Chapter 9: Policy Analysis in the Federal Government: building the forward-looking policy research capacity
Jean-Pierre Voyer
Policy Research Initiative, Privy Council Office, Government of Canadai
Introduction
A
decade ago, senior managers within the federal public service had a
collective prise de conscience with regard to the need to reinvest in
the federal governments policy capacity. A special Deputy Minister
Task Force on Strengthening our Policy Capacity was established in
1995, and it subsequently issued what is commonly referred to as the
Fellegi Report. This report presented a key examination of the state
of the policy capacity across the federal government, and laid out a
roadmap for future reinvestment in this capacity. Almost ten years
after the Felligi report, what has happened?
Studies of policy analysis in government often emphasize different elements of what they understand analysis to be. A not atypical recent definition broadly describes policy analysis as the activity of thinking systematically or scientifically about policy problems, the goal of which is policy prescription (Brooks 2002: 192). Such systematic thinking is the lifeblood of the policy development process in government from issue identification and agenda setting, through policy research and policy development, to decision-making and implementation, and finally evaluation and adjustment, policy analysis is a core activity.
Rarely,
of course, does the development of policy occur in the linear,
rationalistic fashion suggested by this typology. While policy
analysts in the federal government strive to be as professional,
systematic and scientific as possible in offering their research and
advice, they must have the flexibility to respond to the needs of
their Ministers in circumstances that may be less than ideal. Indeed,
the environment in which policy development and analysis occurs is
only getting more and more complex. As Savoie has recently noted,
the policy-making process is opened to an ever-wider array of
stakeholders and faced with multifaceted and interconnected issues
that cut across ministerial lines of responsibility (Savoie 2004).
This
said, the Fellegi report a decade ago, as well as more recent
interviews with senior government managers (Armstrong et al. 2002)
suggest that most departments in the federal government are fairly
strong in the provision of short term advice and analysis. The larger
area of concern, both then and now, has been with regard to the
capacity within the federal government to undertake policy analysis
work focused on the medium- to longer-term. The focus of this paper
will therefore be on those elements of the federal government
dedicated to undertaking medium- to longer-term analytical policy
work where that analysis can be more systematic and rigorous, as it
is freer from the immediate day-to-day pressures of government
operations. We will begin by reviewing the concerns about federal
policy capacity that led to the Deputy Minister Task Force and the
diagnostic offered in their report with its call for more
forward-looking policy capacity. The paper will then touch on key
areas of progress over the past decade, including the establishment
of the Policy Research Initiative, new initiatives to build
connections to the extra-governmental research community,
improvements in the medium-term policy research capacity of
departments, and the development of new tools for research. We
conclude with a look at what may lie ahead in terms of further
progress.
The Fellegi Report
By
now, the story of the initial investment and enthusiasm in policy
analysis within the federal government, followed by a subsequent long
period of retrenchment, has become a familiar one (Pal 2001: 24;
Hollander and Prince 1993). With the rapid expansion and
institutionalization of policy analysis capacity beginning in the
sixties and carrying on into the seventies, the federal government
took a lead role in the development of policy research and analysis
in Canada. It was a time of increasing investment in research and a
strong faith in the power of rational, systematic analysis to make a
difference. The government also invested in a number of mechanisms to
harvest research from the wider policy analysis community, such as
the Economic and Science Councils of Canada, various Royal
Commissions, and a variety of granting mechanisms. Beginning in the
mid-eighties, however, there was a shift in emphasis and resources
from policy analysis to program implementation. The preoccupations
with (new) public management concerns combined with fiscal restraint
meant that the medium-term analysis in many policy areas was
sidelined, and the in-house capacity of a number of departments
declined. By the mid-1990s, following more than a decade of
diminishing capacity and the recent loss of the Economic Council of
Canada (a major source of medium and longer-term research for the
federal government, see Dobuzinskis in this volume) and other
advisory councils, concerns over the state of the federal governments
policy capacity led the then Clerk of the Privy Council, Jocelyne
Bourgon to launch a Deputy Minister Task Force on Strengthening our
Policy Capacity. Chaired by the Government of Canadas Chief
Statistician, Ivan Fellegi, the Task Force produced a milestone
diagnostic of the state of the federal governments policy capacity.
The
Fellegi Report stressed the continued need for a high-quality policy
capacity to address key challenges faced by the Federal Government.
