1

Introduction

The Canadian based Metropolis Project attempts to facilitate the production of

policy-relevant academic research on issues related to immigrants and refugees. Its

network of regional Centres of Excellence is coordinated by a national Centre in Ottawa.

The Metropolis Project is funded by a consortium of federal government departments, the

largest contributors being Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) and the Social

Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Currently there are five Centres of Excellence in operation, each of which is

composed of a partnership among community-based organizations, local universities, and

all levels of government. The Centres operate through the efforts of academics who

manage and coordinate research activities. The Metropolis Project is structured around

the idea that regular, informal interaction between academics, policy-makers, and

community members can effectively exchange knowledge to inform decision-making.

By mobilizing the knowledge-based resources of academics, largely social scientists, the

Project is designed to increase research capacity while making effective use of scarce

financial resources. The Project is meant to provide a “shared strategic platform” from

which to “improve policies for managing migration and diversity in major cities”

(Metropolis Project 2004). The Project has an international component with affiliations

in more than twenty of the largest immigrant-receiving countries. Annual international

and national conferences bring participants together to share best practices, research, and

successful policy, and to discuss the challenges posed to countries, cities, and

communities by immigration.

When I began my research on the Metropolis Project I was curious about the way

research is transformed into policy; the role Metropolis may have had in facilitating this
 2

process; and the part academics may play in this process. What appeared to be straight

forward questions to me when I began doing research, soon seemed complex to answer.

I was concerned my research would result in a program-evaluation of Metropolis if I

continued to decipher the way in which policy is made in Canada and the impact

Metropolis research may have on the process. Yet, what appeared at first to be an

impasse soon became an avenue. Taking cues from those I interviewed, I modified my

questions. Rather than solely querying the process of policy-making and the impact of

research, I started to also examine the role of the Project as a funder of academic research.

I then asked: how does the Metropolis Project fit into the history of academic research

funding in Canada, and what role did social scientists play in contributing to the

formation of social policy before the Metropolis Project? In the process of addressing

these questions I was able to begin conceptualizing a theoretical framework that could

account for the lack of involvement of academics in research for policy during the latter

part of the twentieth century, and the current increase in participation in strategically-

oriented research. Drawing largely on Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller’s work on

governmentality and analysis of neo-liberal forms of governance, I was able to

conceptualize the relationship between academics and the Metropolis Project specifically

and the Canadian state, as a research funder, generally, as an alignment of interests that

facilitates the transmission and translation of knowledge to centres of calculation where

political rationalities become technologies of government. Over the course of this thesis,

I will attempt to demonstrate that the alignment of interests between academics and

elements of governance has developed into, not only a goal-sharing exercise, but also a

hegemonic process in which research is rationalized, legitimized and tailored according

to strategically-oriented policy priorities.

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The research process led me to undertake an extensive review of Metropolis

Project documents available through the national and regional Centres’ websites; to carry

out interviews with academics and other individuals affiliated with the Project; to

volunteer at the Toronto Centre of Excellence; and to attend the Tenth International

Metropolis Conference in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. While reviewing documents about

the Metropolis Project I also read analyses of the history of academics in Canada, the

development of the social sciences, and the role of academics in the formation of social

policy in Canada. Upon reviewing and synthesizing many documents on the structure of

the Project and the function of its committees, boards, and councils, it became clear that

to answer the questions I posed about the alignment of interests, I would need to draw on

the interviews I conducted with academics (mostly affiliated with the Toronto Joint

Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement, CERIS), and with

individuals who have extensive knowledge of the history, role, and function of the

Project.

I have attempted to shield the identities of my interviewees to the extent that the

words I have quoted will be familiar to them but to no one else. If this has resulted in

some vacuity regarding their personalities, relationships to the Project, or politics, it is

due to my effort to ensure that no negative repercussions would arise from their

participation in my research. Interviews were conducted between May, 2005 and April,

2006. Although I asked many of the same questions, all were open-ended and often

based on the direction of the conversation rather than a fixed format. Many of the

interviews were completed in-person but when it was impossible to meet, they were

conducted over the phone. Two of the interviews were recorded and I took detailed notes

for the rest. To the best of my knowledge and my abilities, I followed the ethics
 4

guidelines of the University of Western Ontario whose Research Ethics Board gave me

approval to carry out my research project in the manner I outlined to its members in my

application.

In May of 2005, I began volunteering at CERIS, and was able to access the

materials housed in the Centre’s Resource Room. I spent a minimum of six hours per

day, five days a week at the Centre for approximately four months during the summer of

2005. My first days at CERIS were spent getting acquainted with staff and facilities,

meeting the people who shared the office space I would occupy, and learning my way

around. Located on the top floor of the Faculty of Social Work, within the St. George

campus of the University of Toronto, the view of Toronto from the board room windows

was expansive, although most of my time was spent searching through documents in the

Resource Room. The four offices occupied by CERIS staff ran along the southernmost

wall of the building, and two number-entry security doors on either side of the elevator

shaft separated the offices from the inner area where the Resource Room was located

behind an additional locked door where I spent most of my time. I was assigned a

numbered combination to ease my entry and exit from the Resource Room for the days

the room’s director, employed on a part-time basis, would be absent. In addition to the

Resource Room, the inner space behind the outer door was composed of other cubicle

offices separated by tall, fabric-covered dividers, the kitchenette, and a small board room.

The cubicle offices were occupied by researchers working on some long-term projects

and, past the board room, three more cubicles were reserved for visiting scholars and

CERIS management board members.

During the research process, I volunteered to work for the Resource Room

director. My initial meeting with the director of the Resource Room and the director of
 5

the Centre was an opportunity for us to define the limits of my access while working

within the Centre. The amount of volunteer time was set at no more than fifteen hours a

week, but I enthusiastically completed double the hours within my first two weeks.

I finished a comprehensive integration of old and new Resource Room documents while

making plans to conduct interviews with academics associated with the Centre. I spent

almost every day at the Centre, and when the Resource Room director departed for

another job opportunity I took up a position at her desk as it had a faster computer than

the one I had been using. With my new strategic location, near all the documents, folders,

and papers, I also had new responsibilities. In the interim before a new Resource Room

director was hired I was often the only person in the room, and I became a resource

person for information on the location of documents which were sometimes difficult to

find. I completed two notable tasks: compiling a comprehensive guide to all the Resource

Room documents (which enabled me to become familiar very quickly with all the Room

had to offer); and evaluating all the results of research funding to ensure that all research

products had been received by the Centre and were available in a number of formats,

including a hard copy, disk copy and on-line version.

My volunteer work at the Centre was followed by my attendance at the Tenth

International Metropolis Conference in Toronto in October of 2005. The conference was

an opportunity to see knowledge dissemination, one of the hallmarks of the Project, in

action. I attended plenary and conference sessions daily, and noted what seemed to be the

tendency of presenters, both from the academic world and from the economic sector, to

reduce the status of immigrants and refugees to their potential economic contribution to

the country. I began to suspect that the political rationalities lurking behind the Project

were those of the maximization of human capital, rather than the moral imperative of
 6

assisting those in need (see Lindquist 1994). Schooled in anthropology and aware of how

power operates to maintain hegemony, I sensed a lack of humanity-based approach in the

presentations. However, on the final day of the conference the presentations of John

Ralston Saul and Lord Bhiku Parekh echoed my concerns and proposed that, in order to

understand current immigration and migration issues, one must examine the limits within

which one has been thinking and conceptualizing issues and problems. One must also be

able, shared Lord Parekh, to allow questions of those limits.

Lord Parekh’s presentation had a profound effect on how I thought about the

relationship between academics, the Canadian state and the Metropolis Project. I became

intent on examining the limits within which it became possible and desirable for

academics to contribute to social policy, and began to wonder if they felt a moral

imperative to make such contributions. As such, the theoretical insights of Rose and

Miller on the alignment of interests began to ring with clarity in my ears as I began

examining the ways in which both the funding of academic research has changed, and

how the goals and interests of the Canadian government have changed as well. Thus, the

types of ideas that have salience for decision-makers (a compound term I use over policy-

makers as it covers all those individuals with the power and authority to devise and

instrumentalize policy) are conditioned by the role of the government with regards to

intervening in the lives of its subjects. Ideas form the basis of what becomes policy and

programs of government; these ideas are only made possible through gathering

knowledge about the subject of such policies. Social science research in Canada has not

always been useful for decision-makers. The process that has made it helpful has been

characterized by both the struggle of academics to be seen as legitimate by the

government, and the rationalization of university-based research through the increasing

 7

control of funding for strategically-oriented research by the state. These currents have

increasingly aligned the interests of academics and decision-makers to the extent that they

understand the success of their goals (social justice for academics and economic

integration for decision-makers) to be bound up in their mutual efforts. The Metropolis

Project provides a structure and infrastructure to bridge the gap between academics and

decision-makers, and a framework for the inclusion of community organizations which

facilitates the exchange of ideas and knowledge among representatives from community

organizations, academics and government funders.

Following a description of the theoretical framework used, this paper examines

the history of social science funding in Canada since World War II, with particular

emphasis placed on elucidating the growth in funding for strategically-oriented research

to facilitate the development of government technologies. Then, I will briefly elucidate

the complexities of developing policies in Canada, with an emphasis placed on the

mechanisms through which the formal system of policy-making is facilitated by the

informal activities of agents. Subsequently, I will describe and analyze the structure of

the Metropolis Project, with particular emphasis on CERIS, the site of the majority of my

research. In the conclusion, I will attempt to draw together the threads of my argument

through my theoretical framework to illustrate the limits within which I have come to

understand the relationship between academics and the Metropolis Project. It would

appear that a tenuous balance is created between the social scientist’s desire to continue to

be a legitimate source of knowledge and the apparent need to tailor research to match the

strategic interests of the state.

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Chapter One: Theoretical Framework

Theoretical conceptualizations of the relationship of individuals to the state have

been enriched in recent decades by the work of Michel Foucault. One of the most

influential writers in recent memory on topics such as the history of the modern state,

sexuality, and the growth of disciplinary systems, Foucault created a foundation from

which to examine the relationships between knowledge and power, and between states

and subjects.

One of the most notable revelations from his work is his writing on what he

defined as governmentality, or on the institutional arrangements of the state which utilize

different forms of knowledge to exercise complex forms of power. Peter Miller and

Nikolas Rose, building on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, also incorporate

theoretical insights from the philosophy of science writings of Bruno Latour and Michael

Callon. The synthesis they propose in their analysis of the dynamics of the power

necessary for governmental rule is based on the understanding that government exists as a

world of programs built with expert knowledge, linked together through an exchange and

relay of information from one locale to another (Miller and Rose 1990: 10).

Central to my exploration of the relationship between academics and the

Metropolis Project in Canada are the analyses of Miller and Rose on ways in which

interests between an agent and an organization are aligned so that one is able to convince

the other that to achieve mutual success they are best served by working together (1990:

10). This entails establishing a mutual understanding of concepts, terms, and ways of

thinking about issues and problems. Occurring through a kind of translation, establishing

ways of thinking can best be seen in the thematic and strategic direction of research

funding competitions where freedom of choice of topic is constrained by the limits of the
 9

competition. With the transfer and relay of information in mind, Miller and Rose

examine the ways that information is gathered and transmitted between locales and

centres of calculation where decisions are made, effectively linking individuals into a

network. This is a necessary function, say Miller and Rose, for the operation of

government at a distance, a concept adapted from Bruno Latour’s action at a distance.

Government at a distance requires the relay of information from distant locales to inform

decision-making in a central location. Gathering information, experts generate

knowledge about people and places that contributes to the administration of “diverse

aspects of conduct” (Rose and Miller 1992: 175). Academics, for example, who are

funded by the Metropolis Project, are enrolled as experts on their communities of study,

and as experts of community they become conduits for the translation of the real world

(the world according to the social science techniques of rendering the world knowable).

This form ideally renders their knowledge amenable for informing the development of

policy or programs, often at locales distant from the location where the knowledge was

generated. Fundamental for the development of policy and programs is the collection of

information of various types which may include statistics, reports, or consultations.

Therefore, essential for the calculations of government are the types of knowledge that

inform decision-making and the political will to utilize them. These interlaced concepts

are central to my analysis of the alignment of interests between academics and the

Metropolis Project, and as such deserve a fuller treatment in order to elucidate and

characterize the relationship between academics and the Metropolis Project.

