Whether it’s in the school cafeteria, the House of Commons or on social media, your reputation is out there.
Jodi Butts is joined by The Right Honourable Brian Mulroney to gain his wise counsel on how to build a reputation that can withstand and outlast the fray.
There are plenty of criticisms of democracy in Canada. While the country ranks in the upper echelons of mainstream reviewers concerned with global comparisons, there are disconcerting cracks in the foundation of our self-government.
Indeed, the foundation itself is fundamentally flawed. One could—and should—point out the country’s inequities and inequalities, embedded colonialism, vestigial electoral system, and so forth. But on this episode, our focus is on a sort of immanent critique of Canada’s Westminster system itself, on its own terms. And so we ask: What’s wrong with Canada’s democracy?
On this episode of Open to Debate, David Moscrop talks with Emmett Macfarlane, associate professor of political science at the University of Waterloo and author of Constitutional Pariah: Reference re Senate Reform and the Future of Parliament.
Matthew Mendelsohn, Mike Moffatt and Jamie Van Ymeren
The pandemic has revealed many challenges and opportunities for communities across Canada, and these will require different kinds of responses in smaller communities than in large cities.
For too long, many economic and community development programs that focused on rural Canada were designed specifically to address perceived shortcomings within smaller communities in the context of ongoing urbanization and concentrated economic growth in large cites like Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver.
Many government policies over the past half century have focused on rural communities as places of need requiring subsidies rather than places with rich historic, cultural, natural, and human assets that offer economic opportunity and contribute to community well-being.
But the geography of opportunity is being reshaped. While the agglomeration economy still benefits mostly urban settings, there is no doubt an opportunity to advance new economic and community development approaches in smaller communities in light of pandemic — and soon-to-be post-pandemic — realities. Digital infrastructure, opportunities for distributed work, new connective infrastructure, the opportunities for digital delivery of services, and the cost of housing are all impacting business and family decisions.
These factors and new opportunities need to be integrated into program decisions.
It is clear that strong macroeconomic fundamentals on their own are not enough to produce economic well-being and inclusive growth that benefits people. There is, finally, a large consensus that our policies must pursue economic, social, and environmental objectives together.
The federal government has been at the forefront of this agenda in recent years, looking to embed inclusion, community wealth, sustainability and the distribution of benefits from economic growth into program decisions. It is now clear that progress on measures of community well-being is just as important as progress on more traditional economic indicators of success. And government must play an important role in achieving outcomes on well-being and quality of life because they won’t simply be achieved through traditional macroeconomic tools like lower taxes and deregulation.
There is also increasingly a recognition that to truly achieve inclusive economic growth, a place-base approach is needed, one that looks at place and community as the focus for integrated policies across different sectoral or issue areas. The new focus on place-based approaches is aligned with an aggressive microeconomic agenda, including industrial policies, designed to support local businesses in local communities.
How can we design our economic and community development programs to take a place-based approach in light of emerging realities? And how do we do so in a way that produces not just economic growth, but community well-being and community wealth in rural Canada as well?
We have some guidance. In 2020, the OECD launched a new framework on rural economic development. It highlights the re-thinking going on globally on the best ways to create inclusive, prosperous rural communities.
The new framework, Rural Well-Being — Geography of Opportunities, provides a roadmap on how governments can empower communities and support their economic and community development ambitions. It aligns well with the federal government’s interest in place-based policies, more activist approaches to business support programs, and supporting economic growth in ways that are explicitly focused on inclusion, sustainability and community well-being.
The new approach replaces earlier frameworks, which focused on trying to attract jobs by improving the competitiveness of rural regions. While building competitive and innovative regions is important, we know now that attracting business investment is not enough to produce inclusive, sustainable communities. Sometimes, even with new employment from a new investment, people who live in rural and smaller communities see no improvement in their quality of life.
The new framework focuses on the unique, place-based challenges and opportunities of individual communities and encourages investments in local assets that improve life for people in smaller and rural communities. Investing in high quality public services, improving quality of life and attracting and retaining people are all complementary goals.
The new approach assumes that economic development will only be successful if it is built on a strong community foundation and delivers multiple benefits for residents.
Coming out of the pandemic, there is a unique opportunity to re-think some of Canada’s approach to economic and community development programs. Individual communities are now beginning to see the nuanced and varied ways that COVID-19 has impacted their local regions. Canadian researchers with expertise on rural Canada are taking stock of what the pandemic has done to rural communities and what comes next. And the federal government is in the process of rolling out unprecedented economic recovery investments in response to the pandemic with the goal of building back better and helping individuals, communities and businesses, some of which are targeted specifically at rural recovery.
