The Paul Wells Show - Who talks to government?

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

How should people outside government be involved in shaping government policy? Who has the government's ear, and how do they decide which voices to listen to? Those are the questions Paul puts to this week's guests, Taylor Owen from McGill’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, and Rachel Samson from the Institute for Research on Public Policy.  This panel was organized by the Max Bell Foundation and the episode was recorded live at McGill University. 

A new government always has a lot to say, but who doesn't want to hear? When you're in Ottawa, there are a lot of loud voices and they tend to be the ones with the power in the lobby groups and all of those things or the wealth. Today, shaping public policy from outside government. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to the Paul Wells Show. Last week at McGill University we had a bit of a jam session. Our hosts were the board of directors of the Max Bell Foundation, which promotes better public policy by funding, among other things, the Max Bell School of Public Policy

at McGill, and this podcast. The evening's entertainment was a panel of thinkers, Taylor Owen from McGill's Center for Media, Technology and Democracy, and Rachel Sampson from the Institute for Research on Public Policy. We were gathered to consider a question, what's the proper role for citizens in government decisions? Our timing was pretty good. We gathered on the day Mark Carney unveiled his new cabinet, his second larger cabinet. Everyone knows all those ministers and secretaries of state will be busy.

A lot of people in my line of work will be focused on the outputs. But what about the inputs? Who does the government decide to listen to? And how do those of us outside government make ourselves heard? I think the first thing we should do is check the premises of the conversation. Are we agreed, panelists, that governments should be accepting input from the outside? Should there even be a role for civil society? How do you define that and how would you advocate for a role for policymaking from outside government?

Taylor, Roland, over to you. They set that question around earlier and I'm actually not sure what I mean, how I understand almost any word in that question. So what do we mean by government? Do we mean politicians? Do we mean cabinet? Do we mean a cabinet minister? Do we need a backbencher or do we mean an opposition member, right? On the political side. The ways of engaging with all of those would be fundamentally different from the other side.

Do we mean the political side of government or the civil service side of things? Because that's a fundamentally different type of engaging as well. How do you convince a politician of something is a very different conversation than how you convince a deputy minister of something versus how you engage or get access to a director of a department in a topic you care about versus how you engage with a more junior person who's sent to a conference that you run into, right? All of those are different. And the third in the government category would be political staffers. So how do you engage with the people who are often tasked with very little knowledge of a topic, as you know, thrown into developing policy on a highly sped up, rushed basis and trying to themselves get up to speed on an area that they're going to have to discuss and debate with the civil service who might have been working on this topic for their lives. And so there's three, when I think of government,

I think of those three fundamentally different entry points. Then the question is input. Like what does input mean? And at what point does that input happen in the policy process? I think it can mean something very different at the very beginning when governments are coming up with ideas or someone's running for the leadership

of something and is looking for big new ideas and it's totally different than their predecessor or they're an opposition leader that's looking to reframe a topic in a brand new way that makes them different from the government or they're a civil servant who like we just went through have gone through a process of medium term strategy and whatever that acronym is, the medium term strategy documents that they do in the RIC period. They're looking for a way of rethinking the thing they care about to the incoming government, try to guess what that incoming government is going to be. So that's a different conversation, right? So I think input means very different things at different moments. Shaping, I don't know what it means.

Do we want external actors shaping policy? And what do we mean by that? I think we should be heard as outside actors. I think it's good we're being listened to. I'm not sure we should be ultimately shaping it. I think this is what we have as civil service and elected officials who are responsible for the policy as they're putting in place should be doing ultimately, right? So shaping is a very amorphous thing. And finally, what do we mean by outside people? Like the list

you listed was academics, think tanks, and journalists. Well, like we're at a policy school Well, like we're at a policy school and I would say the vast majority of academics who might have expertise on a topic do not know how to turn their expertise on a topic into detailed policy advice. They know their topic. They're not responsible for drafting legislation, all the legal and charter compliance, all the trade-offs that are inherent in a policy development, all of the political risk and ideologies that are attached to every scenario, that's not their job. So I don't think you want a world where you're just saying academics, you guys write policy. Trust me, that would be a bad idea.

Think tanks kind of do sit in this intermediary role. So are probably best positioned to be a bridge amongst these communities. And we, I think at the center, some ways sit a bit more as a think tank where we bring researchers together with policy people, um, and try and be a bridge between those two worlds and a useful way for policymakers. Um, I don't know if journalists should be in filling policy. I mean, well, the good news, the good news is we absolutely don't. What you say and choose to say and not say

does have an effect on policy, right? Whether that's your desired effect or not. And I would say you shape policy when you're doing things that are less like journalism, probably, right? Sometimes you write about policy in a way that isn't really reported, it's different. And I'd like to hear what you think about that

role, because it's, I think you play a unique role in the discourse because of that. But I don't think reporters should be shaping policy in an intangible way. So like, I don't know the answer to your question because I think it matters how we define all those different terms. Thanks, Taylor.

