Five Good Ideas on surviving and thriving in social policy

Anyone working in social policy knows that it is a challenging field. It seems like we need to make the case time and again as to why it is essential to pay attention to issues such as poverty, affordable housing, and investment in early childhood. We face so many roadblocks as we try to advance constructive change in social policies and programs.

How do we keep at it, and how do we make an impact? Join Sherri Torjman, Social Policy Consultant and former Vice-President of the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, to discuss these issues. As the editor of the forthcoming Caledon Reader, she has been revisiting the wide-ranging work Caledon engaged in over a 25-year period. It has led her to several important lessons she and her colleagues learned along the way: They sought personal sources of inspiration; they developed various concepts and rigorous methods to guide the formulation of their policy proposals; and they tried many different ways to tell their story.

In this Five Good Ideas webinar, Sherri shared these lessons in the hope that, despite the challenges we invariably will face, social policy remains both a respected and relevant field in Canada.

Five Good Ideas and resources

1. Find your North Star: In challenging times, it is helpful to remember the sources of inspiration that drove you to this work in the first place and that will keep you going.
   •Ken Battle and Sherri Torjman. (1995). Lest We Forget: Why Canada Needs Strong Social Programs

2. Do your homework: It is essential to do your homework in any field of practice. In social policy and community-based work, it is important to understand the policy context, policy architecture, and relevant policy grammar.
   • Ken Battle and Sherri Torjman. (1993). Federal Social Programs: Setting the Record Straight

3. Dream big – and small: Major structural reforms often take place through smaller, incremental reforms. Strategic and continuous small steps can lead to significant progress over time. 
   •Ken Battle. (2001). Relentless Incrementalism: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Canadian Income Security Policy

4. Create the pathways: Doing the relevant and often extensive background work enables the implementation of policy proposals. 
   • Ken Battle and Michael Mendelson. (1997). Child Benefit Reform in Canada: an evaluative framework and future directions
   • Keith Horner. (2005). The Disability Savings Plan: Contribution Estimates and Policy Issues

5. Tell your story: It’s one thing to formulate high-quality policy proposals. But no proposal will advance unless the ideas and recommendations are well delivered. 
   • Ken Battle and Sherri Torjman. (1993). Federal Social Policy Agenda: Memo to the Next Prime Minister of Canada
   • Sherri Torjman. (1993). Breaking Down the Welfare Wall

Transcript

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Social policy, working in social policy can be tough. The issues are complex. The pace of change can feel slow, and the work often asks us to make the same case over and over [and] over again about poverty, housing, early learning, health, and so much more. But this work matters deeply and few people know it and understand it better than Sherri Torjman.

So we’re delighted to have Sherri joining us here today. For 25 years, Sherri was Vice president of the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, co-founded by Maytree Chairman Alan Broadband and Sherri’s longtime colleague Ken Battle. Caledon became one of Canada’s most respected think tanks, known for turning rigorous research into practical policy, among its many contributions.

The institute helped design the Canada Child Benefit, which continues to lift families out of poverty today. Sherri is also a longtime friend of Maytree and of Five Good Ideas. She led one of our most popular sessions back in 2012 and joined the panel for our 100th session, The Power of Ideas. So welcome back, Sherri.

We’re so delighted to have you here today. And so now today as also the editor of the forthcoming Caledon Reader, you’ve been reflecting on the lessons learned from that body of work, lessons about staying inspired, doing the homework, and telling our stories well, so we are so pleased to have you here today.

Welcome back and I’m gonna stop talking and turn it over to you.

Sherri Torjman: Thanks so much Liz. Thank you for the very kind introduction and thank you for inviting me to kick off the 23rd session of Five Good Ideas. I think it’s a testament to the work that you’ve done over the years to the success of this initiative, that we’re continuing to see Five Good Ideas survive and thrive today.

So, thanks again, and I want to talk about surviving and thriving in social policy. As Elizabeth said, this is not an easy area in which to be working. We do continually have to make the case for why we’re investing in early childhood development and poverty reduction, and why decent, affordable housing is important.

And you know, it’s surprising in a country like Canada. Where we are a signatory to several UN conventions on, basic rights, and yet we still have to make the case. And so when I was reviewing all the material from Caledon over our period of 25 years, I realized that there are some really important proposals that I’m drawing out for the Caledon reader, but equally importantly are the lessons that we learned in doing that work.

And I thought today that those lessons in surviving and thriving would be some good ideas. I hope that they’re good, some ideas to share with you. But before I do that, I just want to preface my remarks by saying two things.

