Contemporary Issues in Canadian Federalism Series: Developing Public Policy in a Diverse Federation (TRN5-V59)

Transcript: Contemporary Issues in Canadian Federalism Series: Developing Public Policy in a Diverse Federation

[00:00:00 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]

[00:00:03 The screen fades to Rupak Chattopadhyay in a video chat panel.]

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our event today on developing public policy in a diverse federation. This is the eighth event in a series called Contemporary Issues in Canadian Federalism Series. My name is Rupak Chattopadhyay. I'm the President and the CEO of the Forum of Federations and I will be your host this afternoon. Thank you so much for joining us.

Let me start this afternoon by acknowledging the land from which I am talking to you, located here in Ottawa on the unceded unsurrendered territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation whose presence here reaches back to time immemorial. Some of you today may be joining us from various parts of the country, and I therefore encourage you to take a moment to recognize and acknowledge the territory that you are speaking from.

This afternoon, we'll be hearing from two leading experts on the topic of developing public policy within the Canadian context. At a time of high prices, difficult home ownership, stretched public services, federalism impinges on every aspect of our lives. So, let me start by introducing each of our experts and then asking them to make their presentations.

Charles Conteh is Professor of Public Policy and Management in the Department of Political Science at Brock University. Professor Conteh's research and teaching interests are in the area of Canadian and comparative public policy, public management, political economy, and multilevel governance. His current research focuses on governance structures and processes in complex and dynamic policy systems, particularly examining collaborative and strategic policy formulation and implementation. Professor Conteh currently investigates how local, regional, and national economies are reinventing themselves in the face of seismic global, economic, and ecological changes.

Our second expert today is Professor Jennifer Wallner, Associate Professor with the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, and the Jean-Luc Pepin Research Chair in Canadian politics. Her work focuses on federalism and public policy with areas of specialization in education, fiscal centralism, and intergovernmental relations. She has published extensively on Canada, Australia, and the United States, and is currently building expertise on Germany.

Thank you all for joining us today. Each guest will provide a short presentation. They have between 15 and 20 minutes to make the presentation. Then, this will be followed by a panel discussion, and finally, we'll open up the question-answer period for the audience. You're welcome to send your questions in the language of your choice by clicking the raised hand icon situated at the top of your right corner. We will try and get as many questions in as possible, depending on time permitting.

So, let's start off this afternoon's presentation with Charles.

Charles, I'd like to invite you to present. Over to you. Thank you.

[00:03:18 Charles Conteh appears in a video chat panel.]

Charles Conteh: Well, thank you very much, Rupak, for that kind and generous introduction, and thank you to the Canada School for the invitation to share my research with this audience, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for taking time out of your busy schedule to engage with us this afternoon.

So, a bit of context, my interests in federalism, intergovernmental relations go back several years, roughly about 15 years ago when I took an interest in studying the regional development agencies, the RDAs. I mean, these are federal agencies with a mandate to engage different parts of Canada in terms of economic development program delivery, several years of observing, interviewing, engaging these agencies. I was really fascinated by how they navigate the complexities of federalism, how they can set boundaries, how they work with provincial entities, how they engage municipalities, and a few takeaways from those observations led me to a deep conviction that, in fact, to understand federalism is to move past simply sort of a rigid constitutional interpretation, so understanding pragmatic, emerging instruments of how public servants, how public administrators are delivering services, how they are navigating boundaries, how they're engaging with non-state actors, how they're working with municipalities.

And so, from that study, in fact, I began to sort of reconstruct my understanding and my imagination and, frankly, my approach to looking at policy issues. Since then, I've moved on to looking at agriculture, agri-policy, agrifood innovation, but I bring that concept of multilevel governance, kind of a fluid understanding of federalism, into understanding how policies are implemented, how programs are delivered here in Canada. And so, with that background, I want to dive into the conversations (inaudible), looking at the changing contours of intergovernmental relations in Canada with a focus on emerging instruments of multilevel governance within Canadian federalism.

Now, to put things in perspective, I want to conceptualize a few things around how I approach the subject of intergovernmental relations. First of all, when you talk about intergovernmental relations, there are different kinds of contexts. There are federal systems like Canada, the U.S., and Australia, and the like, but there are also intergovernmental contexts that are not exactly federal, for instance, the EU, that may have what they call a more multi-tiered jurisdiction, sort of national government with subnational, oftentimes local, but also a supranational entity like the EU itself in Brussels and other places. And so, you have intergovernmental arrangements in those contexts outside of federalism but pretty much more or less the same in terms of navigating boundaries and designing policies in delivering services and the like.

And you can also think about intergovernmental relations within the context of what we view as sort of unitary systems like the U.K, right? Within the U.K., it's a standard unitary system but you have kind of decentralized entities across all of the union, Wales, Scotland, and the like. And also, within those entities, you have subnational government. And so, looking at any policy domain within the U.K., even though it's a unitary system, technically, you have intergovernmental complexities in policy design and implementation. Now, of course, my focus is on intergovernmental relations within the context of fair legal systems like Canada.

And another thing I also want to clarify is my unit of analysis. Scholars of federalism or intergovernmental relations will oftentimes look at different branches of government. Those are local, they're legislative, and they tend to focus on what we call broad systemic parameters in terms of sort of the legislative canopy (inaudible), different jurisdictions, who's supposed to do what, and they will look at different legislation or acts of Parliament or the legislature within the context of how it works in this intergovernmental setting, and the scholars are looking at federalism or intergovernmental relations from the executive lens.

And I belong to this second branch in the sense that they're concerned about the Cabinet with the mandate to carry out specific sets of policies and giving policy domains economic, social, environmental and the like, and they track the whole process of policy development, implementation, program, design, execution, service delivery, monitoring, and evaluation within that intergovernmental context, and our colleagues look at judicial, for instance, Canada's different courts, subject interpretation, the appellate process, from a lower to an upper, from a provincial to a national, to kind of understand how judicial processes navigate through sort of intergovernmental architecture. Again, my interest is very much in the executive.

And finally, you have levels of analysis. I mean, there are scholars of intergovernmental relations that like to look at the broad systemic frameworks. I mean, these scholars oftentimes would view, for instance, Canada as one typology, one type of intergovernmental relations compared to other types, right? So, they'll have sort of a broad characteristic for Canada compared to the United States juxtaposed with, say, Australia, right? You have other scholars and they belong to the latter that look at a more meso-level policy-centric arrangement. So, in other words, rather than view Canada itself in terms of a broad type, they look at different policy domains and the manifestations of intergovernmental relations within each policy domain.

The underlying assumption is that you cannot broadly sort of just paint Canada with broad strokes being this kind of federal system or this kind of intergovernmental system, or rather to understand the particularities of a given policy domain, whether economic, environmental, agricultural, social, housing, you name it, because each policy domain will have its own configuration of federalism or intergovernmental relations.

And my background in public policy led me to the conviction, and of course, observing the regional development agencies and how they engage in their program delivery led me to the conviction that Canada, in fact, is best understood as different kinds, different subcultures, different patterns, different instruments of intergovernmental relations within various policy domains.

And to sort of put that in broad perspective then, being an academic, I like to talk about research methods, kind of a broad quantile of my approach is looking at Canada as a federal system compared to all the kinds of systems, say, multi-tiered jurisdictions in the EU or unitary systems in the U.K. So, I look at federal systems and I look at Canada, and my timeframe is the past two decades. I want to track over time, kind of chronologically, the adaptation, the transformation of Canada as a dynamic, emergent, adaptive, resilient intergovernmental system and see continuities and departures over time, and I look at executive branch of government because I want to focus on policy which leads me on to the level of analysis, as I mentioned, a meso-level policy-centric focus.

