Evidence Based Policy Making

I had the pleasure of attending the Deloitte Public Sector Leadership Forum on November 13, 2007 as a guest speaker (more about my talk later). One of the other guest speakers was Darrell Bricker, President and COO for Public Affairs of Ipsos Reid. Darrell is co-author (with Edward Greenspon) of a very interesting book that came out a few years ago entitled “Searching for Certainty: Inside the New Canadian Mindset” and a more recent one with John Wright entitled “What Canadians Think (about Almost Everything)”.

In his talk, Darrell spoke about the increasing importance of “evidence” in the development of government policy and in program evaluation. There are three underlying trends that one should be cognizant of:

1) The decline in public trust – not only in government, but in all institutions and organizations. Gone are the days when government could get away with saying to citizens “trust us”. Trust is now situational and has to be earned every time. It can also vanish very rapidly.

2) The rise of the knowledge consumer/citizen – people are not only more educated but they also have available at their fingertips a vast reservoir of human knowledge (thru the Web). People are more likely to challenge authority figures as they too have access to the same knowledge.

3) Searching for Certainty – Canadians are looks for the right answers to questions. They want to be certain about the solutions.

Darrell spoke about the “Rules of the Road” for navigating the new Canadian mindset. Fundamentally as I stated above, it is all about Trust. Citizens will judge the credibility of the sources of information and will seek what is called “trust marks” in judging the quality of the information provided. As part of this, citizens are demanding higher levels of accountability from their governments. This is why governments must move to “evidence based” policy making. As governments move to an “outcome” focus the accumulation of this evidence in an unbiased form that is readily available to citizens becomes more and more crucial not only in helping shape new policies and programs but also in evaluating the effectiveness of existing policies and programs.

In part of my talk I spoke about the massive demographic shifts that Canada will be experiencing in the next 25 years. I was therefore quite interested to hear Darrell speak of Multiculturalism as the new demographic Mega-trend. He also noted that governments are unprepared to deal with this Mega-trend. I will shortly put my speech up on the IPAC site – watch for it.