The first is I would like to pay tribute to my late colleague Ken Battle. I will be making reference to him a few times today. He was a brilliant writer, as many of you know, and he was a passionate advocate for strong social policy. And my colleagues, Michael Mendelson, Anne Makhoul, and many others who are on the line today who contribute to our work. Thank you.

I also wanted to mention that I’m going to be talking about social policy and the work that we did related primarily to federal social policy.

But what was really important for us as an organization was learning from community work and exchanging ideas on an ongoing basis with the kinds of initiatives in which you’re involved. And that was so important for so many reasons. Not just for learning, but for drawing out some of the policy lessons, some of the policy barriers, and continuing to ensure that community work and policy work actually were linked together, that they were not carried on along separate tracks or parallel tracks as we’ve often seen.

And so, first of all, surviving in social policy. How did we do that? And, you know, there were many questions asked about this too. A number of you have said, how do you carry on and how do you continue in a difficult world to keep bringing yourself to the table and continue to be committed to this work. And I know for me, personally, it was finding a North Star, finding a few north stars. For those people thinking about this particular idea, it will be a personal thing. There’s not one answer to this.

For me it was personal experiences growing up. The amazing people I met along way and the values. And I am myself very committed to this. And I’ll just very briefly explain to you each of these areas. I grew up in a household where I remember so vividly that receiving the monthly family allowance check, ’cause we still did have family allowances at that time. Receiving the family allowance check was a found relief for my parents, and I remember my father saying to me, I don’t have to go to anybody to fill out a form and ask for this help. There’s nobody looking into any circumstances. We have children and this help is essential and that [stuck with me through] my entire career, it still has obviously.

The amazing people that I’ve met along the way. In 1981 I was working for the Parliamentary Committee on the Disabled. It was a special committee that had been appointed by the first Prime Minister Trudeau and I was a staff person to that committee. We wrote the obstacles report, some of you’d be familiar with that. And I was in an office placed in an office with two colleagues, one of whom was profoundly hard of hearing and she had to lip read and another who was living with cerebral palsy.

And I remember one day she turned to him and she said, you know, I have to lip read what you’re saying and it takes you half an hour to say a single sentence. Do you know how exhausted I am at the end of the day? And of course we all laugh because it was, uh, it was funny, but it was also so poignant. I remember that moment.

It made me realize that for some people, every day, every minute of every day might be a challenge, not to mention the challenges that we put in place with environments that are not accessible and that create barriers for people. So I vowed at that time, I made a personal commitment, that I would always be working on some form of disability related policy, whatever else I was doing.

And then our values. We all grow up with values. I believe that. Everybody who works in this field has a value of compassion and caring and concern for equality. One of our favorite papers that we wrote at Caledon and that Ken and I wrote, it was published in 1995. We released it on Remembrance Day, November 11th, and it was called Lest We Forget Why Canada Needs Strong Social Programs.

And I just wanna read very briefly, three sentences from that report. “Lest we forget why the generation for whom Remembrance Day is a living memory said never again to the economic devastation and social despair of the Great Depression. Lest we forget why they supported the development of a national system of social security as an antidote to hunger, helplessness, and deprivation. Lest we forget that social programs help create the compassionate society and support a robust economy that now seem a nostalgic memory.”

And sometimes when times got difficult, when we faced some set back setbacks, often Ken and I would just say lest we forget, and it was code for, okay, that was tough, but let’s remember why we’re here and why we’re doing this.

So for each of you, find your North Star. I personally found it helpful and I hope that you do too.

Second lesson or good idea, do your homework. Now, that may sound obvious to say. Clearly in any field in which you’re working, you need to do your homework. But for social policy and community work, I think in general, and for Caledon more specifically, it meant three things.

Do your homework meant understanding the policy context, understanding the policy architecture, and understanding the policy grammar. So by context, I’m referring to the economic, the political, the social forces that have had an influence upon the specific area in which you’re involved. You are part of an evolution, a continuing story, and it’s really important to understand your place in that story.

We published a very early paper in 1993 called Federal Social Programs: Setting the Record Straight, and in that particular report we traced the history of most of the key federal social policy developments, and it really helped us understand, what were the forces that brought us here, and what might be the forces that we’re facing in future that we need to take into consideration.

The policy architecture refers to the fact that whatever measure you’re working on, a program, a policy, typically it’s found within a bigger system or a cluster of programs. And it’s often important to understand the interaction of programs because, you may be working on something and proposing something that may take a long time to put in place.

But at the end of the day, you may inadvertently not help somebody. You may even leave them worse off. We learned that particular lesson when we were working on an analysis of the welfare and the income tax systems. It was called welfare at the time. Now more commonly known as social assistance. We were asked by the Ontario Fair Tax Commission to actually carry out this analysis.

