What is Reinventing Government

Among North American state and provincial governments, there are only a handful of chief executives who make the most of the Internet as a tool for gaining citizen input on policy questions and disseminating a clear and well-crafted agenda. Dalton McGuinty, the Premier of Ontario since 2003, was the first to push the Web beyond conventional e-government functions such as tax or fee payment, the filing applications for programs, and report dissemination, into a realm of interactive facilitation of democratic governance. This chapter describes the context of Ontario politics and establishment of common e-government techniques before McGuinty became his government’s leader, the responsive digital strategies that he adopted to treat Ontario’s situation as he came to office, and an assessment of these strategies five years into his leadership of this diverse province.