As a Canadian, studying the output of American think tanks has become something of an obsession for me. For better or worse, though mostly for the better, think tanks are a foreign commodity in Canada. Sure, we have organizations like the Fraser Institute and C.D. Howe, which are our Cato Institute and Brookings Institution respectively, but they fill a narrow niche. Broadly speaking, most Canadian think tanks are little more than PO boxes with a landing page.
The austere job market for policy wonks in Canada is downstream of the country’s robust party system. Governing parties don’t need to outsource their policy development and, when they do, ideas can be supplied by ad hoc committees, commissions, and consultants that evaporate into the ether when their work is done. The parties themselves are highly member-driven. Some of my earliest memories were from the stuffy basement of our local Liberal Party headquarters where my parents volunteered. Though I barely understood what was going on, I relished the ritual of staying up past my bedtime to watch election results come in while old Anglican ladies manufactured triangular sandwiches.