And we looked at what would happen to 11 sample families if they tried to increase their income slightly from paid employment. And we found that when you took that welfare system and you combined it with the income tax system, there were some unintended consequences that we never had realized. And it made us aware of the fact that we better be careful when we’re making some recommendations not to actually put in place something that would either result in a reduction of a refundable tax credit or that may make somebody ineligible for program for which they previously had been eligible, like, for example, subsidized housing. And so it opened up a whole new world and a new perspective.

In fact, somebody on the line has actually posed a question about the Canada Disability Benefit. Many of you worked on that and thank you for all your work on the Benefit and its interaction with the clawback and social assistance. And now we’ve ensured, and your work has been able to ensure, that no province other than Alberta will be clawing back the Canada Disability Benefit.

But somebody asked about what if you put that Canada Disability Benefit in an RDSP for your child, would that then protect the benefit? And this is just an example of being aware of the interaction. I thought it’s a specific example, but it’s a very important question to look systemically at what’s going on.

By the way, the answer to that, I did acquire into it. I did not get a clear answer. And if anybody’s on the line who knows, that would be helpful. I was advised don’t do it yet until you’re sure. Because you may in fact, and you likely will, see that clawed back.

The policy grammar, third area, refers to the technical concepts that are embedded in any given program or policy in which you’re working. And it’s important to understand that grammar for a number of reasons. First of all, it helps open up the world of recommendations that you actually can make.

When we were working on the design of the current child benefit that took effect in 2016, and of course there were decades of work leading up to that point, we were working on the design with the Department of Finance and wanted to ensure adequacy, wanted to ensure that we reached as many households as possible. And you’re always working within the constraints, as you all know, of limited budgets.

And so one of the things that we did was look at the technical components within that program, and we said, how can we vary these? How can we look at the reduction rate, for example? How can we look at what’s called the turning point or the cutoff point and work within the package of funds that we had to make an effective program that would reach as many Canadians as possible, but also provide adequate assistance to people at the lower end of the income scale?

But it’s also important to understand the grammar in order to make sure that we’re actually referring people to the right program. And I was talking recently to a woman who said she needed to purchase a wheelchair for the first time because of severe mobility impairment. She went to her physician, asked him to fill in the Disability Tax Credit to assist with those costs, and he said, no, you’re not eligible. Your income would be too high because you have a pension. And that’s exactly the reason why she would qualify for that component of the disability tax credit for the cost reduction component.

So when we spoke together, I said to her, well go back and explain the program or find a new GP, neither of which I knew was going to be very easy to do, but she did go back and she was able to finally get assistance with that benefit. So, it’s really important to be able to provide that information.

 I know that there’s a new program that’s been announced by Inclusion Canada Benefits Navigator. I believe there may in fact be someone on our call today who’s working in that area. Prosper Canada has a benefits navigator. I worked for many years in trying to ensure access to the Disability Tax Credit because that’s a very pivotal, important tax credit for a whole range of disability related supports.

 That may sound like a small change, but it’s a really important thing to do. And understanding the grammar. One more part about the tax credits, because many of the benefits that are in place today are actually delivered through the income tax system, and oftentimes governments will announce the amount of a tax credit as its base amount.

So I know of people, I’ve heard of a number of people who have said they’re going to apply for the Disability Tax Credit to get $10,000 a year in annual income. Well, you don’t get $10,000, you get only 15 per cent of that for a non-refundable tax credit. And you actually don’t get anything, you just get your income tax reduced by that amount. The check is not in the mail.

So, doing our homework, the policy context, the architecture, the grammar, all those are important because then you can proceed to do the policy work.

So here we have think big and think small, or smaller. And thinking smaller and working smaller is not unimportant. It’s just a part of a larger process.

So thinking big, and by that I meant what were the really big ideas that we wanted to put in place in the country. A federal benefit that would dramatically reduce child poverty in the country. We wanted to see a national disability benefit in place. We wanted to see the re-indexation of the income tax system. We wanted to see a registered disability savings plan.

We had big plans, and I know in communities you have big plans, too. Reducing poverty in your community, ensuring that everybody has access to a living wage, for example, but oftentimes it’s difficult to get from where you are now to that big idea.

It’s often costly. As you know, we see in budgets that funds are allocated over time. And sometimes we have to think about, okay, what’s the best way if we see a expenditure allocated in smaller portions, how do we apportion those? What do we do? And where do we put those dollars? They will always be limited relative to what we wanna do. How do we actually ensure that we’re moving in the right direction? And we always thought it’s important to have a trajectory of smaller reforms that will help move us in the right direction. Not unimportant, but that will keep us on the right path.