For the last almost decade now, my interest has been in agrifood innovation policy. Now, the concept I bring into my conversation, in understanding intergovernmental relations in Canada and specifically federalism, is multilevel governance. I'll speak very soon to the proposition of multilevel governance, but the challenge is full of conventional constructs of federalism. It brings a new set of assumptions and propositions about how we should understand the practical workings of federalism from the standpoint of policy development and implementation.

The question to try to answer, and I've been sort of asking this question for the last few years now, is what are the emergent mechanisms, structures, and processes of intergovernmental relations in Canada, and I use the word 'emergent' deliberately because I focus on adapting causes of change over time or continuity over time. So, that temporal dimension of tracking continuity and change over time means I want to look at emergent. What is emergent? What is new? Is it a departure from? Is it a continuation? Is it some kind of metamorphosis to existing approaches to dealing with a given policy issue across jurisdictions in the Canadian federal system? And the second question then is, kind of by extension, what good practices and challenges could be sort of distilled or extrapolated from this arrangement to serve as lessons for other kinds of systems, be they federal, multi-tiered, or decentralized unitary systems.

And the premise of my research really grounds itself in the simple fact that to understand federalism in Canada, we need to sort of think beyond the Constitution. The Constitution is a guide, it's a framework. It's the architecture on which our government systems rest. However, given the growing complexity of public policy in Canada's multi-tiered jurisdiction and given some of the emergent expectations by citizens to be more engaged, given the challenges of globalization, industrial restructuring, essentially all of the opportunities and the challenges of governance in the 21st century means that we need to re-think the very architecture of federalism from the standpoint of policy, design, and implementation.

But you may wonder, okay, I keep talking about the present context of the 21st century with emerging challenges, and that would raise the question, what then is the past? Where are we coming from and where are we going? And I wanted to provide sort of a broad stroke of a chronological overview to understand the change (inaudible) of federalism, at least in the academic literature.

In the 1950s, 1960s, Canada was broadly viewed as practicing what we call cooperative federalism. Now, mind you, I have my caveats about these broad typologies but generally, there's some sort of consensus in the literature that in the 1950s and 60s, the post-war year of building the architecture of the welfare states, the federal government had the spending power that was a vision of social building and construction and nation building. And with that, the federal government was able to, in fact, engage with provinces that were very cooperative, were very pliant. I mean, provinces didn't have the resources and, frankly, didn't have the policy sophistication to engage at the same level. And so, they basically worked with the federal government.

And so, those two decades were one of cooperative federalism in which we built the current architecture of the welfare state in terms of social policy, housing, health care, and the like. But by the 1970s, especially by the mid-1970s, things were changing and the economy has gone to a rebound. There was a degree of sophistication on the part of the provinces. They've built the architecture of their bureaucracy. Their resource base was fully developed. And so, you have a subtle provincialism. They started pushing back. They started going back to sections 91 and 92 of the Constitution, and essentially claiming their jurisdictional domain, and this was the age of contestation and also, if you recall, by the late 1960s, the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, and they moved towards a more assertive provincialism and pushing back on Ottawa's claims to certain policy development meant that, in fact, that precedent from the Quiet Revolution and Quebec's demand essentially spilled over to all the provinces. And so, this was an age of contestation, conflict, and pushback by the provinces.

But by the 1980s, they realized that it was really contested, very conflictual, and oftentimes very stagnated. And so, we enter the realm of summit federalism. You'll recall the Charlottetown Accord, Meech Lake Accord. The desire was to overhaul the whole architecture of federalism constitutionally and design something new that will accommodate this new conflict and this new contest that was being experienced in the 1970s. And of course, those efforts came to a complete implosion, a failure, but from the ashes of that implosion, there was a realization that we need to think not about overhauling the architecture but rather designing more pragmatic means of walking across different jurisdictions.

And this was a decade of collaborative federalism. So, in fact, things like the Social Union Framework Agreement and (inaudible) Agreement were designed in the 1990s. What you had was departures from the strictures of the Constitution to more accommodation, pragmatic accommodation. Now, the foundation of that sort of collaborative federalism in the 1990s really eventually matured by the turn of the millennium into something that we call multilevel governance, or at least scholars in my tradition called multilevel governance, because about this time, things were changing. There was a growing decentralization of most policy domains down to even municipalities.

And also, municipalities were becoming very assertive. They were dealing with major challenges, the crisis of housing (inaudible), unemployment… I mean, homelessness (inaudible), infrastructure, transportation, other major challenges. Cities and municipalities were at front line of most social and infrastructural issues in Canada. And even today, we're dealing with major emergencies like fighting wildfires or forest fires and the like. And once again, the conversation around, how do you position municipalities to have more comprehensive engagement, policy design, and response to the issues of the day? So, what the late 1990s and the turn of the millennium led to was effectively multilevel governance.

[00:16:33 A slide is shown with the title "Multilevel Governance in Federal/Multi-tiered Systems – A Conceptual Framework" above text that reads:

"Traditional Collaborative Federalism + New Public Governance & Instruments = Multilevel Governance"

"Traditional Collaborative Federalism

1. Summit federalism
2. Broad-based agreements
3. Static frameworks
4. Purely intergovernmental
5. Municipalities absent"

"New Public Governance & Instruments

1. Fluid institutional boundaries
2. Policy-centric focus on issue subsystems
3. Formal and informal inter-organizational partnerships
4. Joint action among a constellation of actors
5. Co-provision of resources & framing of co-benefits
6. Public servants as policy entrepreneurs"

"Multilevel governance

1. Discrete tiers of jurisdiction but overlapping networks
2. Increased participation of non-state actors
3. Municipalities exercising greater policy agency
4. Shared sanctioning and coordinating capacity for joint ventures
5. Co-creation of value vertically and horizontally".]

But with multilevel governance, you had a combination of two specific kinds of traditions. Multilevel governance was not a doing away of collaborative federalism but rather an integration of collaborative federalism, with what we call a new public governance. I won't go into the details of the key property or propositions of each approach but added to traditional collaborative federalism, you have the new public governance suggesting, in fact legitimizing, the need for fluid boundaries across tiers of jurisdiction for a more policy-centric focus on issues of systems. In other words, try to understand the configuration of key players within a given policy domain whether economic, social, environmental, ecological, and extract the key actors at the federal, provincial, and local level or the municipal level, but also non-state actors, and see how well, in fact, they engage within that policy domain.

And what that also meant by extension, an emphasis on informal interorganizational partnerships that oftentimes will transcend boundaries of jurisdictions or even public-sector-private-sector domain, and the new public governance has a set of assumptions and sort of, if you will, prescriptions around cooperation of resources, framing of co-benefits, in other words, sets of ideas around how different levels of government would engage, but also how they will engage with non-state actors in the design and delivery of specific kinds of policies.

But the part that excites me the most as a public management scholar is that the new public governance sets, in fact, a vision of the public sector employee, the public servant, in the context of governance as a leader, a policy entrepreneur that is navigating boundaries, engaging different kinds of actors. In other words, you don't sit within your domain of a public… of the federal or the provincial or the local, but rather how you engage with actors within the constellation of a policy domain to hash out policy ideas or to design policies across jurisdictional boundaries. So, the notion of the policy (inaudible) is kind of a boundary spanner, someone that can navigate across different boundaries of the world, and combining collaborative federalism with a new public governance will give you the new public or rather multilevel governance.

Now, the key principle of the multilevel governance, I have here in the blue. I won't go into the details but the idea is… so, think about multilevel governance within the context of federalism as designing and executing policies through transboundary partnerships to mechanisms of engagement that go beyond simply the strictures of the Constitution to working with key stakeholders within the policy domain. Now, I want to move past the big, abstract, conceptual, and flesh it out more concretely in two examples I've been looking at for the past few years to help me understand really how multilevel governance manifests itself in Canada.

