Accessing Democracy: The Critical Relationship between Academics and the Access to Information Act

2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 613-622 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Kazmierski
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Access To Information ◽  
Government Information ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Adequate Knowledge ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The Government ◽  
The 1960S

Parliament recognized the fundamental importance of protecting access to government information when it enacted the federal Access to Information Act. When the Act came into force on Canada Day 1983, Canada was just one of a handful of countries to have legislative protection of access to government information. Now, 27 years later, over 80 countries across the globe have enacted some form of access to information legislation.Although the world has followed Canada's lead in recognizing the importance of protecting access to government information, Canada has “fallen behind” (to borrow the descriptor used by journalist and author Stanley Tromp) and may even be “backsliding” (in the words of Laura Neuman of the Carter Center). What has gone wrong with the federal access regime? Why should legal studies scholars care? I address these questions in this article. I start by outlining the symbiotic role between academics and access to government information. I then identify three key factors that have contributed to the decline of the federal access regime: administrative resistance, legislative degeneration, and political indifference. Finally, I close by briefly discussing three ways in which scholars can continue to work to protect and promote access to information in Canada.Academics and AccessAcademics took the lead in advocating for access to government information in the 1960s and 1970s in Canada. One of the earliest advocates was Donald C. Rowat, a professor of Political Science at Carleton University. In a 1965 article entitled “How Much Administrative Secrecy?”, he summarized the key arguments in favour of protecting access to government information, writing Parliament and the public cannot hope to call the government to account without an adequate knowledge of what is going on; nor can they hope to participate in the decision-making process and contribute their talents to the formation of policy and legislation if that process is hidden from view.

The Public Forum

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
Timothy Zick
Keyword(s):  
First Amendment ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Public Forum ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Square ◽  
The People ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The Government ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines concerns relating to preserving access to public properties for the purpose of facilitating freedom of expression. Historically, speakers and groups have fought to obtain and preserve First Amendment rights to access and use what are referred to as “public forums”—places that the government owns or controls, but that are held in trust for the people for the purpose of exercising First Amendment rights. The “law and order” mantra of the Trump Era has revived concerns, dating in particular from the 1960s and 1970s, about preserving speakers’ access to public places including streets and parks. Government “law and order” policies and actions, along with various other access limits, raise concerns about the continued viability of the public forum. In addition, during the Trump Era, issues have arisen with regard to speakers’ access to places in the “modern public square,” including official social media sites. President Trump’s decision to block several critics from the comment portion of his Twitter page is only the most prominent example of this new access concern, which will affect dissenters’ ability to communicate with an increasing number of public officials. Preserving access to traditional and digital forums will be critical to maintaining a culture of dissent.

Novel Coronavirus 2019 Outbreak: A Global Epidemic

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (12) ◽  
pp. 1458-1464
Author(s):  
Sweta Kamboj ◽  
Rohit Kamboj ◽  
Shikha Kamboj ◽  
Kumar Guarve ◽  
Rohit Dutt
Keyword(s):  
World Health ◽  
Upper Respiratory Tract ◽  
Global Epidemic ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Government ◽  
Tract Disease ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Health Organization ◽  
The Impact

Background: In the 1960s, the human coronavirus was designated, which is responsible for the upper respiratory tract disease in children. Back in 2003, mainly 5 new coronaviruses were recognized. This study directly pursues to govern knowledge, attitude and practice of viral and droplet infection isolation safeguard among the researchers during the outbreak of the COVID-19. Introduction: Coronavirus is a proteinaceous and infectious pathogen. It is an etiological agent of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). Coronavirus, appeared in China from the seafood and poultry market last year, which has spread in various countries, and has caused several deaths. Methods: The literature data has been taken from different search platforms like PubMed, Science Direct, Embase, Web of Science, who.int portal and complied. Results: Corona virology study will be more advanced and outstanding in recent years. COVID-19 epidemic is a threatening reminder not solely for one country but all over the universe. Conclusion: In this review article, we encapsulated the pathogenesis, geographical spread of coronavirus worldwide, also discussed the perspective of diagnosis, effective treatment, and primary recommendations by the World Health Organization, and guidelines of the government to slow down the impact of the virus are also optimistic, efficacious and obliging for the public health. However, it will take a prolonged time in the future to overcome this epidemic.

