Apparently some people have had trouble getting on to my site because of the god-awful pop-ups that appear. Alas, this comes with a free geocities site.

What is even more pitiful though, is that I own and am currently paying for dirtyolive.net and have not gotten around to transferring it over. I will be doing this soon. I just can't do it this weekend as I am lecturing a class on Tuesday and I'm not prepared yet.

"The Executive and the Bureaucracy", "Interdepartmental and Intradepartmental Relations" and "The Legislature and the Bureaucracy"

Amazingly, I find this stuff pretty interesting. I'm not so sure about the class though. It can sound pretty dry up there.

I'm going to try and spice it up by adding the case of Mohammed Al-Mashat. Many students in the class are quite young so I don't think they'll remember this incident, but it was interesting at the time. He was Iraq's ambassador to the United States during the Gulf War crisis. He was admitted to Canada as a landed immigrant in 1991. Apparently, his entry was considerably expedited by Canadian officials but no one accepted responsibilty for such a politically controversial decision. In fact, the minister of External Affairs, Joe Clark, wasn't even aware of Al-Mashat's application.

Understandably, this could all be quite boring to you, but the fact that during the inquiry minister's laid blame on public servants, opposition members laid blame on ministers, and even public servants disagreed among themselves brings up some interesting questions.

The appropriate relationship between public servants and politicians, ministerial responsibility, political neutrality, role of the legislature for holding public servants accountable... all this stuff I find fascinating.