It suggested that, in this regard, a most notable weakness centered
on the capacity to undertake rigorous, longer-term strategic and
horizontal analytical work. The Task Force found that most (though
importantly not all) departments were generally doing little work in
this area owing to a range of factors including a shortage of
resources, urgent day-to-day requirements, a perceived lack of demand
from senior mangers and officials, and a weak example from key
central agencies. While longer-term planning may be difficult in an
increasingly complex environment, the report affirmed that
positioning the government to deal with longer-term issues in a
coherent fashion was the central strategic issue for the government
(Canada 1996: 20). It noted that such work was more likely to occur
where there were dedicated internal resources (distinct from
day-to-day operations), supportive external resources, useful
techniques and methodologies, and where there was a strong demand for
such work from senior management. The report concluded that while the
bulk of such strategic work must take place within departments, the
central agencies have a vital role to play in increasing the focus on
strategic and major horizontal issues. Yet there is no fully
effective central function that helps to define issues of strategic
importance, to guide the process for developing longer term and
horizontal policies, and to promote interdepartmental networks. PCO
is the logical focus for such a function (Canada 1996: 39).
Canada
was not the only country in the 1990s to experience concerns about
the state of policy capacity within government. Similar questions
were being raised in other western democracies that also experienced
a significant period of fiscal pressure and emphasis on new public
management (Curtain 2000). For example, in the United Kingdom Tony
Blairs Labour Government released a white paper on Modernizing
Government which suggested that previous emphasis on management
reform had paid insufficient attention to policy capacity. Policies
too often take the form of incremental change to existing systems,
rather than new ideas that take the long-term view and cut across
organizational boundaries to get at the root of the problem (United
Kingdom 1999, p.16). The UK Government committed itself to improved
horizontal and strategic policy development. Recent years have seen
the establishment of a number of key new policy analysis units in
that government, most notably the Prime Ministers Strategy Unit.ii
The Policy Research Initiative
Perhaps
the most important development since the Fellegi Report, in terms of
addressing the federal governments capacity to undertake medium-term,
horizontal policy analysis, has been the establishment of the Policy
Research Initiative (PRI). The PRI was launched in 1996 as a
corporate effort by the Clerk and the community of Deputy Ministers
to rebuilding policy capacity. The PRI first began as an
interdepartmental committee of Assistant Deputy Ministers from over
30 federal departments and agencies that were asked to engage in a
medium-term scanning exercise to identify future policy challenges
faced by Canada. The committee prepared a report, Growth, Human
Development, Social Cohesion, on the key pressure points likely to
arise in Canadian society by the year 2005 as a result of shifting
socio-economic trends and identified research gaps that needed to be
addressed to position the government to deal with those challenges.
The
experience was highly successful in many ways. Not only did it
produce a report that demonstrated how policy research focused on the
medium-term had much to contribute to the formulation of the policy
agenda, but it also confirmed the benefits of interdepartmental
collaboration in policy research. The exercise revealed the
horizontal nature of many key policy challenges and the need for
confronting various perspectives and analysis in establishing common
diagnosis on socio-economic trends and developments facing the
country. In the process of drafting the joined report, much was
learned on the relative policy research capacity strengths of the
various federal departments and a policy research community started
to emerge, as many government policy researchers, contrary to their
colleagues working on policy design or policy implementation, seldom
had had real opportunities to work with their counterparts from other
departments.
Following
these first steps, a permanent secretariat, the Policy Research
Secretariats (PRS) was established as a more formal institutionalized
entity within the Government of Canada, with the mandate to support
newly formed interdepartmental research networks of analysts, and to
reach out to the wider policy research community of think tanks and
university academic. From 1997 to 2002, the PRS was particularly
active in establishing these linkages through major fora such as
high-profile national policy conferences involving hundreds of
government and non-government researchers and through the management
of publications, such as ISUMA and TRENDSiii,
which aimed to tap the contributions of scholars and other external
experts on medium-term policy issues of relevance to the federal
government. However, over this period, the PRS, which was renamed
the PRI in 2000, was never able to reproduce the scale and climate of
interdepartmental collaboration that characterized the early days of
the Initiative, with the result that most of the research work
emerging from the PRI during this period was from external sources to
the federal government, through initiative such as the Trends Project
Series. The interdepartmental networks did not generate much new
research work, with the exception perhaps of a pilot project on the
Knowledge-based Economy/Society, which was lead by HRDC, Industry
Canada, Canadian Heritage and the Canadian International Development
Agency. The KBE/S project produced three major conferences from in
1998 and 1999 with a corresponding number of volumes of proceedings
and was by in large managed by the departments directly involved,
with little if no direct contribution from the PRI secretariat.iv
The
fact that the interdepartmental networks generated little new work is
hardly surprising. Department researchers had been asked to conduct
interdepartmental research work in addition to their regular
departmental responsibilities and activities. No additional
resources had been assigned to the research program of the
interdepartmental networks, except for a small staff at the PRI who
was mostly involved in coordinating activities and publications. For
departments involved, the horizontal work around the first report
might have been exciting but proved difficult to sustain. The
creation of interdepartmental research networks was a necessary, but
not sufficient, condition for the strengthening of the federal
governments capacity to undertake medium-term, horizontal policy
analysis. New departmental resources had to be devoted to policy
research activities.