This is a unique opportunity to influence the shape and form of policies that will influence rural Canada for years to come.
What would strong, place-based rural policies look like in practice? Canada 2020 is embarking on a one-year project of research and convening to address this question. The project will see what we can learn from global efforts to build more inclusive and sustainable economic well-being and community wealth in smaller and rural communities, take stock of what is already working in Canada, and better understand what Canadian research and data are telling us about the evolving geography of opportunities in Canada.
We know that successful approaches must include building capacity within local leadership and empowering local communities to decide how to implement programs. We know that integration into wider regional ecosystems is important for many communities. And we know that solutions will be best if they emerge from processes where governments, civil society, business and communities are all at the table.
We also know that issues like digital infrastructure, connectivity, responding to climate change, access to capital, and accommodating shifting locational decisions will all be important. But what should this mean in practice?
Canada needs a renewed commitment to ensuring the well-being and livelihoods of the millions of people who live in rural areas across the country. We are now at a moment where we can make key policy and program decisions that make sustainable and inclusive economic growth and community well-being a reality for all communities across Canada.
Background
On June 3rd, 2021, Canada 2020 convened policymakers, decision-makers and healthcare experts to discuss reforming and redesigning Canada’s seniors-care sector. Robust discussions occurred on how seniors care can be improved, and how we can protect and support older adults as we move beyond the pandemic. Learn more about our event here.
Highlights
Key Takeaways
Produced by Santis Health
On December 8th, Canada 2020 hosted the next in our series of discussions on how policies can support well-being, connectivity and innovation in smaller and rural communities in Canada.
Canada 2020 is convening researchers, stakeholders and policymakers with expertise in rural and community economic development to engage in policy discussions and identify solutions that can work on the ground. With a focus on COVID recovery and taking stock of changes and new opportunities produced during the pandemic, Canada 2020 is focused on how to make rapid progress on Canada’s rural economic development strategy.
Driven, vibrant, and innovative Canadian communities like Faro, Yukon; Churchbridge, Saskatchewan; Baie-Saint-Paul, Québec; and Clarenville, Newfoundland are integral to our economy, culture, and social fabric, making Canada the prosperous and successful country that it is.
But as the last year has accelerated and revealed, rural and smaller Canadian communities face unique challenges and opportunities.
That’s why Canada 2020 is launching a new research project focused on identifying the best ideas and practices that support community well-being and inclusive economic growth in rural and smaller Canadian communities.
Featuring roundtable discussions, policy labs, events, and discussion papers, A Sustainable, Inclusive, and Digital Future for Rural Canada will work with local and community experts to develop a roadmap for well-being for smaller and rural Canadian communities.
On this episode of @Risk, host Jodi Butts is joined by the 33rd Premier of New Brunswick and now the CEO of the Canadian Centre for the Purpose of the Corporation, Brian Gallant, to discuss reputation as the mother of all risks (M.O.A.R.) in the corporate context. For a business, reputation is more than a comms issue, it’s existential, and Brian wants to see companies find their purpose in order to protect it.
To read the full transcript of this episode, click here.
In March of last year, David Moscrop spoke with feminist theorist and friend Amanda Watson about managing life during the pandemic. The conversation included thoughts about compassion, care, inequity, resistance, and, of course, anxiety.
Just over a year later, as the end of the pandemic begins, the two revisit that conversation. This time the focus is on processing…all of this, with special attention given to the question: How are we managing late-pandemic anxiety and what will a return to “normal” look like?
As mentioned, on this episode of Open to Debate, David Moscrop talks with Amanda Watson, feminist theorist, lecturer at Simon Fraser University and author of The Juggling Mother: Coming Undone in the Age of Anxiety.
On this episode of @ Risk, host Jodi Butts is joined by four-time Olympic Gold medalist, community leader and soon to be doctor, Hayley Wickenheiser. They discuss the importance of sport in our recovery, being a good team player and the impact of the pandemic on the Olympics.
To read the full transcript of this episode, click here.
In Canada and around the world, anxious, weary populations are looking forward to returning to something that will approximate normal life. That return is predicated on, among other things, mass Covid-19 vaccination efforts that continue along slow and steady.
As more of us get the jab, states, including Canada, are considering vaccine certification programs for domestic use, foreign travel, or both. But concerned individuals, including health, privacy, and social science experts, are raising a number of concerns with the idea. While a vaccine “passport” might intuitively seem like a good idea, it’s fraught with risks and trade-offs, leaving us to ask: Should we adopt vaccine certification programs?
On this episode of Open to Debate, David Moscrop talks with Françoise Baylis, University Research Professor, bioethicist, and author of Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing.
