Policy Options

L’échec de la candidature du Canada à l’un des deux sièges non permanents au Conseil de sécurité des Nations unies est avant tout celui d’une politique étrangère de confort,...

In a few short months, COVID-19 has achieved what no individual, organization or advocacy group was able to do for decades: it has exposed the cracks in the way...

Earlier in June, the Fair Deal Panel made public its final report to the Alberta government. The stated goal of the panel was to find ways to get Alberta...

There is growing evidence that COVID-19 is disrupting health, economic, political, and social systems in Canada and countries around the globe. The pandemic is challenging global institutions and national...

The inclusion of Canadians from visible minority groups in the country’s major political and socio-economic institutions is an important indicator of the success that Canada can claim as a...

The COVID-19 pandemic has shattered the arts sector. The consequences for society will be devastating unless an agenda for innovation and inclusive growth is implemented to support the arts...

The COVID-19 pandemic is a massive health, social, and economic shock to Canadian society. Nowhere is this more visible than in our cities, where physical distancing measures to contain...

While the COVID-19 pandemic urgently requires new medical and social innovations, it also draws our attention to long-standing challenges in innovation policy. For example, the uneven health and economic...

When Justin Trudeau became prime minister of Canada in 2015, there was considerable hope that there was a partner in Ottawa whom Indigenous peoples could work with to deliver...

A thoughtful, well-managed and balanced system for contact tracing is essential for preserving our core values of privacy, freedom, equity and safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. The system must...

The Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) program may need redesigning to adapt to the partial reopening of the economy. At the start, the federal government likely envisioned three or...

Over its relatively short history, Canada has been hit with numerous trade shocks that shaped the direction of Canada’s trade, its economic policy, and indeed its very structure. These...

The panic in Canada over the lack of masks and ventilators for COVID-19 has mostly eased, but it would be foolish to let the memory and lessons of those...

The Canada that exits the Great Quarantine may, by mid-century, become a great power. Or it may, as a mirror opposite, become a deep vassal state. The possible futures...

Certains groupes de personnes, et notamment les personnes racisées, sont plus durement frappées par la COVID-19. Je joins ma voix aux militants et aux organisateurs communautaires, aux scientifiques et...

As has been made abundantly clear, coronavirus touches all aspects of urban life – including the platform economy. Before the spread of COVID-19, the rise of platform firms such...

It is difficult to imagine the Fall of 2021. We can hope that a vaccine will have ended the COVID crisis, and normal life will be resuming. We don’t...

Nous sommes à un carrefour important : peut-on saisir l’occasion d’une relance économique pour accélérer la transition écologique ? Pour compenser les pertes économiques colossales dues à la crise de COVID-19,...

Losing an election is always tough. And especially when it is the second in a row. But Canada’s loss to Ireland and Norway in this past week’s Security Council...

Que reste-t-il de lui dans la tempête brève? Qu’est devenu mon cœur, navire déserté? Hélas! Il a sombré dans l’abîme du Rêve! Émile Nelligan, Le Vaisseau d’or, 1899 Cette...

For decades, Canada has struggled with sub-par business investment in innovation – a “low-innovation equilibrium.” Where innovation is happening, opportunities to participate and benefit from it have been distributed...

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed fragilities and inequities in Canada’s innovation economy. When the pandemic began, Canada was already a global laggard in the development and adoption of new...

It is impossible to understate the seismic shift that has occurred over the past few months in the way our healthcare system is run. The experience of waging an...

Canada’s quest for a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council has ended with a thud. The Security Council sits at the centre of the global governance system...

The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) has been stretched by natural disaster relief efforts and is in even higher demand now with Operation Laser, the CAF response to COVID-19. The...

July 1, 2020 is the 10-year anniversary of Ontario’s Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), a key part of Ontario’s comprehensive tax reform package. The package included major changes to the...

It’s bad news for civil rights when a government decides to sentence an entire population to house arrest, but for long-term care residents this pandemic policy is not new....

Since March 2020, oil prices have been in such a free fall that politicians are now debating whether “oil is dead.” Financial experts had warned that the future of...

When the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in Canada, the concern was immediately palpable in northern communities. A persistent housing crisis, in combination with inequities in health care access,...

In April, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms turned 38 years old. The Charter, which forms part of our Constitution and thus part of Canada’s supreme law, is...

(This article has been translated from French.) Following serious public criticism, most recently by the Liberal MNA Jennifer Maccarone, of the intensive care triage protocol developed under the auspices...

As plans for lifting the pandemic restrictions take effect, there is widespread recognition that things will not go back to the way they were. Government, community and corporate sectors...

