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O.D. Skelton: The Work of the World, 1923-1941 is a lively and compelling trip through the letters, diary entries, and official memoranda of O.D. Skelton, one of the most important and influential civil servants in twentieth-century Canada. Skelton was a towering foreign policy advisor to Canada's prime ministers and a lonely advocate for the country's independence from Great Britain. His accounts detail his work as he co-operated and clashed with William Lyon Mackenzie King and R.B. Bennett over Canada's participation in the international arena. Norman Hillmer's selection and assessment of Skelton's writings offer a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of the federal government as Skelton systematically built up the Department of External Affairs and the Canadian diplomatic service as instruments of the national interest, confronted the Manchurian, Ethiopian, and Czech crises of the 1930s, aligned himself with senior francophone politicians such as Ernest Lapointe and Raoul Dandurand, and watched in despair as Europe and Asia descended into war. Providing avenues into a time when Canada was struggling to define itself, this collection shows the ways in which O.D. Skelton pushed the country onto the global stage.

A pioneering analysis of Skelton's passionate foreign policy career.

With the 30th anniversary of the policy advisory systems concept on the horizon, it is an appropriate time to reflect further on the concept’s utility, particularly in helping to understand the dynamics of system change and their implications for policymaking. This article provides diachronic analysis of the policy advisory systems in the classic Anglo-Saxon ‘Westminster’ family (Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand). Analysis focuses on five advisory units: the public service and central agencies, partisan ministerial advisers, external consultants, commissions of inquiry, and select special advisory bodies. The principle research aim is to compare these cases to shed light on advisory system dynamics through identification and analysis of shared and countryspecific patterns of PAS change. We argue that the leading dynamics of politicization and externalization often used to characterize how advisory systems change masks idiosyncratic country patterns. We argue that differences in the tempo, intensity, and sequencing of advisory unit (de)institutionalization are clear in these cases and that attention to these dimensions of advisory system change add precision to understanding the organization, operation, and evolution of these systems.

Seven government researchers who helped to guide their governments' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic speak out.

Seven government researchers who helped to guide their governments' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic speak out.

Seven government researchers who helped to guide their governments' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic speak out.

Seven government researchers who helped to guide their governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic speak out. Seven government researchers who helped to guide their governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic speak out.

Abstract The Canadian policy style has been described as one of overpromising and underdelivering, where heightened expectations are often met by underwhelming outcomes. Here, we examine the evidentiary style of Canadian policy-making which undergirds and reflects this policy style, particularly the nature of the policy advisory system that contributes to this pattern of policy-making. We do so by assessing how the different components of the advice system, which include academics, consultants, and policy professionals within the public service, are structured and relate to each other within the overall dynamics of information management and policy formulation in the governments of Canada. Using examples from recent efforts to revitalize Canadian government, the paper argues that the federal government in particular shows a pattern of the predominance of non-innovative academic “super-users,” distributed policy shops, and process-oriented analysts and consultants who combine with attributes of federalism and partisan budgetary politics to drive a distinctively fragmented and procedurally-oriented federal policy-making process. In these processes, evidence is often secondary to political posturing and short-term electioneering in program creation and execution, contributing greatly to the national policy style set out above.

Health systems have repeatedly addressed concerns about efficiency and equity by employing trans-national comparisons to draw out the strengths and weaknesses of specific policy initiatives. This paper demonstrates the potential for explicit historical analysis of waiting times for hospital treatment to add value to spatial comparative methodologies. Waiting times and the size of the lists of waiting patients have become key operational indicators. In the United Kingdom, as National Health Service (NHS) financial pressures intensified from the 1970s, waiting times have become a topic for regular public and political debate. Various explanations for waiting times include the following: hospital consultants manipulate NHS waiting lists to maintain their private practice; there is under-investment in the NHS; and available (and adequate) resources are being used inefficiently. Other countries have also experienced ongoing tensions between the public and private delivery of universal health care in which national and trans-national comparisons of waiting times have been regularly used. The paper discusses the development of key UK policies, and provides a limited Canadian comparative perspective, to explore wider issues, including whether ‘waiting crises’ were consciously used by policymakers, especially those brought into government to implement new economic and managerial strategies, to diminish the autonomy and authority of the medical professional in the hospital environment.

In considering risk forecasting in light of anthropological and interdisciplinary impact assessment literature, this article demonstrates that impact assessment in Canada's tar sands sector is about designing the future, legitimizing future energy development, and rendering defense of foraging economies into technical, rather than political, channels. Impact assessment is a future-oriented, modeling-based practice, with a problematic relationship to empirical research methods such as ethnography. While purportedly foregrounding the knowledge of expert forecasters over that of impacted people, impact assessment documents and processes actually raise serious questions about forecasters' expertise and impartiality. Using three case studies of traditional land use reports from the tar sands region, this article draws on literature from the Anthropology of the Future to understand and critique the construction of expert knowledge and predictive power in the tar sands region through social impact assessment documents.