In
late 2002, the Policy Research Initiative entered a third phase,
characterized by a deepened internal research capacity and increased
emphasis on generating in-house knowledge products. Attached to the
Privy Council Office, with oversight from the Deputy Secretary for
Plans and Consultation, the PRIs core mandate today is to advance
research on emerging horizontal issues that are highly relevant to
the federal governments medium-term policy agenda, and to ensure the
effective transfer of this knowledge to policy-makers. The PRI leads
research projects, rather than primarily coordinating
department-based efforts. A team of approximately twenty-five
policy research analysts, from diverse academic backgrounds, works on
several research projects in partnerships with participating federal
departments. Projects in early 2005 centered on issues related to
population aging and increased life-course flexibility, new
approaches to address poverty and exclusion, the role of social
capital as a policy tool, the social economy, the management of
freshwater in Canada, the emergence of Canada-US cross-border
regions, the need for increased Canada-US regulatory cooperation and
the costs and benefits of a customs union with the United-States.
Final reports for most of these projects were expected over the year.
Interim research products are often featured in Horizons, the PRIs
flagship publication,
While
the PRI is now more focused on meeting the needs of the internal
federal community, it still undertakes extensive work to build
linkages between federal analysts and extra-governmental researchers.
Through a partnership with the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council (SSHRC), the two organizations have hosted more than
a dozen research roundtables in 2003 and 2004, bringing together
leading Canadian scholars with senior federal officials to address
specific, targeted issues relating to the PRI horizontal projects.
Since
its creation the PRI has used different means to promote horizontal
collaboration and to foster a sense of community among federal
researchers. Beyond its cross-cutting research projects and its
publication Horizons, the PRIs contribution to supporting horizontal
research collaboration extends to its leadership of the Policy
Research Data Group (PRDG). The PRDG is an interdepartmental
committee formed in 1998 to address data gaps that linked to medium
to longer-term policy priorities. Composed of senior managers from
departments with identifiable research functions together with
officials from Statistics Canada and the central agencies, the PRDG
manages a fund of $20 million per year allocated for the development
of data needed to carry out horizontal research. Priority data
projects are identified by the group and the data is then developed
by Statistics Canada, primarily through surveys (such as the General
Social Survey, the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada, the
Workplace and Employee Survey, the Post-secondary Transition Survey,
and the International Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey, amongst
several others). The PRDG holds regular workshops on data-related
issues, where departments and external researchers can present
proposals for new surveys or other data developments. The PRI chairs
the PRDG and provides the Group with the necessary support and
coordination.
Reaching Out to the External Policy Analysis Community
One
of the principal areas of progress with regard to the policy capacity
of the federal government since the Fellegi Report has been in the
variety of new partnerships with extra-departmental researchers.
Interviews with senior managers in 2002 (Armstrong et al. 2002)
demonstrated a consensus that building such connections is no longer
an area of strategic concern. The Policy Research Initiative has
played a key role in building these links, but several other
initiatives have played a similar role in reaching out to the wider
analysis community.
The
Metropolis Project represents one creative new partnership model.
Launched in 1996 at Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), this
project sought to develop the governments analytic capacity to manage
immigration and diversity by actively developing linkages to the
academic community through institutionally-coordinated grant-funded
research. Funded by a consortium of federal departments and agencies,
including CIC and SSHRC, the project provides core funds to five
university-based Centres of Excellence in Montreal, Toronto,
Edmonton, Vancouver and Atlantic Canada to which over 200 Canadian
researchers are affiliated. In addition, the Metropolis Project has
an international arm that involves partnerships with policy makers
and researchers from over 20 countries, including the United States,
most of Western Europe, Israel and Argentina and from the
Asia-Pacific region. Knowledge generated is transferred to federal
officials through annual national and international conferences, and
frequent workshops and seminars. The project has been successful in
building links between academics and government policy researchers,
and mid-level federal managers.
