From pragmatism to neoliberalism: The politics of the remaking of the Ontario administrative state, 1970--2002

This dissertation is concerned with the politics of administrative reform in Ontario between 1970 and 2002. The central problem is to develop an understanding of political and administrative agency serving to transform the theory and praxis of public administration. The question posed here is how was it that neoliberalism came to emerge in the Ontario administrative state? In Ontario's case this was a process of fits and starts beginning in 1969 with the striking of the Committee on Government Productivity and proceeded forward episodically in a series of tentative steps. Despite various proposals to shrink the Ontario public sector and restructure the production and delivery of public services, no government between 1970 and 1995 pursued such a course. Even during the mid-1970s where a discernable shift in economic policy was underway as a result of rising levels of inflation, the response was to constrain the growth in public expenditures rather than undertake a re-engineering of the structures and processes of public administration. The election in 1995 of a Progressive Conservative party, reconstructed as a vehicle for neoliberalism, changed that.;Two key conclusions are arrived at. First, is that Ontario's turn to neoliberalism was tentative and protracted because a vital element was absent. That missing element was a political vehicle possessed of a conviction to drive such a project forward. Second, previous governments of the pragmatic centre were not compelled to restructure Ontario's public administration because economic and poltical condistions did not necessitate such.