Research and publications

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/37828

Collection consists of research, scholarship and publications by faculty and graduate students affiliated with the School of Public Policy and Administration.

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Access status: Open Access ,
Learning from History: Program Reviews and Public Safety
(Policy Options, 2011-02-01) Cohn, Daniel; Foster, Lorne; Greene, Ian
Canada appears headed for a new round of 1990-style program reviews aimed at producing spending restraint. This article uses evidence from two provincial inquiries into failures of government to caution that conducting such reviews on a whole-of-government basis creates too large a task to undertake without endangering the lives of Canadians. The danger involved is magnified further when the task is done in an atmosphere of crisis. In order to effect sound public management, program reviews should be done not on a whole-of-government basis but at known periodic intervals in individual ministries or program areas.
Access status: Open Access ,
Chaoulli Ten Years On: Still About Nothing?
(2015) Cohn, Daniel
Five years ago this author presented the paper Chaoulli Five Years On: All Bark and No Bite? The paper argued that five years after the Supreme Court of Canada’s Chaoulli v. Quebec ruling, there was still no noticeable impact on Canada’s system of provincial single-payer universal health insurance plans. The paper argued that this was because the large life and health insurance firms had little if any interest in competing with publicly funded health insurance in Canada and because politicians saw little to gain by going down that road. Ten years on, even as the opponents of the present health insurance regime try to use Chaoulli v. Quebec to force changes in the laws of other provinces, this is still, for the most part, the case. Unlike the legendary comedy program Sienfeld, Chaoulli v. Quebec is not totally about nothing. However, so far, it has proven to be about as close to being about nothing as any ruling of the Supreme Court is likely to get.
Access status: Open Access ,
Chaoulli Five Years On: All Bark and No Bite?
(2015) Cohn, Daniel
In June 2005 the Supreme Court handed down a complex and non-unanimous decision in the case Chaoulli v. Quebec. The ruling held that prohibitions on the sale of private health insurance for services that are already provincially insured are unlawful, but only under certain circumstances. Further adding to the complexity of the ruling is that it was so worded as to apply only to the Province of Quebec. The Chaoulli ruling generated a virtual avalanche of media stories and a significant volume of scholarly publications. Such activity is characteristic of a public policy-network and its associated policy-community that have been severely disrupted. This paper identifies the element of the ruling which caused this disruption and goes on to ask why this disruption failed to produce a suitable policy window for reforming Canadian health policy along lines favoured by free-market advocates. Specifically, Canada’s system of provincial universal public health insurance plans remains largely as it was before the ruling and no meaningful market for parallel private insurance has emerged. Only a handful of niche products have entered the field. Significantly, Canada’s major insurers have shown little interest in offering such coverage. This paper argues that the reason for this reticence is simply that there is no business case for the major insurers to offer such a product. Even if the courts were to further widen the conditions under which rival private insurance for provincially insured services could be sold and were to lift other restrictions as well, a profitable private alternative to provincial health insurance would still be very difficult to create. As far as health care policy-making is concerned, Chaoulli has proven to be a decision which is primarily bark and very little bite. The paper concludes by asking what lessons the Canadian health policy community can draw from the Chaoulli decision with regard to how future issues are assessed and debated.