Good night, everyone. Actually, that was a, that was a useful, uh, confusing of the topic. That was my goal. And the first conclusion I drew as you were talking was it's also a handy explanation for why it's such a good time to be a consultant in Ottawa these days, because consulting firms essentially

assert answers to all of those questions. When I was going to say the outside, I think we were forgetting a group in the list, the journalists civil society, we were forgetting lobbyists, corporate actors and consultants, and GR consultants. And they have a heavy weight in all of this and probably a disproportionate weight to all the other

people we're talking about as part of civil society. So I think any conversation about outside influence and us wanting more of it needs to recognize that like there are a lot of people with a ton of influence from outside government, but they might be being paid for it and they made up deep financial interests in the outcomes. That's part of this too.

One anecdote, last year, I believe within the last 18 months anyway, I was, there are periodic reports of who are the most lobbied figures on parliament Hill. Yeah. And there was a chief of staff to a senior cabinet minister who was near the top of that list. And I ran into this person.

I said, well, congratulations, you're the person everyone in, in Ottawa wants to meet. And this person says, well, I like to listen to people. I like to know what's going on. And absolutely fair play, but that's a very particular definition of people and what's going on. Well, David Lamedi, when he was justice minister,

since said publicly that he was the most lobbied cabinet minister in the government over some period of time, that's because he was developing policy on AI and that had a real broad set of actors that had interest in it. Rachel Sampson, you work at a think tank. Is government a listening tank? that had a real broad set of actors that had interested. Rachel Sampson, you work at a think tank. Is government a listening tank?

And what are, what are the, how's it going on between IRPP and government or all the various other windows you have into these processes? Well, I'll start by saying that I come at this from two sides since I started my career in the Federal Public Service and worked there for 15 years. So I was on the other side for a long time. And now in think tank world, I often am thinking about how can we be helpful?

Assuming we have a shared interest in developing good public policy for the benefit of Canadians, how can we help? Sometimes I think we can do more in-depth research than the government can do. And that seems kind of crazy when you think like the federal public service has over 300,000 employees. How can a think tank of a few, you know, handful of people do deeper research? But we can because we're not in the throes of the demands of the day,

or if we're anticipating a policy issue, he can work on it for a year or two. We can draw on experts in the academic community. And so we have this ability, I think think tanks have an ability to go deeper on a topic than governments might be able to. And we also have the luxury of looking long-term. I mean, they may do medium-term planning, but quite often it's, the issues are very firefighting right now. What's coming at me? What has to be done this mandate? And as a think tank, we can think about 2040 and 2050 and where do we want to go? And those types of things, which are kind of important

to a lot of public policy issues. The third thing I think that think tanks can do is cut across silos. We all talk about the silos of government and how this department's not talking about department or even within a department, this branch isn't talking about branch. And there are reasons why that's the case.

People are just busy. It's not the top of their to-do lists in terms of what they have to get done. And so think tanks can come in and talk to many different parts of the government and help to connect those dots for them. Taylor mentioned as well that we can be a bridge between academics and governments. There's a lot of translating that goes on, translating technical language into something that's easily understandable, but also explaining how the research or the analysis is relevant within the public policy discussion. Another thing we can do is convening, bringing

together different actors, some of all of these actors that you've spoken about in sort of a safe space. If government has to organize a formal consultation, it's going to take over a year and it's going to be very stilted and people are going to come with their positions. But think tanks can have more sort of informal dialogues that are more free flowing, particularly if they're a closed door. I think think tanks also can help to engage the public on a topic. And I don't think the average person out there is reading IRPP reports, but with the help

of journalists, journalists might read a report or do an interview with one of the researchers and then write an article about it. And then people do read about that and they might talk about it. And it sort of is a way of bringing evidence into the public conversation in a way that governments struggle to do. And the last thing I'll say that think tanks can do is help the quieter voices out there. When you're in Ottawa, there are a lot of loud voices and they tend to be the ones with the power in the lobby groups and all of those things or the wealth. And we can help get the voices of lower income households out there or rural Canadians or indigenous communities, people who may not have that loud voice in Ottawa or in a provincial capital.

So think nice, compelled, play that role and really sort of tell their story in a way that, that isn't getting out there. I think that the questions that we're batting around, who's outside government, how, what does shaping mean and what does government mean? These are kind of eternal questions. I was rewatching the Steven Spielberg's movie about Abraham Lincoln and there's a scene early on where he's talking about the story of Abraham Who's outside government? How, what does shaping mean? And what does government mean? These are kind of eternal questions.