Foucault identified the increasing governmentalization of the state through which

the disciplinary society was slowly supplanted by the society of government. He locates

this movement in the attempt to isolate population as a “field of intervention and as an

 10

objective of governmental techniques” (Foucault 1991: 102). Occurring simultaneously

with the isolation of population, according to Foucault, is the identification of the

economy as a “sector of reality, and political economy as the science and the technique of

intervention of the government in that field of reality” (Foucault 1991: 102).

The accumulation and concentration of both apparatuses of government and the

knowledges that underpin them in the West, according to Foucault, constitute

governmentality. Governmentality, he suggests, is both internal and external to the state

because it is through their schemes that the ability of governments to act on the social

world is constantly redefined. Thus, governmentality is the “ensemble formed by the

institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics, which allow

the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power” (Foucault, cited in Miller

and Rose 1990: 2). Systems of governance depend on the ability to develop and enact a

complex arrangement of knowledges that inform and contribute to the development of

apparatuses, calculations, calculable subjects, and tactics. These ways of thinking about

social problems and the population at large reveal the capacity of the state to define the

limits within which calculations and tactics for intervention can be devised to act upon the

social world through implementation (Miller and Rose 1990: 2). Rose and Miller argue

that the term “governmentality sought to draw attention to a certain way of thinking and

acting embodied in all those attempts to know and govern the wealth, health and

happiness of populations” (1992: 174). Moreover, it is knowledge that is:

central to these activities of government and to the very formation of its objects,
for government is a domain of cognition, calculation, experimentation and
evaluation… [and] government is intrinsically linked to the activities of expertise,
whose role is not one of weaving an all-pervasive web of ‘social control’, but of
enacting assorted attempts at the calculated administration of diverse aspects of
conduct through countless, often competing, local tactics of education, persuasion,
 11

inducement, management, incitement, motivation and encouragement (Rose and

Miller 1992: 175).

They suggest that government operates through the mutuality of “political

rationalities and governmental technologies” and depends on the multiplicity of delicate

networks that link “individuals, groups, and organizations to the aspirations of

authorities” (Rose and Miller 1992: 176). Central to the operation of this form of power

which links agents into a network is the domain of political rationalities that, through

knowledge, renders “aspects of existence thinkable and calculable, and amenable to

deliberated and planful initiatives: a complex of intellectual labour involving not only the

invention of new forms of thought, but also the invention of novel procedures of

documentation, computation and evaluation” (Miller and Rose 1990: 3). A necessity for

alignment of the interests of agents in a network is the ability to define or isolate those

domains of social existence that can be acted upon, through the development of policy,

for example (Miller and Rose 1990: 3). Government has become the articulation of

actionable domains and thinkable thoughts, where knowledge rests at the juncture

between systems of thought and systems of action (Rose and Miller 1992: 177). In other

words, knowledge is a vital resource for governments. When used to intervene in the

lives of the population, the expertise of knowledgeable agents is a valuable and essential

tool for intervention (Rose and Miller 1992: 201).

Insofar as governments rely on knowledge, it is the articulation through language

of knowledge about objects of interest and objectives for intervention that makes it

possible to translate political rationalities into technologies of government which are

devised to act upon the social life of individuals, groups and communities (Miller and

Rose 1990: 6, 8-9). Language can be considered an intellectual technology that inscribes
 12

reality through rendering information into “written reports, drawings, pictures, numbers,

charts, graphs, statistics… [making the information] stable, mobile, combinable and

comparable” (Miller and Rose 1990: 7). When information in stable forms becomes

mobile, it can be transported over distances linking the domain in which it was gathered

with the centre where decisions can be made as a result. Rendering inscribed information

into stable and mobile forms, such as statistics or census data, can thus open the subject of

inscription to “evaluation, calculation and intervention” (Miller and Rose 1990: 7).

Inscribed information becomes programmatic in the sense that it provides the basis for

identifying problems within the state, and posing solutions. Programs of government, as

designs to achieve an ideal and desirable result, are often based on political rationalities

which are informed by expert research that subjects reality to “procedures for rendering

the world thinkable, taming its intractable reality by subjecting it to the disciplined

analysis of thought” (Rose and Miller 1992: 182).

Generated through the regional research process of the Metropolis Project, the

knowledge of academics has rendered interpretations about communities of immigrants

and refugees in such a way that policies and programs can be designed based on this

knowledge to reflect political rationalities in the “world of persons” (Miller and Rose

1990: 8). Political rationalities in the case of the Metropolis Project manifest as policy

priorities, or as problems or issues to be addressed, served by regional Centres of

Excellence that gather knowledge and, through funding competitions, produce research.

The successful and rapid economic integration of immigrants and refugees is currently a

central priority for the Project and, as such, research by academic experts is encouraged

through research funding competitions. The Metropolis Project attempts to generate

policy-relevant research which can aid the development of policy and programmes that
 13

will facilitate the economic integration of immigrants and refugees. This process depends

on a number of preconditions: a researcher must be able to identify who is and who is not

an immigrant or refugee, thus making it necessary to have a set of classificatory schemes

to target the population of people to measure; they must be able to measure the degree to

which economic integration has been achieved and the barriers that may inhibit this

process; and finally, they must be able to reproduce these results in a form that makes it

possible to act upon them. The inscription of reality through these techniques of

recording and re-representation makes it possible, according to Miller and Rose, to enable

“government at a distance” (1990: 9).

Miller and Rose draw from Bruno Latour’s description of action at a distance

where he asks “how is it possible to act on events, places and people that are unfamiliar

and a long way away?” (cited in Miller and Rose 1990: 9). They suggest that governing

at a distance requires indirect mechanisms where calculations in one locale are connected

to actions in another. Miller and Rose explain that the mechanism by which this occurs

involves:

alliances formed not only because one agent is dependent upon another for funds,
legitimacy or some other resource which can be used for persuasion or
compulsion, but also because one actor comes to convince another that their
problems or goals are intrinsically linked, that their interests are consonant, that
each can solve their difficulties or achieve their ends by joining forces or working
along the same lines (1990: 10).

The process that makes it possible for allied interests to align actors is elucidated

by Miller and Rose, adapting a concept from Bruno Latour and Michael Callon, as

translation. Allied interests are created when:

one actor or force is able to require or count upon a particular way of thinking and
acting from another, hence assembling them into a network not because of legal or
institutional ties or dependencies, but because they have come to construe their
problems in allied ways and their fate as (sic) in some way bound up with one
 14

another. Hence persons, organizations, entities and locales which remain

differentiated by space, time and formal boundaries can be brought into a loose
and approximate, and always mobile and indeterminate, alignment (1990: 10).

Language plays an important part of this process when ways of talking and

thinking about issues are shared through one agent’s ability to translate the objectives of

his or her political rationalities into the ambitions of others. Translation also plays an

integral role in rendering a political rationality into a form that it can become the basis of

a research question. The resulting research may then form the basis of a technology of

government, a programmatic design that “presupposes that the real is programmable”

(Rose and Miller 1992: 183). If we return to the Metropolis Project, it is clear that the

various objectives of the Project (such as the economic and social integration of

immigrants and refugees into Canadian society), which are discerned through

consultations with government and community stakeholders, are also within the scope of

the research interests of academics whose projects are funded by the Centres of

Excellence. The interests of academics are relatively consonant with the Project insofar

as the outcome of the research dissemination and translation process facilitates equitable,

fair, just policy or positive results that benefit the communities with whom they work

(Interview July 21, 2005). Inasmuch as political rationalities have a moral form and

consider “the ideals or principles to which government should be directed [to be]

freedom, justice, equality, mutual responsibility, common sense, economic efficiency,

prosperity, growth, fairness, [and] rationality” (Rose and Miller 1992: 179), they can

draw in academics who also adhere to that type of morality or value system. Political

rationalities articulated through a distinctive kind of speech also manifest “as a kind of

intellectual machinery or apparatus for rendering reality thinkable in such a way that it is

amenable to political deliberations” (Rose and Miller 1992: 179). As an intellectual

 15

apparatus, the language of political rationalities, based as it is on a kind of morality and

fuelled by knowledge, defines the limits within which, after rendering reality thinkable,

social problems and issues can be framed. Establishing a common language, or set of

terms, concepts, or theories among academics and the Metropolis Project is a more

complex process than the act of providing funding, although the provision and control of

funding is a substantial component of the process. Thus, insofar as political rationalities

are composed in a moral form that utilizes language both shared between Metropolis

Project’s government department funders and the social scientists who apply for funding

and understood to describe common goals, the impetus for academics to become involved

through applying for funding becomes a choice that reflects an imperative to contribute to

social well-being and justice.

The alignment of interests depends on the ability to phrase social problems in

common terms so that it becomes a moral imperative for both government and academics

to act or intervene. Moreover, to repudiate involvement in programs for intervention or

research for pressing social issues becomes unthinkable. The moral imperative for

academics to act, to contribute something to their research communities, now supercedes

abstaining from political or governmental policy-driven research. When the development

of policy is articulated by government and political authorities alike as an effective means

for positive social intervention, when it becomes the basis for the delivery of programs,

completing research that is meant to inform policy development takes on the quality of

common sense. What has become thinkable is the involvement of academics with the

state to address social problems through the creation of policy, while the unthinkable is

articulated as inaction in the face of inequality. The means and methods for addressing an

issue may be a highly divisive point between academics and political authorities;
 16

nonetheless, academic involvement reflects understanding that an issue merits

acknowledgment and action (Rose and Miller 1992: 184).

By establishing partnerships among decision-makers, academics and

communities, the Metropolis Project has created an organizational framework that

facilitates the face-to-face interaction of stakeholders, the exchange of ideas, and the

translation of those ideas into the basis for research questions. The flow of information

through the partnerships is reciprocal in the sense that both community organizations and

government representatives bring problems “to the table”. Academics, who alone are

permitted to be principal investigators in the research process, become considered experts

of community as the conduits for the flow of research, and translators of the world on the

ground (CERIS 2004: 3). Communities, as the new terrain for intervention, are made

thinkable, and thus amenable to deliberations, through research and inscription by

academic experts. Nikolas Rose argues convincingly that:

communities have been objectified by positive knowledges, subject to truth claims

by expertise and hence become the object of political technologies for governing
through communities…. [A] whole array of little devices and techniques have
been invented to make communities real. Surveys of attitudes and values, market
research, opinion polls, focus groups, citizens’ juries and… more have mapped
out these new spaces of culture, brought these values and virtues into visibility
and injected them into the deliberations of authorities (1999: 189).

The Metropolis Project idea has been premised on creating links between

academic researchers and communities; it is a precondition for funding proposal

adjudication that community partners are a significant part of a collaborative research

process (CERIS 2004: 2). At CERIS, the emphasis on links with communities also

includes community organizations, member or advocacy groups, or even municipal-level

government councils that are involved in research partnerships (Murdie 1999).

Academics who are acting as relays for information, or translators between community
 17

members or organizations and the Metropolis Project, are at least implicitly “on hand to

advise on how communities and citizens might be governed in terms of their values, and

how their values shape the way they govern themselves” (Rose 1999: 189). The ways

community organizations are governed by community members may also have important

implications for revealing the dynamics of local governance, values, and codes of conduct

(Siemiatycki 1996). Rose argues that “to govern communities, it seems one must first of

all link oneself up with those who have, or claim, moral authority” (1999: 190). With the

production of new expert academic knowledge about community, decision-makers are

enabled to create political plans of action, programs and policies as technologies of

government that are designed to affect both community-based and often national, federal-

level action towards the goal of the integration of immigrants and refugees.

The importance of the inscription of information about communities is matched

by the ability to transport, share, and disperse it to places where decisions on political

rationalities are made and programs developed. Establishing networks for the flow of

information is essential to this process. One way this is accomplished is through

knowledge-transfer initiatives at the regional Centres of Excellence which include the

preparation of briefs and working papers; Centre-based workshops and national and

international conferences also satisfy this goal. Most importantly, the Centres add

research reports to the web-based virtual library of the Project to which any member of

the community, federal funder, or public stakeholder may gain access. It may seem that

all information flows to the head Ottawa Centre, but information is distributed via the

public domain making it available to anyone with Internet access. Policy- and decision-

makers, and the media, have access to this central pool of knowledge produced by

academic experts. Thus, via the virtual library, information can be transported to any
 18

decision-making centre that possesses Internet access. According to Miller and Rose, the

“accumulation of inscriptions in certain locales, by certain persons or groups, makes them

powerful in the sense that it confers on them the capacity to engage in certain calculations

and to lay a claim of legitimacy for their plans and strategies because they are, in a real

sense, in the know about that which they seek to govern” (1992: 186). Thus, as Miller

and Rose are suggesting, the capacity to generate and transfer knowledge for potential

policy development confers the ability to make decisions and the legitimacy to do so.