Access status: Open Access ,
The 1997 Canada Child Tax Benefit: A Test of Beland, Rocco and Waddan's Theory on the Implementation of Public Policy in Federations (revised 29 August 2017)
(2017-08-29) Cohn, Daniel
In the 2016 book Obamacare Wars: Federalism State Politics and the Affordable Care Act, Béland, Rocco and Waddan study the implementation of so called “Obamacare” at the state level. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act introduced not one but several reforms to health policies, most importantly, the creation of state-based market-places for individuals to perchance health insurance with federal subsidies, a federally subsidized expansion of state Medicaid programs for low income families, and regulatory changes to require insurers to spend a minimum share of premiums on providing health care to members or face penalties. All of these required state-level action to implement making the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) not just a complex policy but one with shared authority between Washington and the fifty states. Béland, Rocco and Waddan argue that the degree to which any one of these three policies was implemented in a given state can best be explained not by the ideology or partisanship of the state executive or legislatures but by the creation of intergovernmental networks and delegations of authority by policy legacies, institutional fragmentation and public sentiment, impacting each of the policies in each state. This paper asks whether this theoretical framework can provide a more general approach to the study of policy implementation of complex shared authority programs within federations. The test case is the introduction of the Canada Child Tax Benefit and associated reforms to provincial social assistance and programs to help low income families. All of the factors but one (delegation) identified by Béland, Rocco and Waddan were found to play a role in the present case. This could be due to the difference in policy sectors or to the difference in political institutions between the two nations.
Access status: Open Access ,
Local Blackout in Effect? Major Daily News Coverage of Three Municipal Elections in Calgary Alberta
(2020-05-30) Cohn, Daniel
Voters in local elections (such as those for municipal offices, school boards, and other local entities) face a major barrier to making informed choices due to difficulties in obtaining information. Media coverage is allegedly getting worse as daily newspapers retrenchment and close across Canada. Although exclusively online sources have emerged that cover local politics, most lack the resources to do actual reporting and focus on commentary. Consequently, newspapers still play an important if imperfect role in informing municipal voters. This paper presents the results of a quantitative content analysis of coverage provided by Calgary’s two daily newspapers of the city’s 2010, 2013 and 2017 local elections. These papers are The Calgary Herald and Sun. In October 2014, The Herald’s owner acquired the Calgary Sun. In 2016, the two newsrooms merged and several journalists were let-go. This paper tests three hypothesis about the impact of this restructuring on the coverage of local elections. One: When compared to 2010, in 2017 a greater proportion of the stories will be about the mayoralty contest or the election in general, as opposed to the contests for individual city council seats. Two: In 2017, a greater proportion of the stories will be opinion pieces (columns, op-eds and editorials) as opposed to news stories than in 2010. Three: In 2017 a lower proportion of the news stories will be written by local politics “beat reporters”. The net effect, if these three hypothesis are shown to be true, is that not only has the merger further reduced the already low information that Calgarians have access to regarding municipal elections, but the breadth and quality of that information will also have been reduced. However, the evidence presented here only provides mixed results. Hypothesis 1 is not supported, hypothesis 2 is only somewhat supported, and hypothesis 3 could be supported if restated somewhat.
Access status: Open Access ,
Bureaucratic Autonomy in Decision-Making for Adding New Oncology Medications to Public Drug Benefit Plans in Canada
(2023) Cohn, Daniel
In Canada, prescription drugs go through a multi-stage process before they are paid for by provincial governments. For oncology drugs, among the most important of these steps are licensing for sale by Health Canada, a non-binding recommendation by the Pan Canadian Oncology Drug Review (PCODR) as to whether provinces should reimburse for the use(s) proposed for the medication, then each province makes a final decision through its own deliberation process. These final provincial deliberations vary in terms of the role granted to the bureaucrats involved. For example, in Alberta the minister of health has the final say on adding and removing drugs from the provincial formulary. In Ontario, the final say, rests with the bureaucrat in charge of the drug benefits programs, the Executive Officer of the Ontario Public Drug Programs. However, even though this bureaucrat formally has full decision-making authority, it will be seen that in fact, the steps leading up to the final decision substantially restrict the Executive Officer’s autonomy and that the position of the Executive Officer’s office within the state, also creates substantial ability for the Minister to indirectly influence him or her, so that there is not much difference between the decision-making structure of the two provinces. This helps to explain why, even though politicians in Ontario have used the delegation of final decision-making authority to the Executive Officer as a blame avoidance strategy, there is no statistically significant difference in the number of uses for oncology drugs receiving a negative evaluation from the PCODR rejected for public reimbursement by the two provinces. The reader should be cautioned that the research presented in this paper is somewhat speculative in nature. Confirming whether these speculations are accurate will require further research involving interviews with participants.
