So, is everyone ready to work themselves into a lather? Because the national interest needs a little standing on guard done for it.
The problem is the "Canada Site," the main page of the Government of Canada, and, in a way, the country itself. It's at canada.gc.ca, and it's where you'd go to look up every government service there is, from business registration to immigration to the finer points of turning over your savings to the Canada Revenue Agency. National homepages are important things, and not just for keeping up appearances when itinerant Belgians surf by.
But changes are afoot. Visit the Canada Site now, and you'll discover that a goodly chunk of it has been given over to promoting the Conservative Party of Canada. Suddenly, there are action photos of Stephen Harper looking meaningful above good-news stories fluffing his latest announcements. Graphics proclaim that the new government is "Turning a New Leaf" and rattle through the Tories' talking points.
Our national website has become a party organ. The trouble is, the Canada Site has never looked better.
For all the effort that our government has poured into its on-line apparatus, its Web pages have been notoriously mediocre. For years, the government has straitjacketed its agencies with a set of design guidelines that have made them excessively narrow, confusing to navigate thanks to an inconsistent grid of buttons atop every page, and visually hostile -- which I believe I mean as a euphemism for "ugly." Many of these rules came with good intentions, like promoting accessibility and visual uniformity, but have become painfully outmoded.
Now, the Canada Site has turned a new leaf indeed. Under the Tories, it's become a nicely designed piece of on-line real estate. It widens the page, and anchors it with a photo-montage of the country overlaid with the words "Canada: The True North Strong and Free." If the country needs a slogan, I suppose that's as good as any.
Despite a bit of clutter, the new site keeps the links pruned down to a clearly labelled set, directing surfers to popular government services. A wider format gives the navigation along the top a new readability. And the addition of the colour blue -- conspicuously absent in the Liberal years -- does wonders. The whole page is a vast improvement.
But about that blue. As rumblings among the bloggers have pointed out, the similarities between the new Canada Site and the Conservative Party of Canada site (http://www.conservative.ca) are striking. After budget day, the two were running identical press releases lauding the event. You could ask what's wrong with using the government website to promote yourself, if you're the government? It is, after all, a path well-trodden, especially at the provincial level. (The Ontario Web page -- http://www.gov.on.ca -- is especially vile in this regard.) What's wrong is that the Canada Site has a purpose other than looking pretty. Everybody wins when taxpayers can be coerced into using the Internet to transact with the government; it's quicker, more convenient, and hopefully cheaper. The Canada Site is the focal point for everything the government offers on-line, the jumping-off point for any Canadian wondering how they can avoid calling a 1-800 number to ask a civil servant about something.
But turning it over to political cheerleading of any stripe removes any sense of ownership from citizens, and drives users away. Most countries' websites have a separate section that glorifies the political leader of the day. The American government offers services to its citizens at http://www.firstgov.gov, while its president preens at http://www.whitehouse.gov. The British government portal is at http://www.directgov.gov.uk, while Tony Blair lives at http://www.number10.gov.uk.
Even the President of Iran has a separate site, at http://www.president.ir/eng, which offers handy updates on which martyr's house he's visited today (Motahhari, late of 1979), and the number of countries who welcomed Iran's recent nuclear success ("many," curiously unnamed).
As it stands, Stephen Harper has his own at http://www.pm.gc.ca, which suffers a bad case of Harper proliferation, with no fewer than little seven pictures of himself in varying states of helmet-headed awkwardness. And bully for him; it's his own site. But by moving his public-relations apparatus into the country's main site, he's undermining the Internet's ability to improve governance in these parts -- and everybody loses. Lather away.
