Munk School-Queen's International Institute on Social Policy

Welcome by conference organizers. Overview of the day's program.

The past 15 years have seen a succession of shocks across OECD nations which are playing out against the backdrop of an aging population, the green energy transition and the digital economy. They are also layering on top of long-term trends related to the rise and persistence of inequality and generational inequities. How are these shocks and long-term trends intersecting? What socio-economic challenges are on and over the social policy horizon?

• Kevin Milligan, Professor, Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia (UBC). Kevin Milligan is Professor of Economics in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia, Scholar-in-Residence with the C.D. Howe Institute, and Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Since 2011, he has served as Co-Editor of the Canadian Tax Journal. He studied at Queen’s University and the University of Toronto, receiving his Ph.D. in 2001. His published research in over 100 articles spans the fields of public and labour economics, with a primary focus on how the Canadian tax and transfer system affects economic decisions and wellbeing. In 2020-21, he served as Special Advisor (Economic Recovery) in the Privy Council Office.

• Stefano Scarpetta, Director, Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, OECD. Stefano Scarpetta has been the Director of the Employment, Labour and Social Affairs (ELS) Directorate of the OECD since 2013. He leads the work of the Organisation in a number of broad areas including Employment, Labour, Migration, Health, Skills, Gender and Tackling Inequalities and contributes to the implementation of the Secretary-General’s strategic orientations in these areas. Stefano represents the OECD in the G20 and G7 and many other high-level international fora on labour market, social, migration and health issues.  Under his leadership, ELS provides continuous assistance and support to countries in the design, implementation and evaluation of polices drawing from evidence-based analyses of how policy affects different economic, labour and social outcomes. His advice has contributed to numerous policy reforms in OECD countries and beyond, and new policy thinking in areas ranging from inequalities, labour market inclusion and the future of work, social protection for all, the integration of migrants, the economics of public health and patient-centred health care.

• Moderator: Catherine Adam; Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Strategic and Service Policy; Employment and Social Development Canada. Catherine Adam was appointed to the position of Senior Assistant Deputy Minister of the Strategic and Service Policy Branch at Employment and Social Development Canada in August 2017.

  Prior to joining Employment and Social Development Canada, Catherine was the Assistant Secretary to Cabinet for Intergovernmental Affairs Policy with the Privy Council Office (PCO), and the Associate Assistant Deputy Minister of Federal–Provincial Relations and Social Policy at the Department of Finance.

  She has extensive experience in social and economic policy issues in Canada including labour market, income security, early learning and childcare, health policy, Indigenous programming and policies and intergovernmental affairs.

Lunch break.

• Keynote Speaker: Minouche Shafik, Director, London School of Economics; Author What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract. Nemat (Minouche) Shafik is a leading economist, whose career has straddled public policy and academia. She was appointed Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science in September 2017. She did her BA at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, her MSc at LSE and her DPhil at the University of Oxford and, by the age of 36, had become the youngest ever Vice President of the World Bank. She taught at Georgetown University and the Wharton Business School. She later served as the Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Development from 2008 to 2011, Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund from 2011-2014 and as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England from 2014-2017, where she sat on all the monetary, financial and prudential policy committees and was responsible for a balance sheet of over £500 billion. Minouche has served on and chaired numerous boards and currently serves as a Trustee of the British Museum, the Supervisory Board of Siemens, the Council of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and the Economy Honours Committee. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2015. In July 2020 Minouche was made a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords.

• Moderator: Peter Loewen, Director, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Professor Loewen teaches in the Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He is the Director of PEARL, Associate Director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute, a Senior Fellow at Massey College, and a Fellow with the Public Policy Forum. For 2020-2022, he is a Distinguished Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Tel Aviv University.

  Professor Loewen received his B.A. from Mount Allison University (2002) and his PhD from l’Université de Montréal (2008). He held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of British Columbia and the University of California at San Diego. Since joining the University of Toronto Mississauga in 2010, he has held visiting positions at the Melbourne School of Government at the University of Melbourne, the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Coffee break.

The last few years have seen marked by economic shocks, polarization, and populist challenges to democratic norms across OECD countries. In Canada, the Black Lives Matter movement and the reconciliation agenda have heightened demands for social justice. But resistance to restrictions adopted during the pandemic and the rising cost of living are generating resistance to reformist agendas. There has also been an epidemic of misinformation and widespread mistrust of expert opinion and political leaders. What are the implications for social cohesion and for the capacity of governments to achieve social policy priorities?

Speakers:

• Gina Gustavsson, Uppsala University Sweden. Gina Gustavsson is a senior lecturer at the Department of Government, Uppsala University, and has for several years been an associate member of Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Her research spans political theory and political psychology, and she is currently leading a cross-national research project called  Nationhood in a Pandemic, Nordic Gold or Nordic Noir? The Interplay between National Identity, Political Trust, Affective Polarization, and Attitudes to Immigrants in Denmark and Sweden in 2020-2021. Her research has been published in the European Political Science Review, Ethnicities, Nations & Nationalism, Ethnic & Racial studies, Political Studies, and the Review of Politics, as well as in a volume she has edited together with David Miller for Oxford University Press. She has also written a book on Sweden’s controversial covid strategy and its relation to the national identity (“Du stolta, du fria”, 2021), and published op-eds on this topic in the Guardian and the Washington Post.

• Debra Thompson, Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies, McGill University. Dr. Debra Thompson is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University. She is a leading scholar of the comparative politics of race. Her academic research and teaching, along with her commitment to public scholarship, seek to understand, analyze, and explain the complex historic and contemporary relationships among race, public policy, and inequality in Canada and other democratic societies. Dr. Thompson’s award-winning first book, The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a study of the political development of racial classifications on the national censuses of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Her best-selling second book, The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging was published by Scribner Canada (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) in September 2022 and is a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. 