scholarly journals Kebijakan Online Single Submission sebagai E-Government dalam Mewujudkan Good Governance di Indonesia

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Rahmi Ayunda ◽  
Nertivia Nertivia ◽  
Laode Agung Prastio ◽  
Octa Vila
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Industry 4.0 ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
Government Information ◽  
Legal Research ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
The Public ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
The Government

Based on the history before the reform era, there have been many cases of government committing corruption, collusion and nepotism, this is the background of the movement to create a government to run good governance. As time has progressed, the time has come for a time that is all full of digitalization, both in the economy, education and politics. This research uses normative legal research methods. This study shows that the government in running its government will also be based on the development of sophisticated information technology which can be called E-Government. Therefore, there is now a time when the Indonesian government has used and allowed the Online Single Submission (OSS) system to make it easier for people who want to take care of business licensing. The implementation of good governance during the Industry 4.0 Revolution can take advantage of science, technology and information to provide good facilities and services to the Indonesian people, and the public can easily access government information.

Resisting Closures and Winning Wages in the 1960s and 1970s

2019 ◽  
pp. 197-228
Author(s):  
Jim Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Employment Opportunities ◽  
Unsuccessful Attempt ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Mining Communities ◽  
Scottish Parliament ◽  
Political Impact ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The Government ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Uk

The 1984-85 miners’ strike in defence of collieries, jobs and communities was an unsuccessful attempt to reverse the change in economic direction driven in the UK by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments. The government was committed to removing workforce voice from the industry. Its struggle against the miners was a war against the working class more generally. Mining communities were grievously affected in economic terms by the strike and its aftermath, but in the longer run emerged with renewed solidarity. Gender relations, evolving from the 1960s as employment opportunities for women increased, changed in further progressive ways. This strengthened the longer-term cohesion of mining communities. The strike had a more general and lasting political impact in Scotland. The narrative of a distinct Scottish national commitment to social justice, attacked by a UK government without democratic mandate, drew decisive moral force from the anti-Thatcherite resistance of men and women in the coalfields. This renewed the campaign for a Scottish Parliament, which came to successful fruition in 1999.

Saul Bellow

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan R. Chavkin
Keyword(s):  
Nobel Prize ◽  
White Male ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
The Public ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Low Culture ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Colloquial Style

Over a career of six decades, Saul Bellow (1915–2005) published novels, short stories, essays, and plays that attracted immense attention from the public and the literary establishment. The value of his creative work was recognized with numerous awards, including three National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The fourth child of Jewish parents who immigrated from Russia, Bellow spent the first years of his life in Lachine, Canada, before he and his family moved in 1924 to Chicago. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1937, he spent a semester at the University of Wisconsin studying anthropology but quit his graduate study to become a writer. In 1938 Bellow married the first of his five wives. In 1944 he published his first novel, Dangling Man, a novel of existential alienation. Three years later he published The Victim, a novel about anti-Semitism, but it was his next novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), that catapulted Bellow from relative obscurity to being regarded as one of the most important living American writers. This long picaresque novel was narrated by its larky eponymous hero in a vivid, colloquial style. Herzog (1964) secured his reputation as one of America’s foremost writers. With its complex style that captures the interior life, the novel was a surprising bestseller. The publication of Humboldt’s Gift (1975) was probably instrumental in his being awarded the Nobel Prize the following year. In this complicated novel with its inextricable blending of high and low culture and many flashbacks, the narrator ruminates on widely divergent subjects and describes his comic involvement with a variety of colorful people, especially the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, modeled on Delmore Schwartz, and the gangster Rinaldo Cantabile. Bellow continued to publish for the next twenty-five years, but like John Updike and some other white male writers of his generation, Bellow’s reputation was hurt to some extent by critics upset by his white masculine-centered orientation. His popularity with the public and with critics is less than it was at the high point of his career in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, but he is still regarded as one of the major 20th-century American writers. His fiction is known for its unique narrative voice, its ability to portray the intricacies of human consciousness, its metaphysical speculation, and its comedy.

