Melanie Collison

The portal has also built community cohesiveness on a larger scale.

As the Canada West Foundation pointed out in a 2001 study paper, smaller centres are stymied by a lack of expertise and competing funding priorities. In the years since, the urban-rural gap has widened. The paper, E-Municipalities in Western Canada, reported that government web sites typically begin with community and economic development/tourism information and links to community organizations and libraries. They then add information on government and services such as bylaws, budget data and council deliberations. With the information side established, they begin to add e-services, and ultimately, community interaction tools.

Health Canada is a step closer to establishing an electronic health record for every Canadian. The federal overseer of public health is adding disease outbreak tracking to i-PHIS, the data collection portion of the larger Canadian Integrated Public Health Surveillance project.

It is clear that with advances in communications technology and the rush to e-government, privacy issues will define this decade. As the Internet reaches into every nook and cranny, the urgency of concern increases exponentially, especially about health-related information or personal identity information that can be used by police, the RCMP and CSIS.

From coast to coast to coast, the advantages of e-government are capturingnthe imagination of public service workers and appeasing the public

From a photo album of the city

Installing GIS across the whole enterprise