Regarding the Metropolis Project, the centralization of power over knowledge through

developing the research and knowledge-sharing capacity for decision making is mitigated

only by the ways in which knowledge is disseminated by the Project. In the sense that the

World Wide Web is accessible, the virtual library as a site for the accumulation of

inscribed information opens the possibility to be “in the know” to a wider public. The

World Wide Web creates “networks of conduits for the detailed and systematic flow of

information” (Miller and Rose 1992: 186, Rose 1999: 52). There is, thus, the possibility

that the control of information is uncoupled from those with decision-making power and

made widely available. To the extent that the information is used to make policy and

programs, it can also be mobilized by those who wish to propose alternatives and

formulate other possibilities. As a technology, the virtual library assembles lines of

connection enabling the decision-makers to govern at a distance, to calculate, access,

audit, aggregate information, and formulate decisions based on regionally-specific, local,

community-based knowledge that is gathered, generated, and translated by academics.

The Metropolis Project, because of the structure of its design, facilitates this process.

Returning to the idea of the alignment of interests, I would suggest that the

Metropolis Project is a current example of a process of alignment. The project brings

 19

together both academics and decision- and policy-makers to sites where they can interact,

share problems, discuss issues, and exchange information. The national and international

conferences organized by Metropolis provide the venue for the interests of those involved

to be articulated. At the Tenth International Conference in Toronto, for example, when

the issue of strengthening border security was brought up, academics provided potential

answers to the problem, including more fully integrating immigrants and refugees, the

reform of policy that governs border security, and community involvement in security

decision-making (Metropolis Project 2005a). Insofar as the issue of security is defined in

such a way that it is a platform for those involved to speak about its importance,

maintenance and strengthening, conference participants agreed that it was worth talking

about. Issues worthy of attention and ideas that have salience for discussion have become

shared by both academics and decision-makers. Unlike earlier periods in Canada’s

history when academics and the state did not necessarily agree on what constituted

important social issues, the current agreement (between academics and the Metropolis

Project which is demonstrated by the involvement of academics), tenuous as it may be,

regarding what constitutes relevant and important social issues worthy of discussion and

deliberation, has become a salient feature of the Metropolis Project as a funder of

academic research. The moral imperative for academics to act on social issues in

collusion with government decision-makers is a dramatic departure from the tense and

contested relationship of previous decades. Although this tension may still exist, there

are a significant number of academics who seek involvement with the Metropolis Project

as a means of obtaining research funding. This may indicate that the academic’s interest

in affecting social change through contributing to policy development may potentially

rest on the belief that government intervention through program or policy delivery will
 20

accomplish positive results for communities. One academic at the conference related his

solution for both national security and for communities when he said, “National security

will be achieved when individuals in a community feel secure, when they do not feel

alienated or marginalized from the larger mainstream community” (Metropolis Project

2005a). Structured to provide knowledge that will potentially lead to the development of

policies and programs that encourage and facilitate the integration of immigrants and

refugees, the Metropolis Project, as a funder of strategically-oriented research, relies on

the insights and knowledge of social science experts to help insure that local community-

based issues are exposed in such a way to support the capacity for elements of

governance to develop policy and programs on broader issues such as national security.
 21

Chapter Two: “Plucking the Fruit of Research from the Orchard of Knowledge”: A Brief
History of Involvement Between Social Scientists and the Canadian State

Social science research in Canada is primarily funded by the Canadian

government. The Metropolis Project, itself funded by Citizenship and Immigration

Canada (CIC) and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), is

another funding option for research that is applicable to policy development on immigrant

and refugee issues. The sources of funding for academic research projects in the social

sciences have undergone significant shifts since the growth of the social sciences after

World War II. These shifts can be grouped into three periods that reflect changes in the

way funding was distributed yet do not necessarily reflect distinct changes in the attitudes

and ideas of social scientists or the government about their respective roles and their

relationship.

The first period is characterized by the provision of funding to Canadian social

scientists by private U.S. corporations and distributed by the professional-collegial

councils; second, funding was gathered from Canadian government and private corporate

sources and distributed by the professional-collegial councils; and third, the Canadian

government became the primary funder of social science research of which the

Metropolis Project is a part.

The first period was characterized by the image of the ivory tower within which

social scientists retained their autonomy over the types of research they pursued. Harold

A. Innis, one of many social critics of the time, was the archetypal figure for this period

as he strongly advocated that a distance be maintained between academics in the

university and decision-makers in government. This approach was exemplified by his

 22

position as one of the founders of the Canadian Social Science Research Council

(CSSRC) that distributed research funding until the creation of the Canada Council (CC).

The second period, marked by the government’s increasing control over the

research funding process through the creation of the CC, demonstrated that the level of

interest by the Canadian government in the knowledge of the social sciences and the

realization of its potential benefit if used for the development of policy and programs had

increased as the goals of the government changed.

The third period, resulted in the full control over research funding by the

government, and witnessed the creation of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council (SSHRC). After almost twenty years after its creation, it continues to be a

majority funder for the Metropolis Project. Separating the periods of funding into three

sections, seems a pragmatic method by which to reveal the context that made the

Metropolis Project possible; to explore the impact that the increasing control of funding

by the government has had on the interests of social scientists; and to investigate how

interests of both government decision-makers involved in the Project and social scientists

have come into increasing, albeit tenuous, alignment.

Increasing government interest in and control over social science research funding

demonstrates that decision-makers in government have come to rely on expert academic

research to design and support new policies and programs. Thus, the research funding

process, by being brought within the control of the government, has increasingly

rationalized the use of scarce financial resources. By assuming control of the funding

process the government has enabled research to be directed towards the interests of the

state and has lead to the development of policy and programs that govern at a distance.
 23

While endeavoring to examine how the interests of academics in the social

sciences have been increasingly aligned with the objectives of government decision-

makers through the Metropolis Project, it is useful to briefly examine the changing nature

of funding in Canada. This analysis reveals that, as the nature of funding changed, the

social sciences, through the representative professional-collegial council of the SSRC

(later the Social Science Federation of Canada [SSFC]) were attempting to position

themselves in line for government funding by emphasizing the potential contribution the

social sciences could make to government decision-making. As the social sciences strove

to be considered a legitimate source of expert advice on social issues to secure

government funding, the interests of both social scientists and government decision-

makers became increasingly aligned. This occurred as a reciprocal shift in both the

position of the social sciences vis-à-vis the government and the types of issues addressed

by the state. This shift was reflected in the increasing interest decision-makers showed

for the social makeup and “culture” of the country of which the social sciences could

contribute valuable expert knowledge if directed towards those ends.

Culminating in the Metropolis Project, the rationalization of both the research

funding process for the research needs of the government and the perception by decision-

makers that the social sciences did indeed provide knowledge with the potential and

capacity to influence the development of effective policy and programs, social scientists

and government decision-makers appeared to have become increasingly focused on

similar goals. Policy and program development can ostensibly accomplish these goals.

This alignment of interests, as I have come to understand it, rested on the belief

that policy as a technology of government, developed with the aid of scholarly academic

research, had the capacity and potential to affect the social life of immigrants and
 24

refugees in such a way that they could be integrated into life in Canada. The ways in

which social scientists and government decision-makers have increasingly come to

construe their problems in allied ways, whether as the basis of a research question or as

an actionable idea for the development of policy, has resulted from processes that are

illuminated by an examination of how the social sciences have been funded in Canada up

until the creation of the Metropolis Project. Leading up to the first period of funding, I

will discuss the context in which the potential and capacity for the government to

intervene in the lives of citizens became possible due to the changing ways of thinking

about social problems and the role that government should play in addressing them, and

the types of knowledge resources it would require to do so.

The Metropolis Project is premised on the idea that, in order to successfully and

effectively integrate immigrants and refugees into life in Canada, policies and programs

that intervene in and direct the process of integration should be developed by the

government. The role of the government, exemplified by the creation of the Metropolis

Project, is interventionist insofar as through the development of policy and programs it

seeks to affect the life chances of immigrants and refugees. The government has not

always been characterized by intervention but rather, during the post World War I period,

sought to provide opportunities for self-improvement. The ideology underpinning this

position of the government has been referred to by Doug Owram as a post-Hegelian

idealism founded on the belief that personal reform was “an internal rather than an

external matter [and as such] it must derive from an individual act of will rather than from

external enforcement” (cited in Owram 1986: 5). The agency of individuals to strive to

better themselves, given the right opportunities and incentives, amounted to a state less

concerned with intervention and more with providing opportunities for improvement.
 25

From this perspective, individual free-will was thought to be the result of social well-

being. Thus, the early twentieth-century Canadian state was characterized by a belief in

the combination of idealism and individualism. According to Owram, this was “a world

in which the free will of man was untrammeled by the institutions around him. His moral

sense and social leanings would, if properly directed, make that individual effort work

toward the benefit of society. Allowing these forces to work themselves out was thus

seen as the best means of achieving social improvement” (Owram 1986: 7). Canada had

yet to become a “governmental” society in the Foucauldian sense.

However, the period of intense social unrest caused by the economic chaos of the

1930s and both World Wars placed increasing pressure on government decision-makers

to become actively involved in directing the nation’s economy through government

policy, and subsequently through interventionist policies in the lives of citizens (Brooks

and Gagnon 1988: 15). Idealism, as it had been tied to the World War I effort unravelled

and was challenged by the sacrifice of Canadians sent overseas. Owram remarks that,

after the First World War, “the idealist assumption that man in society could work on the

basis of reason and commitment to social betterment seemed challenged by the events of

[those] four years” (1986: 104). As a result, the government called on and depended

upon the insights, expertise and knowledge of intellectuals and academics as the need for

knowledge grew with the level of the government’s social and economic intervention (see

Scott 1998). As both Miller and Rose and James Scott argue, the government that seeks

to intervene in the lives of its population does so using intellectual technologies that

render the social world legible and amenable to intervention (1992: 175, Scott 1998).

Mobilizing knowledge, the government could devise schemes, systems, and procedures to

act upon the social world (Miller and Rose 1990: 2).
 26

An example of the mobilization of knowledge would be the contribution of

economists, especially during the Depression years. They were accorded a measure of

approbation when their economic theory was of utility to the “real” economic issues

facing Canada. Thus, many Canadian political economists made the argument that, to

address the fiscal crises of the Depression years, the government should take active steps

to become more involved in directing the economy. Action was taken to adopt new fiscal

policies based on Keynesian economics (Massolin 2001: 73; Bradford 2000).

As the prominence of the expert grew within state circles, demands increased for

university-trained personnel, generally. The training of a specialized workforce needed

by both government and private industry to assess and manage the results of the growing

complexity of the economy, including international trade, was reflected in rising

university enrolments (Massolin 2001: 109-111). World War II accelerated the demand

for those who possessed specialized knowledge and thus universities were cast as

“storehouses of technical personnel and as centres for industrial research…. [And they]

gained a new-found notoriety and prestige among government officials and society at

large” (Massolin 2001: 109). The wars, especially World War II, created a new

perception of the university’s utility as a source of expertise and advice on social,

economic and scientific issues.

Accordingly after World War II, as the government was increasingly engaged in

social planning, there was also significant growth in the social science disciplines. This

period of growth for the social sciences occurred concomitantly with the secularization of

the university and an increase in student enrolment (Massolin 2001: 69). “No longer

centres of moral guidance and classical learning”, as idealism would have necessitated,

Massolin argues, prior to World War II, “universities, traditionally responsible for social
 27

issues, took on a new, strictly utilitarian alignment…. Canadian social sciences emerged

as a means by which scholars and researchers could dispassionately assess socio-

economic change and remedy industrial problems” (2001: 69). Stephen Brooks and Alain

Gagnon (1988) also argue that the growth of the social sciences in Canada has resulted

from the increase, since World War II, in interventionist policies that have been designed

to modify, manage and engender new types of behaviour among the Canadian

populations which have made new types of analysis and observation necessary (18-9,

116).

The growth of specialized social science expertise in Canada has had two main

effects. It has both legitimized social scientific research for use by government for the

development of social policy and has become a means to render the social world

knowable (Massolin 2001: 32). Moreover, “through the social sciences and state

interventionism,.. society became accessible to the individual and the group alike….

Knowledge and, specifically, social scientific analysis were the means to deal with

change, to shape circumstances, and to alter destinies” (Massolin 2001: 33). Expert

knowledge, in conjunction with an increasingly interventionist state, came to represent a

new kind of idealism, one that saw the key to a better social reality in the creation of a

world of programs and policies which have increasingly become the favorite means of

administration for government (Rose and Miller 1992: 175, see Shore and Wright 1997).