And just as one example, and Elizabeth mentioned in her introduction, the Canada Child Benefit. That was actually many decades of work and there were many in the country who were working on the reform of child benefit. Many of you who are on the call today, who actually, were thinking in this way as well, and we wanted to see a big, adequate, federally delivered benefit, that would be indexed, that would be paid regardless of your source of income, where what you saw on your check or in your transfer, your etransfer that’s what you were able to keep.

And we didn’t have a system like that in place at the time that we were working on this in 1993 when we were first fully underway at Caledon. There were three separate benefits in place in Canada. There was a family allowance as I mentioned, that was a taxable benefit. There was a non-refundable child tax credit that helped offset the cost of raising children. Very important objective. And there was a refundable child tax credit that had a clear anti-poverty focus. The problem was that most families at the end of the day had no idea what they would actually end up with, because it’s impossible to know when something is taxable.

It’s more than impossible to know when something’s delivered as a non-refundable credit, and it gets into that complex mix of the income tax system. You don’t know what you’re gonna receive. So the first step in this process was pulling all those together and figuring out how best, as I said, to integrate both these purposes, the anti-poverty purpose, and then the parental recognition for all families in the country.

The next big step, because we weren’t finished, the next big step was to move toward what we called an integrated benefit. A fully federally delivered benefit because at the time social assistance was providing benefits on behalf of children, which was great, and the amount you would receive would vary by the number of children in the family up to a certain level. That was a fantastic component of the program, probably one of the only key positive aspects. The the problem as we saw it was that there were other people on other programs of income support, or they may have been receiving child support, or they may have been working at a minimum wage and they did not receive those child benefits.

So that next stage was to say, how can we remove job benefits from social assistance, move them over to a much larger federal benefit and everybody in the country would have access to that, to an adequate, indexed, portable benefit, and that took a while. It was only, as I said, in 1998 that that happened. Provinces and territories reinvested their savings in supports and services for children, for low income households.

So what we did was, have a, as I said, a pathway where, we knew we were working in a certain direction, but it did take a long time to get there and there were a lot of problems along the way.

So thinking smaller, thinking big. Thinking smaller, similarly, I think in any community, what you’re trying to do, let’s say for example, you’re working on poverty reduction, but you know that in order to achieve that goal, you’re looking at an adequate benefit, but you’re looking also at an adequate supply of jobs that pay living wages.

But you know that in order to prepare for that, you’ll need people with sufficient skills or appropriate and relevant skills. But you also know that in order to ensure those skills, you need a good education system. Basic, secondary, post-secondary education. And you know that for many people you’ll have to assist with literacy and language proficiency. But at the end of the day that the most important thing is that people need a secure foundation and decent affordable housing. And so you can see all these pathways ahead of you while you’re moving toward this larger goal of reducing poverty in your communities.

 Ken Battle wrote a paper in 2001 called Relentless Incrementalism, and he was referring to the fact that you can have a big goal, but oftentimes you reach that goal by smaller steps along the way. And they have to be continual, they have to be ongoing, and they have to be strategic.

And oftentimes I think that his idea was misunderstood or maybe even misrepresented to say, you know, these are just modest, moderate changes that really don’t affect people’s lives, and that’s not true at all because many of the smaller, significant steps along the way are very, very important. I mentioned the work that I’ve been doing on access to the Disability Tax Credit. It may sound like a very small reform, but that particular tax credit opens the door to eight or more federal programs that are worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars for people.

So, thinking smaller and thinking big go together, but you’re not done yet because you may have your bigger picture and you may have your smaller steps, but you also have to think about the pathways.

So there are many different ways to achieve the goal that you’re trying to, but once you have your general idea in mind and your direction, what we found to be really important was working through that policy proposal, thinking about it clearly, and thinking from the perspective of the policy maker or even the politician who may see this and who may be asking certain questions. They’ll certainly want to know who will be the winners. Economists use that term, winners and losers. I disagree with the term, but the concept is who will gain and who will see their benefits possibly reduced or even taken away. So think about those. Try to imagine who might win and who might lose from your proposal.

And if you can actually explicitly address those and think about ways that you might mitigate some of those risks if there are losses involved. For example, in some of our proposals we had said, perhaps we can grandfather in the people who are already receiving the benefit so that they don’t have to lose anything. There will not be anybody right now who will actually see a benefit lost or reduced. But we’ll start with new people. We’ll start our program or policy, application to the new people who will apply and oftentimes that would help.