I was rewatching a Steven Spielberg's movie about Abraham Lincoln. And there's a scene early on where there's simply a long, long lineup of petitioners outside the office waiting for their five minutes with the president. And in a lot of ways, not a lot has changed, except that every conversation you can imagine

is just orders of magnitude more cacophonous, which means that the people outside are more than ever self-defining and the shaping is more intractable, harder to understand exactly what shaping entails. And. How have you seen that change over the years on Elrond?

I really think there's a lot more of not listening going on. I mean, I, shortly after the 2015 election for the only time in my career, I testified at a parliamentary committee. It was about leaders debates during election campaigns because I am for my sins moderated one in 2015.

And for 10 minutes afterwards, I was considered a bit of a, uh, an expert. First of all, there was a fire bit of a, uh, an expert. First of all, there was a fire alarm. And so just about half of the time that we had for the, for the, for the session was blown. Secondly, the opposition MPs were keenly interested in my opinion, because I disagreed

with what the government wanted to do. And it was a tug of war. They wanted to tease out of me things that I actually didn't want to say. And the government MPs were perfectly cordial and not a word of what I said was reflected in their report. Um, and like, don't cry for me, but I've heard

from many people who've testified at committees in many ways and it's a version of that. It's Kabuki theater. It doesn't have a lot to do with, you know, heard from many people who've testified at committees in many ways, and it's a version of that. It's Kabuki theater. It doesn't have a lot to do with, you know, rumination or consultation or anything like that. For all that, parliamentary committees are actually in a lot of ways, quite superior to parliamentary debate on the floor of the house of

commons for bringing in new information and for, uh, testing it against assumptions and stuff like that. I mean, for all the lured theater, I think parliamentary committees are quite a bit better than a lot of the alternatives. But somebody I saw read recently, someone reported there's just hundreds and hundreds of reports

over the years from parliamentary committees. And you're afraid to ask who reads them because the answer would not be encouraging. And then when social media started to become a very important new force, you would see reports of environmental scans taken by the communications of branches of ministries and of MPs offices and stuff like that.

We would start to read that they had started to evaluate how helpful or otherwise certain journalists were. And some of my colleagues panicked and I thought, well, why would you not ask yourself those questions? And, and, yeah, I think it's just more complex than it looks. Is government taking any of this advice?

If not, why not? And if yes, what is the government, what is governments? I'm now super sensitive about all these nouns. Be careful with every word. I'm just going to rip it apart. Does government listen? I mean, you've actually been listened to by

government on a couple of key files. For better or worse. Yeah. Compared to, according to some. Um, yeah. I'm like, despite what you just said and not to be a ocrafal here, but like, I actually think on some things they are listening, but the process

really matters and I've seen different processes play out and just to what degree that how they're done and who are listened to and when really, really do matter on the outcome. And I thought I'd just say a little bit about the online harms act and and how that came to be because that's the one we at the center and myself were most involved in. But I think the arc of that over almost four years really tells us something about what works and doesn't in this kind of consultation. And so that whole process began in, so we think of how an idea comes into policy. It was in Trudeau's platform.

So he runs on a platform that says, I am going to do something on online safety. There's problems on the internet. I want to fix them. So fine. He gets elected, but that was when deliverology was a thing. There's problems on the internet, I want to fix them, so fine, he gets elected. But that was when deliverology was a thing.

So. I'm like the last Canadian who thinks that would have been a good idea if they had tried it. Well, they did try it in some point, which was probably part of the problem. Um, so this was a concept brought from the UK that was like, they were going to put detailed mandate letters based on the platform. So like a level more detailed than the platform

in a mandate letter and make the mandate letter public. And they were going to force the department and the cabinet minister of the department to deliver on specifically the details of that now public mandate letter. So maybe a good form of accountability, right? Like the government's telling us what they're

going to do and they're going to do it. And now we, the public can hold them accountable. So not a bad concept. But what ended up happening with online harm, he says Guy Beaux was the heritage minister at the time. It now is again, although now as of today, the minister of Canadian identity, which is

interesting. Um. That's not scary. Well, it depends whose identity we're talking about, I guess, but, um, he's the minister and in the mandate letter, it doesn't say pass or explore an online safety bill. It says implement a 24 hour take down on harmful

and hateful speech, which is a very particular type of policy. And in the online harm space, there's, I'll go down the rabbit hole of this, but there's two big ways you can do it. You can either do these takedowns where you force platforms to take down speech after 24 hours, or you can do a bigger sort of risk-based, more sort of regulatory approach. Right?

