empowering municipalities to act in
a business-like way, which is what
I think many people want munici-
palities to do. Municipalities are
not businesses, so they can’t fully be
totally business-like in their endeav-
ours. That’s why I think there is this
balance people are trying to achieve
between transparency and provid-
ing municipalities with the agility to
perform well. That means that some-
times discussions need to be held in
confidence, just as businesses do.”
Christopher Alcantara, associ-
ate professor of political science at
Wilfrid Laurier University, opined
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last year in the National Post that
the time and resources put into vari-
ous transparency mechanisms must
be weighed against the benefits. “It
is important that we develop effec-
tive systems for monitoring how
politicians and public-sector employ-
ees are paid and how they spend
public funds,” Alcantara wrote. “On
the other hand, at some point, there
is such a thing as too much account-
ability and transparency.”
It seems that an almost hereti-
cal notion of too much government
transparency is emerging. In the U.S.,
political scientist Jane Mansbridge at
Harvard University’s Kennedy School
of Government and Cathie Jo Martin
of Boston University argued in 2014
that well-intentioned transparency
mechanisms can lead to govern-
ment dysfunction. Similar arguments
have been put forward by Stanford
University’s Francis Fukuyama, who
wrote in 2015 that “demands for
certain kinds of transparency have
hurt government effectiveness, par-
ticularly with regard to its ability to
deliberate.”
MUNICIPAL MONITOR
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