About the Mowat Centre

Director's Message

Canada is one of the most successful national communities in human history, in part due to the good fortunes of history, geography and inherited political institutions, and in part due to the Canadian genius of embracing diversity and making wise policy choices. But the world is in the process of extraordinary social and economic change, and the policy frameworks which served Canadians so well in the later half of the 20th century may not be right for the 21st century.

Many of the key elements of Canada’s social contract and institutional infrastructure have broken down. In some cases our public policies are based on assumptions that are no longer valid; in others, the assumptions are valid but the programs that gave them life have been tinkered with so much that they no longer achieve their intended purpose. If Canada’s 21st century is to be as successful as its 20th, Canadians and their governments must be prepared to creatively reform many of our public policy frameworks.

Revitalising Canada's policy strategies

Canada’s policy architecture evolved over the 20th century. It built a protected national internal market, a strong manufacturing base centred in southwestern Ontario, and a set of redistributive policies that supported less prosperous individuals and regions. By establishing common national programs, and enhancing equality of opportunity for Canadians, this architecture contributed to our collective prosperity, our enviable quality of life, and remarkable social harmony and cohesion.

But Canada and the world are transforming rapidly. Today, Canadian prosperity is more evenly distributed across Canada’s regions and the diversity of these vibrant regional economies is an enormous advantage for Canada. Canada’s prosperity is now driven by natural resources and services rather than manufacturing. Canadians are required to deal with the realities of globalization and free trade and we are, more than ever, competing with countries around the world for investment and people.

Yet federal public policy has been slow to respond to the new challenges faced by Canadians. Without doubt, demographic changes, including an aging population, will put enormous fiscal pressure on the many programs Canadians rely on.

All Canadian provinces face many of the same challenges, but each province has its own unique reality and interests. Ontario is Canada’s most urban and ethnically diverse province, home to a leading global city-region, and to cutting-edge knowledge, creative and information industries. Ontario is the Canadian steward of our Great Lakes, and many of our communities are highly integrated with the United States. Moving forward, it will be essential to re-imagine the Canadian social contract with an understanding of Ontario’s new reality, just as surely as the interests of all Canada’s regions will need to be considered as we modernize our public policy strategies.

A new way of approaching public policy

Successive minority governments in Canada have made our federal government less able to undertake the long-term policy work necessary to re-vitalize Canada’s strategies. Historically in Canada we have relied on the federal public service, sometimes supported by independent commissions, to develop new policy ideas, but this has not been happening as quickly as necessary given the rapidly transforming global and national economies. While the United States and Europe have rich networks of well-endowed think tanks, Canada’s network is comparatively weaker. This makes the stalled federal policy agenda even more risky because Canada has fewer institutions to step in to fill the gap.

Canadians are increasingly aware that other countries are preparing to compete with Canada as never before and that many are creatively confronting some of their most pressing policy challenges. And many Canadians are increasingly worried that our political leadership is not engaging in substantive debate about the issues that will determine Canada’s long-term fortunes.

But the absence of federal leadership presents all Canadians – along with provincial and municipal governments and other private and non-profit sector organizations – with an opportunity. Increasingly, the ability of governments to deliver successful policies and programs depends on their ability to network, partner and engage a diverse set of actors and organizations. In an open source world, all of us have the power to shape the policy agenda.

At the Mowat Centre, we hope to establish new connections between government decision-makers, public policy researchers, and groups and social innovators in the broader community in order to produce better strategies and policy outcomes for Canada.  Although government will ultimately remain the crucial player, others no longer have to wait. Through new forms of knowledge creation, organizations such as the Mowat Centre may be able to suggest ways to reconstruct outdated policy architecture to strengthen Canada, its regions and its citizens.

Contributing to the national conversation

The Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation has been set up to help inform and revitalize Canada’s public policy agenda, given new Canadian and global realities.  This includes questioning many of the assumptions that underlie our current approaches, while ensuring that all of us continue to share a sense of common citizenship, benefit from equality of opportunity, and have access to all the benefits of being Canadian.

Canada has been lucky, but luck is no longer enough. We need evidence-based applied public policy research and a healthy public debate on some of our key foundational public policies. We do not yet know what Employment Insurance, Equalization, or immigration policy will look like 10 years from now, nor do we know how intergovernmental processes can be improved to facilitate the development of improved public policy. But we do know that change is necessary if Canada is to be as successful in the coming decades as it has been in the previous ones.