And the one thing I've been looking at is the Global Innovation Cluster Initiative. Most of you will remember that this started as the Super Cluster Initiative, the Innovation Super Cluster Initiative, where we have five superclusters created. Now, the genesis of this arrangement was a provincial-federal engagement around Canada's innovation policy design, and the plan was basically to bring in non-state actors that would serve as intermediaries, that would serve as kind of these boundary spanning intermediaries in the execution of policy.

And one of the superclusters that I've been looking at is the Protein Innovation Cluster, the PIC, right? So, from this sort of provincial and federal agreement on innovation policy in Canada, you have one of the GIC, which is the Protein Innovation Cluster, serving as a federal-provincial-local transboundary intermediary institution, working closely with public sector agents but also working with industry partners to execute the specific sort of policy within Canada's innovation policy design, and what I've tracked basically is to understand how to keep cooperative multilevel governance with respect to policy innovation, transcending boundaries, transjurisdictional monitoring and evaluation, actually are being effective within the GIC.

Another example I've been looking at is the Canadian Agricultural Partnership or the CAP. As most of you know, of course, we've moved on to the second iteration of CAP which is sort of the sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership. Now, fundamentally, CAP is simply a federal-provincial agreement… sorry, federal-provincial-territorial agreement on agricultural policy, agrifood Innovation, and sort of milestones that Canada would need to sort of navigate over a five-year period, but the magic of this particular policy is to design a sort of agreement or design a set of deliverables and work with non-state actors as conduits for engaging in the execution or delivery of the cap agreement.

Now, those non-state actors typically would align their strategies with agrifood innovation systems at the local level, and those agrifood innovation systems are grounded within the regions of the management municipalities, and those municipalities tend to align their strategies with their respective provincial agrifood ministries, for instance, in Ontario (inaudible). So, what you have in the execution of the CAP agreement is a joint sort of broad framework between the federal, provincial, and territorial government, but in terms of the execution, you have kind of the distribution of resources to non-state actors sort of aligning their strategies with municipalities who are aligning their strategies with their provincial agencies. And so, you have this complex sort of configuration or control of intergovernmental program design and delivery that essentially is fluid, adaptive, pragmatic, and very practical.

[00:22:44 A slide is shown with the text "Key Takeaway – Emergent forms of intergovernmental arrangements constitute a shift from "layered cake" to "marble cake" federalism" above an image of a layered cake next to a marble cake. The text on the layered cake diagram reads "Past – Layer Cake Federalism" "Programs and authority are clearly divided among the national, state, and local governments." The text on the marble cake diagram reads "Present – Marble Cake Federation" "Programs and authority are mixed among the national, state, and local governments".]

And so, I tried to tease out some core principle from this arrangement, and the broad takeaways, just a few which I'll share with you, you have an emergent form of intergovernmental arrangement in Canada that is best viewed as a shift from a layered cake to a marble cake. So, when I look at those two policy examples of Canada's GIC policy and I look at the CAP agreement, what I found is the manifestation of federalism as a marble cake as opposed to a layered cake. Now, that complexity has its challenges in terms of accountability, but the long and short is that it is about responding to the complexity and the nuances of delivering specific sets of policy within this new context of the 21st century that, in fact, led to these adaptive instruments of policy design.

So, in conclusion then, to view intergovernmental regulations through the lens of multilevel governance, there are several implications. One, that we understand that the architecture of federation is often different from an actual practice of federalism, right? So, the architecture of federation is found in sections 91 to 95 of the Constitution, and rightly so. It's a foundation, it's an architecture, but we have to move past it to really understand the practicalities of policy design and implementation in Canada.

Secondly, we have to move past… now, I use the word 'shift'. My colleagues would push back on the world 'shift'. So, I would say expand our analysis from this static macro institutional analysis of Canada being this kind of federalism compared to the Australian type compared to the U.S. type, but rather understand fluid adaptive meso-level forms of intergovernmental relations, i.e. to view Canada as one typology among different types is to miss the point of complex nuances within policy domains.

And another implication is to take municipalities more seriously as we face the challenges of the crisis of housing in Canada, homelessness in Canada, climate change, immigration, fighting forest fires, municipalities, transportation policy, I can go on and on and on. Municipalities are at the front line of dealing with these complexities and how we re-imagine and re-think the architecture of federalism, the practice of federalism, to incorporate them. While in principle, they are creatures of the provinces, in practice, they are at the front line, oftentimes the custodian, dealing with most of the challenges that we face economically, socially, or in terms of infrastructure and other kinds of issues.

And ultimately, I want to conceptualize intergovernmental relations simply by moving beyond government-to-government. The two examples I provided, whether the GIC or the CAP agreement, the genius of those designs is the incorporation of non-state actors, including industry partners in some cases, as co-delivery conduits. Now, of course, they work with different actors within the public sector. The public sector is responsible in terms of accountability, but the design and delivery is to incorporate non-state actors which means that we want to re-think federalism beyond simply a government-to-government type agreement.

And finally, to think about federalism as complex, adaptive transboundary sort of policy subsystems. I use the word 'subsystem' with the plural, i.e. different kinds of policy subsystems operating in different kinds of policy domains that provide quite a rich tapestry of federalism, even within Canada alone. But ultimately, they all share one thing in common. It's about the pursuit of joint actions across jurisdictions using different kinds of instruments to pursue those end goals.

Thank you.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Thank you, Charles, for a very textured, to draw on your cake analogies, wonderful presentation. I think you've problematized very nicely the challenges of the marble cake federalism that we see not just in Canada but in other parts of the world, as well as highlighting the importance of thinking about interaction within the federal system rather than just intergovernmental relations, because there are now so many players outside of the formal governmental channels. And last but not the least, I think something that we see in many parts of the world, the importance of municipalities, something that became particularly apparent not just in federal countries but also in many unitary states during the course of the recent pandemic.

I'm sure there'll be many questions that we'll return to in a moment with, but for now, I'm going to turn to Jennifer Wallner and invite Jen to make her presentation.

Jen, over to you.

Jennifer Wallner: Merci beaucoup. Ça me fait un grand plaisir d'être ici aujourd'hui avec toute le monde.

And I also want to thank the Canada School for inviting me to contribute to this eighth session in a fantastic series on Contemporary Issues in Canadian Federalism.

[00:27:37 Jennifer Wallner appears in a video chat panel.]

Like Rupak, I am also delivering my presentation on the unceded, unsurrendered traditional Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin people, a territory that crosses the borders of Ontario and Quebec.

The Algonquin people continue to live on the Ottawa River and its tributaries in ten communities, and based on a protocol signed in 2004, the Algonquins of Ontario, the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario are working together to reach a settlement of the Algonquin Land Claim. And they are in the final stage of treaty negotiations, in fact. Negotiations that are unfolding within the evolving modern day treaty making practices and policies. And here now, I will quote the government of Canada's Collaborative Modern Treaty Implementation Policy "to fully embody a true Nation to Nation, government to government and Inuit-Crown relationships with Indigenous modern treaty partners." In offering this land acknowledgment and referring specifically to federal policy. I'm also underlining a fundamental reality of this country. Policymaking involves multiple governing, legally empowered authorities representing different nations, jurisdictions and communities that together are part of Canada's federation.

As has been reinforced throughout the Living Tree series, federalism establishes an environment of opportunities, constraints and complexities within which policymakers and decision makers must work. But what defines federalism is more than a formal division of powers. Essential to the concept of federalism are the twin principles of shared rule and self-rule in which communities of people are bonded together under a common umbrella, while also exercising autonomy such that they each have self-determination.