Another
important development in recent years has been the introduction of
the Research Data Centres program. In 1998, a national task force,
the Canadian Initiative on Social Statistics, recommended the
creation of research facilities to give academic researchers improved
access to Statistics Canada’s microdata files to allow researchers in
the social sciences to build expertise in quantitative methodology
and analysis and improve the availability of rigorous,
policy-relevant research. In partnership with SSHRC and a number of
universities, Statistics Canada has developed twelve Research Data
Centres ( RDCs) located across the country. RDCs provide researchers
with access, in a secure university setting, to microdata from
population and household surveys. The centres are operated under the
provisions of the Statistics Act in accordance with all the
confidentiality rules and are accessible only to researchers with
approved projects who have been sworn in under the Statistics Act as
‘deemed employees.’
The issue of knowledge transfer and building stronger bridges between
government officials and researchers undertaking policy-relevant work
has become a central concern for the three major federal granting
agencies, including SSHRC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council (NSERC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health
Research (CIHR). For example, CIHR had a knowledge translation
requirement built into its founding act in 2000. More recently SSHRC,
Canadas primary research funding agency in the social sciences and
humanities, has embarked on a process of transformation from a
granting council to a knowledge council. By this, SSHRC means that
it would remain a council that delivers grants awarded through peer
review, but would also increase its support and facilitation of
transfers of research knowledge to analysts and decision-makers in
government, as well as other mediators and users of knowledge. Some
of SSHRCs programs have already begun to stress this knowledge
transfer capacity. For example, the Community-University Research
Alliances (CURA) program connects the knowledge produced with
community-based user needs. Similarly, SSHRC has recently partnered
with the PRI to organize a series of important policy-relevant
roundtables bringing together academics and federal policy officials.
The Council recently launched the Strategic Research Clusters Design
Grants program which is advertised as the first concrete step towards
its transformation as a knowledge council. The strategic clusters
are national research networks, each focused on a particular theme,
that enable researchers to interact, on an ongoing basis, with each
other, and with research users and other stakeholders.
Although
pre-dating the Fellegi report with its establishment in 1991, the
Canadian Employment Research Forum (CERF) remains a reference point
when looking at ways to connect the federal policy research community
with the external community. CERF is a non-profit corporation
governed by a board of directors of both government officials and
university-based academics that was set up at the invitation, and
with the financial support, of Employment and Immigration Canada in
the early nineties. It has successfully brought labour market
researchers together at a series of conferences and workshops,
enabling academic researchers to better identify the policy needs of
government officials, and for government officials to be better
informed of the latest relevant academic research. CERF has grown
to be a robust bridge between and among university researchers and
policy researchers from the federal government. However, the
initiative has lost some momentum in more recent years and activities
have been limited as the federal government core funding was replaced
with irregular event-based financial support.
Departmental Policy Research Capacity
Although
these represent important initiatives, the Fellegi Report was
particularly insistent on the importance of investing in the policy
capacity within departments. What has happened to the departmental
capacity since Fellegi?
Concerns
remain that the medium to longer-term capacity in many departments is
still weak, and that the tyranny of the urgent still predominates
with much too much analysis be simply reactive and more superficial
than desirable (Armstrong et al. 2002: 6-8). That said, there are
clearly some departments who have made, or continued to make, strong
investments in medium-term research work over the past decade.
The leaders
The
Department of Finance is probably where policy analysis in the
federal government has been the most stable, as the department was
largely unaffected by program reviews and spending cuts. In addition
to providing ongoing policy analysis in its various areas of
responsibilities, Finance has always maintained a capacity to carry
rigorous policy research on medium term issues. The Economic Studies
and Policy Analysis Division is the focal point of that research,
with working papers being published regularly on a large scope of
issues.
The
Bank of Canada is also staffed with a load of policy analysts, mostly
economists, devoted to financial market analysis, banking issues,
macroeconomics and monetary policy. The Research Department alone,
where most of the work falls into the mid-term research category, is
staffed with more than sixty researchers.
