Fear-Driven Policy
Ottawa’s harsh new penal proposals won’t make us safer, just poorer—and less humane May 2010
How do you create effective public policy in a field that sparks high emotion? Homelessness, the gun registry, Afghanistan, euthanasia, interest rates—in volatile and unstable times almost anything can be turned into an irrational bogeyman that all the research and studies in the world cannot combat. In March, a collection of academics gathered at the annual Walter Gordon Massey Symposium in Toronto to consider this highly charged question under the rubric “Private…