Disruption & Technology

The Public Policy Forum is delighted to announce Ilse Treurnicht has been elected the organization’s new Board Chair, and thanks outgoing Chair Anne-Marie Hubert for 10 years of service to PPF and its Canada-wide network of policy leaders.

With Brian comes rigour, quality and depth. Welcome!

The debate over the employment status of gig workers continues to play out in California legislation. What can Canadian regulators learn for our own first attempts at legislation from California’s decision to enact Assembly Bill 5?

Digital transformation can be risky — but the status quo is riskier.  Drawing on insights of CIOs and senior public servants, this report identifies strategies for dealing with the risks of not embracing digital technology for public services, including: legacy systems costs, cyber security, culture and people, and service failure.

Building off of last year’s seminal report on the rise of the intangibles economy, PPF’s newest contribution to Canada’s economic conversation proposes an industrial plan to “rebuild Canada” post COVID-19. New North Star II presents a plan that accounts for the technological push-and-pull of today’s global economy and finds common ground between opposite ends of the political spectrum, in an effort to jump-start Canada's economy.

Courts and legislatures are deciding whether your Lyft driver is an independent contractor or an employee. The classification is a big deal, affecting workers' protections through to retirement. This paper surveys the current state of the gig economy and how courts, tribunals and legislatures in North America and the UK are tackling the issue of employment classification.

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In the third edition of our Brave New Work Newsletter: Five things we learned at our Brave New Work Conference, our latest report on the correlation between Canadians’ fear of job losses from automation and populist and nativist views, and a new blog post on why 'robots will replace us' thinking is not that simple - or that scary!

The most popular way of analyzing the future of work — the labour substitution model — is far too narrow for our complex world. By looking at three other dimensions of change, we can better understand, and prepare for, tomorrow’s opportunities.

The Digital Democracy Project (DDP) is a joint initiative led by the Ottawa-based Public Policy Forum and the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. The project will study the media ecosystem in the run-up to and during Canada’s October 2019 federal election by monitoring digital and social media and by conducting both regular national surveys and a study of a metered sample of online consumption.

Who is fearful of automation and what do they want politicians to do about it? This paper finds a correlation between Canadians’ fear of job losses from automation and populist and nativist views—but also that Canadians favour traditional government policy approaches to job disruption, such as retraining, more than radical measures such as reducing immigration.

Canadian society has the resources to operate more effectively than violent extremists — and at scale — said panelists at two PPF events on countering radicalization online. Participants made recommendations in four policy areas to combat hate that festers without intervention, which not only threatens public safety, but the human rights and lived-experiences of all Canadians.

In an upcoming report for PPF’s Brave New Work project, Peter Loewen and Benjamin Allen Stevens find a correlation between Canadians’ fear of job losses from automation and populist and nativist views—but also that they favour traditional government policy approaches to job disruption, such as retraining, more than radical measures such as reducing immigration.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) could dramatically improve the way governments deliver services and data to citizens while protecting governments from the risks associated with government-led digital projects. This report examines what was learned through two Government of Canada API projects, and how to build on their successes.

The 16 new Fellows from across Canada will be focusing on the Future of Work.