Knowledge is, of course, a key component of governing. The relationship

between power and knowledge is nowhere more evident than in the examination of the

ways in which the Canadian government has gained control of the research funding

process that does in fact generate knowledge and “ways of thinking” (Miller and Rose

1990: 2). When contentious issues, such as unemployment, have plagued the
 28

government, research to support options to remedy the problem has been based on a

mutual acknowledgment of the problem. In other words, through a common language

and set of terms, concepts, and theories, a domain of life is rendered amenable for

intervention. Research can facilitate this process when the goals of both academics and

government are linked and appear consonant (Miller and Rose 1990: 10). This occurs

insofar as “one actor comes to convince another that their problems or goals are

intrinsically linked, that their interests are consonant, that each can solve their difficulties

or achieve their ends by joining forces or working along the same lines” (Miller and Rose

1990: 10). Thus, securing control of the funding process was but one element in bringing

into alignment the interests of social scientists with the government. The struggle of the

social sciences for legitimacy in the eyes of funders has perhaps increased awareness that

they do indeed have an important role, especially for the designs of government.

Governing at a distance required just the sort of knowledge and expert advice that the

social sciences could provide to the increasingly programmatic and interventionist state

(Miller and Rose 1990: 9-11).

The increasing state control of research funding over the last fifty years has made

it the task of representative bodies for the social sciences both to legitimize social science

research and to lobby for funding. In order to appear legitimate in the eyes of funders, the

social scientists in Canada have attempted to demonstrate their utility to government

through conducting policy-relevant research on social issues. Increasing control of

funding has provided the government with a means to generate thematic or strategic

research which is commensurate with its plans for social intervention. It is important to

note, however, with the collapse of the spaces between government and academics

through the control of funding, the research of academics, the flow of ideas, theories,
 29

concepts and ways of seeing the world have been translated into government policy and

planning language. The recent interest in social capital with regards to its social functions

and applicability for policy development is but one example of a conceptual framework

imported from academia (see Policy Research Initiative 2003 and Regan 2005).

The first period of funding for the social sciences in Canada is represented by the

efforts of the CSSRC to become the political voice of social scientists in Canada.

Modeled on the structure of its United States counterpart, the CSSRC funded academic

research mainly through grants from corporations in the United States such as the

Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the Carnegie Corporation for eighteen years prior

to accepting Canadian state funding (Fischer 1991: 1; Brooks and Gagnon 1988: 13;

Owram 1986). Unlike the social sciences in the United States, the Canadian social

sciences needed encouragement, through systematic funding and support, to address

specifically Canadian social issues (Fischer 1991: 5-6).

The CSSRC was established in September of 1940 by Reginald G. Trotter

(historian, Queen’s University), John E. Robbins (Education Branch, Dominion Bureau of

Statistics), Harold A. Innis (political economist, University of Toronto), Robert A.

Mackay (political scientist, Dalhousie University), and Frederick C. Cronkite (law,

University of Saskatchewan) (Fischer 1991: 5). There were three significant factors that

contributed to the formation of the CSSRC, according to Donald Fischer, in The Social

Sciences in Canada: Fifty Years of National Activity by the Social Science Federation of

Canada. First, when the Second World War began, two of the CSSRC’s founding

members, Harold A. Innis and John E. Robbins, with increasing pressure on social

scientists from the government to contribute expertise to war-related research, endeavored

to create a funding council that would remain at “arms length” from the state by refusing
 30

to accept government funds (Fischer 1991: 7). Fischer recounts that “[t]he Council

(CSSRC) was approached directly by the government’s Rehabilitation and

Reconstruction committees, and in each case declined to be involved. Instead of

supporting these moves or diverting energies of the proposed CSSRC into war research,

Innis and Robbins were clear that this was exactly the right time to push the organization

of their Council forward” (1991: 7). Characteristic of Innis himself, the CSSRC’s move

to refuse government funding reveals the belief of Innis and other social scientists of the

time that the potential social benefits of the social sciences for society lay in their ability

to maintain their autonomy from the government. Carl Berger also writes that, “Innis

stood against the rising tide of demands on scholars to participate more directly in the

political life of the country. He was critical of the [League for Social Reconstruction]

LSR and the case for centralization of the Rowell-Sirous report, or even their joining the

state bureaucracy, as disastrous threats to Canadian scholarship” (cited in Brooks and

Gagnon 1988: 80).

Second, the CSSRC faced competition for social sciences territory from other

similar organizations such as the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), the National Research

Council (NRC) (which was largely devoted to the natural sciences), and the Canadian

Institute of Internal Affairs (CIIA). Both the RSC and the NRC in 1939 were potentially

going to create divisions devoted to the social sciences. The CSSRC’s separation and

autonomy for a time after was a product of these early attempts to retain autonomy and

resist entanglement with larger organizations within Canada (Fischer 1991: 7).

Third, due to the lack of substantial opportunities within Canada for study at the

PhD level, or subsequent advancement in the field, many graduates left the country for

postgraduate study in the United States or elsewhere, many never to return. This loss, the
 31

subsequent shortage of talented young scholars coupled with a shortage of programs for

them to attend and a lack of financial aid, according to the 1941 report by the CSSRC’s

committee on Post-Graduate Training, posed serious problems for the future of the social

sciences in Canada.

After the 1941 report, the CSSRC began to apply a research funding program that

would help develop the social sciences in Canada with support from funders in the United

States. Funding in the form of grants, bursaries, and fellowships enabled the publication

of many scholarly books, allowed academics to engage in research projects and take

leaves of absence to finish projects delayed by the war, and facilitated the training of

many post-graduates (Fischer 1991: 17-90).

The CSSRC began a series of research projects, completed by member academics

through the 1940s, which were designed to “provide knowledge on the regions of Canada

and on the social problems that faced Canadian society” (Fischer 1991: 22). These

projects began in 1942 with the development of a nationwide Canadian atlas.

A subsequent project on the Canadian Arctic was designed to measure and record the

economic resources in the North. Yet in the background of this project, there was

increasing political pressure for research on the geography of the North to be undertaken

in the event that armed forces stationed at weather stations in Germany or Japan launched

attacks. Although discerning the problems and issues that faced Canadian society served

a utility for solving social problems, the political uptake of research began to dissolve the

discrete boundaries between academic and state involvements. Without explicitly

tailoring projects for use by the government, the research was applicable for political

purposes as was the case with the Arctic project. In 1945, a Biculturalism research

project was created to investigate the relationship between English and French speakers in
 32

Canada. The key figure on the project, the economist from the University of New

Brunswick, Burton S. Kierstead, remarked that the CSSRC “should never touch any

social problems with important policy implications… [yet] conversely research will be

sterile and meaningless if we refuse the responsibility of social science by deliberately

choosing to investigate purely neutral and socially insignificant problems” (cited in

Fischer 1991: 23). Kierstead’s remarks exemplify that for the CSSRC in this period there

exists a discrepancy between the ideas of social scientists and government as to what

constitutes issues worthy of research. This tension between the divergent interests of

social scientists and government reflects the extent to which social problems were

construed in allied ways during this period of funding.

However, purposely funding research for use in the development of policy became

a reality in a final sponsored project for the 1940s which aimed to encourage the

discipline of anthropology to contribute to social science research in Canada. It was

designed based on a report in 1942 by Thomas F. McIlwraith, an anthropologist from the

University of Toronto, which alerted the CSSRC to the state of anthropological research

in Canada. In response, grants were allocated to fund graduate research on the

“conditions and needs of the North American Indians in Canada” (Fischer 1991: 25).

This project was the first collaborative project by the CSSRC designed to have national

policy implications (Fischer 1991: 25).

The CSSRC’s main focus of supporting independent scholarship and training in

Canada was dependent on grants provided by U.S. corporations and foundations, owing

to the continuing reluctance to accept funding from Canadian government sources due to

the influence of Harold Innis’ ideas. However, in 1944, J. Bartlett Brebner, a historian

from Columbia University, after being commissioned by the CSSRC and visiting nearly
 33

every university in Canada in 1945, released his report entitled Scholarship for Canada:

The Function of Graduate Studies (and commonly known as the Brebner Report), which

cited massive flaws in the system as it was. He suggested that “Canada needs to detect,

train, encourage, and retain every scholar she can find, for they will constitute the

principal group who will keep Canada up with a rapidly changing world, who will bring

Canada brains and experience to bear on Canadian problems, who will pass on to youth

and to the nation at large the vital tradition from the past” (cited in Fischer 1991: 20).

In an attempt to secure funding, the CSSRC used the Brebner Report to leverage

financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation to support fellowships. The attempt to

retain a distance from the Canadian government, from funding for applied research, was

also mirrored in the exclusion of particular disciplines within the social sciences

considered too applied, or those which were “too practical, too professional, or too

closely tied to government policy making” (Fischer 1991: 10). Despite being closely

aligned with government policy-making, economics was a high-ranking discipline in the

CSSRC in terms of influence. History, political science, sociology, geography, and

psychology had successively smaller roles in its operation (Fischer 1991: 12). Retaining

a distance from the government with regards to accepting funding was an important

feature of the operation of the CSSRC and maintained the divide between the social

sciences and the interests of government. Without control of the funding process, the

government could not actively direct the types of research being undertaken and the

research questions asked.

From 1940 to the early 1950s, funding was secured by the CSSRC from such U.S.

sources as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the Carnegie Corporation. Until the

creation of the CC in 1958, these three sources provided nearly all (90%) of the CSSRC’s
 34

funding. Meanwhile, the Canadian government under Lester B. Pearson’s direction

began the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences

which would later become known as the Massey Commission after its lead academic

director, Vincent Massey. The Massey Commission’s report, referred to by some as a

“high-minded and defensive strain of Canadian cultural nationalism”, emphasized that

government funding for universities and research would be necessary to develop a

nationally unique “Canadianism” (Massolin 2001: 195). Additionally, the Massey

Commission, according to Litt,

hastened the arrival of a new era in which culture was recognized as a legitimate
concern for government, and as such, one that required serious attention,
coordinated management, and a comprehensive strategy. Through its public
hearings, the Massey Commission expedited an incipient change of attitude within
Canadian political culture…. Suspended somewhere between government and the
people and belonging wholly to neither, the arts council proposal was the
bureaucratic embodiment of the cultural elite and its liberal humanist nationalism
(cited in Massolin 2001: 329).

Consequently, the release of the Massey Commission’s report precipitated the demise of

extra-national funding sources for the social sciences and the increase in government

interest in funding Canadian cultural content both through grants for research and direct

funding for Canadian broadcasting (Massolin 2001: 194). Thus, the report directly

impacted the willingness of U.S. corporations to fund Canadian social science and began

to close off the possibility of new funding as plans for the CC were announced. Fischer

also notes that “some social scientists doubted the appropriateness of a Canadian

institution having to rely in U.S. philanthropy” (1991: 27-8). The CSSRC had tried

unsuccessfully to raise funds locally and by the mid-1940s there was increasing pressure,

especially from the Carnegie Corporation, for local funds to be secured. The Ford

Foundation did provide one final grant to ensure the financial survival of the CSSRC until
 35

the CC was fully implemented. After the death of Harold Innis in 1952, the Rockefeller

Foundation discontinued their support doubting that the new leadership of the CSSRC

would be as beneficent as Innis’s leadership had been (Fischer 1991: 27-8).

When universities began receiving government funds in 1951-1952, the CSSRC

appealed for funds and a small amount of money was regularly supplied. Ultimately, the

available funding sources did not provide enough and the CSSRC, for the first time,

appealed to the government for assistance. The request was denied and the CSSRC was

told to wait until the implementation of the CC to receive more funding (Fischer 1991:

28-9). In effect, what occurred as a result of the recommendations of the Massey

Commission was the development of a Canadian social science funding body that would

have the capacity to encourage the enrichment of Canadian scholarship and enhance the

image both nationally and internationally of Canada as a unique country with a culture

and values distinct from the “pernicious ideas and social influences” that crossed the

border from the U.S. (Massolin 2001: 195). The significance of the creation of the

Canada Council according to Philip Massolin rests on its symbolic as well as practical

value. Moreover, he suggests that “financially, it had been a ‘revolutionary departure’ in

Canadian intellectual life; through the council, intellectuals and artists received state

support for which they had longed for decades” (2001: 207).

