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During the past 30 years, research on policy analytical capacity's multidimensional nature and the evolution of policy advisory systems (PASs) has both increased knowledge of these processes and structures and opened new avenues of inquiry. While it is clear that changes in PASs in many countries have occurred ‐ featuring processes such as the increased externalisation and politicisation of policy advice ‐ studies of changes among the roles played by core policy professionals in advice provision have lagged. One aspect of this question concerns the nature and extent of changes in this 'forgotten fundamental' of advice systems related to how these professionals are arrayed within 'policy shops'—that is organisational units identified in the 1960s and 1970s as the main organisational home of policy professionals in government. Whether or not such shops have changed from the central‐integrated model identified in early studies and, if so, how, remain outstanding and foundational questions. Recent research in Canada has mapped the distribution of policy professionals at the central and provincial level and found more types of analysts and venues than in earlier eras— which range from the 'classical' integrated policy shops of the 1960s and 1970s which remain in central agencies and single‐purpose line departments to the much more 'distributed' patterns found in many departments dealing with multiple or complex controversial issues. Using Canadian data, this study outlines the development of these organisational types and their distribution in government and discusses the implications of these changes for better understanding the work, and needs, of core professionals in policy advice systems.. Points for practitioners: 'Policy professionals' or public employees specifically tasked with policy analysis in government are key players in policy advisory systems despite the addition of more external and internal actors in policy advice systems in recent years.How these advisors and analysts are organised in government, whether they work in clusters or small groups, and how they interact with other civil servants and policy‐makers are a key determinant of their activities and influence in policy‐making.In the policy sciences, work in the 1960s and 1970s established 'the policy shop', that is relatively small centrally located organisational units employing mainly policy analysts, as the main home of policy professionals in government. These units often enjoyed a monopoly in analysis and played a key role in policy‐making. However, research on these organisations has not kept up with changes in advisory relations within and outside of governments and the impact such changes have had on the influence and activities of core professionals.Recent work by the authors looking at the large Canadian province of Ontario has identified more than a single type of arrangement of analysts in the current era. This paper expands this analysis to both small and large jurisdictions in Canada, including the federal government, and develops two detailed case studies of the current organisation of policy professionals in smaller central agencies like Ministries of Justice as well as in larger omnibus Ministries of the Environment.The study finds a 'distributed' model of policy shops—in which multiple policy units exist throughout the agency—to be dominant in both cases and in all the governments examined and suggests this is now the new normal, replacing the dominance of the older more integrated central shop model. The predominance of the distributed model contributes to the fragmentation of policy advice already underway in government due to the growth in the number of external advisors such as consultants and think tanks, and internal ones such as political staffers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Public Administration is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Public Administration is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper describes the sources and methods used in assembling a microconsistent regional data set for Canada for 1981 for use in counterfactual general equilibrium policy analyses focussing on regional impacts of government policies. A microconsistent data set al the regional level requires assembling detailed consistent accounts of production and demand by region, of interregional and international trade flows, and of transactions involving multiple levels of government. For many or most countries, the data requirements associated with regional general equilibrium analysis preclude this form of work. But because of the substantial progress made in recent years in developing provincial data sources in Canada, such as the provincial input-output tables and the provincial economic accounts, the situation in Canada is different. Using these data, it is possible to construct an interregional microconsistent benchmark data set at a suitable level of commodity detail for subsequent model use. This data set has already been used in an initial evaluation of a number of Canadian regional issues (see Trela and Whalley (1985)). The methodology used follows that presented in an earlier paper of ours (St-Hilaire and Whalley (1983)) which described the construction of a 1972 national data set for Canada developed for tax policy analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Public Administration is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Public Administration is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Progress in reducing health inequalities through public policy action is difficult in nations identified as liberal welfare states. In Canada, as elsewhere, researchers and advocates provide governing authorities with empirical findings on the sources of health inequalities and document the lived experiences of those encountering these adverse health outcomes with the hope of provoking public policy action. However, critical analysis of the societal structures and processes that make improving the sources of health inequalities difficult—the quality and distribution of living and working conditions, that is the social determinants of health—identifies limitations in these approaches. Within this latter critical tradition, we consider—using household food insecurity in Canada as an illustration—how polemics and anger mobilization, usually absent in health inequalities research and advocacy—could force Canadian governing authorities to reduce health inequalities through public policy action. We explore the potential of using high valence terms such as structural violence, social death and social murder, which make explicit the adverse outcomes of health‐threatening public policy to force government action. We conclude by outlining the potential benefits and threats posed by polemics and anger mobilization as means of promoting health equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Public Administration