So, Gui Bo gets this letter and it says, do one of them. He then starts consulting. Good, he's asking experts. Every single one of them tells him, don't do the thing that's in your mandate letter. And he's like, well, I got a problem here because I'm being held accountable by this prime minister's office to deliver on this thing. And I'm not sure I should be deviating from that. He releases a white paper outlining that policy proposal. And predictably, it gets universally criticized by the outside, by civil society, by academics, by think tanks. Everybody says, you weren't listening to us. That's the wrong approach. It'll lead to more censorship,

overtake downs by platforms, blah, blah, blah, blah. So like not a good start. Then what he does is actually, I think the right process. They start ultimately a three year process of consultation on this. They do a national commission. They do an expert panel for the government with some of the top people in this on it. And we help them with four citizens assemblies, like long citizen assembly processes where they, citizens from across the country talk to experts around the world on this stuff. And they take all of that input and they

come up with a structure of a bill. I think that version has wide buy-in across civil society. And there's a lot of competing interests on this file from like civil libertarians to anti-hate groups to child protection organizations that all have different views of this file, but they all agreed on it. Like there was buy-in on this thing. But then what did they do? They add two pieces to that bill that were not consulted on. Nobody knew they were coming. So at the last minute, they add two separate amendments to this bill that were highly controversial and received all of the blowback on the model and the bill died. So they start with a bad model and they end with a mad model, but in the middle, they

did the three years of hard consultation that in my view, and it's super biased, so take it with a grain of salt, was probably the best version of that kind of regulatory model in the world because it learned the lessons from other countries around the world and picked all the best pieces. But it really matters how you start and end. And ultimately, if you table a bill that has a

couple of things in it that weren't consulted on, it ended up losing all the goodwill from civil society. It was behind it. It fractured the Alliance that was behind it. Academics ended up fighting over it and it then limped its way through parliament and never passed. Let me throw a lob at you.

I think I know the answer to this, but it's good to ask you the question. Yeah. The two new elements at the end of poison pill designed to sink the whole thing. No, I don't think so at, but it's worth asking the question. Yeah. The two new elements at the end of Poison Pill designed to sync the whole thing? No, I don't think so at all. I really don't think so. I think they, I think they were added for reasons

that were not necessarily aligned with the core goals of the actual regulatory model that had buy-in, but it was a huge mistake. I strongly believe that I hadn't done that. We'd have this marvel in place and we'd be in alignment with all of Europe, the UK and Australia who have similar model or in place. And we don't.

Rachel, we, I think we can all see cases of this where a government does a fair bit of listening or really gives it the old call as try. But, but then it seems to hear voices that an outside observer would not have thought were dominant and things go parachaped or other cases. I've spent the last two years spending a lot of attention, sparked partly by an IRPP conference in

Ottawa about the response to COVID, searching in vain for an organized government exercise in evaluating government's response to COVID. And it's hard to shake the strong impression that this is a file where the previous government at least really didn't want to listen. Cause it was just, you know, that way lie dragons. And so they were just going to do some other

stuff instead. I mean, there's, you know, is government listening, I think is another wicked question because there's a, there's a hundred answers to that. I think the answer is it's mixed. Yeah. I mean, there has been a proliferation of advisory panels and bodies and consultation processes.

And those are the formal things. But I think actually some of the most valuable listening sessions are the ones that are not formal and not public, right? Those are when someone calls you up and says, hey, what do you think about this policy issue that I'm working on right now? Or there's an informal meeting.

I mean, those types of things can be much more valuable for both sides. I mean, it's really helpful for us as a think tank to hear what's the government wrestling with, you know, what are the challenges they're facing, how would that influence the advice we provide and the research we do and the analysis we do. But I think it's also helpful for them to get an insight into some and the research we do and the analysis we do. But I think it's also helpful for them to get an insight into some of the research or analysis that's been done on that or even to point them to a particular expert on the outside that might be able to offer something else to them. So that informal dialogue I think is ad hoc, right? It really depends on whether public service, political stuff, at any level on the person

and whether they think it's valuable to reach outside. I think particularly on some of those intractable policy issues where they're really wrestling, you saw with the housing file, for example, there was a lot of reaching out to experts. Several expert panels were set up. There were a few experts were brought into a cabinet retreat and I think it was because it was a hard thing to solve. And so there was this desire to draw from the outside. I think that's not the case with all policies because sometimes they know what they want to do or they have a clear sense of where they want to go. They feel like they have the expertise they need or the advice they need on the inside. And

so they just move without engaging externally for good or bad. So it depends on the issue. But I'd also note that there are valid reasons why they might not listen to the outside. And I know from being within government, there's lots of the outside things coming at me that sometimes we're useful and sometimes we're not. Sometimes advice is it's just not practical. I think of a case that we've done research on the idea of a universal basic income.