Governing is always a challenge. However, these challenges are amplified in liberal, democratic, multinational federations with strongly empowered constituent unit members and re-empowering members through treaties and land claims that are united across an expansive territory through institutions but with important differences in identities, socioeconomic profiles, resources and indeed fundamental understandings of the federation itself and how it should work. But what are seen as challenges can also be embraced as opportunities when recognized and understood, particularly in the various realms of public policy.

However, to make that possible, we need to embrace collaboration where upstream and downstream actors, including elected politicians, public managers, service providers, user groups and relevant interest organizations and advocacy groups are engaged. Furthermore, engagements must be based on deliberation to bring forth relevant knowledge, stimulate processes of mutual learning, and build joint trust ownership over new solutions. As I will discuss today, real collaboration is absolutely essential here in the Canadian Federation, not simply a catchphrase or a slogan that can be casually bandied about.

And I believe there are also four considerations that need to be recognized in order to achieve real collaborative policymaking arrangements in practice. They are non-hierarchical arrangements, trust ties, information sharing and what can be colloquially called collaboration from nose to tail. As I will discuss with you today, public servants play an essential role in operationalizing each of these points. You help establish processes, bring the right people to the tables, and enable the necessary dialogues to capitalize on the opportunities Canada's system of federalism presents. Some may ask why it's important to think about these things when making policy. Aren't policy just simply there to shape behaviours and realize objectives through efficient and effective instruments. Why am I bringing up ideas and identities?

Because I believe and in fact, I don't just believe this. It's a true statement of fact. Policy, the making of it, the implementation processes to actualize it and the outcomes from it are tangible representations of expressions of the will of the people as channeled by political decision makers, informed and supported by the work of public servants. To work therefore, policy must be legitimate and developed in a way that respects and reflects the reality that Canada is a composite country that is not actually hierarchically configured, despite what some may think, and that no single government can speak unilaterally for all aspects of citizens' lives. The needs of citizens throughout the Federation can only be met if their and their aspirations realized with real collaboration in public policy therefore. Federalism is not a zero sum game, and collaboration does not, nor should it necessitate dramatic and illegitimate sacrifices to the principle of self-rule in pursuit of shared rule.

In today's presentation, I will be addressing three things. I will actually start with the Constitution and its significance for the dynamics of policymaking in Canada. I will then outline the deep interdependence in the Canadian Federation that necessitates engagement of multiple jurisdictions, despite the formal division of powers. From there, I will conclude with a discussion of some of the practices and arrangements that help facilitate collaboration and the role that public servants can play. So, first, the Constitution. The model of federalism that informed the drafters of Canada's Constitution in 1867 is premised on the idea of allocating discrete sets of powers and entrusting them to one of two orders of government, the central government in Ottawa holding certain powers and the provincial, now by convention, the territorial governments holding on to others. With each order of government being responsible and accountable for its actions in its respective areas to different electorates. This model was seen to have two compelling benefits. First, it helped to recognize and preserve areas of autonomy for the future. Constituent members of the newly formed Federation, particularly in sectors that were significance to the representatives of the individual colonies back in the 1860s, including hospitals, education, municipalities, public lands, incorporation of companies, natural resources, while also establishing a general common government, central government that could help facilitate the establishment, what was then known as the Dominion Government of Canada, in fact, that could facilitate the establishment of a common market, ensure common security, and help foster a collective strength that would be unattainable for each constituent member on its own.

Put simply, without the division of powers entrenched into a constitutional document, Canada, as we now know it would never have come to be. The second reason it had compelling benefit was it was viewed as an approach to federalism that would maintain a clear division of roles and responsibilities and lines of accountability. As the federal government was entrusted with its set of powers and the provinces were entrusted with theirs. The metaphor that was used at the time to describe this arrangement was a nautical reference to watertight compartments. This constitutional design of watertight compartments is centered on the idea that each order of government should exercise its powers and work within its respective jurisdictions free from the influence of the others. The drafters thought that this would enable efficient and responsible governments and did not foresee that these separate governments would need to work together to resolve common problems, pull resources to secure collective benefits or formally engage in relations.

In fairness, when the men, when the small group of men designing Canada's constitution were working, the roles and responsibilities of the state resembled nothing like what they look like today. There was little notion of a social safety net, and the footprint of government activity was rather restrained. There was also nothing of the vertical and fiscal imbalance, as was discussed during the third session of the series. Health care, education, child care, public transportation, public housing, energy, natural resource development and pollution control were not even remotely conceived of then as they are today. Consequently, the designers of Canada's constitution had little idea that cooperation, coordination or collaboration between and among the two orders of government in Canada would ever be necessary. This fact perhaps explains why no formal… no provisions to formalize intergovernmental arenas were included in the Constitution. Working in their areas of jurisdiction largely independently. Provinces have in fact developed formidable capacities.

Indeed, it is necessary to underscore that provinces are the locus of many policy innovations in Canada that have evolved into overarching pan-Canadian frameworks. From hospital insurance in Saskatchewan to childcare in Quebec. Income tax, which was first introduced by the province of British Columbia to Alberta's climate strategy that fed directly into the subsequent pan-Canadian accord on clean growth and climate change. Provincial legislators, supported by their respective public services working in their areas of jurisdictional authority, have contributed to developing policies that meet the needs of not only their specific residents, but also those living in other parts of the country. Which leads me now to the second component of my presentation, the reality of interdependence. So, like Charles, I also completely believe that you can't just look at a constitutional document to see how a federation actually functions in practice.

And so, while the Constitution is structured according to a clear separation of powers, the reality is that policymaking, both the production of it and the effects from it rarely fall into the neatly defined powers codified more than 150 years ago. Furthermore, the resources and capacities needed to respond to many of our challenges often exceed those held by one government on its own, from healthcare to education and the programs and practices that have reported strong achievements due to provincial actions would not be possible without the actions of the provinces supported financially through major federal transfers and the equalization program.

Finally, multiple governing units, including municipalities with separate or subsumed authority, are implicated in so many areas of activity from tourism to agriculture, fisheries to natural resources, energy production and distribution to immigration. The decisions of one influence the others. Regardless of what our constitutional order attempted to establish or what some working throughout the country may wish to believe. Canada is not only a composite country, but an interdependent federation. Our recent experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic, I believe, provide a compelling example of this condition of interdependence.

To start, the formal division of powers between the federal, provincial and territorial governments translated into situations where one government alone could not execute complete authority over major policy levers to fight the pandemic. Take vaccines. The federal government was responsible for approving and subsequently procuring the vaccines for the country, while the provinces, territories and Indigenous governments were responsible for the delivery of those vaccines for those within their jurisdiction. Local and regional public health authorities, local governments and Indigenous authorities who operate within provincial territorial settings, moreover, also played a major role in the development and execution of strategies to distribute vaccines throughout the population.

Consequently, implementing a vaccine strategy required the engagement and coordination, indeed the collaboration of decision makers and implementers in different governing bodies for an extended period of time. Then, looking from a very matter of fact perspective, the spread of a pandemic, the responses required to combat it, and the intentional and unintentional effects of those responses cannot be contained within the political and administrative boundaries we have developed to help us organize and structure our activities. Effective Tracking of COVID-19, for example, requires that tests are available and that the public can access them, that the results of the test are reported and that data is made available in a systematic and, comparable fashion. However, because each provincial and territorial government is responsible for developing its own arrangements for testing and tracking, and while the Public Health Agency of Canada provides considerable support, the Federation as a whole has not collaboratively developed a coordinated health data tracking system.