Over
the last decade, Statistics Canada has considerably increased the
quantity of analytical products coming from their data collection
activities. Four groups are responsible for the bulk of the
departments research publications: Business and Labour Market
Analysis, Family and Labour Studies, Health Analysis and Measurement
and Micro-economic Analysis. Staffed with some fifty social
scientists and a few affiliated researchers from academia, these
groups conduct research on various labour market topics,
productivity, technology and innovation, family outcomes, and health
topics. Statistics Canada researchers benefit from direct and
unrestricted access to the rich data sets collected by the
organization.
While
commenting on the recent deterioration of the policy capacity across
the federal government, the Fellegi Report noted that Human Resources
Development Canada was an exception with its investment in
forward-looking planning and research. The Applied Research Branch,
created in 1994, conducted policy research covering labour market,
human capital development, income security, social development,
labour adjustment and workplace innovation issues and for several
years was the largest social policy research capacity in Canada. The
ARB built on the significant investments made by Employment and
Immigration Canada in the area of surveys, social experiments and
program evaluation well before the creation of HRDC. The ARB
proposed a new model for managing mid-term policy research, by
getting actively engaged not only in the interpretation of data, but
also in the planning of surveys and other data collected though
social experiments. External experts would be invited to
collaborate with ARBs research staff and the organizations
responsible for the data collection in developing research
hypothesis, planning the survey or the experiments in accordance with
these hypotheses and then harvesting the information and conducting
primary research as various waves of data became available. The
branch lost some momentum when HRDC got caught in a middle of highly
mediatized, and quite overblown, scandal over data holdings and data
linkages. As part of an internal reorganization plan, the research
branch was partly dismantled in the early 2000s and the remaining
research group was further split when HRDC resources were reallocated
in December 2003 into two new departments, Social Development and
Human Resources and Skills Development.
The
Micro-Economic Policy Analysis (MEPA) branch of Industry Canada also
ranks among the large research units of the federal public service.
The branch emerged in the early 1990s as a central point of policy
research expertise for providing policy analysis and advice on a wide
range of issues related to the knowledge-based economy and the need
to improve Canadas innovation performance. The forty economists or
so who work in the branch divide their time between the management of
research contracts, their own research work and the articulation of
key messages to policy-makers. The MEPA has been particularly
successful in the past ten years in attracting the contribution of
top North-American scholars to their research agenda and in
transferring the results of this research to policy makers, thanks to
a special talent at translating research findings into decks which
have become the standard way of communication with senior officials
and decision-makers.
Strategic
analytical efforts at Health Canada were at one time quite diffuse
throughout the department. In recent years they have moved to a
hybrid model with the creation of a core corporate applied research
group, the Applied Research and Analysis Directorate, combined with a
number of smaller units distributed through its various branches.
The Branch core function is to develop and implement a strategic
policy research agenda for medium and long-term issues, helping
co-ordinate Health Canada’s internal and external policy research
activities, and funding extramural research under the Health Policy
Research Program. The Directorate, with over fifty researchers, now
compares very well with the research capacity of other line
departments like Industry, HRSD and SD and engages in research
partnerships, modeling and data collection activities, as well as
program evaluation.
Why
do these high-capacity departments stand out? Often thanks to the
leadership of particular senior managers who, even in a period of
downsizing, insisted on the importance of investment in medium-term
strategic research capacity. Even in a period of fiscal restraint and
a focus on program management, these managers continued to ask
questions which demanded analytical, evidence-based responses and to
ensure that some resources were made available to provide those
answers (Riddell 1998: 5). As well, these departments did not
hesitate in regrouping their research resources to create critical
masses that could be identified with a mid-term to long-term focus,
and remained somewhat remote and protected from daily demands and
crisis faced by most policy shops.
The B pool
Other
departments have made notable attempt to build up their mid-term
research capacity in response to the Felligi report. Indian and
Northern Affairs Canada, Heritage Canada and Citizenship and
Immigration fall in this category. Indian and Northern Affairs
Canada established a Strategic Research and Analysis Directorate in
1993 with a mandate to support the Federal Governments policy making
regarding the changing relationship between the Federal Government
and First Nations, Inuit and northern peoples of Canada through a
program of policy research, analysis and advice. The Directorate
has a small staff that manages research from external experts and
participates directly with products of their own as well. In
November 2002, INAC and the University of Western Ontario organized
the first Aboriginal Policy Research Conference. The nearly 700
delegates came from the federal government and academics and
Aboriginal organizations to spend three days discussing research and
policy.
Heritage
Canada invested in building some mid-term policy research capacity in
the second half of the 1990s with the creation of the Strategic
Policy and Research Branch which provides a corporate research
function to support the long-term strategic direction of the
Department and contribute to the overall Government research agenda
in areas which affect the mandate of Canadian Heritage.
