Membership Matters

Dear PPF Member,

Two years ago, the Public Policy Forum undertook a review of our strategy, which included consultation across the country with current members, past members and others engaged in our work. Out of this came a renewed strategy we called Being the Think Tank About Tomorrow.

It should be a given that think tanks are about tomorrow. Yet all too often they spend year after year, decade after decade pushing out the same cookie-cutter solutions despite changing circumstances. PPF’s strategy focuses most particularly on the policy implications of three forces of change: technological change, climate change and geopolitical change.

Often more than one is at play, as in the technology-rooted geopolitical competition between China and the United States or the impetus for a clean energy future – and so what used to be normal policy motion often becomes extraordinary commotion. Witness populism, the explosion of disinformation, the unfolding move from the internal combustion engine to EVs.

We are an applied policy shop. Our more than 200 members are on the frontlines of just about everything. If technology or climate or geopolitics are rewriting the rules of their games, we work with them to find practical fresh solutions so that as Canadians we enjoy the fruits of a successful future. We also want to ensure those fruits are available to all. We draw on a membership that includes federal departments and agencies, every province and territory, businesses in multiple sectors, labour unions, colleges and universities, foundations, associations, not-for-profits, etc. Their mix provides us the necessary tension – grounded in common purpose – to map out the most promising pathways.

In some ways, all this prepared us for the pandemic, which has thrown yet more upheaval at the policy equation. Foundational sectors like air travel and tourism have been shut out of the economy of the present. Science has risen to the moment in the form of miraculous new vaccines developed in months not years. Fiscal policy is looked at anew. Or not.

The long-standing PPF model was made for times like these – times when diverse interests need to come together to explore how forces of change are affecting them and how consensus can be found in keeping apace the future, then find the best pathways forward. Good policy matters more than ever. When PPF organized its first Canada Growth Summit in 2016, we called it Beyond Two Percent. That is a theme to which Sean Speer, our new PPF Scotiabank Fellow in Strategic Competitiveness, returned in a recent report, in which he reminds us “we have more agency over the country’s economic performance than we often realize. It is crucial therefore that we exercise this agency fully and wisely.”

Canadians are never without options. It is a matter of figuring out which are the best under the circumstances of the times and how we can build a durable consensus around them so that policy fundamentals don’t get blown around with changes to the political winds.

We at PPF are proud of the work you can see featured in this membership letter, whether it be our Brave New Work project or our Energy Future Forum. We are a non-partisan, independent and self-supporting organization. When potential partners ask us how they can help, we always say we need two inputs: intellectual capital and financial capital. If you have one or both, please come assist us in our pursuit of a better tomorrow for Canada and Canadians.