Futureproofing Canada

From June 12 to 14, 2023, the Institute on Governance (IOG) and the Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation at the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) partenered to convene Resilient Institutions: Learning from Canada’s COVID-19 Pandemic – a conference on making public institutions and governance more agile. As the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has recently demonstrated, countries that want to thrive in this turbulent century must be adaptable. In this keynote address at the Resilient Institutions conference, Alasdair Roberts, professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar at the Canada School of Public Service and a visiting professor at the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University, examines Canada’s track record on adaptability and considers how the country can respond more effectively to new conditions and ideas. Despite the many merits of the Canadian approach to governing, adaptability has come under threat in recent years. Short-term politics have increasingly taken the place of forward thinking, technological change has disrupted the public sphere, and the public service has become less nimble. Taking account of these challenges, Roberts proposes a program of reform that is focused on the country’s flexibility for the dangerous decades ahead. This episode of the podcast is a recording of Alasdair Roberts’ keynote address at the IRPP’s Resilient Institutions: Learning from Canada’s COVID-19 Pandemic conference, which was co-hosted with the Institute on Governance and took place in Ottawa from June 12 to 14, 2023.

What do the results of the 2023 Alberta election mean for the future of the province? What consequences will the election have for the province’s relations with Ottawa, with other provinces, and with First Nations? Tune into this panel discussion, moderated by the IRPP’s Charles Breton, executive director of the Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation, for a forward-looking exploration of these questions and many more. The panel features Jed Johns, manager of government and Indigenous relations at Epcor Utilities Inc; Sara Hastings-Simon, assistant professor in the Department of Geoscience and School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary; Sonya Savage, former minister of the environment, minister of energy and MLA for Calgary-Northwest; and Trevor Tombe, professor in the Department of Economics and research fellow in the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary. This episode of the podcast is a recording of a panel discussion held at an IRPP private gathering on June 5, 2023, in Calgary, Alberta.

It is impossible to think about inequality in Canada without an understanding of Canada’s settler colonial reality. Public conversations about settler colonialism and the inequalities it imposes on Indigenous Peoples have changed over the last decade thanks to the work of Indigenous activists and leaders. In this episode of In/Equality, host Debra Thompson speaks with one of the public scholars who helped bring about this change: Pamela Palmater, a Mi’kmaw lawyer, author, and Associate Professor of Indigenous Governance at Toronto Metropolitan University. What does critical and impactful public scholarship on settler colonialism look like? Can courts in Canada still provide a valid avenue for Indigenous people seeking redress? We delve into these questions and more.

Various orders of government and institutions like universities develop policies for disabled people. How often are disabled people brought into the process of policymaking? In this episode of In/Equality, host Debra Thompson speaks with Michael Orsini, a Professor of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa and a critical disability scholar. The conversation begins with an an understanding of what policies impact disabled people? How are disabled people made invisible in the making of these policies? How does autism force us to rethink assumptions about disability and diversity? And how can we reconceptualize policy to move toward disability justice? Tune in for answers to these questions and more.

Childcare has been entering and exiting the Canadian political agenda since the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1970. Now, Canada is entering a new period on child-care policy. In this episode of In/Equality, host Debra Thompson speaks with Adrienne Davidson, Assistant Professor of Political Science at McMaster University. Beginning with subsidies and nonprofit daycares, this conversation covers various policies that impact Canadian families, including parental leave and the importance of early education. How do these policies differ between Quebec and the rest of Canada? How are they framed? What effects do they have on racial inequality across the country? And how are they changing?

Canada has seen major changes in social housing policy since the 1990s. How has this shift impacted homelessness? In this episode of In/Equality, host Debra Thompson speaks with Alison Smith, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the author of Multiple Barriers: The Multilevel Governance of Homelessness in Canada. Homelessness is a constant discussion in major cities across Canada, yet Quebec is currently the only province that has a policy on homelessness. What can other provinces learn from its approach? How do we understand homelessness for the dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of this land? What are the roles of cities, provinces, and the federal government in preventing extreme housing insecurity? We delve into these questions and more.

Economic inequality in Canada and other developed countries has been rising since the 1980s. Along with this trend, Canada has seen a withering of redistributive policies and major changes in the way we talk about poverty. In this episode of In/Equality, host Debra Thompson speaks with Keith Banting, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Queen’s University. The conversation explores how inequality and redistribution intersect with racial inequality and immigration, particularly with the rise of a populist backlash. What does this populism look like in Canada? How should we frame discussions of economic inequality? Tune in for an expansive discussion on the rise of inequality and responses to it.

Black Canadians are more likely to be targeted by police for stop and search, and more likely to be incarcerated. In this episode of In/Equality, host Debra Thompson speaks with Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, where he is a leading scholar of race and Canada’s criminal justice system. How does racial data get collected in Canada? What does it reveal about the treatment of Black people by the justice system? How have Canada’s drug laws been used as a tool of racialized social control? Tune in for answers to these questions and deep dives into various intersections of race and criminal justice in Canada.

Welcome to In/Equality! In this new series from the Policy Options Podcast, we explore various aspects of inequality with experts from political science, criminology, history, and other disciplines. We will hear from researchers about the latest research on economic inequality, racial inequality, disability justice, rural-urban divides, and more. In this first episode, IRPP President and CEO Jennifer Ditchburn helps us get to know the host of In/Equality, Professor Debra Thompson of McGill University. What brought her to research racial inequality? What motivated her to create this series? And what can we expect from the coming conversations.

In this episode, our series on federalism turns to one of the most contentious issues in Canada these days: healthcare. We go back to first principles to understand how federalism influences the way we approach healthcare in Canada. We also ask what makes an effective healthcare system? And how does federalism complicate or help that dynamic? What are the different roles of each level of government and the stakeholders they interact with? And how do they work or don’t? Our expert guests are Katherine Fierlbeck, McCullough Research Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University, and Chaim Bell, Physician-in-Chief at Sinai Health and Professor of Medicine and Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. This episode was recorded during an online event held by the Canada School of Public Service and is the sixth and final installment of a partnership between the school and the IRPP’s Centre for Excellence.