It sounds fantastic, right? We know people need a certain amount of money to be able to afford shelter and food. And that it makes sense. It resonates with a lot of people. When you look at the practicalities of actually doing that and what it would mean and the amount of money that it would require, and then all the things that would have to be built into deciding, well, if you can't afford to give it to everybody, who are you getting

into? What are the criteria and what distortions does that create and what other social programs would you have to get rid of to pay for it? So there's things like that where it just, the actual implementation of it is much more complex than the recommendation from the outside.

And the other thing I think has been noted too, it's quite often recommendations from the outsider are not very specific. It's like build more homes. Yeah. You know, of course we should build more homes. But how, how do we do that? What's the government rule?

How do we have this interdictional thing happen? All of those things come into it. And the trade-offs question, you know, I worked at finance Canada for much of my career of my career when you get all the budget submissions that come in with all of the things the departments want and you can't do it all. You have to make hard decisions and even great ideas, great advice just fall off the list because it's not as urgent as something else or not the priority of that government. And there's no, there's competing advice. Many people in government

will describe it as trying to drink water from a fire hose. There's just so much coming at people who are considering these policies that you're just one drop in that fire hose. And so of course you may not have that influence. The last thing is that quite often people don't know about the research or the advice. They don't know it's out there and it's because there's just so much information to break through that wall is really tough.

One thing about cash I'll think about, can I just talk about things about that? Yeah. I think this idea that there are trade offs and technicalities and decisions that civil servants mostly are making that we don't see from the outside is largely a function of them not being allowed to speak.

And often you engage with civil servants who are deep in a file. And these are like world experts on these topics. Like they are incredibly skilled and sophisticated at writing legislation. And they know all of, they know more than us random experts on the outside who are just like looking in and peering in from the outside.

But unless you're like in confidential settings with them, they can't go out and respond to the random op-ed that's telling them to do something that's not charter compliant. They're like, well, we can't do that. Like great idea, but like that literally will not work or this is the wrong stage of the process for us to do that. Or it's conflicting with another piece of

legislation that we're aligning with, but they're not allowed to have that conversation with the public and I wish they were sometimes. For a time in 2010, 2012, that period, one of my standard opening lines when I spoke to groups of public servants was it's very good to be speaking to a group like this because I know that none of you are allowed to speak to me.

And the thing is they used to, and that expertise, I mean, going back a million years to when John Kretchen was prime minister, there was for a few weeks, the government was going to ban unpasteurized milk cheese in Canada, which is like Brie and Cameron Bear. And there was this extraordinary uproar. And I took it on myself to wonder why on earth that this was a thing. And it turns out that there was a mid ranking

official in the health department who was the world's foremost authority, stacks of academic papers, widely referenced on the incontrovertible health hazards of eating unpasteurized. And this was his moment. Right. Absolutely. He got, he got a little bit of bandwidth and

off he went, you know, unfortunately Al He got, he got a little bit of bandwidth and off he went, you know. Unfortunately, Alfonso Galliano was a senior minister in Crechens government and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese is made with unpasteurized milk. And that was the end of that guy. How did, how did things end up for him? I'm sure he, I'm sure he had a very fruitful

rest of his career, uh, but no further influence on public policy. Time to go to the third of our questions, which is what is the state of the linkages between outside and government? Is it getting better or worse? And if it's getting worse, how can it get better? I think, so one manifestation of this

extraordinarily dense information environment is that it seems to me that government corners less smoothly than it used to, that there's a real fear of an open conversation because the processes are so complicated. And then when it becomes clear that the government's direction is untenable, then there's a hard shift.

And so, I mean, we had a first minister's conference to decide Canada's climate policy in 2017 and that set the broad terms of the Trudeau government's policy until there was no more Trudeau government. And then suddenly, welcome to 2025, there is no more consumer carbon tax and we're doing high speed rail.

