New web page designed to measure government’s progress
Last week, the government of Canada launched a new mandate tracking webpage that’s intended to help Canadians hold the government accountable.
The webpage — called the Mandate Letter Tracker — will display the progress and completion of the 364 commitments found in the mandate letters Prime Minister Trudeau wrote to his cabinet ministers shortly after the Liberals won their majority government in 2015.
Part of the tracker’s purpose is tied into an approach called “deliverology.” According to CBC, deliverology was developed by an advisor to Tony Blair’s Labour government in the United Kingdom, and aims to prioritize the delivery of policy and the measuring of results.
With their mandate letter tracker, the Liberals are now trying to embrace that approach by quantifying both how many promises they’re keeping, as well as the effects these contributions are having on well-being across Canada. Some critics, including CBC columnist Robyn Urback, point to the fact that the mandate tracker doesn’t track actual promises that the Liberals made to Canadians and that doing so would result in many more promises that have been abandoned.Additionally, they point to the category of “underway with challenges” as probably meaning “definitely not going to happen.” In this category is the government’s promise to balance the budget by 2019-2020 as well as the national inquiry for missing and murdered indigenous women.
Recently, Maclean’s identified the inquiry as being dragged up into bureaucratic chaos and personal conflict, with some Indigenous leaders and advocates calling for the inquiry to have a “hard reset” and to mitigate the damage that’s already been done.
Meanwhile, the mandate tracker, or as Urback puts it, the Liberals’ own “self-focused, self-issued, self-completed report card,” will continue to be updated over the next two years.
Photo by Alora Griffiths/The Ontarion