The Olivia Framework:Concepts for Use in Finely-Grained, Integrated Social Policy Analysis (Working Paper 45)

The Olivia framework is a set of concepts and measures that, when mature, will allow users to describe, in a consistent and integrated manner, everything about individuals and institutions that is of potential interest to social policy. The present paper summarizes the current stage of development in achieving this highly ambitious goal. The current version of the framework supports analysis of social trends and policy responses from many perspectives: • The point-in-time, resource-flow perspectives that underlie most traditional, economics-based policy analysis. • Life-course perspectives, including both transitions/trajectories analysis and asset-based analysis. • Spatial perspectives that anchor people in space and history and that provide a link to macro-analysis. • The perspective of the purposes/goals of individuals and institutions, including the objectives of different types of government programming. The concepts of the framework, which are all potentially measurable, provide a language that can support integrated analysis in all these areas at a much finer level of description than is customary. It provides a language that is especially well suited for analysis of the incremental policy changes that are typical of a mature welfare state. It supports both qualitative and quantitative analysis, enabling some integration between the two. It supports citizen-centric as well as a government-centric view of social policy. In its current version, the concepts are most highly developed as they related to social policies as they related to labour markets, equality and social integration, care-giving, immigration, income security, sustainability, and social and economic well-being more generally. However the paper points to likely extensions in the areas of health, justice and safety.

Globalization, Trade Policy, and the Permissive Consensus in Canada (Working Paper 27)

Do public protests dramatize the new political salience of trade policy? This article analyzes a survey of Canadian mass opinion taken just before the protests against the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas in Quebec City in April 2001. The survey design allows a comparison of the difference between Canadians’ positive assessment of trade agreements but more ambivalent responses to “globalization.” We examine a series of underlying attitudes and values to probe latent opinion on trade and globalization. We conclude that the permissive consensus on trade agreements is robust – that is, Canadians are prepared to defer to governments on trade liberalization – but this consensus may be endangered by ongoing globalization and pressures for North American integration that go well beyond issues of tariffs and trade. On these latter issues, the nature of globalization and integration, not its existence, are subject to heated debate.