Blog Post
On September 12, 2016, the CCA marked an important milestone: it’s been 10 years since the release of our first report, The State of Science and Technology in Canada. The report identified several clusters of Canadian strength in S&T, and these findings were integral to the identification of priority areas in the federal government’s 2007 S&T strategy. But it wasn’t a neat line from publication to policy. That’s because the development of science policy and the use of science to develop policy are rarely straightforward, and often challenging.
In announcing his decision to go to the moon, John F. Kennedy said as much: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
Kennedy’s quote has been analyzed at length. Many consider it to be a good example of how to set policy: state a clear goal (“go to the moon”), a rationale for it (“organize and measure the best of our energies and skills”), and a timetable for accomplishing it (“in this decade” ― elsewhere he says, “Before the end of the decade”). But no one believes that this is all there is. Policy development is not like baking a cake from a mix: goal + rationale + timetable = policy. There are a host of political, economic, and logistical hurdles to overcome, many of which change over time. And then there’s the matter of the evidence to support each component of this process: evidence about the science behind a proposal, economic feasibility, ethical justifications, and public confidence. Sometimes evidence is in abundance, sometimes it’s scarce, sometimes conflicting. No two policy cakes are baked the same way.
So as we acknowledge a decade of work (with a piece of celebratory cake?), we also recognize that the policy process is a work in progress. As such it’s important to focus on how to improve it. This includes thinking about what constitutes (good) evidence, how to assess different kinds of evidence, what best practices exist to present evidence to decision-makers and the public, and how to evaluate successes and failures.
All of these questions and ideas will be discussed at the Second Annual Symposium on Evidence-Informed Decision-Making on November 8 in Ottawa, part of the pre-conference activities of the Canadian Science Policy Conference. The CCA and its three Member Academies ― the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences ― are proud to host this event. Broadly speaking, the symposium will explore how we can better approach evidence-informed policy development to move it from theory to practice.
I’m hoping that, during these discussions, we can challenge each other to unpack the value of evidence, not just its validity, and consider how we can be more relevant and responsive in our approaches to providing evidence to policy-makers. I encourage you to join us in the exercise. It’s shaping up to be an informative day with more than 15 eminent speakers and panellists. You can register for the symposium here.
I look forward to continuing the conversation. As always, you can contact me at eric.meslin@scienceadvice.ca or on Twitter @emmeslin.