abstract

abstract

Abstrakt

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract

It is difficult for policymakers to predict the behavior of people in response to a water rationing policy. The public may not necessarily behave as expected or in accordance with market rules or policy mandates. In this research, I will ask whether people were responsive to a summer 2011 City of Saskatoon legal restrictions to reduce their outdoor water consumption due to reduced capacity at the water treatment plant resulting from excessive solids in the river water. I will try to explore the policy response - which can be expressed as a reduction of outdoor water consumption in 2011 in response to the water mandate - while holding constant other factors, including environmental variables (temperature and rainfall), socio-economic factors (income and education level), lot size, and an annual downward trend in water consumption that appeared in many North American cities during the past two decades. Monthly water consumption data for the period from 2004 to 2012 for the City of Saskatoon were analyzed to detect if there is a policy response from the water mandate during June and July 2011. Regression analysis with water consumption as the dependent variable and lot size, temperature, rainfall, education index, income, consumption trend, and policy as independent variables was conducted to test whether there is a policy response in the Saskatoon water records, holding other factors relevant to water consumption constant. Results showed there was a statistically significant reduction in Saskatoon water consumption during June and July 2011 as a result of the water rationing mandate, with considerable variations through different neighborhoods. In addition, there is a positive relationship between water consumption and lot size and a reduction in water consumption over the research period from 2004 to 2012. The policy response varied widely across neighborhoods, and there was relationship between policy and annual income per capita, and household size; households with more income per capita are less responsive to the policy while bigger household sizes showed more policy responsiveness. Key words: City of Saskatoon, water rationing, water policy, water mandate, outdoor water use.

Simply put, Crown liability doctrine in Crown/Aboriginal Law in Canada is a mess. Demonstrably, there are fiduciary-based duties, fiduciary-based principles, an over-arching honour of the Crown principle, Crown honour-based duties, and a constitutional Crown/Aboriginal “reconciliation” imperative. How the various pieces are meant to fit together is atypically unclear. In this project, Ronald Dworkin’s rights thesis is invoked as a conceptual tool in an attempt to help bring some order to the disarray. It is argued that the Supreme Court of Canada made a fundamental (Dworkinian) mistake in the manner in which they adopted fiduciary concepts into the core of Crown/Aboriginal Law; that this mistake has led to a dysfunctional doctrine; and that the Supreme Court has implicitly acknowledged their error and are now in the process of incrementally mending their materially flawed doctrine. Crown liability doctrine in Crown/Aboriginal Law in Canada is now centrally organized around the principle that the honour of the Crown must always be upheld in applicable government dealings with Aboriginal peoples. Enforceable Crown honour-based “off-shoot” duties operate to regulate the mischief of Crown dishonour in constitutional contexts. The Supreme Court has now stated that a (non-conventional and fundamentally unresolved) Crown/Aboriginal fiduciary obligation is one such “off-shoot” duty. This emergent “essential legal framework” is meant to protect and facilitate the over-arching project of reconciling the pre-existence of Aboriginal societies with the de facto sovereignty of the Crown, which reconciliation project, it is argued here, is to be fundamentally undertaken by the executive and legislative branches of government working collaboratively with Aboriginal peoples. The judicial branch of government is then largely limited to the more modest task of regulating the mischief of constitutional Crown dishonour. This project ultimately purports to theorize this relatively new Crown honour-based framework, and to conceptualize what residual role there is for fiduciary accountability to play in applicable Crown/Aboriginal contexts moving forward. It is concluded there is likely only a narrow jurisdiction remaining for fiduciary accountability in Crown/Aboriginal contexts, which jurisdiction appears destined to take the form of conventional fiduciary doctrine which, as will be demonstrated, has itself been fundamentally reconfigured in recent years.

One of the main tasks of key account management (KAM) practice is the creation of customized value propositions for a business-to-business organization's most important customers, which often requires the support of multiple internal departments. Thus, making internal alignment central in KAM in order to exchange value and serve the key accounts (KA) long-term. This study will, therefore, explore internal alignment in KAM and aims to identify what contributes to internal alignment and how misalignment could emerge in KAM teams, in order to understand the significance of internal alignment and identify possible reasons for misalignment in KAM. The theory was framed by 7 elements of internal alignment including shared values, style, skills, staff, strategy, structure and systems. The empirical data was collected through qualitative semi-structured interviews with KA managers. The findings suggest that internal alignment is of importance in KAM and that the elements of internal alignment studied in the thesis are dependent on each other. Furthermore, it was found that misalignment is most commonly caused by personal disputes, however, all elements studied were found as contributing factors to misalignment. The findings led to the conclusion that internal alignment is not a target state, it is rather a measure of progress and that all aspects that do contribute to internal alignment also entail causes for misalignment.

The emerging Blockchain technology has the potential to shift the traditional centralized systems to become more flexible, efficient and decentralized. An important area to apply this capability is supply chain. Supply chain visibility and transparency has become an important aspect of a successful supply chain platform as it becomes more complex than ever before. The complexity comes from the number of participants involved and the intricate roles and relations among them. This puts more pressure on the system and the customers in terms of system availability and tamper-resistant data. This thesis presents a private and permisioned application that uses Blockchain and aims to automate the shipping processes among different participants in the supply chain ecosystem. Data in this private ledger is governed with the participants’ invocation of their smart contracts. These smart contracts are designed to satisfy the participants’ different roles in the supply chain. Moreover, this thesis discusses the performance measurements of this application results in terms of the transaction throughput, transaction average latency and resource utilization. / Graduate