State support, as we shall see, had a more profound effect than solely enriching

the cultural life of Canada: it also brought within the confines of the state the control over

the financial allocation for research funding. As a precondition for the alignment of

interests, the ability to direct, even if only subtly, the types of research funded, the

government of Canada became the primary funder of social science research. With the

new terrain of culture open for inquiry, the stage was being set for the intervention of the
 36

government, through policy development, into the cultural life of residents. With culture

identified as a “domain of cognition” (see Miller and Rose 1992: 175) that could be both

enriched by scholarship and be potentially rendered open to intervention by government,

it is of no surprise that, in 1957, Northrop Frye argued that “with the Canada Council Act,

federal aid for universities is linked with federal aid for culture. The principles involved

for culture are precisely the same…. It is logical to link the university and culture: in fact

it could almost be said that the university today is to culture what the church is to

religion: the social institution that makes it possible” (cited in Massolin 2001: 329-30).

As culture entered the domain of political rationalities, the legitimacy and potential use of

social science research became apparent to the government as it was seen to possess the

capacity to assist in the design of technologies for governing and to administrate this

domain of social life that had fallen within the purview of decision-makers. Insofar as

social scientists and, to a some extent academics from the humanities, were experts on the

domain of culture, their strategic use for state planning and policy development would

increase from this period onwards.

The second period in funding under discussion begins during the first year of

operation of the CC. The CC, having built its procedures and programs for funding on

the experiences of both the CSSRC and Humanities Research Council of Canada (HRC),

began by holding a competition for research funds that had been endowed to it by the

federal government. The CSSRC changed its name once the CC was created, according

to Fischer, to the Social Science Research Council of Canada (SSRC) to avoid any

confusion with the CC (1991: 41). A substantial amount of money had been awarded by

Lester B. Pearson for the CC’s operation, and research funding which it would run

through the established programs of the SSRC and HRC; this included a startup award of
 37

fifty million dollars with an additional fifty million from which only the interest could be

spent (Fischer 1991: 36, Ostry 1962: 14). John E. Robbins (Chief of the Education

Branch, Dominion Bureau of Statistics) who, in addition to being a founding member of

the CSSRC, was appointed as the permanent Executive Secretary-Treasurer for the SSRC

and tasked in 1957 with judging the funding competitions alongside the selection

committees of the SSRC (Fischer 1991: 41). The significance of this appointment and the

duty of adjudicating research proposals left Robbins and the selection committee to

provide a list of recommended winners which was for the most part approved by the CC.

The appointment of Robbins in 1957 to adjudicate research proposals, himself a member

of the government’s public service, was a harbinger of events to come.

The initial competitions from the late 1950s until the early 1960s drew

considerable numbers of applications and the relationship between the CC, the SSRC and

the HRC, until 1963, was characterized by the two-term Chairman of the SSRC, Father

Mailloux, as “increasingly… a matter of close, co-ordinated and stabilized collaboration”

(cited in Fischer 1991: 43). This sentiment, however, did not reflect the views of all of

the SSRC members, nor did it reflect the increasingly coercive shape that collaboration

was taking. SSRC members and chairmen worried that the SSRC had been reduced,

through this collaboration, to an agency in service to the CC, rather than the (relatively)

autonomous organization that it had been. In 1963, after the findings of two reports (the

Clark Report in 1958 and the Ostry Report in 1962) that were critical of the way the CC

was operating, the CC brought the adjudication of research funds within the confines of

its organization, taking away the ability of both Councils (SSRC and HRC) to administer

funds. The CC from that point on assumed full control of the adjudication of research

proposals and the distribution of funds. The creation of the CC, according to the Ostry
 38

report, had nearly eviscerated all forms of external funding, and from 1963 onwards, the

government became the main funder of social science research in Canada. It was

significantly outmatched by the funding dedicated to the NRC (National Research

Council) for the natural sciences (Ostry 1962: 11-16). Ostry’s report outlined the

challenges faced by social scientists in Canada in the pursuit for funding insofar as they

would have more success aligning their interests with the CC if their research interests

were complementary. A lack of options for funding no doubt affected the types of

research funded, yet the emphasis for funding of this period was still placed on

facilitating the development of the cultural character of the country.

It had yet to be cultivated as source of strategic knowledge for interventionist planning to

the degree that it became later in the 1970s (Massolin 2001: 206-8).

A significant shift in the role of the SSRC had occurred after the creation of the

CC and the subsequent removal of the SSRC’s powers to distribute research funds and

adjudicate proposals. The SSRC had moved from being a funding agency to the position

of representative and government lobbying body in the wake of the creation and operation

of the CC (Fischer 1991: 61-2, 73). With the control of funding firmly within

government control, the next significant change to the funding of social science research

was the creation of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) in

1977, exemplifying the third period under discussion. However, a number of significant

events took place prior to the creation of the SSHRC that provides a context for how

cultural and linguistic diversity became a domain rendered intelligible through social

science research for administration. The conditional legitimacy of social science research

is explored by Stephen Brooks and Alain Gagnon with regards to the Royal Commission

on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.

 39

During the 1960s, the government was preoccupied with issues of national unity

which precipitated a Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.

The Laurendeau-Dunton Commission, also called the Commission on Bilingualism and

Biculturalism, was initiated by Lester B. Pearson and completed its work in 1963.

According to Brooks and Gagnon, it “marked a significant stage in the relationship of

social scientists to the state… [because it] affirmed both their role as experts… and the

relevance of their disciplines to public policymaking” (1988: 97). This affirmation was

fleeting, however, according to Brooks and Gagnon, as the commission “merely lent a

veneer of intellectual legitimacy to the political reforms that were instituted with the

passage of the Official Languages Act in 1969” (1988: 98). Furthermore, Brooks and

Gagnon also argue that:

When analyses by social scientists were fundamentally critical of the socio-

economic system, or challenged powerful economic interests, as was the case
with the Real Poverty Report and the Watkins Task Force on Foreign Ownership
and the Structure of Canadian Industry, the conditional legitimacy of social
scientific advice in the eyes of Canadian governments was demonstrated very
clearly (1988: 98).

Despite opportunities to demonstrate the applicability of the social sciences to

national issues, the legitimacy of the social sciences for use by government was still in

question, and thus the provision of research funding was unstable. Further efforts to

rationalize university research by the SSRC would be an attempt to prove the legitimacy

and benefits for Canada of funding social science research. In 1972, for example, a report

from the SSRC to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada Commission

(AUCC) was written on the rationalization of university research. By rationalization of

research, the AUCC Commission understood two general things. From an economic

point of view, the rationalization of research referred to “the problems of how to

 40

encourage the most efficient use of funds and human resources in the conduct of social

science research” (SSRC 1972: 2). This process of rationalizing research also referred to

the “ ‘justification’ of research activities in the eyes of government and the Canadian

community at large; another term which has been used in this context is ‘accountability’”

(SSRC 1972: 2-3). The call for the rationalization of research by AUCC is significant

because for the first time in Canada there was an attempt to delineate a process by which

research funding could be systematized. It reflected the growing pressure during the

1970s on academics to justify, or rationalize, their research. Quoting from a Senate

Special Committee on Science Policy (the Lamontagne Committee) “that government

funding agencies ‘assist only those (projects) that are relevant to the Canadian scene”

(SSRC 1972: 4), the authors of the report insisted that:

if the study of what is clearly germane to our present society (e.g. of the European
culture from which we have inherited) throws light upon what we are, the study of
what is clearly alien enlarges our view of what we might be and what we lack;
and also of the nature and experiences of men of other cultures with whom, as
human beings, we should concern ourselves (1972: 5).

This excerpt reveals that: the justification for funding research in the social

sciences was as much a plea for disciplinary recognition and legitimacy as it was for

the procurement of funding. Also revealed are the foundations for the study of cultural

diversity which would become particularly important for the government’s agenda

under Pierre Trudeau’s liberal government and continue to be of importance to the

state culminating in the Metropolis Project. To be seen as the bearers of expert

knowledge that was socially applicable and therefore fundable, it is clear that the

SSRC sought to emphasize how research can be accountable, efficient and productive
 41

by contributing to cross-cultural social research initiated by scholars. To this end the

report emphasizes the concern of the SSRC by stating that:

Independent research has the best chance of being useful and relevant from the
academic point of view and in the conduct of such research the scholar can be
most “productive”. Governments naturally wish to pluck the ripe fruit of research
from the orchard of knowledge. But without constant and careful nurturing the
orchard withers and fruit does not appear. Free research is still the best university
research (SSRC 1972: 16).

Furthermore, inasmuch as the interests of social scientists were aligned with

funders or decision-makers they relied on the government’s receptivity to the expert

knowledge of academics and on the terrain of culture being a governable domain.

Thus, the legitimacy of the social sciences, and therefore their funding, has depended on

the extent to which their research interests have proved to have some import for state

planning and policy development. In 1973, a statement from then minister of state for

science and technology, Madame Sauvé, revealed the growing disenchantment with free

or independent research. She stated that “we look forward to a shift toward research on

societal problems and away from ivory tower research with respect to government-funded

activity…. Some may argue that things are moving too fast but, if the universities do not

participate in this wider opportunity to serve society, the government will continue to

fund research at increasing levels in government laboratories or in cooperation with

industry” (cited in Rowat 1976: 540). Thus, as Sauvé’s comments demonstrate, there was

increasing pressure on the social sciences from the government to orient their research

towards societal problems, at least the ones the government was interested in addressing.

The introduction of the Multiculturalism Act in 1971 precipitated a new grants

program called the Canadian Ethnic Studies Program (CESP). Built on recommendations

from the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism established by Lester B.

 42

Pearson, the program was based on the “recognition that the scholarly study of ethnicity

in all its dimensions was necessary in… universities but had been neglected” (Heritage

Canada 1993: i). With culture already a terrain of inquiry, ethnicity was then included on

the terrain as a topic about which the government needed to know. With few academics

doing research in the field of Ethnic Studies, and the multidisciplinary nature of the

research, there were no programs devoted to this research. The program (CESP) was

launched in 1973 as a component of the Heritage, Cultures and Languages Program of

Multiculturalism and Citizenship Canada (Heritage Canada 1993: v). According to James

Cameron, “the Canadian Ethnic Studies Program, devoted exclusively to the field of

ethnicity, expanded university curricula, redirected or augmented faculty research

programs, linked institutions more firmly to ethnic constituencies, and strengthened the

ethnic identity of institutions” (2002: 2). Universities had become social institutions

concerned with ethnicity as they had once been with culture, rendering through study

“aspects of existence [such as cultural diversity] thinkable and calculable, and amenable

to deliberated and planful initiatives” (Miller and Rose 1990: 3). The goals of this

program mirrored a statement by Trudeau, who declared that:

The need exists, and was recognized by the commission, for systematic and
continuous study of Canada’s multi-ethnic society. The Department of the
Secretary of State will therefore undertake a detailed investigation of the problems
concerned with the development of the Canadian ethnic studies program or
centre(s) and will prepare a plan of implementation (cited in Cameron 2002: 2).

The program (CESP) materialized as an advisory council that would disperse

research funds and act as liaison to government on policy issues. The Canadian Ethnic

Studies Advisory Committee [CESAC] became a key section of the CESP (Cameron

2002: 3). The committee was operated by no more than eight scholars chosen by staff of

the Multiculturalism division of the Secretary of State. Chosen for their research and
 43

expertise in the field of ethnic studies, scholars lent the program an air of credibility with

their commitment to peer evaluation, according to Cameron. Operated by scholars, the

CESAC was able to maintain a distance from the government as an advisory body whose

“decisions were rarely reversed by Multiculturalism officials” (Cameron 2002: 5).

Adjudication of research proposals was based on “scholarly significance, social or

practical importance, theoretical approach, research plans, demonstrated competence, and

bibliography” (Cameron 2002: 5). In 1978, the Minister of Multiculturalism announced

the creation of an Ethnic Studies Chair at the University of Toronto, to the surprise of his

officials who then drafted supporting guidelines for establishing additional endowed

chairs. The Endowment Assistance Program (EAP) meant that any

Canadian university, or a voluntary organization in collaboration with a

university, could propose a chair of ethnic studies. If the organization matched or
surpassed the government offer of $300,000, and if the university satisfied other
important criteria - a tradition of studies in the area, appropriate library holdings, a
plan for future development, a supportive ethnic community, etc. – then the
government and university signed a contribution agreement. The successful
applicant would be granted full autonomy over hiring and the chair’s plan of
action. The university would have to provide a financial audit and a full
evaluation after five years (Cameron 2002: 6).

