On May 14, the annual $60,000 Donner Prize for the best public policy book by a Canadian will be awarded at a gala dinner in Toronto. The shortlisted authors, including Globe and Mail columnists John Ibbitson and Tony Keller, were asked to identify a misunderstood issue or misguided policy related to their books and explain the importance of getting it right.
Kevin G. Lynch and James R. Mitchell, authors of A New Blueprint for Government: Reshaping Power, the PMO, and the Public Service (University of Regina Press)
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Part of Canada’s sustained underperformance over the past decade or so – anemic productivity, weak growth, stagnant living standards, immigration mess, affordability pressures, underfunded military, national debt doubling – has its roots in the way our governments are governing.
The gap between how the federal government should work and how it actually operates is a chasm, caused by corrosive governing imbalances that affect everything that Ottawa does. While the most impactful of these is the extreme centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s Office, they also include the marginalization of ministers, dominance by political staff of the non-partisan public service and prioritizing of communications over policy and service delivery.
The attacks on our economy and sovereignty by President Trump, coupled with Canada’s underperformance, signal an urgent need to change our policy trajectory. In our book, we examine the intersection between how the government operates and our major policy challenges such as productivity and trade.
Tony Keller, author of Borderline Chaos: How Canada Got Immigration Right, and Then Wrong (Sutherland House Books)
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Immigration, like all public policies, brings both costs and benefits. Government’s job is to manage things to minimize the former and maximize the latter, for the good of Canada. That had always been obvious. But in the period my book focuses on, it ceased to be.
Between 2015 and 2024, Ottawa and the provinces treated immigration as a subject for single-entry bookkeeping. They counted the economic upsides of much higher immigration and much weaker screening, while ignoring the possibility that the new approach might involve costs that outweighed its benefits.
In my book I ask, “Is immigration a problem or an opportunity? Do we need walls or doors?” The answer to both questions is, of course, yes.
There’s an old saying: to govern is to choose. For a long time, Canada was a happy outlier where immigration was relatively high, yet uncontroversial. This success was the logical result of careful choices. But after 2015, Ottawa and the provinces began acting as if immigration policy no longer required choices or limits. We forgot the symbiotic relationship between walls and doors.
Canada can regain our pro-immigration consensus. But we must learn the lessons of what we got right before 2015, and what went wrong after
Tim Wu, author of The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (Alfred A. Knopf)
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There’s a belief, close to an article of faith, that technological advance will always yield broader prosperity for all. OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman captured the creed in 2024 when he said that if we achieve artificial general intelligence, “poverty really does just end.” The view demands a kind of deference to the tech industry as the spinning engine of future progress.
But the belief is often wrong, for it takes human agency to make technology serve us. Consider the cotton gin, invented in 1794, which went on to entrench plantation slavery and ultimately bring ruin to the American South. Or fentanyl, hailed in our lifetime as a breakthrough in pain management before destroying countless lives. The truth is that technological design is a form of policy, and new technologies interact powerfully with economic structure. What we have in place today is a highly extractive economic structure, designed to concentrate wealth in a few hands, that left to its own devices will seize whatever surplus new technology creates.
The lesson for AI is plain: we need some combination of ethics, public norms, and law to steer artificial intelligence so that it augments humanity rather than marginalizing it. It is hard to imagine a higher priority.
John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker, authors of Breaking Point: The New Big Shifts Putting Canada at Risk (Signal)
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Many Canadians believe Donald Trump’s tariffs and threats of annexation represent a grave new threat to Canada’s future. But Trump is only forcing us to confront challenges we have long refused to face. To mix the metaphor: Canadians have been kicking the can down the road and now the chickens have come home to roost.
Our country is divided horizontally, with referendums of succession possible in both Quebec and Alberta, and vertically, with younger Canadians rightly angry that they could be the first generation in this country’s history to be poorer off than their parents.
We have shamefully neglected our military, which in turn has compromised our foreign policy. We offer lip service to the rights of First Nations and other Indigenous people without offering them real hope of a prosperous and sovereign future. Worst of all, governments have so mismanaged things that the national consensus in favour of high levels of immigration has been lost.
The good news is, Canadians have faced and met equal and greater challenges in the past. But now it’s our turn to make the choices, and sacrifices, needed to secure the future of our country.
Bob Joseph, author of 21 Things You Need to Know About Indigenous Self-Government: A Conversation About Dismantling the Indian Act (Page Two)
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I hope my book explains that self-government is not about separating from Canada, but about Indigenous nations having more control over their lives within the Canadian Confederation.
The so-called “benefits” of the Indian Act, such as tax exemptions, should instead be viewed as restrictions that create a cycle of dependency and isolate Indigenous peoples from the mainstream economy. The Indian Act and its policies were based on the misguided principle that Indigenous peoples were “wards” or “children of the state” who needed to be prepared for “higher civilization” through forced assimilation.
Moving toward self-government allows the country to address the historic injustice of forced assimilation and getting it right fosters economic certainty for all Canadians. Dismantling the Indian Act aligns Canada with international human rights standards, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Canadian Human Rights Act, and empowering Indigenous nations to be self-reliant and self-governing creates a more just, inclusive and successful country for the next seven generations.