And so, our information on infection and transmission rates of COVID-19 in Canada is incomplete. Decisions made within specific jurisdictions therefore impact the quality of data on the pandemic itself. At times, such effects can be more immediately and directly perceived, such as the unilateral decisions made by provinces and territories during the pandemic to close their internal borders to travelers, restricting freedom of movement in the name of public health. Lockdowns and curfews were also decisions made under provincial and territorial authority. As a result, Canadian families were separated from one another for months at a time, which was regarded as an acceptable constraint by those jurisdictions that decided to pursue such action, given the situation of the virus. While a dramatic and visible example, the COVID-19 pandemic encapsulates the institutional and practical realities the decision makers and policymakers regularly face in Canada.

Many areas of policy activity transcend the boundaries and silos of political and investigative authority. Contending with climate change is another perfect example of an area that falls into shared jurisdiction between the two constitutional orders of government, a fact that has also been confirmed by the courts. Canada's capacity to meet its international agreements, therefore thus turns on the commitments of all governments and the development and installation of policies that fall squarely into provincial and territorial jurisdiction. Commitments are hard to achieve, however, if the targets have been unilaterally set by one and imposed from others. Furthermore, the consequences of decisions made in one jurisdiction in the environmental arena spillover either directly or indirectly onto others. Finally, evaluating actions to assure accountability and access and assess the effectiveness of interventions requires transparency from decision makers, collaborative modes of regular information sharing and detailed monitoring of results.

Collaboration is not simply a fad or a catchphrase or an era of policymaking dynamics in Canada. It is a concrete necessity that is hard to achieve. And so here now, I will turn to the third component of my presentation on collaborative policymaking itself. Considerable research has gone into explaining why there are strong disincentives in the Canadian political sphere to support collaborative policymaking. To start the fragmented party system and our first past the post electoral system that artificially generates majority governments impede inter-party collaboration and negotiations among elected officials.

Then, there are the weakly institutionalized arrangements for intergovernmental relations. Political executives meet face to face irregularly and infrequently, in many cases, only when the federal Prime Minister or federal ministers call the meetings and set the agendas essentially unilaterally. Added to this, there have been a number of actions and inactions by the federal government to make unilateral decisions that had dramatic effects for the provinces and territories such as the 1995 federal budget, which offloaded major areas including housing, while instituting extensive cuts to federal transfers in order to balance the federal budget.

This has diminished political trust in the system. And of course, there are incentives for politicians of all stripes from all spaces to shift blame as they work directly in the public eye, and endeavor to get re-elected. Despite these considerable and varied disincentives for collaboration. Citizens in Canada have made it clear that they want governments to work together, and public servants across governments have played and continue to play a decisive role in making collaboration possible and in facilitating dialogue between the different orders of government in Canada. Charles has just provided a series of detailed case studies, offering various examples. In my own interviews with intergovernmental officials, many pointed to transformations in the child tax benefit, the recent expansion of affordable child care, the recognition of same sex partners and the removal of restrictive barriers for LGBTQ+ parents, developments in endangered species legislation and sales tax reform as examples of areas where dedicated efforts to coordinate and cooperate produced fruitful results.

Collaborative policymaking has become a key component of public administration studies and a touchstone in both intragovernmental and intergovernmental relations. In most liberal democracies, it is advocated as a way to develop policies more inclusively that are better coordinated with the needs of citizens aligned to the problems they are intended to resolve and are likely to be more easily implemented as a far wider range of networked actors are involved. From this work, we find that four features have been identified as particularly important for achieving a virtuous circle. The four, I mentioned at the outset to help anchor this presentation. They are non-hierarchical arrangements, trust ties, information sharing and collaboration from nose to tail.

First and foremost, rare are the spaces where a single government on its own maintains the complete authority over all the formal arenas to address policy problems. This condition takes on even greater meaning in Canada, where our watertight separation of powers means that different jurisdictions control areas of authority that need to be leveraged to address most problems. Furthermore, in many areas of policy activity, particularly those associated with social policy and the labour market, the powers are held by the provinces such that the federal government cannot and should not attempt to lead in a hierarchical fashion. As public servants, you have the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the division of powers, how it works, as well as the positions and efforts of the provincial and territorial governments, when tasked by a federal minister to engage in a policy area.

Secondly, trust ties, those emerge from regular and frequent contact and forthright communication. Which is ironic, as I'm speaking to a black wall right now and cannot see all of you. However, here is where the importance of intergovernmental tables dedicated to specific sectors play a major role. In contrast to the high-profile events of First Minister's meetings, for example, sectoral tables meet more frequently and rely on the ongoing engagement of dedicated public servants to really keep the work of the Federation running. Admittedly, our intergovernmental tables could use some attention and re-thinking in their configuration. But as public servants, none the less you can build networks both within the federal government and among your provincial and territorial counterparts that can help establish mutual bonds of reciprocal trust.

Third, information sharing. This is undeniably an area where Canada needs considerable work. This country has received low marks from both scholars and civil society actors in regards to our transparency and access to information. I could use many colourful descriptive words here, but let me just provide an example. The intergovernmental tables I just pointed to above operate almost entirely behind closed doors, are reserved solely for political executives and the most senior of public servants. Public communiques are infrequently released and exceptionally vague in substance. Looking more broadly, many barricades to information sharing have been erected by various governments and public authorities in all levels of government, all orders of government, both sealing information off from other jurisdictions and then furthermore, even from within their own governments. By preventing access for other public servants working within the same government. This practice of unapologetic and arguably anti-democratic secrecy needs to be addressed to support collaboration.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, is this concept of collaboration from nose to tail. This means that from the very beginning of a kernel of an idea in a minister's mind that you, as public servants ensure that the parties implicated in the initiative are brought in from the get go and engaged throughout the policymaking process. The significance of nose to tail engagement has even more meaning in a multinational federation with a strict delineation of powers and contested understandings of the federation itself, like Canada. As public servants, you stay for a longer period of time in your position, shielded from the electoral cycle, and therefore can develop a deeper expertise in your field than what most politicians will ever achieve. You also may create better opportunity structures to participate in longer term secondments or in exchanges, to work in the bureaucracies of other public services throughout the country.

This can afford a greater problem solving perspective in negotiations, while also developing a sensitivity to the ways in which the ideological perspectives of politicians influence the kinds of instruments they will prefer and the types of responses to problems that they will prioritize. You are honest brokers who still appreciate the confluence of ideologies, values and understandings of the legitimate role of each order of government. You therefore a dual role developing recommendations that are both technically feasible and politically acceptable, such that the policies produced from collaborative processes are not only efficient and effective, but also legitimate. Yes, our Constitution may have been written more than 150 years ago by a small group of men who could not have foreseen our contemporary realities and thought that watertight compartments was the way to go.

It may have envisioned stark roles and responsibilities that would not necessitate dialogue between different orders of government, and there were very real disincentives in place to frustrate anyone who tries to bridge these divides. But the resilience of the Canadian Federation, fueled in part by the dedication and wisdom of public servants, has made collaboration between jurisdictions not only possible, but a feature of policymaking in this country. From the beginning of 1867, right up until now, we can continue to spur policy innovation and create dynamic responses to exigent and persistent challenges by establishing non-hierarchical arrangements, ensuring trust ties, sharing information, and committing to collaboration from nose to tail. I thank you for your attention and welcome your questions.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Thank you Jen, for a very detailed presentation. Am I audible? Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, thank you. Sorry. No, thank you very much for going into that. I think you've hit on a very important point, the importance of collaboration and cooperation within our system, even though the constitutionally we are set up or meant to be working in watertight compartments.

