“Politically it helped us tremendously to be attacked by this coalition,” he said. “So we never really had to engage in the question of what the evidence actually shows about various approaches to crime.”
Needless to say, there were voices in the room that tried to defend the uses of evidence in policy making. I found Wendy Thomson, now a McGill social policy professor, but previously in the political thick of things as former British prime minister Tony Blair’s chief adviser on public service reform, especially engaging.
Thomson spoke of the need for “brave politicians” to rise above the exigencies of party politics, and when a policy direction was clearly misguided, stand up and say, “It can’t go on like this.”
One intriguing possibility raised in the discussion was that this sort of political bravery, married to sound policy, might happen more often in times of crisis than in easier days. So the Tories cut the GST when they were swimming in surpluses, but would they do something so obviously unsupportable, at least in pure policy terms, in these more challenging days?
But that raises yet another question. In truly testing times, are governments actually capable of gathering evidence and developing policy based on it? Kevin Lynch, Ottawa’s top mandarin as Clerk of the Privy Council, also spoke at McGill today, and he left me worried on this score.
“There’s always an urgent search for knowledge to better understand the nature of the crisis, so as to better shape the policy response to the crisis. And this takes time and it takes expertise,” he said. “This is always in tension, and fairly great tension at times, with the understandable desire for action, to do something, and to be seen to do something.”
He means, of course, desire on the part of politicians to be seen to be busily solving problems. In the current economic mess there is ample evidence of a rush to seem to be shoveling stimulus billions out the door, against urging, from among others David Dodge, for a more measured response.
So I’m left with two unsatisfactory impressions of the link between evidence and policy. In good times, politicians might feel they have the luxury of ignoring evidence, and so design and implement expedient policy; in bad times, politicians might feel they don’t have the luxury of gathering evidence, and so design and implement expedient policy.
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