For as long as anyone can remember, provincial politicians have made the case that what's needed is more -- or smarter -- investment from Ottawa. Starting this week, Premier Dalton McGuinty can expect firepower for his demands to Ottawa from a new University of Toronto think tank. His government
provided $5 million in seed money to launch the new research centre, and he was to speak at its official launch Jan. 25.
The
Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation, according to its website, "is an independent non-partisan think tank. Our research focuses on
those federal policy frameworks and strategies that will most strongly
affect Ontario's prosperity and quality of life in the next century."
The centre's materials emphasize collaboration with private and non-profit sector partners as an important governance tool, and seem -- like so many provincial and municipal politicians -- to begin with the assumption that current federal policy is broken, an outdated, jerry-rigged relic of a bygone era. "Many of the key elements of Canada's social contract and institutional
infrastructure have broken down," Mowat Centre director Matthew Mendelsohn writes in his
Director's Message introducing the think tank. "In some cases our public policies are
based on assumptions that are no longer valid; in others, the
assumptions are valid but the programs that gave them life have been
tinkered with so much that they no longer achieve their intended
purpose."
The centre's first major project will be to form a commission to modernize support for the unemployed, scheduled to launch in February 2010.
Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation