FEATURE Spring 2025 // Canadian Government Executive / 25 oritize basic research rather than policy research and public education. The journalistic community was never well-equipped to do this sort of work, and in any case its capacity has been degraded because of the internet revolution. The federal bureaucracy has also struggled to fill the need for long-term strategic capacity. A 1996 report documented its limited ability to “look over the horizon to identify new issues and position the government to deal with emerging trends.” In response, Privy Council Office launched a project to promote long-term thinking known as the Policy Research Initiative (PRI). However, PRI was moved out of PCO and restructured after the election of the Harper government in 2006. Its lower-profile successor, Policy Horizons Canada, is now located within Employment and Social Development Canada. A 2015 study of policy capacity in the federal government found the same weaknesses in strategic capacity that had been described in the 1996 report. Nor are political parties capable of filling the gap in long-term thinking. This is a crucial deficiency, because parties have become more important actors in the policy process over the last thirty years. As I have noted, party platforms are more important determinants of policy for new governments than they once were. But parties are almost completely lacking in policy capacity. A 2021 study found that there was no federal party in which senior officials considered policy formation to be a priority in the central party office. Decay in Elite Dialogue Adaptability requires more than a capacity to foresee dangers and invent strategies for managing them. An adaptable system can also build political support for one strategy or another. Political support has two dimensions. There must be some measure of agreement within a system’s leadership group, and also agreement among the general public. In a federal system like Canada’s, the challenge of building the first sort of agreement is complicated by the fact that the leadership group is divided. It includes ministers within the federal, provincial and territorial governments, all accountable to distinct electorates. Over the last eighty years, Canada has developed an elaborate system of intergovernmental diplomacy that is designed to reduce the risk of miscoordination among governments -- or to express the point more positively, to promote coordination within a formally divided leadership group. This includes routine interactions among bureaucrats working in different levels of government, as well as routine meetings for ministers handling specific portfolios such as finance or health. From the 1940s until the 1990s, this system of intergovernmental diplomacy was capped by near-annual meetings of first ministers. One observer said in this period that first ministers’ conferences (FMCs) were practically “built into Canada’s constitution.” However, the practice of holding annual FMCs was abandoned after the 1990s. By that time, FMCs were closely associated in the public mind with failed efforts at deal-making on constitutional reform. At first, a retreat from annual FMCs seemed like a good way of reducing contention in national politics. But this retreat has now proved to have bigger costs. FMCs were never about deal-making alone. These meetings were also an important mechanism for building rapport among first ministers and encouraging a shared understanding about the national policy agenda. FMCs also showed the public that leaders were capable of engaging in dialogue despite sharp differences of opinion. Paradoxically, the institution of regular FMCs was abandoned just as the practice of summitry was being more deeply institutionalized in other contexts. For example, first ministers in Australia now meet more frequently than they did in the 1980s. Similarly, the European Union has entrenched regular meetings of government heads in an effort to provide “strategic direction” to the Union. Canadian prime ministers also participate actively in international summits like the regular G7 meeting. In the international realm, summitry is defended as an essential practice to promote understanding and coordination among allied governments. But the same logic is not applied at home. Decay of the Public Sphere The case for democratic government hinges partly on the assertion that citizens, when given the opportunity to engage freely in deliberation, will devise creative solutions to the complex problems facing their community. Moreover, deliberation is expected to generate more support for the policy ultimately adopted by government. In both ways, democracy promises to improve the adaptability of the system. However, this promise can only be realized if there is a space in which Canadians are able to engage in deliberation. The political philsopher Jürgen Habermas referred to this
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