Vass Bednar is an Action Canada Fellow and Dylan Marando is a PhD student in the University of Toronto's Department of Political Science.
A belated new year's resolution for policymakers: think small.
Income inequality is growing. Emergency rooms, prisons, and lecture halls are as congested as our highways. The complexity and wickedness of our problems is slowly paralyzing the public policy process.
From here, intuitions might suggest two broad orientations – go big or go home.
In the "go home" scenario, policymakers avoid complexity, reduce the risk of major failure, and make minor adjustments to the settings of existing policy instruments. Bump up the budget for program what's-it-called by 2 per cent, and then decrease spending in some other place proportionately. Perhaps a program receives a jazzy new name. But no major adjustments to taxes. Definitely no new initiatives large enough to displace existing ones. This is a familiar stance. Let's face it, Canada hasn't had a major policy "win" like medicare since the Guaranteed Income Supplement alleviated seniors' poverty – and that was just a supplement to OAS and CPP.
In a "go big" scenario, we construct a compelling narrative. Policymakers and politicians make promises about a far-off future that are difficult to measure and thus impossible to scrutinize. They suggest at least one or two costly programs that send a shock to the system. In this case, reward could increase, but so do risk and timelines. A thoughtful and well-meaning program today can be a boondoggle tomorrow. Canada could end up in a place where we haven't fixed any problems, and have actually made new ones.
So here's a thought. Think small. That is, resolve to reject the status-quo approach to policy design and instead put our most ambitious and contentious policy creations into action right away. As in, immediately. Take a proposal like Guaranteed Annual Income and test it in one of Toronto's thirty-one Priority Neighbourhoods. Go to Spring Park, PEI, and connect every resident to a virtual doctor and health plan. But don't rush to even imagine a national or universal solution before such cases have been relentlessly evaluated and modified, and direct feedback from citizens has been solicited. And don't wait for a sophisticated solution to rapidly emerge from a comparative jurisdiction either. Design and build one in your own backyard; like when the Mayor of Medicine Hat ended homelessness. As creatures of the provinces, cities – especially smaller ones – may feel constrained in terms of their ability to tackle our toughest problems. This has to change, and soon.
In fact, policymakers at all levels of government should think of municipalities as especially effective sites of nimble problem solving. Use the unique size and structure of our cities, as well the differentiation of our neighbourhoods, as a fertile learning environment for policymakers. Forget the Constitution's silence on cities – let's really recognize our cities as receptive partners in innovation, as well as methodologically well-disposed venues for controlled experiments. The higher we climb the ladder of federalism, the more veto-points we encounter. So why not start where the institutional boundaries are most porous?
Importantly, piloting a policy is not the same as experimenting. Piloting is not the same as taking high-risk high-reward ideas and throwing them out into the real world. Pilots are often just pit stops for bland policies as they make their way through an ideationally constrained process. They sometimes arise under the protection of a panel recommendation or redundant study. Pilots are binary; a chance to say yay or nay to a static idea. Pilots are like dipping your toe into a cold lake. You're not really testing anything. You already know what you're going to do. You're just buying time.
On the other hand, conscious prototyping is a messier but faster way of landing a meaningful result. It's open to a host of possibilities and expects mostly failure. But it takes this trade-off because it wants to move past the political correctness of conventional methods so as to avoid unnecessary delays. It removes a lot of normative biases and tries to focus instead on the evidence in front of it. It's highly participatory and iterative.
We need a rapid and nearly risk-free exchange of ideas and data points between policy-makers at all orders of government. We need this not to be about tinkering at the margin, but about material change. We also need structures in place, like those conveniently offered by municipalities, that make sure paradigm prototyping is contained enough to avoid major spill-overs of "bad" ideas.
Now, making a resolution is one thing, and keeping it is another. We all know that the majority of resolutions fail. But should resolutions only be made on January 1st? What can we learn from the ones we haven't kept? Which challenges did we avoid even attempting to address? And why do we keep making resolutions annually? Answering these questions illustrates the approach that can catalyze a new and more interesting era of public policymaking in Canada. Let's think, but think small while we dream big.