International Trade Canada has a small unit devoted to trade policy
research and since 2001 produces on an annual basis a compendium of
trade-related research work and analysis undertaken within and on
behalf of the Department.
In
addition to supporting the Metropolis project as one of the key
funding partners, Citizenship and Immigration Canada maintains an
internal research program mainly oriented towards the exploitation of
the information provided by the Longitudinal Immigration Database and
by surveys dealing with the labour market performance of immigrants.
Agriculture Canadas Research and Analysis Directorate relies on
large-scale computer models and other sectoral models to measure how
changes in market conditions or policies affect the agricultural
sector. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation conducts mid-term
research to help address national housing issues and has a large
grants and awards program to foster innovation and the development of
the external housing research community. Infrastructure Canada is
the new kid on the block with substantial investment in research
since its creation in 2003. A small research unit, the Research and
Analysis Division, manages a series of research priorities on public
infrastructure issues in collaboration with other federal governments
and devotes a significant amount of resources to external research
contracts.
Status
of Women Canada has a handful of researchers that manages since 1996
a Policy Research Fund to support independent, forward-thinking
policy research on gender equality issues. Over forty projects have
been funded since the first call for proposals was issued in 1997.
The Law Commission of Canada is an independent federal law reform
agency that advises Parliament on how to improve and modernize
Canadas law. The Commission manages research projects, mostly
commissioned to external experts, on various themes. The Canada Rural
Partnership supports research and analysis that provides
socio-economic information and analysis on rural Canada and matters
of interest to rural Canada.
The Canada School of Public Service has a Vice-president heading a unit named Research and University Relations which seeks to provide relevant, accessible, and leading-edge research in governance and public management for federal public servants. The unit is relatively small, with less than a dozen staff, but draws as well on external experts and works with many Canadian universities to carry their research workplan. The RCMPs Strategic Direction sector incorporates policy development and research capacity to provide advice and support to senior management in setting the strategic direction of the organization. The sector is mainly known outside of the RCMP for his thorough environmental scan of the socio-economic, technological, legal and political environment, both at the domestic and international levels.
The
above does not represent a comprehensive review of all policy
research capacity across federal departments. Our brief overview
nevertheless suggests that the amount of resources engaged in
medium-term policy analysis and research across the federal
government is not negligible. But the number of issues calling for
in-depth analysis, and of particular relevance to the federal
government, is far from negligible either.
Has progress been made since the Felligi report? Overall progress in some of the departments may have offset some setbacks in other departments. Also, the distribution of research capacity remains highly unequal from one department to another. What the above description does not reflect is the impact of recent budgetary measures calling for spending cuts and reallocation across all departments. For several departments, these pressures just add to previous department-specific reallocation exercises and have led to a gradual erosion of departmental research and data development budgets. While researchers jobs may have not been cut, there are clear indications that the branch budgets devoted to non-salary items, contracts, conferences, data development or other operational items, have clearly suffered.
Analytic Tools and Methods
Over
the past decade, the federal government has invested in a number of
new tools and methodologies to improve its medium to longer-term
policy research capacity. For example, Statistics Canada in
partnership with a number of departments such as HRDC and CIC, and
with the guidance and support of the Policy Research Data Group, has
introduced a number of important new longitudinal surveys which,
while costly and time-consuming to produce, have significant
advantages over cross-sectional data. Examples include the National
Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, the Longitudinal Survey of
Immigrants to Canada, the National Graduate Surveys and Follow-up
Surveys, the School Leavers Surveys, the Workplace and Employees
Survey). These surveys provide federal government analysts with the
capacity to much better identify the key trends and challenges in
several strategic policy areas including early childhood development,
labour market transitions, and immigrant integration
Federal
departments have also continued to invest in modeling techniques,
which have improved their capacity to undertake medium and
longer-term analysis. Macroeconomic models, introduced in the
seventies, remain a key tool for any research or analysis involving
macroeconomic forecasting or macro policy analysis. The Department
of Finance and the Bank of Canada have traditionally been the most
intensive users, but other departments use them as well. For
instance, occupational projections introduced at Employment and
Immigration in the early eighties are produced regularly with the
help of such macroeconomic models and their derivatives. General
equilibrium models were instrumental in assessing the merits of
introducing key policy reforms, such as GST or the Free Trade
Agreement. They are still used today by departments like Finance,
Industry Canada, International Trade and Agriculture Canada, to
assess the economic efficiency gains and potential increases in GDP
per capita that could result from major policy changes.
