Classics Readings in Canadian Public Administration is a collection of 28 influential articles in Canadian public administration. It brings together articles from the pre-1985 period to provide a picture of a rich, distinctive era in Canadian public administration. The articles are divided into four parts: Structures, Human Resources, Financial Management, and Policy and Administration, each with an introduction that explores the issues that bind the articles together. This collection provides a useful historical approach to the discipline allowing students to see the continuities in the field as well as the areas in which major changes have occured, and encourages them to refer to the valuable theoretical history of Canadian public administration.

Introduction Part I: Structures 1. Challenge and Response: A Retrospective View of the Public Service of Canada, J.E. Hodgetts 2. The Tasks of Management: A New Approach, Royal Commission on Government Organization 3. Administrative Reform in the Federal Public Service: Signs of a Saturation Psychosis, H.L. LaFramboise 4. What Central Agencies May and Ought to Do: Structure of Authority, Colin Campbell and George J. Szablowski 5. The Role of the Mandarins: The Case for a Non-Partisan Senior Public Service, Mitchell Sharp 6. The Accountability of Public Servants: Our Government Would be Better if Senior Mandarins Were Less Secure, Hugh D. Segal 7. Structural Heretics: The Non-Departmental Forms, J.E. Hodgetts 8. Regulatory Processes and Regulatory Agencies, G. Bruce Doern 9. From Canadian Crown Corporations, C.A. Ashley and R.G.H. Smails 10. From The Ombudsman Plan: The Case for the Plan in Canada, Donald C. Rowat 11. An Outsider's Observations of Federal-Provincial Relations among Consenting Adults, Donald V. Smiley Part II: Human Resources 12. Changing Concepts of Power and Responsibility in the Canadian Public Service, Kenneth Kernaghan 13. Codes of Ethics and Public Administration: Progress, Problems and Prospects, Kenneth Kernaghan 14. Collective Bargaining in the Federal Public Service: The Achievement of a Milestone in Personnel Relations, Robert A. Vaison 15. Representative Bureaucracy: Linguistic/Ethnic Aspects in Canadian Public Policy, V. Seymour Wilson and Willard A. Mullins 16. From Sex and the Public Service, Kathleen Archibald 17. Service at the Pleasure of the Crown, William A.W. Nielson Part III: Financial Management 18. Efficiency in Government and Business, A.W. Johnson 19. A Budget for All Seasons? Why the Traditional Budget Lasts, Aaron Wildavsky 20. On the Audit Trail of the Auditor General: Parliament's Servant, 1973-1980, Sharon Sutherland 21. An Evaluation System for Government: If Politics is Theatre, Then Evaluation is (Mostly) Art, Rodney Dobell and David Zussman Part IV: Policy and Administration 22. Organizational differentiation and integration: the case of regional economic development policy in Canada, Peter Aucoin and Herman Bakvis 23. Reflections on the Workability of Executive Federalism, J. Stefan Dupre 24. Bureaucracy and State Intervention: Parkinson's Law?, Albert Breton and Ronald Wintrobe 25. The Impact of the Charter of Rights on Public Administration: A Case Study of Sex Discrimination in the Unemployment Insurance Act, F.L. Morton and Leslie A. Pal 26. The Rise and Fall of Policy Planning and Research Units: An Organizational Perspective, Michael J. Prince and John A. Chenier 27. Coordination and the Management of Estuarine Water Quality, Mark Sproule-Jones 28. The Political Economy of Policy Instruments: Tax Expenditures and Subsidies in Canada, Kenneth Woodside