The Movement for Japanese American Redress

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Asaka
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The Government ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Redress Movement

The Japanese American Redress Movement refers to the various efforts of Japanese Americans from the 1940s to the 1980s to obtain restitution for their removal and confinement during World War II. This included judicial and legislative campaigns at local, state, and federal levels for recognition of government wrongdoing and compensation for losses, both material and immaterial. The push for redress originated in the late 1940s as the Cold War opened up opportunities for Japanese Americans to demand concessions from the government. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese Americans began to connect the struggle for redress with anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements of the time. Despite their growing political divisions, Japanese Americans came together to launch several successful campaigns that laid the groundwork for redress. During the early 1980s, the government increased its involvement in redress by forming a congressional commission to conduct an official review of the World War II incarceration. The commission’s recommendations of monetary payments and an official apology paved the way for the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and other redress actions. Beyond its legislative and judicial victories, the redress movement also created a space for collective healing and generated new forms of activism that continue into the present.

Public Lands and Their Administration

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam M. Sowards
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Public Lands ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Resource Scarcity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
Park Service ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

For more than a century after the republic’s founding in the 1780s, American law reflected the ideal that the commons—the public domain—should be turned into private property. As Americans became concerned about resource scarcity, waste, and monopolies at the end of the 19th century, reform-minded bureaucrats and scientists convinced Congress to maintain in perpetuity some of the nation’s land as public. This shift offered a measure of protection and an alternative to private property regimes. The federal agencies that primarily manage these lands today—U.S. Forest Service (USFS), National Park Service (NPS), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), and Bureau of Land Management (BLM)—have worked since their origins in the early decades of the 20th century to fulfill their diverse, competing, evolving missions. Meanwhile, the public and Congress have continually demanded new and different goals as the land itself has functioned and responded in interdependent ways. In the mid-20th century, the agencies intensified their management, hoping they could satisfy the rising—and often conflicting—demands American citizens placed on the public lands. This intensification often worsened public lands’ ecology and increased political conflict, resulting in a series of new laws in the 1960s and 1970s. Those laws strengthened the role of science and the public in influencing agency practices while providing more opportunities for litigation. Predictably, since the late 1970s, these developments have polarized public lands’ politics. The economies, but also the identities, of many Americans remain entwined with the public lands, making political standoffs—over endangered species, oil production, privatizing land, and more—common and increasingly intractable. Because the public lands are national in scope but used by local people for all manner of economic and recreational activities, they have been and remain microcosms of the federal democratic system and all its conflicted nature.

A Discussion of Aviezer Tucker's The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 535-535
Author(s):  
Valerie Bunce
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Scientific Validity ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
The Public ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Post Communism ◽  
The 1960S

The concept of totalitarianism emerged between the two world wars in twentieth-century Europe to become a central concept of Cold War social science designed to highlight similarities between the Nazi and Soviet regimes and implicitly to contrast these forms of dictatorship with liberal democracy. While in the 1960s and 1970s many critics challenged the concept’s Cold War uses as an ideology of “the West,” the idea of totalitarianism and later “post-totalitarianism” played important roles in East Central Europe, where they helped dissident intellectuals, academics, and activists both to understand and to challenge Soviet-style communism. The concept of “totalitarianism” remains heavily contested. But whatever one thinks about the concept’s social scientific validity, there can be no doubt that it played a crucial role in both the scholarship of communism and the public intellectual debates about the possibilities of post-communism. Aviezer Tucker’s The Legacies of Totalitarianism: A Theoretical Framework (Cambridge 2015) addresses many of these issues, and so we have invited a range of political scientists to comment on the book and the broader theme denoted by its title.

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