• Richard Johnston, Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, UBC. Richard Johnston (PhD Stanford) is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Canada Research Chair Emeritus in Public Opinion, Elections, and Representation at UBC. He has also taught at the University of Toronto, the California Institute of Technology, Harvard University (Mackenzie King chair, 1994-5), and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author or co-author of six books, four on Canadian politics and two on US Politics. He has co-edited five other books and has written 100 articles and book chapters. Much of his work focuses on party systems, elections and public opinion, in Canada, the US, and Germany. His other main preoccupation is with the complex of issues in immigration, diversity, multiculturalism, and the welfare state in Canada and in the OECD. He was Principal Investigator of the 1988 and 1992-3 Canadian Election Studies and Research Director for the National Annenberg Election Survey (Penn), 2000-8. He was the director of survey for the Major Collaborative Initiative on Equality, Security, and Community. In 2007-8 he was president of the Canadian Political Science Association. In 2017, he was given the Mildred Schwartz prize for lifetime achievement in the study of Canadian politics.

• Keith Banting, Professor Emeritus and Stauffer Dunning Fellow, Department of Political Studies and School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University. Keith Banting is Stauffer Dunning Fellow and Professor Emeritus at Queen’s University. His research has long focused on the politics of social policy, which he has extended to include the relationship between multiculturalism and immigration on one hand and support for social programs on the other.

  In the field of social policy, Dr. Banting is the author of The Welfare State and Canadian Federalism.  Hiis more recent contributions include Inequality and the Fading of Redistributive Politics, and “Framing the New Inequality: The Politics of Income Redistribution in Canada”, (both with John Myles). He retains his old interest in federalism, and recently published “The Three Federalisms and Change in Social Policy”.  In the field of multiculturalism, Professor Banting is an editor (with Will Kymlicka) of Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary Democracies. More recently, they published The Strains of Commitment: The Political Sources of Solidarity in Diverse Societies (2017). His most recent article in this field is “The Puzzling Persistence of Racial Inequality in Canada, co-authored with Debra Thompson (2021). Professor Banting is a member of the Order of Canada and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

This session will take stock of the main take aways from the day’s deliberations - the most significant social, economic and political shifts facing Canada over the next five to ten years; priorities for action; whether we have the policy levers, capacity and data to understand and respond to complex and high velocity trends.

Speakers:

• Sean Speer, Editor at Large, The Hub; Senior Fellow, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy

  Sean Speer is The Hub’s editor-at-large and Senior Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and project co-director of the School’s Ontario 360 research project. Sean is also currently the PPF Scotiabank Fellow for Strategic Competitiveness at the Public Policy Forum and editor at large at The Hub. He previously served as a senior economic adviser to former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

• Carolyn Tuohy, Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow, Department of Political Science and Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy

  Carolyn Tuohy is a professor emeritus of political science and distinguished fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She holds a B.A. from the University of Toronto, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University.  She specializes in comparative public policy, with an emphasis on social policy. Her most recent book is Remaking Policy: Scale, Pace and Political Strategy in Health Care Reform (University of Toronto Press 2018). She is currently working on a book on the power of narrative discourse in public policy. Other publications include Accidental Logics: the Dynamics of Change in the Health Care Arena in the United States, Britain and Canada (Oxford University Press 1999), Policy and Politics in Canada: Institutionalized Ambivalence (Temple University Press 1992), four co-edited books and numerous journal articles and book chapters on health and social policy, professional regulation, and comparative approaches in public policy. From 1992-2005 she served in the senior administration of the University of Toronto as Deputy Provost and as Vice-President, Government and Institutional Relations. She has served as a member of the Board of Directors and the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) and as Vice-Chair of the Boards of Directors of the Institute for Work and Health and of the Canadian Heath Services Research Foundation (now the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement). She was Founding Fellow of the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto (now merged with the Munk School), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

• Naheed Nenshi, former mayor of Calgary.
  
  Naheed K. Nenshi served as Calgary’s mayor for three terms between 2010 and 2021. During his time, Calgary became one of the greatest cities in the world, named as the best city in which to live in the Western Hemisphere. His leadership saw an unprecedented investment in quality of life including transit, roads, recreation centres and libraries including the magnificent Central Library, while keeping taxes the lowest in Canada. His time as mayor also saw the City of Calgary through four states of emergency, including devastating flooding in 2013 floods and the COVID-19 pandemic. He also became an international voice on urban issues, with audiences across Canada and around the world, including the World Economic Forum in Davos. Naheed was awarded the World Mayor Prize as the best mayor in the world in 2014 by The City Mayors Foundation. He also has received the President’s Award from the Canadian Institute of Planners and the Humanitarian Award from the Canadian Psychological Association for his contribution to community mental health. Maclean’s magazine once called him the second-most influential person in Canada, after the Prime Minister, much to the amusement of his mother.

• Margaret Biggs, Matthews Fellow in Global Public Policy, Queen’s School of Policy Studies

   

  Margaret Biggs is currently the Matthews Fellow in Global Public Policy at Queen’s University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Development, Brookings Institution. Ms Biggs previously served as Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, Priorities and Planning, in the Privy Council Office (PCO), and as President of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). She was also Assistant Deputy Minister responsible for policies and programs in the areas of social development, labour markets, and skills and learning in the Government of Canada. Ms Biggs currently serves on numerous Canadian and international boards and advisory bodies including World Universities Service Canada (WUSC), the McCall-MacBain Foundation, FinDevCanada, the International Foundation for Electoral Support and Global Skills Opportunity. She co-led the Study Group on Global Education’s report Equipping the Next Generation of Canadians to Succeed in a Complex World.

Summary of the day's proceedings and looking ahead to the policy seminar series.