Communication and Transparency for the Governance of Crisis Response

The 2007 Signal49 Research report A Resilient Canada: Governance for National Security and Public Safety elaborated six key principles for the governance of multi-party crisis response. This briefing presents an overview of developments in Canada with respect to the communication and transparency principle.

The briefing conceives of crisis communications as information flows within and between responding entities and from these entities to the media and the public. It looks at operational guidelines and strategic documents to determine the degree to which Government of Canada policy has integrated the principle. It supplements this assessment with findings from interviews with Canadian experts and open source literature to illustrate how communication and transparency structures have played out over the past five years and how social media has altered the crisis communication landscape.

Prominent themes include the role of the private sector; the relationship between communications, transparency, trust, and public confidence; and, in particular, the implications of social media’s increased prevalence.