The endowment program proved to be attractive to many universities and

encouraged the development of the field of Ethnic Studies. As a component of the social

sciences, the interest in ethnic studies signaled the recognition by the government that in

order to govern a multicultural society, new information and knowledge would have to be

gathered. The introduction of the Multiculturalism Act and subsequent creation of the

CESAC opened up a space for concentrated research on newcomers to the country and on

the diverse cultural backgrounds and practices of citizens. As the terrain of the social

sciences, the study of cultural diversity in Canada became consolidated under this

program. Its creation within the government signified the extent to which culture had
 44

become a “domain of cognition” that required new types of knowledge inscribed and

transported to decision-making centres to inform the development of policy and programs

(Miller and Rose 1992: 175). From my perspective, the impetus for governments to rely

on the insights of social science experts is a direct reflection on the government’s

willingness to fund research. However, one fundamental component of this process,

whereby the interests of decision-makers and social scientists were to some degree

aligned, was the government’s ability to set the direction of research projects and

encourage their strategic importance for the development of policy and programs.

With social science research being funded solely by the government through the

CC, a degree of state control over this research was accomplished. Despite the creation

of the CESP, Donald Rowat, president of the Political Science Association, in 1976

disclosed figures supporting the conclusion that indeed the government had begun to fund

internal government research over external university-based research by the mid 1970s.

He observed that “the in-house expenditures of the federal government for research and

development in the human sciences have grown from $21 million in 1970-1 to over $53

in 1975-6, an increase of over 150 per cent in five years. By contrast, the amount going

to the university sector through the Canada Council has increased by less than 100 per

cent, from 6.4 million dollars to $12.5 million” (Rowat 1976: 541).

The pace of research was, according to Rowat, one of the motivations for the

government to favour in-house over university-based research. Decision-making in

government, he suggested, was based on short term goals and quick results. By being

compelled to provide quick results for government-sponsored research projects, the

traditional academic role of social and state critic was jeopardized. On the analysis of

contract-based research, Rowat cited Hugh Thorburn on the role of political science in
 45

Canada. According to Thorburn, government contract research “takes up the

uncommitted time and thought of many academics, and more important, it encourages a

kind of sympathetic understanding of the government’s point of view by a process of

association and consequent co-optation…. Scholars [must] not be seduced, in a time of

financial stringency, to become the under-labourers searching out the data and arguments

sought by people in positions of political power” (cited in Rowat 1976: 542-3).

The significance of participation in contract-based, government-sponsored and -

directed research was that it had the unfortunate effect, claimed Rowat, that “it shifts the

interests of academics into narrow problems of immediate concern to the government and

away from broad ones of long-term concern to society as a whole” (1976: 543).

This shift of interests distracted academics from “one of the main functions of university

researchers as analysers and critics of society… [who] try to foresee the problems of the

future and the basic reforms that may be required” (Rowat 1976: 543). As in the previous

periods of funding, the tension inherent in the alignment of interests between social

scientists and government decision-makers was publicly articulated, as it had been by

Harold Innis, making the creation of the SSHRC an important step to orienting social

science research in Canada towards strategic government goals.

It was in 1977, despite opposition and cautioning from the CC and AUCC, and,

with the public support of the SSRC, that three new councils emerged which became the

conduits for the distribution of government funding for academic, university-based

research in Canada. The Medical Research Council (MRC), National Science and

Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Social Science and Humanities

Research Council (SSHRC) consolidated the relationship between the state as funder, and

the social and natural sciences in Canada. The CC became devoted solely to the funding
 46

of the fine arts after the creation of the SSHRC (Canada Council 2006). The hegemonic

appropriation of the name of SSRC (with the inclusion of the Humanities) signals an

appropriation of the legitimacy and trust earned by the original SSRC through years of

advocacy and lobbying for additional research funding. Formed to ensure the autonomy

of academic researchers, the SSRC continued to negotiate a path between the increasing

pressure from government for the production of socially valuable and policy relevant

research and the autonomous, scholar-initiated research characteristic of the traditional

social critic. Balancing between securing the recognition of government that social

science research was indeed a legitimate, fundable and important social resource, and the

autonomy of the university-based academic, the leadership of the SSRC attempted to

resist the rhetoric of effectiveness and accountability that was infusing public

management systems. With the new SSHRC located within government, it was necessary

for the SSRC to change its name in response to the Social Science Federation of Canada

(SSFC) (Fisher 1991: 80).

The SSHRC, in its first organizing Act, was directed by government funders to

provide research funds for work on national issues and of national concern. Government

funding would also support research through SSHRC in areas deemed strategic by the

government (Fisher 1991: 90). At the outset of the creation of SSHRC, the prevailing

attitude of the government with regards to funding social science research was, according

to Fisher, one which questioned the relevance of social science research and viewed

academics with suspicion. He states that:

[b]y 1980, the government regarded independent social science research as

somewhat irrelevant to the productive, economic processes, and was suspicious of
the tendency on the part of social scientists to be critical of the political system
and of politicians. To try and rectify this tendency, governments were more likely
 47

to define social science research as a tool that ought to be harnessed for

development rather than simply supported (Fisher 1991: 91-2 emphasis added).

Although Fischer makes a pertinent observation, in a much broader survey of

academic involvement in research for government purposes one will find that it has not

been lost on governments, even from early in Canada’s history, that research and expert

knowledge can be generally applicable and amenable to policy creation (see Owram 1986

and Massolin 2001). It is, however, a significant change in government perspective to

view research as a tool to be harnessed which implies that if subtly directed, research

projects can be directly applicable to the needs of government decision-makers.

By removing the funding process from the control of academic councils and bringing it

within the control of the state, first partially through the CC and then totally through the

SSHRC, research could be potentially funnelled into the policy creation process.

Increasing control over the funding process established an increasing hegemonic control

over the types of research projects deemed worthwhile and fundable through the

adjudication process within SSHRC influenced by government funders. The independent

research interests of academics faced constraints in the midst of forces to align them with

the strategic research goals and issues deemed socially important by the SSHRC.

The Ministry of State for Science and Technology produced two reports that

outlined the direction that SSHRC was going to take, as a research funding body, by

describing the position of the government concerning funding academic research.

The first was entitled A Rationale for Federal Funding of University Research (1978) and

the second, A Human Sciences Policy Framework (1981). Together, they outlined the

government’s proclivity for funding research in both the social and natural sciences with

the expectation that the social sciences contribute by addressing problem-oriented

 48

research questions (Fisher 1991: 92). The 1980s found social scientists and the newly

named Federation (SSFC), which lobbied on their behalf, in closer contact with the

government. Fisher, summarizing John Trent from the SSFC, recounts that “the

increasing tendency towards encroachment and interference by the Government of

Canada in the allocation of funds for social science research, and the heavy dependence

on the SSHRC for research funds” (1991: 92-3) presented formidable problems for

academics in a decade of fiscal restraint. As research funding demands increased into the

1980s, the SSFC continued to lobby for a commensurate increase in research funding

(Fisher 1991: 93). The new 1980s ‘envelope system’ for distributing budgeted money

within government produced increased competition, bargaining and negotiating between

politicians and bureaucrats, even in the same policy areas, for a fixed sum of funding

dollars. The SSHRC, situated in the Social Development envelope, competed with some

of the largest departments in the government. As a result of having to distribute scarce

resources, the budgetary decisions of the SSHRC were scrutinized by ministers from the

social development portfolios, cabinet committees and the Treasury Board.

This situation, according to Fisher “forced the SSHRCC to take government priorities

seriously” (1991: 93).

In the midst of the efforts of the SSFC to collaborate with the SSHRC, a proposal

in principle was released to the government for the five-year period of 1980-1985 on

investment in the funding of research in the social sciences and humanities. Released on

June 22, 1979, the report outlined The Scientific Activities Act of 1976 that mandated

that the SSHRC would “promote and assist research and scholarship in the social sciences

and the humanities” (SSHRC 1979: 1). To promote and improve Canada’s economy, the

government announced a series of initiatives to expand the funding of the applied

 49

sciences such as engineering and the natural sciences. The SSHRC recognized that the

social sciences must be considered a legitimate source of information for the social

development of the country if they were to increase their funding (SSHRC 1979: 3).

The report, in a comparison of the social and applied natural sciences, accentuated

the ability of the natural sciences to be used by man to manipulate the social world.

The social sciences were not accorded this ability and instead tasked with developing an

understanding of the changing complexities of human phenomena (SSHRC 1979: 3).

Understanding of the complexity of social life and of the impact of technology research in

the social sciences was estimated to provide “invaluable aid to responsible decision-

making” (SSHRC 1979: 4). Drawing on this research “and applying it… governments,

private organizations and individuals can reduce the uncertainty in decision-making and

increase the probability that their actions will prove successful. Such research will not

make decisions easier, but will help us understand the alternatives better” (SSHRC 1979:

4). Social science research in Canada, at least according to the SSHRC, would enable the

government to create successful courses of action demonstrating, in this instance, that for

the SSHRC the provision of funding was explicitly tied to maintaining and endorsing the

appearance of legitimacy and rational use to the government of social science research as

the SSRC had done before.

This report described the role and objective of the SSHRC for the 1980s to be “to

promote and assist excellence in Canadian research and scholarship in the social sciences

and the humanities” (SSHRC 1979: 23). The strategic priorities for the SSHRC for the

1980s included four areas: “to support such independent research as in the judgement of

scholars will best advance knowledge; to assist in and advise on maintaining and

developing the national capacity for research; to encourage research on themes

 50

considered by the Council to be of national importance; and to facilitate the

communication and exchange of research results” (SSHRC 1979: 24). The authors of the

report attempted to maintain a precarious balance between endorsing social science as a

utility to government while advocating for the autonomy of the social science academics

to determine the types of research they would pursue. This shifting ground upon which

the SSHRC, SSFC and other human science councils stood reflected the tension between

creating alliances with government by advocating for the legitimacy and utility of the

social sciences while attempting to simultaneously disentangle the alliances between

social scientists and government decision-makers.

The objective of the SSFC in relation to the SSHRC and government became “to

promote the development and interests of the social sciences in Canada” (Fischer 1991:

88). This objective was reflected in the mandate of the SSFC to “contribute to the

development of effective social science research policies in Canada; [and] to develop the

potential of the social sciences to contribute to the analysis and formation of social

policies” (Fischer 1991: 88). Serving to legitimate the applicability of the social sciences

to social issues, the SSFC advocated for the social sciences by lobbying for their use in

policy-making, which in turn would necessitate an increase to funding if they were

perceived to be useful for government decision makers. In order to secure continued

financial support, the research interests of social sciences in Canada had been

increasingly brought into an often tense and unstable alignment as the government offered

limited financial support for research on particularly Canadian issues, most of which

related to the development of the natural sciences and technology (Fisher 1991: 94-6).

The interests of the government and the social sciences had yet to cohere in any

significant way.
 51

The year 1981 was a tumultuous one for both the fledgling SSHRC and the

Federation with regards to mapping out an autonomous position for the funding of social

sciences. The Office of the Minister of Communications, in the summer of 1981, stated

that the 1979 SSHRC plan for the 1980-1985 funding course no longer met the research

needs of government and would have to be revised. The government relayed to the

president of the SSHRC that it had no interest in funding ‘pure’ research. In response to

an additional ten percent funding cut, the president of SSHRC, André Fortier, was

informed that unless the report of priorities was rewritten the SSHRC would not receive

funding (Fisher 1991: 95). Fortier devised a new plan that focused on “two related

categories: Canadian related studies, and non-Canadian related studies” (Fisher 1991: 95),

in addition to a plea for an increase in funding by at least 25 million dollars to account for

the increase in studies related to Canadian issues. Canadian studies, in Fortier’s new

report, were further divided into three types of initiatives: “independent research; themes

or strategic research; and Areas of Canadian Study that included the provision of funds to

small isolated universities, for regional studies, and support for the infrastructure of the

social science research community” (Fisher 1991: 95). In consultation with the SSHRC,

the SSFC conveyed its concern regarding a decrease in funding for independent research

and advocated the possibility of cutting policy-oriented research from the SSHRC plan,

citing the internal capacity of government to conduct their own research (Fisher 1991:

95). To the government, the SSFC advocated for the autonomy of the SSHRC by stating

that independent “research cannot be treated in the same manner as daily policy concerns,

and that it is in its [government’s], and Canada’s, own best interest to give greater

autonomy to the SSHRC” (cited in Fisher 1991: 96).