I think since the 80s at least, it's been very clear that without collaboration, it's not possible for us to achieve the welfare outcomes that politicians and public servants envision for the country. I think it's very clear, you've made some very clear connections in terms of how this collaboration has led to very positive policy outcomes in recent times. But I think you've also made a very important point that where there is no collaboration, where there is no coordination, the outcomes can be very, very stark indeed. I'm sure a lot of our participants today as individuals are living through this, where on the one hand we're growing our population by at least half a million people every year, but we don't have enough housing, we don't have enough doctors. And so, this is different levels of government who are in charge of these different pieces. And somewhere, there is a coordination process that hasn't quite come together. And so, as Canadians, we are living through these realities. Federalism is, I think, so ingrained in in the way we function as a nation, in the way we think that it permeates every aspect of life in Canada.

With this, I'm going to move to a panel discussion, a short panel discussion. I've got a couple of questions for Charles and Jen, and then we'll open it up for questions from the audience. So, Charles, my first question is to you. You said multilevel governance is different from traditional forms of intergovernmental relations in the Canadian context. Could you elaborate a little bit more on that?

Charles Conteh: Most definitely. Thank you for that Rupak, I'm glad that you asked, because essentially, you've giving me the chance to kind of flesh out a few things that I didn't get a chance to flesh out in my earlier presentation. So, I mean, basically to juxtapose multilevel with what we call traditional collaborative federalism is to pretty much understand the need for complexity or embracing complexity. If you go back to the Constitution as the architecture on the collaborative federalism, it's about saying, how can we take an exclusive jurisdiction? Whether you're a provincial, sort of policy person, say, by section 91, I have an exclusive jurisdiction in this set of areas and by section 92 the province. We have an exclusive jurisdiction in that sort of area. How can we, in fact, be able to walk and build some joint venture? And typically, the result is some kind of summit federalism or some high-level federalism. And Jen spoke to that at length, wherein you have these broad framework agreements that are opaque, that are hashed out behind dark walls and then the execution part will take years to work out.

It's contentious, it is challenging, whereas multilevel governance talks about from conception, to design, to implementation, the need for overlapping networks across different tiers of jurisdiction, the need for the inclusion and the participation of non-state actors. Because you have a very sophisticated citizenry that oftentimes will, in terms of civil society groups, think tanks and other sort of non-state actors that in fact embody knowledge, expertise in a given policy domain, whether it's energy, whether it's innovation, whether it's climate change, what have you, and being able to incorporate those actors, those non-state actors within these more transparent spaces and ultimately also respecting, acknowledging and leveraging the role of municipalities. From the design original design of regional federalism, municipalities where simply non-existent, they were an afterthought. We know this and Jen spoke to this, that over the past few decades we've come to appreciate the reality of municipalities are the very frontline of combating, dealing with, responding to our major challenges from immigration to housing and homelessness, to dealing with major emergencies like firefighting and the like.

And how do you re-think and re-design the very structure of policy making and implementation to factor in the reality of the role of municipalities? And I'm not just talking about the larger municipalities like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and the like, but also midsize and smaller municipalities. Canada is a nation of regions. If other nations in Europe can boast of a long history, Canada can boast of a large geography. And so, municipalities sort of provide these intubations, this constellation of different ideas, different cultures, different value systems, different vision, different experimentation with different policy approaches, and how do we incorporate those into our design of broad policies to meet the challenges of the day? So, what multilevel governance is talking...

Rupak Chattopadhyay: No, no, that's a great segue because I just want you to hold your thought there because the question that I was going to ask Jen as a follow up was, given Jen's own research as well as her working within the… at Intergovernmental Affairs, how Jen do you think one might incorporate… I mean, clearly the two trends, as Charles just pointed out, and as you have as well, and I think we all in the federalism space recognize this one is the rise of the non-state actor. Civil society is very important player in the policy space, but also the rise of municipalities. How do you think the intergovernmental table might incorporate this? So, go ahead.

Jennifer Wallner: So, this is a really thorny issue that actually I'm currently in the process of developing a grant application with my colleague André Lecours on precisely getting into some of these issues because of course, the provinces have their own arrangements within their own governments that are supposed to facilitate the engagement of municipalities. And it is their position that it is only the province that is responsible for speaking on behalf of the municipalities in their relationship with the federal government. So, I think, though, that through… so, how do we kind of move beyond that? I think it's going to be with better use to start with of the intergovernmental tables themselves, because of course, there's a distinction between what the political realm is saying about something and then also what you as public servants might be operating within and certainly for smoother relations. And so, then you can start to see experimentations where you would say to the Province of Alberta. Well, for this meeting on environment, we would also really like to hear from the City of Calgary and the City of Edmonton. Would you be able to bring them to the table and communicate effectively among us as a small starting point. To then ideally ease into a world where more of these representatives would be at the table in the intergovernmental forum? That would be my answer for that.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: That's very interesting. I would probe a little bit more on the question of municipalities in a minute, but I just wanted to… given what you're saying, with my (inaudible) federations hat on and taking advantage of being the host, there are two very interesting experiments or approaches that I just wanted to highlight for the audience, and something that both of you might be aware of. As you know, the Australians have… used to have what is called COAG, Council of Australian Governments, which is the Commonwealth Government and the state governments, and now it's called the National Cabinet, but what's interesting is, as an observer at all COAG meetings, there is also a rep from the Australian Local Government Association which ensures that the municipal voice is heard at the table. A more recent experiment where the forum is involved in advising the Brazilian presidency, is in setting up a new federation council in Brazil, which not only has the states, but to Charles' point, has actually, in Brazil, three municipal associations represented, one that represents the rural municipalities, one that represents the medium-sized cities, and one that represents the megacities like the Sao Paulos.

Because very correctly, I think you've said that just because… not all municipalities have the same issues and concerns, not the same interests. And so, I think it's very important to have some differentiated way of expressing or aggregating interests within that space. I mean, Charles, in your presentation, you talked about the need sometimes for moving… please forgive me if I misquote you, moving outside of inflexible structures imposed by the Constitution, but there are also real encumbrances that the Constitution places on municipalities. So, in the context of municipalities where they have no constitutional authorities but at the same time are the ones on the front lines of service delivery, how do you reconcile that lack of authority with the important, the increasingly more important, role that they play in delivering services?

Charles Conteh: That's a great question, Rupak, and the one example that really comes to mind when I think about this would be the regional development agencies, the RDAs in Canada. So, at a high level, the RDAs are federal agencies given a mandate to work with different provinces and work in different parts of Canada, distributing certain resources and assigning certain programs, but the genius of their approach, I think, really speaks to policy entrepreneurship, public servant leadership at the administrative level. Because, yes, their design is, or rather the mandate is, to design the set of programs and deliver across, but I'll give an example too, FedDev here in Ontario or FedNor, one of the agencies within… two of the agencies in Ontario, but also would give an example to what used to be the Western Economic Diversification Agency. That's now split into two different agencies.

What that did was to basically align their program delivery with municipalities by encouraging private sector groups to work with municipalities in their regional innovation strategy because they had these sort of programs called regional innovation systems. So, municipalities were incorporated in partnership with private sectors to put forward programs to the RDAs in terms of things to fund or to work with over three years, over five years. So, I think the brilliance of the RDAs is that in their program delivery design, they factor in municipalities, and oftentimes, having their economic development strategy, their innovation strategy, industrial strategy, and they encourage private sector actors to basically leverage those strategies, bring in municipalities in designing programs or ideas that the RDAs can work with. I thought, for me, that's a brilliant example of policy entrepreneurship, governance, leadership that can set boundaries and, frankly, pragmatically accommodate the challenges of federalism.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Thank you. Thank you, Charles.

Again, taking off from sort of where Charles left off, Jen, you talked about the importance or patterns in politics and public administration that have a bearing on sort of how collaboration unfolds or not in this country. In your view, what trends do you see that might actually intensify challenges in collaboration and cooperation?

Jennifer Wallner: Yeah, that I can speak to. So, I do in fact feel that the intensification of the politicization of the public sector, in fact, and specifically changes and expansions in the role of political staffers and their access points that they have to ministers and the control that they have over what a minister sees, is quite dramatic. And of course, in saying this, I'm not… I do not wish to cast aspersion on the very dedicated political staffers who contribute to the workings of this country as well. It's just the political staffers have one specific view in mind, which is the subsequent and successful re-election of their government or of their official, whereas coordinating in a federation like this requires stepping out from that sort of narrow, siloed configuration of, these are my political aspirations, and instead, starting to see that, again, we're a composite country and that, for instance, when we keep hearing from Alberta and other governments, we have to stick to our lanes, well, those lanes aren't real in practical terms and in trying to stick to our lanes, you're undermining not just the country but also your own jurisdiction, right? If the federal government decides to push too unilaterally in an area, it will undermine its efforts.

So, for instance, when Prime Minister Harper tried to create a common market and sort of impose it a little bit hierarchically, it got immediately pushed back by provinces and subsequently rejected by the Supreme Court of Canada. Similarly, when provinces try to think that they can just hammer forward something without engaging with their other provincial neighbours, such as relations between Alberta and B.C. over pipelines, we see that undermining results occur. So, instead, we have to try and find a way to encourage the political sphere to start to see these in different concepts and understandings of federalism, and this is also where actually, quite frankly, I think that universities play a significant in this. If I hear one more person talking about how federalism is a zero sum game, I mean, it's not. Really, nothing in life is, unless you're thinking in very narrowest of terms. So, I think that as we start to change the way that we teach about these things, change the way that we maybe articulate these things, that we can continue to move forward in the way that Canadians want us to.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: I think that's a very important point to make. I mean, one of the reasons, historically, countries and federations are either very large or very complex is that's the only way you can govern them, and that's why federalism becomes so central, and I think you're absolutely right and I've also seen this view where people focus far too much on the self-rule aspect of federalism and not enough on the scheduled side of things, and federalism is about both. I mean, if you overemphasize one, then you have something that's dysfunctional, right? Either one, whether it's self-rule or shared rule, you overemphasize one and it becomes dysfunctional.

Well, thank you very much to the panel for addressing these questions that I had. We have a few questions from the audience, so I'm going to turn to them. We have five questions. Some of them are specific and the others are open to both of you. So, the first question is for Charles. How do we convince provinces to expand beyond their constitutional jurisdictions in the area of energy policy so we can create pan-Canadian solutions to help advance climate change?

Charles Conteh: That's a great one.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Sorry, Charles, before you start talking, just in the interest of time, I'll try… if you can just keep your answer to about two minutes, if you can.

Charles Conteh: I will try to do that.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Thank you.

Charles Conteh: Telling a professor to speak within that time is quite a challenge, but to dive in, the reality is that this remains one of the major conundrums in Canada, the energy policy. I mean, let's face it, the backdrop of all of this is ideology and politics and certain spaces in Canada that have certain convictions about their future, their economic interest, and what have you, but I think a first step into the conversation would be an acknowledgment that our destiny is bound together as a nation, economically, ecologically. So, matter of fact, our destiny is bound globally in terms of climate change with all of humanity. So, back to the Constitution, technically, the provinces will have a right to beat their chest and say, listen, by Section 92, energy policy belongs to me, but the feds will come back and say, by Section 91, we have an obligation to basically enforce, execute any international obligations that Canada enter. From Kyoto Protocol right up to Paris 2015, it is our responsibility such that any policy domain that kind of contravenes or violates that, we need to engage with that policy domain.

And so, if it's about a conversation about my right jurisdictionally, that would be a reply to that, but I think it really boils down to understanding, and once again, through the lens of multilevel governance, just a set of practical realities about overlapping networks in terms of policy, energy policy, with climate change or environmental policy overlap, and the overlap with economic development or industrial or innovation policy, and recognizing those overlapping networks that you find mechanisms for overlapping jurisdiction and finding a way to deal with it. And what multilevel governance would propose, I won't go into details because of time, but it's about, how do you design shared sanctioning and coordinating capacity for joint ventures within a given policy. The ideology and the politics will be there, but I think at a high policy level, in terms of policy design and program delivery, it's about mechanisms by which policy… public servants and policy entrepreneurs could hash out those shared sanctioning and coordinating arrangements for joint ventures. It is doable if we recognize our destiny as a nation and with all of humanity as bound economically and ecologically.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Thank you, Charles. The next question, Jen, is for you. The question is, how did the change in Canadian federalism in the 1990s influence the development of social policy for marginalized groups like the Indigenous people, Black communities, immigrants? What challenges arose and what alternative approaches could enhance equity in policy responses?

Jennifer Wallner: That's a really great question, and certainly, the decisions that were taken in the 1990s, particularly having lived through the ones in Ontario that ended up where the Ontario government was offloaded the responsibility for housing and then, under Mike Harris, decided to subsequently download that to the municipal level, where you're seeing first-hand where the municipal level does not have the substantive capacity to deliver and execute meaningful housing policy and social housing policy to meet the needs of citizens. This is glaringly apparent in the country. This is a thing that many of my students actually continue to interrogate. Alison Smith also has written an excellent book on this, for people who are interested, that has just come out from the University of Toronto Press. Again, I repeat her name, Alison Smith. And again, the challenge in Canada is that the provinces are actually the real locus for so many of these issues about equity and access.

We can have all the federal directives we want, for instance, UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Yes, the federal government has ratified it. However, almost everything falls into areas of provincial jurisdiction and until the provinces decide to move on these things, very little will end up being able to happen. So, given these conditions, it is remarkable actually to see, through the effort and engagement of non-state actors and also of Indigenous governments and other forces of mobilization, that they have managed to sort of push the needle in some direction. That said, equity in policing, in the penal system, in social housing, in welfare, in the effects of climate change, are still very racially divided in the country. And so, only through us either running for office, engaging as public servants, and being willing to sort of encourage a new way of thinking about this, we're going to sit in the same sort of situations that we are in right now, which are undesirable.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Thank you very much. The next question, and this is for both of you, could each one of you provide a specific example of a non-state partnership involved in Canadian public policy design and implementation? So, Jen, you, and then Charles.

Jennifer Wallner: I need few more moments to think.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Okay, so Charles, go ahead.

Charles Conteh: I mean, one example that would immediately come to mind, it's not a perfect example but it captures the vision, is the Canadian Agricultural Partnership and I gave an example to that in my slide. So, in fact, the genesis and the process that eventually led to that policy design was extensive consultation on the part of the federal government with non-state actors, especially industry groups within agriculture but also think tanks, and the beauty of that also is that certain provinces, not all provinces but certain provinces, also engage in extensive consultation with non-state actors, industry groups, and other civic groups, and those prior consultations actually fed in to the federal, provincial, territorial discussions that ultimately led to the first iteration of CAP.

And the second iteration of CAP, which is SCAP, Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership, basically builds on that extensive prior consultation with non-state actors. So, I would look at CAP as a brilliant example, with some imperfections around it, of engaging non-state actors. And by the way, some provinces engage very extensively with municipalities because, as a matter of fact, municipalities are concerned about issues regarding watershed and ecosystems, how agriculture ultimately affects the integrity of those watershed and ecosystems. And so, they were brought into the conversation to think about SCAP going forward. How can we sort of balance the interests of agrifood innovation with the integrity of watershed and all the kinds of ecosystems? And so, municipalities were very much part of that conversation. So, I see CAP 1 and SCAP, which is the second iteration, as a great example of expanding the boundaries of conversation in that sense of jurisdictional policy design and implementation.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Thank you, Charles. Jen.

