【正文】 New Public Management and the Quality of Government: Coping with the New Political Governance in Canada Peter Aucoin Dalhousie University Halifax, Canada Conference on ‘New Public Management and the Quality of Government’, SOG and the Quality of Government Institute, University of Gothenburg Sweden 1315 November 2020 A tension between New Public Management (NPM) and good governance, including good public administration, has long been assumed by those who regard the structures and practices advocated and brought about by NPM as departing from the principles and norms of good governance that underpinned traditional public administration (Savoie 1994). The concern has not abated (Savoie 2020). As this dynamic has played out over the past three decades, however, there emerged an even more significant challenge not only to the traditional structures, practices and values of the professional, nonpartisan public service but also to those reforms introduced by NPM that have gained wide, if not universal, acceptance as positive development in public administration. This challenge is what I call New Political Governance (NPG). It is NPG, and not NPM, I argue, that constitutes the principal threat to good governance, including good public administration, and thus the Quality of Government (QoG) as defined by Rothstein and Teorell (2020). It is a threat to the extent that partisans in government, sometimes overtly, mostly covertly, seek to use and override the public service – an impartial institution of government – to better secure their partisan advantage (Campbell 2020。 MacDermott 2020 a, 2020b). In so doing, these governors engage in a politicization of the public service and its administration of public business that constitutes a form of political corruption that cannot but undermine good governance. NPM is not a cause of this politicization, I argue, but it is an intervening factor insofar as NPM reforms, among other reforms of the last three decades, have had the effect of publicly exposing the public service in ways that have made it more vulnerable to political pressures on the part of the political executive. I examine this phenomenon by looking primarily at the case of Canada, but with a number of parative Westminster references. I consider the phenomenon to be an international one, affecting most, if not all, Western democracies. The pressures outlined below are virtually the same everywhere. The responses vary somewhat because of political leadership and the institutional differences between systems, even in the Westminster systems. The phenomenon must also be viewed in the context of time, given both the emergence of the pressures that led to NPM in the first instance, as a new managementfocused approach to public administration, and the emergence of the different pressures that now contribute to NPG, as a politicized approach to governance with important implications for public administration, and especially for impartiality, performance and accountability. New Public Management in the Canadian Context Since the early 1980s, NPM has taken several different forms in various jurisdictions. Adopting privatesector management practices was seen by some as a part, even if a minor part, of the broader neoconservative/neoliberal political economy movement that demanded wholesale privatization of government enterprises and public services, extensive deregulation of private enterprises, and significant reductions in public spending – ‘rolling back the state’, as it was put a at the outset (Hood 1991). By so