbia is a hot bed of Internet activity, with particular involvement by the Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks (http://www.env.gov.bc.ca) and the Ministry of Small Business, Tourism and Culture.
It’s not just federal and provincial governments getting in on the act. The City of North Bay has a site (http://www.canadorec.on.ca/northbay.htm) that details a variety of information about the city, including tourism, recreation and lifestyle informatio n, as well as statistical and community profile information. Perhaps most importantly, the site includes information about the industrial parks that can be found in the city. Why does North Bay invest time and effort into making this information available on the Internet? Like most municipalities, the city wants to encourage industry to relocate to its city — and hence, is using the Internet as a tool to implicitly market the city as a potential site for relocation. Smart municipal leaders are realizing that the world’s largest computer networks might offer some real competitive and strategic advantage in the competition for corporate relocation.
Certainly, the Internet is gaining growing interest in government across the land — and like everything else on the Internet, the number of ‘sites’ are growing in leaps and bounds. Not a week, and indeed not a day goes by, that some new Internet initi ative isn’t announced by some government in Canada.
Yet, we are at a very early stage with the use of the Internet as a means of communications between government and the governed. There will be many difficulties in the way of progress – most notably, we will likely see entire legions of bureaucrats, whose job it is to handle paper and deliver services, become quite stressed by the impact that the Internet will have on their day to day jobs.
As well, it will also take some time and effort to make the many experiments more real and more relevant to everyday, average Canadians. Much of what is occurring on the Internet today with government in Canada is experimental in nature, and there is a lot of work that yet needs to be done. We need high tech leadership in Ottawa, in provincial capitals, and in city and town halls across the land –people who understand the Internet — we need geeks on Parliament Hill and in City Hall!
When it comes to the much hyped information highway, the Internet is showing that it will be at the core of many of the information network developments of the future. Those Canadians who have discovered the richness and diversity of the Internet shoul d do everything they can do to help government understand the nature of the opportunity before them.
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