The non-profit and voluntary sector is the vital third leg of the stool – with government and business, it holds the province of Nova Scotia up and together. The...

Many people gravitate to political jobs because they love the adrenalin of campaigning and are ideologically committed to building support for their party. Predictably, when an election is called,...

The confluence of two public health emergencies has made life even more dangerous for people at risk of overdose in British Columbia. COVID-19 comes at a time when the...

When you visit diverse Indigenous communities across Canada, whether they be Inuit, First Nation or Métis, northern or southern, rural or urban, you hear a common refrain: a desire...

Au Canada, les manifestations en hommage à George Floyd ont montré une fois encore qu’en ce qui concerne les injustices et les inégalités liées au traitement de la différence,...

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis is a formidable test for welfare states all over the world, including here in Canada. In this context, unemployment benefits are crucial because of the...

Canada’s system of long-term care was a powder keg; COVID-19 the spark that set it alight. As the virus overtook nursing and care homes across the country, we began...

A political party’s director of communications promotes and protects the party brand, ensuring the vision, mission, and policies of a party align with its corporate identity and brand ethos,...

When the federal government introduced Canada’s medical assistance in dying legislation back in 2016, there was swift and fierce backlash against one of the eligibility criteria – a person’s...

In the COVID-19 era, Canada needs to better understand the relationship between identity and health. To do that, we need to use intersectional analysis, the study of the way...

En l’espace de 48 heures, en raison du désistement surprise de son seul adversaire, Dominique Anglade est devenue le 11 mai dernier cheffe du Parti libéral du Québec. Dix-huitième...

Although Canadians tend to focus on political parties and candidates during an election campaign, the work of another important set of actors – election administrators – is often overlooked....

A manager in the health sector in Montreal, Myriam has been juggling work with two young children, who have been out of school for over two months. “I was...

In movies about political campaigns, we often see a character who whispers in a politician’s ear, providing strategic advice about what to say to the media or what information...

Under normal circumstances, the Ontario Mental Health Act allows involuntary hospitalization of a capable person who has a mental disorder that is “likely” to result in “serious bodily harm”...

More than 50 years ago, Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of American Cities, changed how a generation of urban planners and other policy-makers think about cities....

In mid-May, the federal government announced a major program to help large companies address the economic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. The Large Employer Emergency Financing Facility (LEEFF) will...

À l’émission Tout le monde en parle du 17 mai dernier, Yoshua Bengio, directeur scientifique de Mila et professeur au Département d’informatique de l’Université de Montréal, et Valérie Pisano,...

Relative to our international peers, Canada is experiencing alarmingly high fatality and mortality rates due to COVID-19 in long-term care (LTC) facilities. Lessons from other countries are useful in...

Over the past several days, in the midst of the protests related to the killing of George Floyd and death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto, many people have asked...

En Alberta, la lutte contre le coronavirus a été plutôt efficace, et ce, malgré quelques ratés, notamment une éclosion importante de cas dans un centre de transformation de viande....

A great idea is priceless. A great campaign to share that idea, however, comes with a big price tag. Election campaigns cost money, making fundraisers integral to any successful...

Financial security can be thought of as an island where everyone has enough money to meet their needs, now and in the future, while financial insecurity is the sea...

Should Canadian intelligence agencies report on pandemics? Yes. Deploying the warning and analysis capabilities of the community should be part of a whole-of-government approach to a global health emergency....

The decision by the Trump administration on April 22nd to effectively freeze immigration flows into the United States is the latest in a series of moves by that government...

(This article has been translated into French.) During a federal election campaign, the news agenda is often set by national media organizations such as broadcasters CBC-Radio-Canada, CTV, TVA and Global; newspapers...

(This article has been translated into French.) In the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, Quebec, like other parts of Canada, feared that the horrifying experiences of overflowing hospitals in...

The actions of national campaign directors are consequential for the success or failure of political parties in Canadian federal elections. Like the head coach of a hockey team, they...

Canadians have never had greater access to news and information than they do today. In addition to daily newspapers, television, radio and Internet news sites – many of which...

Relatively few Canadians know what happens beyond the headlines of election campaigns, and the workers behind the scenes who make it all come together. But to understand politics, citizens...

(This article has been translated into French.) Even in the midst of a global pandemic, electoral politics marches on. Right now, there is an organizing frenzy unfolding around the Conservative and...

For Canada, one of the disturbing realities arising from the pandemic response is the breakdown in the global, rules-based trade system when we needed it most for critical supplies...