And it's not at all clear to me how that happened. Anyway, that's my observation. The state of the leak linkages is clumpy, I would say. Taylor, what do you think? I don't think that they're not listening. I think we've talked about all sorts of ways people are listening in all different forums

and all different manners, but it's ad hoc and it's informal and it's chaotic. And maybe that's itself a bit of a problem. And I do wonder if there's ways we can be better formalizing linkages between citizens and the way we're governed beyond just electing parliamentarians. And we have Peter McLeod coming tomorrow to the school to talk about, and his book he's just written about sort of how do we formalize deliberation in democracies. And there are a lot of experiments around the world that do this, right? Like I've become a real convert on

citizens assemblies and deliberate democratic processes where we're not just saying we are going to consult or we're saying we're going to do round tables. We're actually bringing in a very rigorous way way citizens who have a stake in how they're governed into the policymaking process in a very structural formal way. And my experience with them is that there is a huge appetite to do it. And the type of engagement you get is deeply meaningful and brings in around it, around the citizen consultations, a wide range of civil society actors and private sector actors and expertise, but they come into contact with the government via a citizen led process, which brings like a really nice formalized buffer between those

people with all their interests and all their histories and stakes. It brings a buffer between them and parliamentarians and governments formally. So I don't know what the exact answer is, but I have to think it's better than just ad hoc random consultations at various moments. I mean, they could learn something from governments. They haven't just done the citizen assembly process, but actually formalize them into the legislative process. Like we actually have to do these before we pass legislation and we're in some way bound to them and like it's fairly radical, but I

think it's part of the solution here. There's a self selection problem, of course. Citizen subways? Yeah. Sort of, sort of. I mean, there's a self selection problem for juries too? Yeah. Sort of, sort of. I mean, there's a self-selection problem for juries too. Yeah. But we've figured out ways around that, right? Through random sampling and sending out tons of using population-based sampling. And so like to a certain degree, people who agree care about inputting, care about their civic responsibility enough to volunteer. I would say their interests and desires and

incentives to doing so can be made representative of country. In February of 2022, a bunch of people decided that their input was to park trucks on parliament hill for three weeks. Yeah, that wasn't a citizens assembly. They thought it was. a bunch of people decided that their input was to park trucks on parliament hill for three weeks. Yeah, that wasn't a citizens assembly. They thought it was.

Well, I mean. I think that's one of the most interesting things that's happened since I've been covering politics. And I think it's something that's still very difficult to talk about because the most engaged observers are just totally camped on, on like that was a. But that's a perfect example for why you need some sort of legitimate formalized process. Like when we did these assemblies on regulating

the internet, you can imagine there's very different views on that. Yes. And people came into that process, some thinking this was going to be overt censorship and some thinking we should just censor everything. And so they'd be on opposite sides of that convoy protest, I guarantee you.

Yeah. But through four months, they were brought through a process where they empathized with each other, they understood the issue. And ultimately most of them end up agreeing on like a common path. Yeah. So like there is an antidote, I think, to just

convoy versus some other protest, right? But there are still eternally a lot of people who stand outside that process, don't go through any of that process and somebody decide at the end that it was baloney all along. I mean, sure there are spoilers and the biggest challenge of these assemblies and like, I'm not an expert on this thing, so I'm not a diehard defender of them. I just think they're

intriguing and in some ways convinced by their value. But one of their biggest limitations is you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars bringing a hundred people through a process and they might be entirely transformed and empathetic to others and agree in a common policy. But how do you communicate that to millions of citizens? And that's where I think this process is really broken down and there's some lots of new experiments and tools and how to extend those

deliberations to wider citizenry. I think that probably we need that. Uh, Rachel, any thoughts from you on this, on the, the, the, the, the final question, which is the state of the linkages, even the existence of linkages between outside and inside. So yes, it's mixed, it's ad hoc, but I'll give some

examples of where I think it's worked well, or at least it was a start. So one example that the IRPP is our work on employment insurance. So the previous Trudeau government launched a TRIPRA consultation process on employment insurance with the intent of reforming employment insurance. We have yet to see the large-scale reform of employment insurance, but they were committed to the consultation process. And they engaged us to host some roundtables with some academic experts, but also with unions and

small business representatives, etc. And no one agreed. No one agreed how to solve this, you know. Businesses didn't want premiums to go up. The unions and several experts wanted to increase benefits, but without increasing premiums you couldn't pay for it. You know, it was a difficult conversation, no resolution. But based on that, we developed a series of reports and did analysis and worked with some of the experts and published some reports on it that helped to explain the different points of view on employment insurance and analyze some of the policy ideas that were being debated. We heard from departments and things that they thought it was helpful, it was useful.

We have yet to see the policy decisions that come out of it, but that type of engagement is something where people can come together and have an informed evidence-based discussion about a policy topic. Another example, I'll give a shout out to my former deputy minister, Paul Booth, who's here, is leadership from the inside. When he came in to Environment, Climate Change Canada, when I was there, he tasked us with

developing an academic engagement strategy. At that point, the scientists, the physical scientists had lots of interaction with external academics, but the social scientists did not. So we explicitly set up these three pillars of it. One of which was a research network, so building an ongoing relationship between the researchers on the inside in the economics shop with external

academics, a speaker series where we bring in sort of leading thinkers to speak to the department about a particular topic, and then a visiting scholar position where a professor who's on sabbatical came into the department and was in the tent, you know, had security clearance, was embedded within the policy team and really contributing their research and also honestly helping to train and teach some of the staff there to improve their skills.

