Governance & Democracy

In 2017, the Public Policy Forum dedicated its annual Prime Ministers of Canada Fellowship to the idea of governance in the digital age. The goal was to explore and explain how the world is changing and how governments are responding. Kent Aitken won that Fellowship and wrote a report that practitioners can use as a resource as they contemplate the pressures of change on governance systems. Governance in the Digital Age is the result of a year of research, surveys and interviews with about 300 government practitioners and stakeholders in Canada and around the world.

The digital transformation that governments are seeking and citizens are expecting is more than just 'a challenge,' says PPF's Prime Ministers of Canada Fellow Kent Aitken in this new report. After conducting almost 300 interviews over the course of a year, he concludes that governments are currently not set up for the complexities of the digital age and suggests four areas that they need to fundamentally change.

Local news across Canada has been cut in half in the last decade, writes Terry Pedwell of The Canadian Press. In this Globe & Mail article, he highlights a new PPF report “Mind The Gaps — Quantifying The Decline of News Coverage in Canada” which looks specifically at the decline in civic reporting of civic institutions like city hall, police stations and courts.

Many different approaches to support journalism, locally and beyond, have emerged in recent years in the wake of the sharp decline of traditional industry players. Public policy will play a crucial role in shaping the rules for ownership innovation and protected space for Canadian journalism.

In our study of 20 small and mid-sized Canadian communities, the number and depth of newspaper articles about civic affairs declined sharply between 2008 and 2017, leaving citizens less informed about their democratic institutions.

In major emergencies, regardless of cause, it was almost inevitable that responding authorities would struggle. Even in terrorist or natural disasters that seem to have been handled relatively well, the authorities were overwhelmed by the scale & complexity of what they faced. To prepare for the worst, we need to practice failure in emergency management

Past Event

On Oct. 1 PPF held a breakfast and a panel discussion with Kent Aitken, Bianca Wylie and Amanda Clarke to launch Kent’s study of Governance in the Digital Age. The report explores the challenges, opportunities, and cultures of the digital era, and distinguishes between what's simply "changing the channel" to digital and what's fundamentally different for governments and stakeholders.

In this Op-ed, Ed Greenspon and Taylor Owens discuss some of the policy options which would help address the threats to democracy posed by hate speech and disinformation, and which has been empowered by a highly consolidated digital media landscape.

In this Globe & Mail editorial, the PPF report "Democracy Divided" and its authors Ed Greenspon and Taylor Owens are discussed, as well as the recommendations within the report. The editorial points out that electoral reform has stalled and notes that Greenspon and Owens recommendations could help Elections Canada protect themselves from threats in the digital age.

With the release of the PPF report "Democracy Divided", The Logic covers the threats that social media marketing tools and the highly consolidated digital media landscape creates for democracy in Canada and explains why this matters to Canadians.

In this Nieman Journalism Lab article we get an overview of the policy recommendations in the PPF report "Democracy Divided" as part of PPF's ongoing Shattered Mirror Series. The report addresses questions of disinformation and hate speech and its spread through social media marketing tools.

Democracy has been made vulnerable to attack by hate speech and disinformation on digital and social platforms. Policy must be implemented to reconcile freedom of speech and freedom of the press with these online news threats to democracy.

At the start of 2018, PPF, with the support of our six partners, decided to dive deeper into the state of local and community news media. We set out to examine how, exactly, journalistic coverage of communities across Canada has changed over the past decade.