Of course, you know that policymakers and politicians will want to know the cost of what you’re proposing. It’s always a question that’s top of mind for people working in policy. And for those of us working either in community or in policy work, it is difficult to do accurate costs. We could do ballpark costs, but we can’t do cost estimates with great accuracy. And oftentimes we had to work with people in universities to partner with other organizations. You need to have a model that has actual data built into it in order to truly assess the costs and sometimes you can partner with other organizations that have similar interests or get some funds in order to hire somebody who can help you.

And I remember that in 2004 we were approached by a fellow by the name of Al Etmanski who headed up PLAN, the Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network. And we were having an informal conversation. He said, I have an idea. I’d like to see a disability savings plan, because as parents we worry about what will happen to our children with with disabilities after we die. Do you think it’s a good idea? And I said I think it’s an excellent idea. However, you need to make sure that you build in some component for lower income contributors. That’s really important given the high rates of poverty among people with disabilities.

And you need to be able to think through some of this. We really need to do some in-depth work. And so with some support from Avana Capital Corporation, the Be Light Foundation, the Law Foundation of BC we put together some funds and we hired somebody with knowledge in this area. Well, not in this area, but related knowledge. He was a fellow who retired from Finance Canada and he was responsible for Registered Retirement Savings Plans, RRSP’s. And I think he had the dubious distinction of knowing more than anybody in the world about those programs.

So we said, can you apply your knowledge to this new proposal, a registered disability savings plan? How would it work? What would the contribution level be? How much might it cost? How can we build in a low income component where government actually would provide some of the contribution in the form of grants or bonds?

And we published his paper. It’s in the sheet we provided, and it was just, it really helped, you know. It really helped move along that idea because it became more real, even though they were just options. It provided the information that policymakers and politicians will look for.

If you can move your proposal along and think it through in depth, it’s very, very helpful. We had somebody in government say to us, they like those turnkey proposals. I didn’t really know what turnkey meant at the time, but I learned that it meant providing enough information that it really took the proposal along its way and was helpful to the people who are going to take it to the next level, but you’re not finished yet.

You may have created the pathways, but you have to tell your story. And I know all of you do this. I know all of you have to do it in your job. It’s a really important part of community work, of policy work. And I think the most important part is think about your audience and then try to gear your communication to that particular audience.

And it’s not easy. There’s a lot of information out there today. We are bombarded with information, a lot of noise. How do you cut through all that material and get your story told. And we had another challenge at Caledon because, we were set up in ’92 and fully operational in 1993. We were the new kids on the block. And even though Ken and I had our respective networks throughout the country, we were a new organization and we really had to figure things out and do a lot of testing along the way in terms of what might work in telling our story.

And it was 1993. There was gonna be a federal election. We were working together to write a federal social policy agenda. And we were saying, we really hope that the person who’s going to be the next prime minister will actually see this. That’s why we’re writing it.

And then we both said, well, why don’t we just say that? So we did a memo to the next Prime Minister, not knowing where that would go. And it was a short memo, had all the information in there on the agenda with all the components fitting together. But it helped open the door because at least four people read it. All the people working on the campaigns, the four campaigns of the candidates who all wanted to be the next prime minister. But it did help us meet with a number of federal officials with the prime Minister and finance ministers. We were talking directly to them.

I’ll give you one more example then we’ll open for questions. I told you about the work that we were doing on the interaction of the welfare and the income tax system, and that was a very detailed analysis. And, we wrote a huge report on the interaction, just telling the story about how we undertook this work and how we arrived at our conclusions. That was a whole report in itself, but then we had a whole other set of graphs and writing that we were doing related to all the reforms that we we’re proposing to actually minimize the negative effects that we were seeing on those interactions. So we decided, okay, we’re going to write a separate report only on the recommendations, because that was a big substantive report in itself.

And I’ll tell you, I knew at the end of the day nobody was going to read either of these two reports. Well, maybe the commissioner who had actually, asked us to do this work, but I thought, there, ha, we have to figure out how we’re going to tell this story. It is so important. And we decided at that time we’re going to try to write the three pager. A bit more than an executive summary, but it really got out the key elements, and I’m sure that more people have read the short story than the two longer stories or reports combined was really important to figure that out.

But another aspect of that particular initiative was important. It was a very complex analysis, as I mentioned, and we were, I remember clearly, beside the printer, the graphs were coming out and while we were looking at different families, the graphs were telling a similar story. There were all big black bars, and I remember saying to Ken, this is unbelievable. This is a wall. It’s a welfare wall. And he said, there’s a title. Okay, we need to use that title. And we did. We have interactions of the welfare wall, interactions of the income tax and welfare system breaking down the welfare wall. That welfare wall became an expression, a concept, that now has been used in federal reports, in community stories. It was even used by a welfare recipient in describing her life. That was the most important test.