So those types of things can be incredibly valuable. I think it is fair to say that the closer you get to government, the harder it is to simply issue some sort of blanket dismissal. They don't listen to us. My God, there's people who just never stop listening and who listen in many creative ways. And, but, um, especially in an environment of heightened expectations of being listened to, which

is the lot of being listened to, which is the lot of any citizen today, you curate the music you hear, you curate the films you watch or don't watch. You, you curate your community of people that you have conversations with all the time. Then they certainly come howling at journalists who don't cover things the way that they want

us to cover things. And they also have a sort of hypersensitive expectations as citizens, perhaps properly, but that's just incredibly hard to manage. But there's probably a media role there, right? Like. What's that? I think there's probably a media role there too.

And I'm curious how you see, I mean, when you got that public policy forum award, you gave this talk, right? Yeah. I found it really powerful, which is like that media has a responsibility here to talk about policy to publics in a way that isn't just purely day to day reporting. It isn't purely horse race politics, but it's something else.

And that's part of the solution here too, right? But now I'm going to, I'm going to steal one of your moves and say, it's harder to point at a media than it ever was, you know? Sure. I mean, I, I have been wanting to write about this extraordinary moment in a book that came out last year about the modern history of the

New York Times. It's called the Times by Adam Nagorny, who's a Times journalist. And it tells the story of that paper from about 1977 to the moment that Donald Trump gets elected president. So one of the big shortcomings of the book is all the madness afterwards is not addressed.

But he does talk about a time in 1988 when the candidate Democrat for president dropped out because he was alleged to have had an affair, Donna, Donna Rice and Gary Hart. Exactly. And suddenly the private lives of presidential aspirants became salient.

And so the New York times wrote to 11 candidates for president and said, we want your health records. We want your bank accounts. We want your bank accounts. We want you to sit for interviews with Lawrence Altman, who's a medical doctor so he can, he can kick the tires on your physical fitness to be president and by and large, they all, they all step right up. And if anyone tried to do that today, not only

would a Donald Trump when he was candidate or a Pierre Poliak when he was candidate, refused to up temperate to these demands. Most readers would be astonished at the cheek of any news organization that thought it had a right to make those demands. And so there is a media rule, but there's less

of a media commons than there ever was. Who has questions for our panel? So my question is about community organizations because you did not touch a lot on this reality where the government will offer subventions and grants to community organizations that in return will advocate for changes. And this leads to very strong power imbalance. And I think we saw in the past election how it was playing with kind of the sense of security or stability of those organizations.

So I would love to know more about your thoughts going forward about how like, can we stabilize these organizations while creating a space where they can fully express themselves and like just favor civic participation, knowing that we're in times where polarization is just alarmingly increasing and it may be harder and harder to take strong stance and advocate for the voiceless. You're one of the challenges, um, about organizations that require

funding is how to balance the interests of the funder with the work that's done. I mean, at, at dire PP, we are staunchly independent. The funds that we receive have no influence over our research and what we say, but we're not an advocacy organization. There are many organizations out there that are established for a particular purpose and aligned potentially with where the funds are coming from. So that starts to make the advice a little murkier in terms of, you know, is it independent and how should the government receive that? And then if you layer on that, that the funding is from the government, that becomes even more complicated, Right? And so I think advocating

for transparency on where funding comes from, how that funder is able to influence what the organization does, those types of things are really important. And so any organization that isn't transparent about that, you know, could potentially raise questions. Community organizations can mean many things, but if what I'm reading is organizations who are potentially single issue organizations with deep values attached to them and strong beliefs in an ecosystem that is increasingly polarized and divided and incapable of having sort of public discourse around them, then I think that's a real problem, right? And it's partly because the way we're having these discourses in an ecosystem that's increasingly

fragmented and incentivizing that kind of division. So there's a media piece to this. How are we having these conversations? And are we having them in a place that accentuates those divisions or minimizes them? And I think it's clearly the latter. And I think universities bear some responsibility here. Like we need to be a place where those kinds of conversations can happen. And I'm not sure we are

right now. Governments listen to who they choose to listen to. And that's not even nefarious. It's just gotta be that way because there are so many things to listen to that you have to pick. And there are always moments of tension when it seems like there's a possibility that the party's favor, the government could change it.