Microsimulation
models, such as Statistics Canadas Social Policy Simulation Database
and Model (SPSD/M) have been handling the distributional impact of
proposed policy options for the last two decades. More recently,
Statistics Canada introduced a new model, the LifePaths
microsimulation model of individuals and families. The model allows
for a better appreciation of how various policies designed to impact
decisions at different points in the lifecourse interact to affect
the outcomes of individual trajectories. The LifePaths model creates
data about an artificial population that mirrors the characteristics
of Canadian society. As Rowe notes, this represents a radical
addition to the analytic tool kit that offers the prospect for
improved public policy investments to support Canadians in all the
diversity of their lifecourse (Rowe 2003: 8). Health Canada also
developed its own micro-simulation models. The Pharmasim model
quantifies the impact of changes to provincial pharmacare programs on
households and government expenditures. And the Health-Tax
Microsimulation Model (HTSIM) enables analysts to quantify the impact
of changes to tax measures.
Through
HRDC, the federal government has also made substantial investments in
social experimentation in the 1980s. A yearly budget approximating
$20 million has been supporting several large field experiments and
demonstration projects in various locations of Canada during most of
the nineties. Projects such as the Self-sufficiency Project based in
B.C. and New-Brunswick, the Community Employment Innovation Project
taking place in Cape Breton, Nova-Scotia, and the Learn$ave Project
implemented in 10 sites across Canada, involved thousands of
participants and use rigorous quantitative analysis, in the form of
random-assignment evaluation design, to test and evaluate proposals
for new programs and policy initiatives. However, HRDC (and now
HRSD) investments in social experimentation are unique, as other
departments have not yet devoted any resources to this powerful
analytical tool for better policy design. HRDC has also been
innovating by making use of laboratory experiments, or experimental
economics, to inform policy design. In 2002, the Canada Student
Loans Program commissioned the Social Research and Demonstration
Corporation (SRDC) to conduct an economic experiment to test the
response of program recipients to the provision of various forms of
short-term/part-time student financial assistance.
Environmental
scanning is a technique that has gained in popularity with several
federal departments. Generally a typical scan is a report capturing
a view of the socio-cultural, economic, technological, environmental
and even political trends and circumstances around the organization
(Howe, 2004, 81). Efforts are currently being made to better
integrate the various departmental scans currently underway, but for
now, this activity is only carried on a small scale and remains
highly decentralized.
Does all this make a difference?
One
might question the need to be concerned about the federal government
policy research capacity, given the assertions that such policy
analysis work has little impact on either day-to-day government
operations or longer term policy directions (Pal 2001: 23; Brooks
1996: 85). Yet the work of such units, with a medium- to long-term
focus, can and does often make an important difference, to the
development of government policy. Often this influence is only
indirect, introducing concepts, insights and alternatives that may
only gradually, depending upon the right circumstances, resonate with
decision-makers and take hold in the policy development process. At
other times, such work may have a much more direct impact. For
example, in the late nineties, the Deputy Minister of Industry made
ten presentations in twelve months of the work of the departments
Micro-Economic Policy Branch (Riddell 1998: 7) — work that very
directly informed the governments innovation agenda. Similarly, Picot
offers several examples where the quantitative analysis of Statistics
Canada has played a substantial role in informing many key policy
areas over the past decade including the reform of Employment
Insurance, child poverty efforts, promotion of research and
development, immigrant integration, and issues of access to
post-secondary education (Picot 2003). Similarly, the work of the
Applied Research Branch of HRDC during the nineties contributed to
inspire various government initiatives in the area of adult
education, child development, youth employment and parental benefits.
It also prevented the government from reacting to alarmist
diagnosis, like the claim regarding the end of work in the mid
nineties, by producing thorough analysis of labour market trends.
Conclusion: Looking ahead
Policy
research capacity within the federal government is healthy and
compares well with the capacity observed in other OECD governments.
Recent analysis point to a problem of demand as opposed to a problem
of supply (Armstrong, 2002). Decision-makers and senior government
officials are overload with information and are captive of the
crisis or issues of the day. They rarely find the time to give
proper consideration to research findings. This demand deficiency
makes the supply the more vulnerable. If policy researchers fail to
create opportunities to present the results of their work, they may
not survive the recurrent waves of resources reallocation,
departmental reorganizations and spending cuts that have
characterized the lives of all levels of governments, as well as
private sector businesses, since the last recession. More emphasis
has to be put on knowledge transfers and finding appropriate
mechanisms to package and convey the results of the policy research
to senior officials and Ministers. The role of knowledge broker is
bound to increase in future years, especially in large organizations.