Jennifer Wallner: So, one of the reasons why I'm having such a hard… why it's a challenge to kind of have an example right on the tip of my fingers is because, not to get academic here for a moment but, the design of Canada's political institutions and the logics of parliamentary government really dampen the capacity to collaborate, because collaboration, if we mean it from real engagement from the beginning of a policy idea all the way through the system, is a bit antithetical to the way that legislation is produced and how policy frameworks are sort of made. So, this is also why it's a bit of a challenging fit sometimes in this world. But that said, there are certainly examples.

For instance, I know in Saskatchewan, when they were developing the uranium consultation processes, stakeholder groups, business communities, Indigenous communities, were all consulted through a huge consultation practice. So, again, consultation is not quite the same as real collaboration on the policy that comes from it. And of course, the perceived legitimacy of the consultation process itself is conditioned by its presence or transparency to the public throughout the process and also in the subsequent policies that are produced from the consultation. But that said, certainly, in energy policy, we've seen this, from my understanding, in the way that Alberta developed its climate strategy under the Notley government. They had industry groups engaged right from the get-go to sort of develop and produce that climate strategy in concert with each other. So, those would be my examples.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Thank you. And also, to look forward to some of the challenges we're dealing with, whether it's shortage of doctors or nurses or a shortage of housing, both the development of policy and implementation will require engaging with industry groups because the implementation will be entirely… unless the government decides to set up a department that hires doctors or builds housing, which happens in some countries, hasn't happened here and unlikely to happen here, it'll require a participation by non-state actors in the implementation. Charles.

Charles Conteh: Rupak, I just want to sort of quickly jump in and say I appreciate the question, sort of focusing on the broad policy, and for the most part, we've been talking about policy design, but I have found that some of the most exciting innovation around transjurisdictional partnerships in Canada is not so much at a high-level policy, but in terms of program design and implementation, right? Multilevel governance pays attention to sort of envisioning public servants as entrepreneurs in how they package and design policy. When I observe the ideas of the regional development agencies, you have this broad policy that basically, from a distance, when you look at it, it was simply the federal government having its policy to engage with disadvantaged regions, end of story.

But how they package the policy essentially was the genius of intergovernmental arrangement wherein they brought in the provinces, especially what used to be the Western Economic Diversification Agency. They brought in the prairie governments into the arrangement. They aligned that federal package with the provincial strategies and priorities, and they brought in… so, when they reach out to the private sector, they incentivize them to work with municipalities because municipalities have their own active strategies. So, I think when I look at multilevel governance and try to understand federalism, yes, broad policy or high-level policy design is great, but how public servants sort of package programs, how they deliver it, how they incentivize non-state actors to participate and to engage, how they bring in municipalities, for me, is sort of the below-the-radar ingenuity of intergovernmental relations.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Absolutely. Thank you for that, Charles. I agree. I completely agree there and I think Jen was nodding as well, where I think the program level, it's particularly salient.

We have two more questions but I've also been reminded we have 10 minutes to the end of the program. So, this one, the next question, Jen, is for you. What does the increasing use of the notwithstanding clause by some provinces mean for the current state of federalism and the appropriate division of powers? Is it mere politics or something more significant?

Jennifer Wallner: Yeah, so the notwithstanding clause, for those in the audience who don't know about it, it's Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and it's essentially sort of the opt-out clause that was built in during the Constitution negotiations because provincial premiers in particular were concerned about the creation of a Charter of Rights that would compress their powers, and that they would not be able to execute their authority in the way that they sort of wanted to. So, we created the notwithstanding clause which only applies to certain sections of the Charter. And so, sort of the most famous original sort of use of it was by the Government of Quebec when it was applied to their language laws, and one feature of the notwithstanding clause is that it has to be renewed every five years by whatever enacting legislature or parliament chose it, and that's done in the idea that if the people of that province or of the country don't want this provision to be maintained, they will change the government in office or encourage the government in office to do so. So, that's the logic.

Now, what do I think about this in terms of the country. I think that there are some challenging patterns that are emerging that are undermining the notion of rights throughout this country and are a degradation on the understandings of individuals nested within specifically provincial frameworks, and this is a concern, particularly as provinces do have considerable and expansive power and influence over their respective populations. So, how we end up navigating these very challenging waters is going to be an interesting process. I'm not trying to be intentionally vague here. It's that I really… there's a different dynamic that is occurring in Canada right now, and when I say this, it is not to pretend as if we haven't had challenging dynamics in the past and that there hasn't been real politicization and there hasn't been infringement on rights in all sorts of ways, shapes, and forms, absolutely not. But currently, we are seeing the mobilization of a significantly sort of different pattern of activity that I think we need to heed and ensure that we create deliberative spaces to discuss these things as opposed to dismissing actions and activities as, say, part of, to use the American reference, baskets of deplorables on either sides of arguments, right? And we need to try and find ways to transcend that sort of polarization.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Thank you.

One last question. I think we've dealt about this, dealt with this in various ways in the prior discussion, but Charles, this is for you. How is multilevel and more complex approach to governance impacting resource allocation to areas like health care and education?

Charles Conteh: Well, that's a great question. I think that, ultimately, multilevel governance has a broad sort of proposition to the expectation of interjurisdictional partnership, how to bring actors together across different domains. So, the specifics of major flagship areas like health care, education, and the like, I think ultimately, it's about recognizing… and I think multilevel governance (inaudible) fairly straightforward, that you recognize overlapping networks across jurisdictions, overlapping resources that no single government can tackle these major behemoths alone, and that ultimately then, you have mechanisms for joint ventures across jurisdictions, and I think basically recognizing the need for bringing resources together to tackle the challenge would mean finding the platform to engage. I mean, health care is a major challenge. It's a conundrum. There are cracks in the system. I dare say it's an emergency for Canada, given the state of affairs in that policy domain. So, I think that, look, some measures are being taken.

The federal government has managed to engage with the provincial and territorial counterparts to come up with a broad pact. Already, B.C.'s embracing that arrangement and all the provinces I understand, are considering and soon to follow. So, there is some movement along those lines and I think it's recognizing the need for overlapping networks, overlapping platforms, overlapping resources, and the reality that regardless of what the Constitution says about this being your exclusive jurisdiction, you don't have the resources, and I'm speaking to my provincial friends, to go it alone. And so, you need to work with your federal counterpart. But at the same time, now, the feds have the humility to recognize that you may have the spending power but you don't have the jurisdictional authority to impose your will over the subnational counterparts. And so, recognizing those realities, facing the challenge of massive cracks in the health care system, I think we can forge platforms of overlapping networks and shared resources to deal with it. I see signs of recognition and I hope that things will move in those directions.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Thank you very much. Thank you, Charles. Thank you, Jen. That brings us to the end of the program. I think interactions like this are very important, both as a means of dialogue amongst practitioners of federalism but also to get us thinking and more engaged with the practitioner community.

Let me conclude by thanking the School for organizing, the Canada School for organizing, this event. I particularly want to give a shout out to Genevieve Sophie and Jean for putting this all together, both in terms of content but also in terms of the technicality of the event which is… without which we wouldn't have been able to interact today. I hope to the audience that you found today's event useful, and please, I've been reminded to remind you all to make sure that you send along your evaluations for today's event and to remind you also that the School has more events and courses to offer. For those of you who are interested, the next event of the series is on legal issues and contemporary federalism and that takes place on the 15th of November. So, I encourage you to keep coming back to the to the School's website and to stay engaged.

Thank you, everybody, for your participation. Jen, Charles, thank you for wonderful presentations, and thank you to the audience for tuning in.

Jennifer Wallner: Yeah, thank you very much.

Charles Conteh: Thank you, and thank you, Rupak, for great moderation.

Rupak Chattopadhyay: Thank you.

[01:28:49 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]

[01:28:55 The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]