Policy Success In Canada

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. In Canada many public projects, programs, and services perform well, and many are very successful. However, these cases are consistently underexposed and understudied in the policy literature which, for various reasons, tends to focus on policy mistakes and learning from failures rather than successes. In fact, studies of public policy successes are rare not just in Canada, but the world over, although this has started to change (McConnell, 2010, 2017; Compton & 't Hart, 2019; Luetjens, Mintrom & 't Hart, 2019). Like those publications, the aims of Policy Success in Canada are to see, describe, acknowledge, and promote learning from past and present instances of highly effective and highly valued public policymaking. This exercise will be done through detailed examination of selected case studies of policy success in different eras, governments, and policy domains in Canada. This book project is embedded in a broader project led by 't Hart and OUP exploring policy successes globally and regionally. It is envisaged as a companion volume to OUP's 2019 offering Great Policy Successes (Compton and 't Hart, 2019) and to Successful Public Policy in the Nordic Countries (de La Porte et al, 2022). This present volume provides an opportunity to analyze what is similar and distinctive about introducing and implementing successful public policy in one of the world's most politically decentralized and regionally diverse federation and oldest democratic polities.

Policy analysis in Canada brings together original contributions from many of the field’s leading scholars. Contributors chronicle the evolution of policy analysis in Canada over the past 50 years and reflect on its application in both governmental and non-governmental settings. As part of the International Library of Policy Analysis series, the book enables cross-national comparison of public policy analysis concepts and practice within national and sub-national governments, media, NGOs and other institutional settings. Informed by the latest scholarship on policy analysis, the volume is a valuable resource for academics and students of policy studies, public management, political science and comparative policy studies.

The study of public policy in Canada is well rooted in traditional legal-historical analysis of Canadian government and political economy. However, the current emphasis among political and other social scientists on policy issues, and the proliferation of theoretical concepts that such an emphasis has generated, are relatively recent developments. In fact, it is only since the 1970s that a separate field of policy studies has emerged in Canada. In Policy Studies in Canada twenty-one leading scholars in the field of Canadian public policy trace the progress of a quarter century of research and publication in the fields of policy studies and policy analysis.

Studies of public policy in Canada are traditionally narrow, focusing on a particular policy area or jurisdiction without giving consideration to the significant procedural commonalities that can be identified across the public policy spectrum. Canadian Public Policy provides the first comprehensive, theoretically informed, empirical evaluation of the development of public policy in Canada. It represents the culmination of a fifteen-year program of large-scale primary research into Canadian policy-making by Michael Howlett, an internationally recognized public policy expert. Each of the chapters investigates one stage of the policy process – including agenda setting, policy formulation, decision-making, policy implementation, and policy evaluation – in the Canadian context. The volume is book-ended by an introductory section setting out the logic of the policy cycle model, and a conclusion summarizing the research program and results. Investigating how Canadian experiences can inform and contribute to existing policy models, this unique volume will be a fixture in the Canadian public policy literature for years to come.

Over the last fifty years, Canada's public schools have been absorbed into a modern education system that functions much like Max Weber's infamous iron cage. Crying out for democratic school-level reform, the system is now a centralized, bureaucratic fortress that, every year, becomes softer on standards for students, less accessible to parents, further out of touch with communities, and surprisingly unresponsive to classroom teachers. Exploring the nature of the Canadian education order in all its dimensions, The State of the System explains how public schools came to be so bureaucratic, confronts the critical issues facing kindergarten to grade 12 public schools in all ten provinces, and addresses the need for systemic reform. Going beyond a diagnosis of the stresses, strains, and ills present in the system, Paul Bennett proposes a bold plan to re-engineer schools on a more human scale as the first step in truly reforming public education. In place of school consolidation and managerialism, one-size-fits-all uniformity, limited school choice, and the "success-for-all" curriculum, Bennett advocates for a new set of priorities: decentralize school governance, deprogram education ministries and school districts, listen to parents and teachers, and revitalize local education democracy. Tackling the thorny issues besetting contemporary school systems in Canada, The State of the System issues a clarion call for more responsive, engaged, and accountable public schools.