So, and I’m not suggesting in every single initiative in which you’re involved, that you have to have a short two word expression or code for what you’re saying, or to write with a particular, I don’t want to say gimmick, in mind, but to write with a particular, how are we going to do this? But I do think that it helped for this particular case of a very complex analysis where I was afraid that these important results would not be shared. I do think it helped to have that small piece and to have that code for a much bigger concept. That welfare wall just hold a huge story in both visual and conceptual terms.

Now, somebody, a few people on the line have asked about AI. And I know that it may be very easy to take your report and to push where’s my AI assistant, or have your bot write your summary. I would not advise that. You can do that after you’ve written your own three pager or whatever it is.

But please try to write it in your own words. Go through that material or whatever your story is in detail. You can’t just have somebody or some bot picking out those top words.

It’s not just intellectual. Social policy is not just a set of ideas that we put together. It’s not only in your head, it’s in your heart and in your guts. And unless you actually feel that, unless you can answer the questions and know what’s important, I’m not sure that people will actually feel your story. And at the end of the day, that helps so very much.

And so what we’re really trying to do in all this work, doing the homework and thinking big and small, and creating the pathways and telling the story is to create strong foundations for households, for families, for individuals, for communities, and for our country.

Yes, it’s difficult work, but I don’t think there’s anything more important. Don’t think there’s any work that’s more important right now than what you are doing, than what we’re trying to do together to care about and to care for each other. Thank you for everything that you do, and thank you for being on the call today.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Sherri, you always exceed my expectations. That was just incredible. Thank you. And I have to agree with you. I can’t imagine Chat GPT coming up with the welfare wall. I’m pretty sure it’s not gonna do it.

Sherri Torjman: We never would have.

Elizabeth McIsaac: No. But it was such a powerful metaphor. Because people could feel it.

And you’re right, it comes from a feeling and instinct and it resonated with people who actually experienced it. And so I think those are the kinds of expressions that give policy change so much drive. So thank you. That was just incredible.

There’s a couple of questions coming up and there’s a couple of questions that came earlier that I wanna just circle back to, because I think that they relate to some of what you’ve covered. You talked about doing the homework and that’s so incredibly important and you laid out a wonderful arc to it in terms of the context, the architecture, and the grammar. Another piece of this, someone asked about, do we need to look for comparables from other jurisdictions outside of Canada?

Is that part of the homework to see where else things have been tried and done or tried and were successful or failed? How much is that a part of it?

Sherri Torjman: Absolutely. And that’s an excellent question and thank you for having posed that. Yes. Definitely.

I have to say there’s not a single country. Sometimes people would ask, what is the country that we should be following? And I have to say we didn’t find that there was a single country that excelled in everything. There may be countries that are doing social policy and making social investments far better than others, no question.

But we found that it was helpful to be more specific. So if we were looking for initiatives in certain areas, like let’s say disability policy, we would be looking across the board and we’d find that there were some countries doing really interesting things in that area, maybe not so much in others.

So by way of example, Australia has a disability supports insurance, which is delivered as a social insurance. That’s a terrific idea. It means that people who need disability supports for daily living and the cost of which can be onerous, can gain support through that social insurance program.

So we would look to that country for that particular initiative. They’ve also, by the way, I just found out recently at a meeting that I was at, that Australia has a very interesting financial empowerment set of policies where they’re helping people with debt reduction and going after the payday lenders and all the people who are taking back from lower income households who can hardly afford to feed their families or pay their rent.

So there’s a lot of work to be learned there. We would look at the UK for some of the work on individualized funding. Just you know, [as an] example, and I don’t want to forget at all the work going on in our own country because we have a big country and it is really hard to oftentimes be able to scale up our workhorse, share our message.

But oftentimes we would look across the country as well as throughout the world because there is such fantastic work going on in communities everywhere in Canada. And we would learn from them.. We would try to share some of those lessons. And as I mentioned, did I mention we had a series at Caledon called Community Stories.

I’m not sure I said that before… We had, okay. We had a series called Community Stories where we tried to share those lessons and there were so many pieces from there where upon which we could build. We also learned about policy barriers and some of the areas where we would have to do some work to enable those particular efforts.