Because then it becomes really obvious that a new government might come in that wants to hear other voices and wants to stop hearing the voices that are used to being listened to. And to some extent, there's not much to be done for that to some extent it's healthy for there to be in groups and out groups up to a point. Arguably in the United States, we're seeing

what happens when you pass that point. Hey there. Uh, I'm just wondering if you folks could speak a little bit to, um, how an erosion of trust is impacting engagement with external stakeholders. Whose trust and whom is being eroded? The public's, sorry, the public's trust in government. It's something that we talk about quite a bit and

thinking about what governments can do about that. And I think that's a complex question and something that's going gonna require more research and discussion. But, you know, for example, we're doing research on industrial policy. So that's tends to be when governments are providing some sort of funding or tax credit to companies

for a particular public policy purpose. And you can think of the subsidies for the battery plants in Southern Ontario or something along those lines. There's a lot of mistrust in what the government did there, right? The motivations behind it, who they were trying to benefit, why there was so much money. You know, there were a lot of questions that have come up

as we start to look at this topic. And it seems like the government could have done a lot better at communicating their vision and what they were trying to achieve, but also sharing their work, their analysis behind it. Why did this make sense? What was their approach? Even if they couldn't share the specifics of the financing of a particular deal, they could have shared some of the principles that they were using in providing that funding.

They didn't do a very good job of that. I think that's the sense. Right. And what we've heard from a lot of people is just that it generated a lot of mistrust that the government doesn't have their interests at heart, isn't managing money well, those types of things. And I think more transparency and better communication would really help those. Yeah, I agree with that. Just one thing on trust is I think trust can be a really slippery metric. In the US, for example, over the last 20 years,

we've seen a real polarization of trust. So people still have very high trust in government or media, but only ones that are aligned with their ideology. So liberals trust the New York Times and conservatives trust Fox News. So they both have very high trust just in different segments of the institution. And it's the same with government where Trump supporters have very high trust in Trump and liberals would have almost none. And for a long time in Canada, when you survey people on trust, up until quite recently, our trust levels of our institutions, of our democratic

institutions functioned really differently. But we had broad based trust for a common set of institutions across the political spectrum. And that was certainly the case in media until very recently, where we had like very high levels of trust for the five mainstream news organizations, for example, up until about eight years ago. Same with politics. Central government agencies had fairly high levels of trust across all the most of the political spectrum. And we are now looking, in our work, any research we've done anyway, much more like America, where our trust is becoming polarized. And I think that is the thing we want to look at,

right? Not trust levels overall, but if trust levels are becoming points of division, worryingly we're heading in that direction. And I'll just note too, so the RPP works on this project, a survey project, the Confederation of Tomorrow. And one of the things it found is that when trust fell in one government, like a provincial government, like a provincial

government, it fell for all governments. So it, it wasn't, they didn't distinguish between the stripe of government at those levels. It was if they lost trust in one level of government, they lost trust in all levels of government. There was also a fascinating moment last summer in the United States when liberal trust in big media collapsed briefly, but utterly.

And that was when the Biden presidency was tested and then put to an end and Kamala Harris was trying to become president. And in the early part of her campaign, she was not allowing her candidacy to be tested by journalists and scrums or in formal interviews. And when a couple of us pointed this out, that it seems a very fragile and tentative candidacy.

It's an overwhelming response from democratic voters in the States and democratic sympathizers in Canada was, you have no right to jeopardize this perfect candidacy. I had friends of mine who, who sophisticated friends with long experience in politics and media say things like, why should she sit for an interview with the New York Times?

The New York Times is campaigning for Donald Trump and Politico is campaigning for Donald Trump and CNN will put a Trump rally on live, but they won't put a Harris rally on live. So why should she give them anything but the back of her hand? And then we, you know, not quite a perfect mirror situation, but exactly the same response from

Poliev supporters to the assertion that he should maybe open himself up a little bit more to some kind of scrutiny from the dogs of the press. Almost nobody in modern society has an institutional ride or die who is right no matter what they're right if they agree with you and they're right to the extent they agree with you. And then to hell with her, which is an

offshoot of the, of an environment where almost everyone can perfectly curate most of their life. They get very frustrated with those parts of their life that they can't cure. Nevermind us very much, including government. Thanks so much for coming outside to joining it. We're coming from outside to join us inside. Our thanks to the panelists.

How do we get married? coming from outside to join us inside. Our thanks to the panelists. Thanks for listening to the Paul Wells show. The Paul Wells show is produced by Antica. My producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producer is Stuart Cox. Laura Regehr is Antica's head of audio. If you subscribe to my Substack, you can get bonus content for this show, as well as access to my newsletter.

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