Policy Success in Canada Cases, Lessons, Challenges

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In Canada many public projects, programs, and services perform well, and many are very successful. However, these cases are consistently underexposed and understudied in the policy literature which, for various reasons, tends to focus on policy mistakes and learning from failures rather than successes. In fact, studies of public policy successes are rare not just in Canada, but the world over, although this has started to change (McConnell, 2010, 2017; Compton & 't Hart, 2019; Luetjens, Mintrom & 't Hart, 2019). Like those publications, the aims of Policy Success in Canada are to see, describe, acknowledge, and promote learning from past and present instances of highly effective and highly valued public policymaking. This exercise will be done through detailed examination of selected case studies of policy success in different eras, governments, and policy domains in Canada.

This book project is embedded in a broader project led by 't Hart and OUP exploring policy successes globally and regionally. It is envisaged as a companion volume to OUP's 2019 offering Great Policy Successes (Compton and 't Hart, 2019) and to Successful Public Policy in the Nordic Countries (de La Porte et al, 2022). This present volume provides an opportunity to analyze what is similar and distinctive about introducing and implementing successful public policy in one of the world's most politically decentralized and regionally diverse federation and oldest democratic polities.

Evert Lindquist, Professor of Public Administration, School of Public Administration, University of Victoria,Michael Howlett, Burnaby Mountain Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 1), Dept. of Political Science, Simon Fraser University,Grace Skogstad, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto,Geneviève Tellier, Professor, School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa,Paul t' Hart, Professor of Public Administration, Utrecht University

Evert A. Lindquist is Professor of Public Administration at the School of Public Administration, University of Victoria, British Columbia. He has served as Director of the School of Public Administration (1998-2015), Professor at the University of Toronto (1988-1998), the ANZSOG-ANU Chair in Public Management Research (2010-11), and the first Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat Visiting Fellow (1992-94). He is Editor of Canadian Public Administration, the journal of the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. He has published on diverse topics on public administration, decision-making, central agencies, reform, restructuring, organizational and policy capacity, and think tanks.


Michael Howlett, FRSC is Burnaby Mountain Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in public policy analysis, political economy, and resource and environmental policy. He taught at Queen's University (1986-1988) and the University of Victoria (1988-1989) before SFU. He was Visiting Professor (2009-2010) and Yong Pung How Chair Professor (2013-2017) at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, Visiting Professor at the Universita degli studi di Cagliari (2012), Visiting Research Fellow at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2018), and Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Advanced Studies of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen (2020).

Grace Skogstad is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She has served as chair of the Department of Political Science (2012-2020) and as Interim Associate Vice-Principal Research (2020-2021) at the University of Toronto Scarborough. A past president of the Canadian Political Science Association, she is currently President of the International Public Policy Association. She specializes in Canadian Politics, especially Canadian federalism, and the comparative public policies of agriculture, food, and renewable fuels in North America and the European Union. She was awarded the JJ Berry Smith Doctoral Supervision Award from the University of Toronto in 2021 and the Mildred A. Schwartz Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association in 2019.


Geneviève Tellier is Professor of Public Administration at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on public budgeting, public finances, and parliamentarism. She has published on the topic of public budget participation, parliamentary institutions, budget decisions and elections, balanced-budget legislation, taxation, and more recently gender-budgeting. Her recent book was published by the University of Toronto Press: Canadian Public Finances: Explaining Budgetary Institutions and the Budget Process in Canada (2019).

Paul 't Hart is Professor of Public Administration at Utrecht University, having returned to this post after spending five years as Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University (2006-2010). Authoring and editing over 50 books, he is best-known for his research and teaching on crisis management, political psychology, public leadership, and success and failure in government. Recent works include: Great Policy Successes (OUP 2019), Successful Public Policy: Lessons From Australia and New Zealand (ANU Press 2019), and Guardians of Public Value: How Public Organizations Become and Remain Institutions (Palgrave, 2020).