Book excerpt: Published in 1984, How Ottawa Decides is an insider's view of how Ottawa tried throughout the 1970s to establish priorities and act on them. The book anatomizes the politics of the bureaucracy and the Cabinet, showing how power really operated in Ottawa during this period. It tracks the failure of many ambitious efforts to impose political control over government departments long used to operating without undue interference from elected officials. How Ottawa Decides is startling first-hand account of the forces that really ran the federal government in the 1970s.