 52

While the autonomy of the SSHRC from government was in constant question in

the SSFC, the lobbying activities of the SSFC were mainly directed towards the SSHRC,

increasing the tension between the two organizations. By the mid-1980s, the SSHRC was

considered by the SSFC to be merely an “agent of government… [that was] determined to

sacrifice independent research in favour of research in the shorter term national interest”

(cited in Fisher 1991: 98). In this vein, the SSHRC began to emphasize funding research

based on preset themes and through strategic grants. Contrary to the mandates of the

SSFC which emphasized free and independent research both interdisciplinary and

discipline specific, the SSHRC continued, with what had begun as a single thematic

research program in 1979 on Population and Aging, to increasingly fund thematic or

strategic research. Control over setting themes for research was the focus of several

reports prepared by the SSFC for the SSHRC that acknowledged the divergent and

competing interests of policy-makers and social scientists but emphasized the necessity of

investigator-initiated research (Fisher 1991: 105-6). In 1987, after an initial review of the

Strategic Grants program, the SSHRC committed continuing support for the program. In

the same year, Gilles Paquet was appointed chair of a Second Task Force of Priorities by

the SSHRC to review prior strategic research efforts for the previous decade and to

discern possible new directions. The resulting document, “Focus on Strategies”, outlined

three potential initiatives. These initiatives were designed to have a broad appeal and

encourage collaborative engagement between researchers, government, the private and

non-governmental sectors (Fisher 1991: 107).

“Focus on Strategies” called for increased support for “Spontaneous Initiatives”

which were directed towards sponsoring research projects initiated by scholars if they fell

within the criteria of the specific initiative. Funds were to be allocated for the support of
 53

the creation of research networks or centres and for the areas titled “Concerted Action”

(Fisher 1991: 107). Paquet’s report also suggested that research themes have a duration

of five years (Fisher 1991: 107). Under a new SSHRC program that roughly coincided

with the release of the Paquet report in 1989, Joint Initiatives were to receive $900,000

and be designed for the “encouragement of partnerships between the public, private, and

university sectors by developing unified, multidisciplinary approaches to the study of

national issues” (Fisher 1991: 108).

For the Canadian Ethnic Studies Program (CESP), Canadian Ethnic Studies

Assistance Committee (CESAC) and the Chair Endowment Assistance Program (CEAP),

the 1980s proved to be a challenging period, yet one of growth for the CESP. On the

success of the program, one official remarked that by “1984 it became increasingly clear

that the ethnic-specific chairs could not fulfill (sic) the need for the cross-cultural, cross-

disciplinary study of general issues of ethnicity, cultural identity, immigration, history,

racism, inter-group relations and other important areas of study” (cited in Cameron 2002:

6). After a review and revision of the criteria for the program, the scope of the position

was broadened. The CESAC recommended the provision of fellowships and a program

was established to provide six awards annually. The Multicultural Studies Fellowship

Program “divided [the awards] equally between junior and ‘more established’ scholars”

(cited in Cameron 2002: 7). The election of Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government

in 1984 and the passage of the Multiculturalism Act in 1988 served to renew enthusiasm

for the study of ethnic diversity. After the passage of the Act, a new program was

launched through the CESP that was meant to facilitate “advanced study and the

development of academic resources relevant to Canadian multiculturalism” (cited in

Cameron 2002: 7). The program was divided into four thematic sections: Race Relations
 54

and Cross-cultural Understanding, Heritage Languages and Cultures, Community Support

and Participation, and Cross-government Commitment (Cameron 2002: 7).

The creation of a new Ministry of Multiculturalism and Citizenship by the

Conservatives in 1991 heralded a review of CESP initiatives. In collaboration with

SSHRC, the report entitled State of the Art Review of Research on Canada's Multicultural

Society, along with similar reviews being conducted by the academics at the time,

concluded that, despite some omissions in the research on ethnic diversity, Canada’s

multicultural studies were quite substantial (Cameron 2002: 7). A year after the Liberals

were elected in 1993, programs on multiculturalism were moved to the new Department

of Canadian Heritage where a comprehensive review of all multicultural programs was

undertaken in 1995-1996 to ensure that the programs remained effective “instruments in

dealing with the needs of an evolving and diverse society” (cited in Cameron 2002: 8).

With its many recommendations, the review stated that programs be reformed to reflect “

‘a more formalized strategic planning and evaluation process for multiculturalism

activities’ designed to further the policy objectives of identity, civic participation, and

justice” (cited in Cameron 2002: 8).

In the release of a SSHRC funding strategy in the early 1990s, the social,

technological and environmental consequences of rapid technological change were

priorities for research. Amidst advocating for research on rapid technological expansion,

however, were the priorities of “how to build social harmony and justice in the midst of

cultural and racial diversity; and, how to ensure the continuing development of a vibrant

and distinctive Canadian culture” (SSHRC 1990: 1). The importance of locally-situated

Canadian research was weighted towards developing the social capacity for individuals to

contribute to international competitiveness. Also stressed was the capacity for the social
 55

sciences to contribute to a knowledge base that would assist the oxymoronic “evolution of

democratic control and freedom” (SSHRC 1990: 2). Through three types of granting

programs, the SSHRC sought to reflect a commitment to quality. Through the

administration of Research Grants, Strategic Grants and Research Communication and

International Relations Grants, as well as Doctoral and Postdoctoral fellowships, the

SSHRC intended to perform a “leadership role in research policy in Canada through

consultations and liaison with government and the scholarly community” (SSHRC 1990:

3).

As an advocate to the government and public at large for the utility and

importance of the social sciences, the SSHRC five-year plan outlined the necessity for

effectively utilizing human and financial resources while competing for scarce

government funding. In relative terms, the budget of the SSHRC in 1990 only minutely

exceeded the 1979 budget, with the Council receiving the least amount of funding of the

three granting councils (NSERC, MRC, and SSHRC) (SSHRC 1990: 5). Funding, this

plan suggested, was the key to enhancing research capacity and diversifying funding

initiatives. With securing an increase to funding in the next budgetary allotment a

primary concern, the report offered three priorities to meet the challenges of the 1990s.

The priorities were designed to “strengthen the social sciences and humanities through an

increased investment in the training of the next generation of researchers; to develop and

promote research structures that will enhance research quality, productivity and

relevance; and to find ways to enhance communication of research results” (SSHRC

1990: 7). The objectives on which these priorities were based reaffirmed the mandate

that had been the basis of the SSHRC as a funding body since its inception and also
 56

reflected the commitments of the earlier councils, both the SSRC and Canada Council.

Four objectives are listed as follows:

1) to enhance the advancement of knowledge by supporting basic research in the

social sciences and humanities;
2) to support strategic research in fields of national importance;
3) to help ensure Canada’s national capacity for research and expertise in the
social sciences and humanities by supporting advanced training in these
disciplines; and
4) to facilitate communication among scholars in Canada and abroad and to
promote awareness and use of SSHRC-funded research results within the
academic community, the public and private sectors and the general public
(SSHRC 1990: 7).

Despite the similarity that these objectives bear to previous mandates, the

strategic plans that describe the intentions of the SSHRC for the 1990s reflect a very

different orientation to the relationship between social science and humanities research

and its potential use by the state. Unlike previous plans, the plan for the 1990s, in its

description of the way in which priorities were to be operationalized, made clear the

intention that research of use to the state or private business for policy development was

of prime importance (SSHRC 1990: 8-11). Additionally, relationships that bolstered this

process of creating enduring partnerships and collaborations were encouraged for their

potential ability to satisfy the strategic research for decision-making needs of the state

(SSHRC 1990: 10-1). The focus on collaborative research partnerships for the SSHRC

extended to interdisciplinary research teams that provided an opportunity for the next

generation of scholars to be trained. Training opportunities also offered an opportunity for

new researchers to learn what “constitutes excellence in research” and arguably, methods

to satisfy the adjudication committees and secure funding (SSHRC 1990: 12). Training in

this context was as much concerned with teaching new researchers how to conduct

excellent research (read as research that is deemed excellent by an academic peer group
 57

and by SSHRC), as an opportunity to bring new students into the system of competitive

funding where they learn that they must design a project based loosely on the priorities of

the SSHRC in order to be funded.

Forming partnerships between researchers, public and private sectors, community

members, and international contributors was given special funding priority in the SSHRC

guide to priorities for the 1990s (SSHRC 1990: 15). Additionally, a focus on creating

innovative funding partnerships and new research networks and arrangements was

advocated. Participating in all aspects of a research project, partners could contribute in

various ways that would ideally promote a synergistic and effective use of resources.

They could provide “monetary assistance,… a loan of premises or equipment, pledging

staff time to assist in the project or providing access to experts within the partner’s

network of contacts” (SSHRC 1990: 15). In addition to research partnerships, Joint

Initiatives had the potential to “encourage government agencies, private corporations, or

community organizations to collaborate with the SSHRC in co-developing and co-

funding programs of research in areas of particular need” (SSHRC 1990: 16). In line with

this directive, an agreement was signed with Multiculturalism and Citizenship Canada in

1990 “for a state-of-the-art review in the area of multiculturalism… [which], depending

on the outcome, may lead to further cooperation between the two partners to fund

additional research in this field” (SSHRC 1990: 16).

Creating new institutional structures played a role in satisfying the funding agenda

of the SSHRC regarding the formation of partnerships and collaborative research projects.

Research infrastructure, noted as a drawback for the successful implementation of new

forms of exciting research if it was inadequate, was a way to strengthen “the national

capacity for research in the social sciences and humanities” (SSHRC 1990: 17).
 58

Infrastructures, such as networks of research centres across the country were professed to

be a method to encourage the development of research agendas on current and surfacing

issues but also to “consolidate research” (SSHRC 1990: 17). In fact, the Networks of

Centres of Excellence Program, sponsored by the three funding councils and Industry

Canada, was established in 1989 and rendered a stable program in 1997. Structured of

partnerships among universities, government, industry, and non-governmental

organizations, the twenty-two networks address four areas: “health, human development

and biotechnology, information and communication technology, natural resources, and

engineering and manufacturing” (Whelan 2001). Research centres “enable research

teams to share the direct and indirect costs of research, to benefit from economies of scale

and to save other costs by using a common infrastructure for communicating research

results” (SSHRC 1990: 19). With the potential to link regional centres to other

international networks, the Council proposed to “assist exceptional Canadian researchers

and research teams to establish linkages and, where appropriate, formal affiliations with

researchers in other parts of the world” (SSHRC 1990: 20). Wrapped in an economic

imperative to utilize resources effectively and in an innovative and knowledge-generating

fashion, the SSHRC’s strategy for the 1990s combined important elements such as an

emphasis on partnerships and collaboration, training of future researchers, the formation

of centres of research activity, and effective communication of research results that

materialized in the structure of the Metropolis Project in 1996. Under this imperative the

Ministry of Multiculturalism backed the new Metropolis Project and its promise of

policy-relevant research and solid dissemination strategies. The Endowment Assistance

Program of the CESAC, despite having established twenty-eight research chairs across
 59

the country, was terminated in 1997 as an increasing amount of ethnic diversity research

was being funded by the SSHRC (Cameron 2002: 8).

The Metropolis Project, in its structure and design, embodies the effort of the

government since social science research began to be funded by the CC to strategically

orient academic, university-based research towards policy-relevant issues. If it can be

said that the periods preceding the creation of the Metropolis Project were characterized

by an ad hoc relationship between social scientists and government, then Metropolis

succeeded where other attempts to streamline the research interests of academics had

failed. It brought together through its research funding process and many committees,

social scientists, government, and community representatives that through face-to-face,

person-to-person interaction could discern areas and issues for research on immigrants

and refugees. Ethnicity and culture as areas of interest for government decision-makers

made the Metropolis Project possible, rendered its research applicable for policy

development insofar as the subjects of research (immigrants and refugees) were also a

topic of interest of the political rationalities of decision-makers and were translated into

the policy priorities that form the basis of research funding competitions. However,

unlike any other attempt to concentrate research on an area of decision-making interest,

the Metropolis Project provided a unique opportunity for social scientists, through their

involvement, to influence the creation of priorities for research. Yet, also different in the

Metropolis Project was the opportunity through face-to-face, person-to-person interaction

between stakeholders to monitor, influence, coerce and cajole participants who were

making the policy and research priorities that resulted in a hybridized (and perhaps

contested) plan for research funding that emerged from discussion and negotiation.
 60

The history of funding of social science research in Canada has marked, through

the three periods I have concentrated on, the increasing intervention of the government

into the affairs of culture and ethnicity. It has also been marked by the attempts of the

collegial-councils for the social sciences to make social science research appear as a

legitimate source of knowledge for government decision-making to help guarantee

sustained funding. The effect of rationalizing social science research has been to ensure

that funding inputs result in a value-for-money research output ideally applicable for

policy development and relevant to social issues of the day that enable the government to

govern at a distance.
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Chapter Three: A Brief Analysis of Policy-Making in Canada

As the social science research funding process has been brought under the

increasing control of the Canadian government, there has been growth in direct funding

for strategic research for policy development. The Metropolis Project, as a funder of

research on policy and for policy development, was launched in 1996, soon after

Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), as it now exists, became a government

department responsible for operations and service delivery of immigration and refugee

programs in 1994. Called the research division of CIC, the Metropolis Project emerged

from its founders as an idea for a small research-to-policy project that would be based on

person-to-person interactions to facilitate knowledge sharing. Designed during a period

of both departmental and financial cutbacks within government, the Project was created

to maximize, centralize, and mobilize knowledge resources from the academic

community to contribute to the development of policy and programs which would

effectively integrate immigrants and refugees. With strategic research funding priorities

focused around the idea of integration, the Metropolis Project, through its Centres of

Excellence would attempt to generate both regionally specific research and support

macro-level, national analysis that would potentially inform the policy-making process at

all levels of government. To demonstrate how the formal design of the Project through

the informal person-to-person interaction between academics and representatives from

government departments has served to tenuously align the interests of academics with

those of the Project, it is essential to briefly elucidate the general process of federal level

policy-making in Canada as it relates to the translation of central ideas, or political

rationalities (e.g. economic integration, see Nader 1997: 712, Miller and Rose 1992) into

government technologies such as policy and programs.