Access status: Open Access ,
Iran at the Crossroads Pending Trump’s Return
(2024-12-01) Karimi, Sirvan
Given the prevailing perception of Iran’s Islamic regime as the most immediate threat to American national security, Trump’s return to the presidency in January 2025 may have profound consequences for the ruling clerical regime. Despite its reckless and disruptive behavior and military maneuvers intended to showcase its military power and impress its perceived enemies, it can be argued that the Islamic regime is prone to acting rationally when it perceives a threat to its political survival. The political pragmatism of the regime, as manifested in its inclination to make temporary political concessions, is conducive to forestalling and deflecting any planned US menace on its political existence.
Access status: Open Access ,
Afghanistan Shows the U.S. Folly of Trying to Implant Democratic Institutions in Abroad
(Academic Journalism Society, 2021-09-29) Karimi, Sirvan
The rapid conquest of Kabul in Afghanistan and the triumphant seizure of power by the Taliban triggered shock waves throughout the world.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Appeals and the Limits of Digital Education in the Post-Covid Era
(2021-06-28) Karimi, Sirvan
Though shifting to online teaching and learning has been a persistent trend for the last two decades, remotely delivered teaching has become a pervasive and ubiquitous worldwide phenomenon during the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no misgiving that the staggering impact of COVID-19 on education sector will cement e-learning as an indispensable ingredient of the traditional teaching and learning system. The intensification of the shift to digital teaching and learning is alleged to have the potential to reduce educational costs, diminish bargaining leverage of faculty and teachers’ unions in the education sector, and enhance learning capacity of students. Contrary to the views of ardent exponents of online teaching and learning, it can be demonstrated that e-learning neither reduces educational costs nor can it undermine the bargaining leverage of faculty and teachers’ unions.
Access status: Open Access ,
Comparing the Politicization of COVID-19 and the Great Depression
(2020-06-28) Karimi, Sirvan
The COVID-19 pandemic has set in motion a seismic wave of consternation, anxiety, and trepidation. The crisis has provided a fertile ground for the proliferation of books, articles, and case studies across different academic disciplines. While most attention has concentrated on the analysis of the economic, social and psychological impacts of the pandemic, less attention has been paid to the emergence of an environment within which responses to the crisis are politicized by governments, political parties and politicians in order to enhance their electability. Furthermore, the politicization of the response to COVID-19 is to a great extent shaped by political expediency, not ideological orientation. Some have already attempted to compare the COVID-19 crisis and the Great Depression of the 1930s (see Fishback 2020; Gumede 2020; and Smith, 2020). Though the forces behind the economic crash of the 1930s and the recent economic shutdowns emanated from different sources, the politicization of responses to both crises emerges as a common trend.
Access status: Open Access ,
Canada could benefit from Trump challenges
(Institute for Research on Public Policy, 2017-07-17) Karimi, Sirvan
Canada has an opportunity to bring in, through immigration, the best and brightest students and academics who are alienated by Trump’s policies.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Democratisation Failure in the Middle East: Causes and Prospects
(Uniwersytet Lodzki (University of Lodz), 2024-01-16) Karimi, Sirvan
It has almost become conventional wisdom among analysts and experts on Middle Eastern politics to relate the fate of the democratisation process and its failure in the region to the foreign policy platforms of the USA and its Western allies. Contrary to the prevailing interpretations of democratisation failure in the Middle East, it will be argued that the historical proclivity of leftist organisations and parties to conflate anti-imperialism with fostering hostility towards liberal values, the limited scope of industrialisation, and culturally and religiously ingrained competing loyalties are factors that have cumulatively made a significant contribution to the cultivation of a socio-political environment that is not receptive to democracy.