And so, yes, look across the world. By the way, somebody asked about AI. A number of people asked about AI. One of the advantages I think is that, and I heard this expressed at meetings recently as well, that oftentimes when you Google a specific initiative, and it may come up that Germany is doing something interesting, let’s say, or Japan, and then you go into that initiative, but you can’t read what it is because the documents are all in German or the policy statements are in Japanese. And now with translation, we actually can have access or greater access to that information. There are many other implications to AI if we want to discuss that or pick that up later, but it’s just one tool that may help us in some of that work in looking at comparables.

So thank you for the question. Very important. And don’t forget the amazing work that’s going on here at home.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Absolutely. I felt quite certain that you were going to use the words Relentless Incrementalism because it’s so synonymous with Caledon and correcting it in terms of the ambition remains very big.

And it’s recognizing that sometimes it’s just different smaller steps to get there and it’s being relentless about pursuing that path. Absolutely. So people or who are in this work know that they’re in it for the long haul. You don’t get transformational policy change in six months or even in one term. It often is a long course, a long journey.

And so with your experience, how do you measure, recognize the progress when it happens incrementally? Because sometimes you don’t get the big celebration, the big moment until many years later. So how do we take care of that? Because that helps to keep people motivated, it keeps them on course on track.

Sherri Torjman: It does. It absolutely does. And that’s a great question. And I think there are ways of doing that in both traditional policy work and in community work.

So just let me speak about community work for a minute and then go to the policy work because I was saying that the trajectory that you create or the theory of change in which you may be working where you’re trying to reduce poverty in a community, and that’s your goal. But that will take a long time. That’s very complex agenda and a very long-term goal. And how do you feel that you’re making progress along the way? Well, if you need to look at skills development, you can measure the kind of work that you’re doing in that area and that your community is doing, you can see whether there are changes that are taking place that are relevant. You can track them and get data on that.

And with respect to education, whether it’s primary, secondary, or post-secondary, you can actually see some of the developments and who’s gaining access to that. Whether in fact we have a better educated population in our community and we can look at what we’re achieving with respect to affordable housing, the homelessness work that in which Maytree has been very actively involved with many partners, and thank you for all your work in that area, but you’ve been able to shine the light on that problem whether we’re improving, whether they’re not.

So all these steps along the way, along this pathway can be measured and monitored. Sometimes not so much in numeric terms. Oftentimes we don’t have the data. Sometimes we even have to create our own data, but oftentimes in terms of the discussions we have with people and hearing their stories and knowing, yes, we’ve moved this along, we’ve made this particular change.

Let me talk just very briefly about the Canada Disability Benefit from a policy perspective because that I could both celebrate and cry. It’s something … Comprehensive income security is something that we’ve worked on since 1981, since that committee that I mentioned to you and our obstacles report.

And that sure has been a long-standing objective. And finally, we saw that proposal in the Throne Speech in 2020 and it took effect in Canada in 2025, which was great. Unfortunately, the amount was not very good. And so we sure have our agenda cut out for us. Let me say this, the amount was not adequate relative, I think, to what had been sort of promised in a Throne Speech in 2020.

Maybe that’s what kind of distracted people a little bit and gave a hope that it would be a lot more adequate than it is. It’s a maximum $200 a month. So we have our work cut out for us. We know that, you know, that can’t be the end we hope.

But there are other things that we can do along the way because in order to receive that benefit, you have to be eligible for the Disability Tax Credit. That is a gateway regardless of your income. Regardless of your income. That’s important because if you want to apply to the DTC for the cost reduction, you do need a taxable income. But to apply for anything else, any of the other programs, to which the DTC is a gateway, you need to, you need to qualify. No income requirements.

So, I know that sounds like a small intermediary step, but when, you know, we worked to see the navigation processes that were put in place in the tax branches across the country, there are now navigators for the Disability Tax Credit within the tax branches. There’s a whole new form for professionals, for gatekeepers to fill in. A much easier form, I think. It’s still complex, but it is easier.

These are little steps along the way. They don’t feel like they’re really big, but they’re important. And you can see the changes. You can see that some people are now able to qualify for benefits and so sometimes it’s data. Sometimes it’s stories, and sometimes you just know from a policy perspective that you have to open certain doors in order to open other doors. And if you’ve been able to do that, you have a sense that you’re accomplishing something along the way. So, so please hang in there. It’s not easy in many cases, but so, so very important.

Elizabeth McIsaac: One of the things that you alluded to in your comments was the complexity of the intersections across policy files and so many social policy issues, cover multiple domains, different orders of government. Income security, education, mental health disability, so on and so forth. From your experience, what is your advice on breaking down the silos and helping to work collaboratively?

Sometimes it can create competition. Sometimes it becomes an issue of turf. How do we avoid that so that there’s constructive, productive results from the work?

