Farah Qaiser is the director of research and policy at Evidence for Democracy. Rachael Maxwell is the executive director at Evidence for Democracy.
Transparency is a funny word: it sparks many emotions, but there is little agreement on what exactly it means in practice. In politics, the word has several associates, including accountability, openness and anti-corruption. It is often used as core rhetoric during elections by most parties, even though reckoning rarely occurs during or after the campaign.
Let’s imagine for a second, then, that transparency means citizens should be able to tell what their government is trying to do, and why. Ostensibly, this seems like a reasonable expectation. Yet from the sidelines, it’s often hard for the public to understand what considerations go into policy decisions.
This issue has existed for years, but it’s been a particular concern during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period of great flux in which people from all walks of life have had to understand the ever-evolving decisions affecting their lives. Policy actors, too, have themselves leveraged the virtues of transparency and evidence: Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, mandate letters issued to Cabinet have all stated a commitment to the “use of science and evidence-based decision-making.”
So at Evidence for Democracy, we recently attempted to answer the question: can the evidence behind policy decisions be found by the lay public?
To do so, we used a framework to assess the transparency of evidence usage in 100 randomly selected federal policies, announced between January, 2021, to June, 2021. For each policy, we asked: what do policymakers know about the issue? What is the government’s chosen action, and why? How and when will we know if the policy has worked?
Our assessment found that federal policies scored low when it came to the transparency of evidence, meaning that it’s very difficult for individuals outside of government to find the considerations behind policy decisions. Too often, policies failed to provide a source for any evidence mentioned, and rarely acknowledged alternative options or any absent, weak or contradictory evidence.
As an example, let’s look at Transport Canada’s one-year ban on pleasure craft in Arctic waters and cruise vessels in Canadian waters. The policy is clear, but for us, it scores a zero, as the underlying evidence is missing. For example, how many cases of COVID-19 emerged due to travel via cruise vessels? Why was a one-year ban chosen, instead of stringent COVID-19 testing for travellers?
There are, of course, important nuances to keep in mind. To start, just because an outsider can’t see the evidence from the sidelines, does not mean that the evidence doesn’t exist, or that it wasn’t considered in the policy-making process; this, however, is why making processes more transparent and accessible is so necessary. The transparency of evidence may also fall short due to necessary confidentiality, or crisis-time circumstances, but this needs to be an exception, rather than the default, when it comes to policy-making.
Canada’s federated democracy also comes with its own challenges. For one, policy-making is distributed across several levels of jurisdiction, which blurs who ultimately bears the responsibility for transparency. For example, to build a national child-care system, the federal government must strike a deal with every province and territory.
This kind of complexity, however, doesn’t obviate the need for transparency. Since government policy is in essence a public good, citizens deserve the opportunity to understand how decisions are arrived at, especially in times of increased uncertainty when trust in government is mission-critical.
What seems clear is that we have a transparency problem when it comes to how federal policy is shaped and justified in Canada. This poses a risk for democracy, too.
When people cannot understand how or why a government decision was made, they are more likely to disconnect, and less likely to participate in civic engagement. If democracy relies in large measure on the principle of participation, this isn’t a healthy direction. Instead, offering citizens the opportunity to scrutinize the relationship between evidence and public policy gives them the chance to consider whether they agree with the decisions shaping their lives.
And we risk losing sight of the fact that we all benefit when governments make policy decisions informed by the best available evidence. Data, facts and science challenge what we might consider as common sense, and help distinguish the boundaries between reality and political framing (though framing too, can be propped up by evidence). A robust evidence base makes well-informed policy decisions more possible.
As hard as the word transparency may be to pin down, the promise of it is real. There is no time like the present for the Government of Canada to deliver on its commitment to using the best available evidence – with all their receipts in hand.
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