I think this is a good initiative. I’ve talked with senior provincial government bureaucrats (past and present) that say the first thing cut in the past has been policy development expertise in the departments and that many of them do not have the internal horsepower to properly evaluate and support policy decision making. Tapping into this external expertise makes good sense.
Of course that does sound self-serving coming from a consultant -but I suspect there is not a whole lot of work for me on the social policy front.
Not to be too jaded but it looks like a ‘make work’ project for Andy Scott who will head the organization. Nobody has done LESS work than the liberals on social policy, are you really going to believe them when they tell you that ‘well, we just didn’t know what was going on’
This from a government that wouldn’t even sign their own legislation to grant basic human rights to 30,000 people. Just take a look at the next blog-corporate taxes down 14% from already amongst the lowest in the country and you can see where their priorities are.
Research has never been easier, for poverty the liberals held their own ‘summits’ where they got TONS of direct feedback directly from the poor themselves and poverty organizations. Senior organizations do even more lobbying and more research, and its all just a click away with a mouse. These guys are VERY well paid and have staffs, as well as one of the fewest days of actual sitting in the country, so there is simply no ‘excuse’ for it. They certainly don’t need yet another organization to make recommendations, what I suspect is that with Andy Scott they want somebody to talk to academics to get the kind of research that the government LIKES to hear.
Just to prove my point, today at Charles site there is a news item that Lamrock is making a change to the way cheques are distributed. For those that don’t know, charlesotherpersonality.blogspot.com is where the article is.
The blog is from the Common Front for Social Justice which provides a point by point glossary of why these changes are BAD for the poor. Academics, of course, completely ignore policies such as these for just describing statistics. Here is all the research all done up, and emailed directly to Lamrock so he can read it. Of course, when he was holding all these summits he could have brought it up then and had a discussion, but I talked to many at the meetings and as far as I can tell this change was never even brought up.
So social policy doesn’t need a new organization to connect to research, information comes right to an MLA’s doord. So again, I suspect its that this is the kind of ‘research’ that the government wants to see.