Awards

• Short-listed for Legislative Assembly of Ontario Speaker's Book Award 2012 (Canada)
• Short-listed for Legislative Assembly of Ontario Speaker’s Book Award 2012 (Canada)

Overview

Finance departments have often been portrayed as guardians of the public purse. In The Guardian, a multidisciplinary group of contributors examines the Ministry of Finance of Ontario since the Second World War. During the last sixty years the Ministry was transformed from a relatively small 'Treasury' to a sophisticated policy machine. What started as a modest bookkeeping operation evolved into a key bureaucratic and policy agency as the government of Ontario assumed a leadership position in developing the province. These essays reveal Ontario's 'finance' as a dynamic policy issue shaped by the personalities of premiers and ministers, the energies of public servants at all levels, and a critical dialogue between political and administrative worlds. Drawing on different methodologies, this collection profiles a ministry as policy entrepreneur, spender, revenue generator, capacity builder, budget director, program manager, and intergovernmental agent. The Guardian fills a significant gap in public administration literature and in so doing describes how Ontario's Ministry of Finance defined its role as 'guardian.'

Full Product Details

9781442642546

Table of Contents

Reviews

'A strong, well-executed collection, The Guardian chronicles and analyses an important yet largely unstudied component of provincial governance - the Ontario Ministry of Finance. The chapters, which combine primary sources, interviews, and archival research, are original, clearly focused, and soundly balanced. The Guardian is a serious advance in state-of-the-art research - nothing of such range and quality exists in English on a similar institution at the provincial level in Canada.' --Graham White, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

'A strong, well-executed collection, The Guardian chronicles and analyses an important yet largely unstudied component of provincial governance - the Ontario Ministry of Finance. The chapters, which combine primary sources, interviews, and archival research, are original, clearly focused, and soundly balanced. The Guardian is a serious advance in state-of-the-art research - nothing of such range and quality exists in English on a similar institution at the provincial level in Canada.'--Graham White, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

Author Information

Patrice Dutil is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University.

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