Access status: Open Access ,
Digital Transformation in the Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities for Faculty Unions
(Sciedu Press, 2026-05-19) Karimi, Sirvan
It has long been conventional wisdom among historians and political philosophers to conceptualize technology as the engine of social transformation that has guided societies through the tunnel of history. Understood as a medium or the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, technology is a society-shaping dynamic that constantly changes, and its successive waves of applications affect all spheres of society, including the education sector. While technology has historically been an integral part of education systems, its application in teaching and learning activities has gained significant momentum since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced worldwide educational institutions to undertake an abrupt transition to online delivery of curriculum. The digitalization of education has acted as a double-edged sword for faculty unions. While growing online teaching and learning has generated a wide variety of compelling challenges that threaten to erode the bargaining power of faculty unions, it has simultaneously provided opportunities for them to counter and overcome those challenges, thereby revitalizing their organizational, communication, and mobilization capacities.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Imperative of a Deeply Ingrained Liberal Political Culture to the Protection of Civil Liberties
(Lamintang Education and Training Centre, 2025-03-25) Karimi, Sirvan
Civil liberties encompass a broad range of human values that bolster individual freedom and human dignity. The indispensability of vibrant civil liberties to a healthy and well-functioning society lies in the grounds that they provided for citizens to participate in the democratic process, criticize their respective governments, and hold their governments accountable. Civil liberties are not luxuries but inalienable entitlements that are essential and imperative for human development and society's socioeconomic progress. Consequently, civil liberties protection has emerged as the most fundamental and cherished human aspiration in developed, developing, and underdeveloped countries. Within the existing literature on human rights protection, it has been the conventional wisdom that effective protection of civil liberties requires the entrenchment of a Bill or the Charter of Rights in the constitution. In addition to signing or ratifying the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, almost all countries across the world have with varying degree entrenched civil liberty protection mechanisms in their respective constitutions. While constitutional protection of civil liberties is believed to be a necessary mechanism to safeguard individual rights, it can be argued that it is society’s political culture shaped by deeply ingrained liberal values and principles fostering constitutionalism, not mere written words of the constitution, that can effectively function as a bulwark against state encroachment of civil liberties.
Access status: Open Access ,
Economic Restructuring, Class Reconfiguration and the Canadian State
(Political Science Graduate student association, 2002) Karimi, Sirvan
In the long run, the state can serve class hegemony by itself granting certain material demands of the popular masses-demands which, at the moment of their imposition, may assume a quite radical significance (free and universal public education, social security, unemployment benefits, etc.). Once the relationship of forces has changed, these popular gains can be progressively stripped of their initial content and character in a covert and mediate fashion.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Rise, Fall, and Resurgence of Modernization Theory
(PLUS COMMUNICATION CONSULTING SRL, 2026-01-07) Karimi, Sirvan
Out of the intellectual fermentation of the post-World War II era, modernization theory emerged as a pervasive theoretical force to exercise a spectacular hegemony for three consecutive decades. The enchanting appeal of modernization theory emanated from its theoretical claim to have discovered an emancipatory formula that could allegedly extricate economically backward nations from the gravitational force of underdevelopment. Despite the ubiquity of the concepts of modernity and progress in socio-economic discourse, which is an indication of the continuing influence of modernization theory, the strength of modernization theory began to dwindle by the 1980s. It will be demonstrated that modernization theory was based on structural functionalism, which itself had been shaped by the Eurocentric assumptions of historical transformation. With the emergence of economic crises in the 1970s, which contradicted the theoretical foundations of modernization theory, the edifice of both structural functionalism and modernization theory began to crumble. Despite the eclipse of modernization theory’s appeal, its modified versions continue to be used by students of democratization and economic development.
