Impact Canada: one year in

It was just over a year ago that Impact Canada was launched. It was a bold idea to take a “mission-driven” approach to transforming government. Could we work across government departments and across sectors to focus collective efforts on the citizens we serve and the problems we are trying to solve? For those who work with and within government, you know that’s not always the way we work.

Originally announced in Budget 2017, Impact Canada was set up to test and accelerate what we call “outcomes-based” funding approaches. Using the important federal lever of grants and contributions spending, we sought to become part of (and perhaps even lead) the global movement of governments that are working to mainstream approaches like prizes/challenges, behavioral insights, pay for performance and pay for success funding models. The promise of these models is that it focuses efforts not on the process or outputs of a program, but rather on clearly defining the sought after outcome and ensuring there is a multisectoral approach to achieving it. These approaches require new partnership models where government, not-for profit and private sectors need to work very differently together, and we need new impact measurement approaches to quantify, measure and track progress.

What have we accomplished in a year? Lots.

We built up a team of experts with real world experience that are dedicated to ensuring that we remain accountable stewards of public funds. The team works hard every day with colleagues across government that are equally dedicated to demonstrating that for the benefit of Canadians, we can work better, together.

Various initiatives have been launched — Smart Cities Challenge, five Clean Tech challenges, Indigenous housing, opioid drug checking technology challenge, opioid social impact bond feasibility study, whale innovation challenge — as well as numerous more in the pipeline. Take a look at all of this work on our Impact Canada platform. This type of work takes time to demonstrate results. While it is too early to report on outcomes, each initiative that is launched builds on lessons learned from the last, and we are already seeing important process gains.

To support our collective efforts, it became clear early on that we needed to build capacity within the system if these new approaches have a chance of becoming mainstreamed. As a result, we launched a new Fellowship program in nearly 2018 to recruit specialized talent in the areas of behavioural insights, innovative finance, impact measurement, data science and prizes/challenges. We now have 8 Fellows in these areas placed across partner departments that are helping to build capacity and scale up these new approaches.

Related, we were extremely pleased to have launched the new Impact Canada Advisory Committee, comprised of domestic and international luminaries who are now advising on the implementation of Impact Canada. Their collective experience and wisdom was on full display when we held our first meeting this past November. The first meeting summary and their recommendations back to Impact Canada will be published online soon.

Some reflections from the last year? It’s been hard! There are a lot of skeptics out there and I think we’ve heard it all — you can’t work with stakeholders to co-design a project, you can’t fund programs this way, the private sector isn’t interested in this kind of work, etc. Thankfully, we have met a growing number of public servants that are dedicated to working towards a “yes” and see the possibility in the new partnership and funding models we are advancing to make a meaningful difference in the lives of Canadians. Stay tuned for some guest blogs in 2019 from our partners as they take a deeper look into specific lessons learned over the last year.

And while it is easy to be critical of either these innovative approaches, or the progress we have made as a government in implementing them, it’s always helpful to benchmark our work globally. In November, I had the pleasure of representing Canada at the launch of OECD’s first ever review of a government’s “innovation system”. This report was the culmination of almost two years’ worth of work and while it uncovered a number of areas that we, as a government need to work on, there is much to be proud of how the federal public service is making gains.

But there is much more to do.

We are busy planning a number of other new challenges, up to 2 more pay for success projects, a new behavioral insights-informed service delivery model and a new experimental methods guide, just to name a few. By the time summer 2019 arrives, our goal is to have projects that span social, environmental and economic policy domains and a mix of prize/challenges, pay for success and behavioural science approaches. The expected cohort of initiatives should provide us with a sample size large enough to help us start to understand what works within what context and inform our 2.0 efforts later in 2019 and beyond.

So as 2018 draws to a close, I wanted to personally thank my team and other colleagues in PCO, Indigenous Services, Infrastructure, Natural Resources, Fisheries and Oceans, Health Canada, Crown and Indigenous Relations, Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Heritage, Public Safety, Employment and Social Development, Finance Canada and Treasury Board Secretariat. Also a huge thanks to all of our external partners that have collaborated and helped guide our work.

Looking forward to an excellent and productive 2019 as we all continue to work towards making the lives of Canadians better.