Sherri Torjman: That’s again, another excellent question and thank you. And I know when we worked in communities, whether it was on the Vibrant Communities Initiative or Action for Neighborhood Change, that partnership and collaborative governance was always a key principle that there had to be groups working together. Groups in similar sectors had to work together. You had to have different sectors working together. That partnership was always essential and fundamental.

In terms of our policy work, we would often try to hold meetings with our colleagues and try to share our ideas and ensure that we were on the same page, and oftentimes we weren’t. Oftentimes we had to agree to disagree, especially in the early stages where some of the proposals, like removing child benefits from social assistance, that wasn’t easy to do. We worked on explaining why that was important. It was something that I think was seen negatively right at the beginning, but I think a lot of work in explaining why this is important, with partners, I think helped move that along.

I wanted to say just one more thing that I hadn’t had a chance to mention, and that in one of our initiatives, we created a policy dialogue involving government representatives. They would meet on a regular basis. They put it in their calendar. Second Tuesday of every month, we’d have a lunch and learn, and it was representatives from 10 different departments.

And so rather than competing with each other for a particular program or working on a particular issue, we would ask them, how can we work together on this? How can you pool some of your resources or your data, or your knowledge, or your community connections, or your government connections to reach this goal?

And so we would work together. There was no ask. Nobody came with an agenda. This was a learning session. We also had on the line somebody from community, who would be presenting at every session. And there would be an exchange. And here’s something you can learn. How can we all together figure this out?

And, by the way, we catered it through a social economy company that was a group of psychiatric survivors is what they call themselves. It was Crackers Catering and it’s still used to this day in a number of government meetings. So it was a learning session for everybody.

And I think if you can approach these clashes or these complexities through learning. I do think it helps, in a collegial way to, in a constructive way, to move things along.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Great example. Thank you. There’s a number of questions. I mean, at the heart of social policy is people. It’s affecting people and so much of work that Maytree has been engaged in is looking at how do you create participation opportunities for participation and engagement.

There were a number of questions about how can community organizations or non-profits or ordinary people or people’s lived experience engage. Obviously, that’s a huge question. We have about four minutes left, and I think you have lots of experience in this, so if you could just reflect on that a little bit in terms of engagement.

You’ve talked a bit about it in the context of government partners, but just a little more on different stakeholders coming into the process and how to do that.

Sherri Torjman: Right, and, and I do think it’s incumbent upon people working in policy to reach out and make sure that we do talk to people and, of course, always welcome people in communities coming forward and asking us questions. There has to be that open door and there has to be some initiative, I think, taken to make sure that we’re talking to people.

I remember in doing those interactions of the welfare and the income tax system, we had spreadsheets with 60 columns and a hundred rows and … very complex. And I remember saying to Ken, shouldn’t we be speaking to some people and finding out their experiences as to what happens.

And we set up some conversations in some groups and we learned some really interesting things that we didn’t know, that no spreadsheet, no data would ever tell you. And it had to do with the administration of the program, things we didn’t know, and that there were gaps, certain gaps, which were creating hardship for people. Unless we went out explicitly and found out that information, we would’ve been missing a really big, significant piece of the story. And so I think we should make efforts, all of us, to reach out to each other and see how we can create those bridges and those intersections.

They are essential.

Elizabeth McIsaac: So. Do you have a final thought [as] we’re about to close the conversation? We’ve had an incredible engagement from the group, and lots of really good questions.

 If I go back to the title of this and it’s Surviving and Thriving in Social Policy, and it’s taxing, pardon the pun, but it is taxing to be in that work for the long haul and rejuvenating and the getting to the thriving, not just surviving.

What would be your final comment, Sheri?

Sherri Torjman: It’s a difficult time. It’s a very difficult time for people with an affordability crisis, with political uncertainty, with economic uncertainty. But I look back to the lest we forget. I look back, every generation there were depressions and there were recessions and there were always hard times.

And this is the nature of our work. We will always be facing challenges no matter what year it is and no matter what we’re facing. So keep going. We have managed to come a long way. It may take a long time, but keep going. And remember, find your North Star, but remember it. And sometimes you’ll have to go back to it, but that’s okay because I personally found it kept the passion and the commitment alive. So if you’re able to do that too, I really hope that it helps.

Elizabeth McIsaac: Wonderful answer, wonderful answers, and a wonderful conversation. I really, I deeply appreciate it. We do a lot of work on policy at Maytree, and there’s always, coming back to the source for wisdom and insight is always helpful and rejuvenating. So I truly appreciate that you took the time today. Thank you, Sherri.