Access status: Open Access ,
Balancing Inclusion and Diversity with Upholding Free Speech Rights in Canadian Universities: Challenging but Feasible
(2021) Karimi, Sirvan
The tension emanated from deeply polarized socio-cultural values has found its way into the Canadian university campuses. In their endeavour to strike a balance between promoting diversity, inclusion and respecting free speech, the Canadian higher educational institutions have encountered formidable challenges. Central to the contention revolving around the free speech debate is an assertion that institutional pressures for consolidating a culture of political correctness is believed to have the potential to curtail and stifle freedom of expression which has in turn triggered governmental intervention in certain Canadian provinces. The lack of a proper balance between the quest for promoting inclusion, diversity and free speech can in the long run undermine the socially vital mission of universities, and hence corroding the public trust in the higher educational institutions. Obviously, there is no single solution that can function as panacea to surmount theses pressing demands faced by the Canadian universities. However, it will be argued that the extension of constitutionally protected freedom of expression to the Canadian universities is not only geared to address the shortcomings of academic freedom, but it is also conducive to harmonizing the pursuit of promoting diversity and inclusion with upholding free speech principles.
Access status: Open Access ,
Public Administration and Democracy: The Virtue and Limit of Participatory Democracy as a Democratic Innovation
(PLUS COMMUNICATION CONSULTING SRL, 2021-01-09) Karimi, Sirvan
The expansion of public bureaucracy has been one of the most significant developments that has marked societies, particularly Western liberal democratic societies. Growing political apathy, citizen disgruntlement and the ensuing decline in electoral participation reflects the political nature of governance failures. Public bureaucracy, which has historically been saddled with derogatory and pejorative connotations, has encountered fierce assaults from multiple fronts. Out of these sharp criticisms of public bureaucracy that have emanated from both sides of the ideological spectrum, attempts have been made to popularize and advance citizen participation in both policy formulation and policy implementation processes as innovations to democratize public administration. Despite their virtue, empowering connotations and spirit-uplifting messages to the public, these proposed practices of democratic innovations not only have their own shortcomings and are conducive to exacerbating the conditions that they are directed to ameliorate but they also have the potential to undermine the traditional administrative and political accountability mechanisms.
Access status: Open Access ,
From Progressive Radicalism to Democratic Degeneration: The Trajectory of John Locke's Political Theory
(2021-03-11) Karimi, Sirvan
As an organic intellectual of the emerging propertied class in 17th century England, John Locke has made an enduring contribution to the prevailing ideas shaping the socio-political order in Western societies and beyond. Through invoking the law of nature and natural rights which were nothing more than what he had abstracted from the socio-economic conditions of the seventeenth century and had projected back into the state of nature, Locke assiduously embarked on justifying the separation of civil society from the state, naturalizing class inequalities identifying the preservation of property as the fundamental function of the state, and rationalizing the subordination of propertyless classes to the emerging liberal democratic political order geared to preserve the interests of economically hegemonic classes.
Access status: Open Access ,
Liberalism, Law and Social Rights: The Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Era of Welfare State Restructuring
(2022-03-29) Karimi, Sirvan
Despite expanding the boundary of formal equality, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is conducive to rationalizing liberalism's conception of the role of the state. Contrary to the hasty expectation of social rights advocates who hoped that they can utilize the Charter to advance social rights in Canada, the Charter has in fact been interpreted by the courts in a manner that justifies the subordination of the social rights to the vicissitudes in the economic sphere, which has historically been ingrained as an overriding tenet of liberalism. In line with a long-held liberal principle that the real threat to individual liberty emanates from the state, not private property relations which are indeed the basis for socio-economic inequalities, the Charter interpretations by the courts have, in fact, reinforced a legal rationalization for the neoliberal-motivated forces of welfare state retrenchment which are reflected in the courts’ refusal from imposing any positive obligation on the state to provide the basic means of subsistence for citizens as a matter of right. Thus, judicial interpretation of the Charter reflects and reinforces the nineteenth-century liberal tenet that the judiciary can restrain but cannot compel the state to take positive actions.

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