If you want to know the best time to get a passport at the federal government building near our office in Toronto, you can consult a handy chart that sits outside the main doors. It uses colour-coded bars next to various times of the day to show when volumes typically reach their peak. Not surprisingly, things are easier in the morning, but it gets heavier by noon and is still sometimes crowded before the end of the day. I can offer an even better hint, which I would have known even if I'd never stepped into that office: there's no lineup on the Internet. As the government works to settle contract disputes with the Public Service Alliance of Canada, all reports indicate citizens will face minimal disruption. The walkout of 125,000 employees seemed merely to serve as a reminder of the more severe consequences we could all face if agreements were not reached sooner. It also provides us an opportunity to consider to what extent the Internet, and particularly Canada's much-lauded Government On-Line initiative, will have an impact on public sector labour unrest in the future.
When strikes break out, the obvious idea is that those most important to the employer, the customers, will be inconvenienced in some major way. Some papers, including the Globe and Mail, said a prolonged strike "could have created chaos across the country, affecting everything from employment insurance to RCMP security checks." Security is one thing, but many of the more routine public sector transactions have been moved online since PSAC last had to renegotiate wages. EI, passport, Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security forms are all available at the click of a mouse. There remain many branches of PSAC, like Corrections, that we can't do without. But basic administration? GOL should have automated those worries away.
Just as we started to examine the vulnerabilities in Ontario's power infrastructure following last year's blackout, however, a closer look at the depth of GOL will expose our e-government limitations. The Canadian government primarily uses the Internet as a channel to push out forms, but back-end processing is still relatively immature. There's no great benefit to an online EI application, for example, if the information sits in a database until someone can review it, or even worse, for someone to print it out on the other end. In some cases, of course, we have no choice. Computers aren't always enough to replace the public sector processes that allow citizens to be served effectively.
In several research studies, citizens have indicated a strong interest in online forms and GOL resources, but they insist on keeping the phone lines and in-person branches open. That's more than reasonable, considering the limits of PC penetration in Canada, and taking into account the extenuating circumstances that can complicate routine transactions. Citizens, especially those who have not used a government service before (like obtaining their first passport, for example) have questions, and senior citizens seem particularly more comfortable asking those questions to a live body. For all the FAQs and easily navigable Web pages, GOL won't fully take off until someone develops virtual assistants who can respond to queries captured through speech recognition (Memo to Calgary's Code Baby -- this is a project for you).
Online forms might at least be captured and organized more effectively for those public sector workers who return to their jobs this week, but that doesn't mean they won't still have a lot of catching up to do. Depending on how many people turned to the Web to bypass the labour dispute this week, there could be piles of paperless work waiting for them. There's the rub: even when public sector employees go on strike, GOL provides a way for the government to strike back.
Autor: Shane Schick
Quelle: ITBusiness, 13.10.2004