is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Background: The availability of costly safety measures against transfusion-transmissible infections forces Western countries to confront difficult ethical questions. How to decide about implementing such measures? When are such decisions justified? As a preliminary to addressing these questions, we assessed which concerns shape actual donor blood safety policymaking in five Western countries.Study Design and Methods: Our qualitative study involved determining which issues had been discussed in advisory committee meetings and capturing these issues in general categories. Appropriate documents were identified in collaboration with local decision-making experts in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The introduction of hepatitis B virus nucleic acid testing and selected measures against variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, West Nile virus, and Q-fever were chosen as cases representing decision-making on safety measures with high costs and low or uncertain added safety.Results: A broad inventory of concerns was established, including: 1) nine categories of advantages and disadvantages of candidate safety policies; 2) six kinds of difficulties in assessing risks and forecasting the effects of safety policies; 3) 13 decision-making principles; and 4) six kinds of practical barriers hampering the translation of candidate policies into decisions.Conclusion: Blood safety policymaking involves a wide variety of competing concerns, and approaches to reconcile these considerations are themselves contested. Developing a systematic decision-making approach requires ethical reflection on, among others, reasonable costs of safety and the value of transparency in public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the extent to which social science evidence is considered by community leaders in small towns and rural areas. It uses secondary analysis of 18 transcriptions from interviews in rural regions within two Canadian provinces to examine what types of support (if any) are used by respondents to justify their claims and assess the extent to which they depend on systematically collected and analysed evidence. The results indicate that the respondents seldom provided justification for their claims and when they did, scientific evidence was infrequently used. Instead, the respondents most often used examples from their personal experience or public meetings as support. Comparative analysis of the two rural region showed that the pattern of support was different in each - with respondents from British Columbia ( BC) relying more on personal examples and those from Newfoundland and Labrador ( NL) relying more on public presentations or the internet. The results suggest that much work needs to be done to make social science evidence available and useful to those in small towns and rural places. According to those results, the most strategic way to begin is through existing networks, community groups, and local examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how political tensions developed around the issue of Canadian water export, how policy solutions and alternatives to the problem were offered, and how finally it came to be recognized by the national government. The water export issue reached the formal agenda after a lengthy period of being denied serious consideration. However, it is arguable that agendas are set if an issue receives attention from policy decision makers. This is because an issue's ascension to agenda status is not an indication of how it is actually going to be decided upon. The case of water export demonstrates that the government adopted a policy solution consistent with assumptions prevalent at the time and acceptable among elected decision makers. Yet, the solution was contrary to the expectations of those who demanded a complete water export ban in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shift towards governance and greater reliance on third parties in the design, implementation and evaluation of policy has created new pressures to ensure that policies are designed and delivered in a consistent and effective manner. In the interest of improving transparency, accountability, effectiveness and efficiency, governments in Canada and in the UK, as in many industrialized countries, have begun to emphasize the need for evidence-based policy-making. As a result, knowledge and research have become key assets in the production of policy. Yet, with their current capacity and knowledge base wanting, governments have increasingly relied on the knowledge and information of external actors and have afforded greater authority to them on this basis. This has created a situation in which evidence-based inputs are given greater weight. This shift has particular implications for voluntary sector organizations whose basis for intervention has lain historically with the interests that they represent. Already, in the Canadian case many national organizations have seen their focus shift to research activities under the impetus of new funding initiatives explicitly encouraging activities grounded in knowledge and policy analysis. Moreover, policy guidelines have been elaborated in order to enhance the sector's capacity to contribute to the development of policy in a depoliticized manner. Using a series of interviews conducted with representatives from national voluntary organizations in Canada, this article explores the implications of such a shift for the voluntary sector in Canada, and asks whether the Canadian case holds some lessons for voluntary sector–state relations in other jurisdictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Public Administration is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article reports on the impact of policy research in Canadian universities. One area which is occasionally identified as a potential source of innovative and improved public policy formation and evaluation is the university and its various departments of social and policy sciences. In the face of intractable social and economic problems, there have been repeated calls for academics to become more relevant, and to address problems of immediate interest. Moreover, research institutes and centers have been created in an attempt to involve more completely the university in public discussion and to provide policy advice to government.

A methodology is presented for evaluating the effect of research on public policy. The article reviews the origins of the methodology, outline it in depth, and explore what happened in implementation.This study was implemented by the International Development Research Center, Canada, in order to learn more about how the research it supports influences public policy. Through a series of background studies and cases studies, the Center is building an understanding of how its work is used in policy formulation and will use that understanding to strengthen its capacity to support such work in the future.