Peter Hicks

Peter Hicks worked for many years as assistant deputy minister, with policy responsibilities in a number of social departments and central agencies of the Government of Canada. He is the author of the 2016 IRPP Horizons essay, The Enabling Society.

Articles by this author

An observatory for Canadian social data? A second opinion

In their recent Policy Options post, Annie McEwen and Geranda Notten describe the lack of good quality data available to assess how well Canadian social goals are being met. They suggest that one solution would …

Beyond stealth in social programming

Ken Battle’s recent Policy Options article “Social Policy-Making Still Stealthy After All These Years” is a valuable reminder of the importance of his 1990 article (also in Policy Options) in which he described how large …

Measuring poverty? Let’s get empirical

Efforts to find one simple indicator of poverty are unlikely to succeed and run the risk of misdirecting policies intended to reduce poverty. Better approaches exist, but they involve hard work and collaboration. They are …

The "enabling society" can improve social policy

As consumers, we have witnessed huge changes in the last several decades in how we shop and interact with sellers of goods and services. These transactions are increasingly happening online, and they are also far …

The inconvenient truth about pension reform

Canada’s retirement income system has attracted much attention in recent years, and there have been pension reform proposals at the national and provincial levels. Many of the proposed reforms are thoughtful and appear to be …

To truly modernize social programs, it will take big data and analytics

Finding better ways of wiring for e-government is important and necessary. Nobody would disagree with the need for better computing, electronic communications and information management. However, digital improvements will bring about only modest gains if they …