It is therefore imperative that the federal government preserves a
solid internal policy research capacity that has the ability to speak
the language of policy as well as the language of research. Canada
can afford more think-tanks and scholars devoted to the analysis of
policy issues. In that regard we may be lagging other countries,
such as the U.S. or the U.K. But without a strong internal capacity
to produce, process and synthesize research information, to translate
and to communicate, new investments in research capacity external to
governments, may not do much to improve the quality of policy making.
References
Armstrong, Jim, et al. 2002. Strengthening Policy Capacity: Report on Interviews with Senior Managers, February-March 2002. The Governance Network.
Brooks, Stephen. 2002. “Policy Analysis in Canada.” In Christopher Dunn, ed., The Handbook of Canadian Public Administration. Don Mills: Oxford University Press.
Brooks, Stephen. 1996. “The Policy Analysis Profession in Canada.” In Laurent Dobuzinskis et al., eds., Policy Studies in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Canada. 1996. Strengthening Our Policy Capacity. Report of the Task Force on Strengthening the Policy Capacity of the Federal Government [The Fellegi Report]. Ottawa.
Curtain, Richard. 2000. “Good Public Policy Making: How Australia Fares.” Agenda: A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform 8, no.1: 33-46.
Hollander, Marcus J., and Michael J. Prince. “Analytical Units in the Federal and Provincial Governments: Origins, Functions and Suggestions for Effectiveness. ” Canadian Public Administration 36, no.2: 190-224.
Howe, Valerie. 2004. “Environmental Scan Initiative,” Horizons 7, no.1: 81-82
Pal, Leslie. 2001. Beyond Policy Analysis: Public Issue Management in Turbulent Times. Scarborough, ON: Nelson Thompson.
Picot, Garnett. 2003. “Does Statistical Analysis Matter?” Horizons 6, no.1: 6-10.
Riddell, Norman. 1998. Policy Research Capacity in the Federal Government. A Report prepared for the Policy Research Initiative. Ottawa.
Rowe, Geoff. 2003. “Fragments of Lives: Enabling New Policy Directions through Integrated Life-Course Data.” Horizons 6, no.2: 7-11.
Savoie, Donald J. 2004. “Searching for Accountability in a Government Without Boundaries.” Canadian Public Administration 47, no.2: 1-26.
United Kingdom, Cabinet Office. 1999. The Modernising Government White Paper. London.
Voyer, Jean-Pierre, 2003. “Les techniques exprimentales au service de la politique sociale,” Sociologie et Socits, vol xxxv, no 1,
iEndnotes
I would like to thank Robert Judge, from the Policy Research
Initiative, for his contribution and assistance in writing this
paper.
ii
As part of its commitment to improved
horizontal and strategic policy development, in 1998 the UK
government established the Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU) in
the Cabinet Office, reporting directly to the Prime Minister through
the Cabinet Secretary. The PIU was designed to report on select
issues crossing departmental boundaries and to propose policy
innovations to improve the delivery of government objectives. In
2001, a second unit, the Prime Ministers Forward Strategy Unit, was
established to provide the Prime Minister and other Cabinet
Ministers with strategic, private thinking. A year later the two
units were merged to form the Prime Ministers Strategy Unit. The
Strategy Unit is located in the Cabinet Office and reports directly
to the Prime Minister.
iii
Under the Trend Project, the PRI, in
cooperation with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada, developed six books where team of academics examined
different forces that are driving change in Canada and identified
the potential implications for policy.
iv
The proceedings of these conferences were
published under the following titles: Transition
to the Knowledge of Society: Policies and Strategies for Individual
Participation and Learning. ed.
Kjell Rubenson and Hans G. Schuetze. Vancouver, BC: UBC Institute
for European Studies, 2000; Doing
Business in the Knowledge-Based Economy: Facts and Policy
Challenges. ed. Louis A. Lefebvre,
Elisabeth Lefebvre, Pierre Mohnen. Boston: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 2001, and Citizenship
and Participation in the Information Age.
ed. Manjunath Pendakur and Roma Harris. Aurora, ON: Garamond Press,
2002.
Yellow Vests of Canada 