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In the mid-1990s a government program review produced dramatic cuts to jobs in

the public service and the reduction or elimination of many programs and services

(Savoie 2003: 211). Resulting from these cuts was the recognition within government

line-departments (departments of government vs. central agencies such as the Privy

Council Office or Prime Ministers Office) that they would have to engage creative

solutions to the complex processes posed by funding cuts. In 1995, the Task Force on

Strengthening the Policy Capacity of the Canadian Government, created by the Chief

Statistician of Canada, Ivan Fellegi, was designed to provide a framework to strengthen

the policy capacity of the government while “developing a strong policy community

across government” (PCO 1997, Savoie 2003: 116). The task force made several

recommendations to enrich the government’s policy capacity and “urged a much stronger

emphasis on a ‘horizontal and government-wide’ perspective on policy and closer ties

with the external policy-research community” (Savoie 2003: 116). From the conference

proceedings that influenced the final report of the Task Force, a former Deputy-Minster

commented that “policymaking happens everywhere, not just in policy shops. A cabinet

document, for example, doesn’t have to be prepared by a policy unit; the ones that win

approval are those that have been shopped around well, their advocates have built the

necessary alliances, they have made good connections, networked, demonstrated their

political sensitivity. This doesn’t require a central policy shop” (Smith 1996: 20).

Combined with cutbacks to funding, the impetus for the Metropolis Project, as a means to

capitalize on scarce resources (the knowledge of expert academics) and develop policy-

relevant research (through the modest grants of its funding competitions), relied on the

development of partnerships and alignments between community organizations,

universities, and government funders (Metropolis Project 2004).

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The Project was designed to encourage the process of illuminating effective policy

development with the understanding echoed by a former clerk of the Privy Council that

policy development “depends on having a broad base of knowledge and an understanding

of interrelated events” (PCO 1997). From the task force emerged the idea of policy

communities (groups of individuals responsible for developing and analysing policy and

completing research for it) that could facilitate the process through sharing information.

Through the efforts of the Public Service of Canada to bring together policy

specialists, policy communities acted as a means for the exchange of ideas about strategic

policy issues, and created personal contacts between policy practitioners (PCO 2001).

Policy communities were significant for the development of policy because they created a

framework for the exchange of knowledge across government departments and such

knowledge sharing was an attempt to harmonize the “definition of the public interest”

(PCO 2001). Thus, these “knowledge workers” controlled a key resource for decision-

making: knowledge (Public Service Commission 1997). The Metropolis Project

functioned as a result of the same impetus to create informal relationships and

opportunities for interaction that resulted from the formalized structure of the

organization: this is discussed in more depth in the following chapter. The policy-making

process itself, according to Donald Savoie, in an article for the Journal of Canadian Public

Administration, was inflected with an informality that has resulted from the increasing

complexity and interconnection of policy issues. He stated that: “policy issues no longer

respect organizational boundaries and, as a result, policy-making has now become

horizontal, consultative and porous” (Savoie 2004: 4). With the recognition that the

“policy-making process is a fragmented process in which the state, societal actors, and

attentive publics whose behavior and attitudes matter, differ between issues and policy
 64

fields”, an analysis of policy-making must begin with the ways in which ideas matter for

the policy development process (Brooks 1994: 2-6).

Policy is, according to an individual closely affiliated with the national Metropolis

Project centre in Ottawa and who is a bureaucrat, “a broad overarching statement. Effect

is given to the policy through the development of programs” (Interview August 11, 2005).

As a broad statement, policy is also a prescription for a course of action.

The development of policy is tantamount to the recognition by the government that the

issue upon which the policy is based is within the scope of the government, from the

perspective of elected or career officials, to intervene, and may appear (or be “spun” in

such a way so as to appear) to be in the public interest (Doern and Phidd 1992: 89, PCO

2001, Savoie 2003: 207). Consequently, a fundamental aspect of policy is, according to a

former policy analyst with whom I spoke, “all about optics” (Interview June 2005), or as

Donald Savoie phrases it, “in politics perception is reality” (2003: 172). To add another

element from a member of the Canadian public service, “Policy-making is values-driven

and pragmatic. Not only must policy look good and sound good, it must also be workable

(Morris 1996: 16-7). Cris Shore and Susan Wright, in the Anthropology of Policy,

suggest that policies “are most obviously political phenomena, yet it is a feature of

policies that their political nature is disguised by the objective, neutral, legal-rational

idioms in which they are portrayed” (1997: 8). Thus, policies can direct, modify, or chart

a course for social action while being products of cultural and social circumstance, and

can reflect the normative values, morals, and objectives as “discursive formations” of a

fragmentary and porous process (Shore and Wright 1997: 7). Policies result from, what I

argue to be, a translation process that attempts to cleanse the policy product of the

underlying cultural values which inform its creation, recasting it in seemingly neutral
 65

language. Further, Shore and Wright argue that not “only do policies codify social norms

and values, and articulate fundamental organizing principles of society, they also contain

implicit (and sometimes explicit) models of society” (1997: 7). An analysis of policy-

making reveals that policy is both developed quickly and incrementally, that one policy

may conflict with another, that it is based on political rationalities and aspirations and that

it may result through the efforts of civil servants to bring an issue to the attention of

decision-makers. Therefore, as models of society, policies codify sets of social and moral

values which are cloaked in language that, as an intellectual technology, conceptualizes

and rationalizes the imperative for potential action.

Generally, in Canada, according to the above-mentioned Metropolis-affiliated

individual, policy development is initiated in response to four kinds of stimuli:

1) response[s] to a need [e.g. post 9/11 security policy], 2) interest groups bring an
issue to everyone they can think of [e.g. childcare], 3) the incautious statements of
politicians [in which] they make a statement… As a result, a new policy direction
is taken and new policy is developed to address the statement [e.g. Millennium
Scholarship Fund], [and] 4) long-term strategic goals for government where each
department, spread over both provincial and federal governments, have to play a
part in addressing the goal [as a] part of the picture to complete [e.g. make Canada
the best place to live in the world] (Interview August 11, 2005).

As this individual reveals, issues that form the basis of policy can emerge from

multiple sources and reflect both the political recognition that the issue is worth

acknowledgement, is within the capacity of the government to act, and is of significant

consequence to invest the resources of the public service to codify a plan for action.

Within the political and bureaucratic levels of government and through the efforts of

“interest groups”, issues, ideas and problems form the basis for the development of a

policy response by the government. Needs may be identified in a variety of ways such as

through the media’s identification, through exchanges between individuals within

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government departments and their contacts within the community, or through articulation

in official government statements such as the Reply to the Speech from the Throne where

the incoming government outlines their strategic priorities for their term in office (Doern

and Phidd 1992: 91, 150). The Privy Council Office facilitates the process of setting the

priorities through consultations with the government departments in the form of a call

letter sent out twice yearly. This is another opportunity for the bureaucracy (and the

public to which they are responsible) to shape policy priorities (Kostiuk 2001: 11). The

process of defining priorities for policy is fragmented by the compression of issues for a

party’s political term in contrast with the issues originating from the permanent

bureaucracy that is content to operate in an incremental and patient fashion (Savoie 2003:

171). Defining the situation that requires a policy response, according to the PCO,

involves describing “how people are behaving or how they may behave in the future”

(2001). Taking a behavioural approach to the development of policy entails identifying

the following factors: “1) the behaviour that is, or may be, creating or contributing to the

situation; 2) who [are the people] engaging in the behaviour; 3) who is affected by the

behaviour and what these effects are; 4) whether some behaviour, or behaviour of some

persons, is more serious than others; 5) [the] external factors… influencing the behaviour;

and 6) what behavioural changes are desired to address the situation” (PCO 2001). With

regards to the Metropolis Project, the issue of developing the means through policy to

integrate immigrants and refugees is a central policy priority that aims to modify

behaviour through forms of integration. If the situation is perceived (by those with

decision-making power to initiate policy both through the bureaucracy or through

political channels) as a failure of immigrants and refugees to integrate, then questions and
 67

ideas that inform the development of policy will concern the capacity for the government

to encourage the process.

Most policy issues are forwarded into the federal policy-making process by a

sponsoring government department or ministry that bears the responsibility of researching

and drafting a document to be debated in the Caucus and assessed by a Cabinet

Committee. Cabinet documents and memoranda are ideally, according to a former senior

policy advisor, “a mixture of verbal and written exchange of views, scientific and

technical, bounded by a values framework” (Kenny-Scherber 2003: 270). Moreover,

Mark Schacter, in a Policy Brief on decision-making for the Institute on Governance,

suggests that “the Canadian system facilitates rapid and informal flows of information….

[and] highly formalized systems for ‘policy management’ and decision-making have not

succeeded in Canada because they were inefficient means for transmitting information

and ideas to cabinet” (1999: 2-3). Thus, the documents that enter the policy-making

process are constituted by both a necessary formality and an implicit informality insofar

as they are the result of consultation across policy communities, within departments of

government, or through discussion with experts external to government.

In the next stage of the policy-making process, policy advisers within a

department “engage in discussions ‘up the tube’ to the minister through the deputy

[minister] and across ministerial lines and central agency officials. Frequently, there is

also contact with outside interests and with other levels of government” (Kenny-Scherber

2003: 270). Advisers consult with the Treasury Board and Department of Finance, to

assess the level of available funding for the proposal, and the Privy Council Office, to

garner advice on the proposal to ensure that it passes through the next stages of approval

and to ensure that the proposed policy is in line with the priorities of the government
 68

(Bouwer and Meredith 2001: 14, Abrams 2001: 4-5). The civil servants who occupy

positions with the PCO thus control information, a vital resource in the policy process.

The proposal is also delivered to the Prime Minister’s Office to be assessed by the

government of the day for its endorsement. After the proposed policy is debated and

discussed by a Cabinet Committee, if deemed acceptable, it is usually approved by the

Cabinet. With the support of the Cabinet, the proposal is again debated by the Caucus.

If the proposed policy is successful after debate in the Caucus, a variety of results

can be produced. Policy may be transformed into legislation which inscribes the policy

into law in adherence to the Constitution (PCO 2001). It may also result in “agreements,

guidelines or, more generally, programs for providing services, benefits, or information”

(PCO 2001). The choice of instrument for affecting change through policy is dependent

on factors such as the appropriate role of government with regards to its political platform

or a cost-and-benefit analysis that acknowledges the limited financial resources of

government. According to the PCO, there are five categories of policy instruments

(2001). Information, as an instrument, is utilized on the basis that “by giving them [the

subjects of the policy] specific information, it may be possible to influence their

behaviour” (PCO 2001). Capacity-building, which includes going beyond the provision

of information, provides the means for the development of personal ability. Economic

instruments, including charging fees, collecting taxes or public expenditure, could involve

the transfer of money from one area or level of government to another. Rules, as guide

for behaviour, can manifest as “Acts, regulations or directives… contracts or

agreements… guidelines, voluntary codes or standards and self-imposed rules that usually

apply to groups of people, but they do not have legal force, relying instead on persuasive

or moral value” (PCO 2001). Lastly, creating an organizational structure to administrate

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the use of policy instruments ensures that there are “departmental or agency structures to

deliver programs” (PCO 2001). Rose and Miller suggest that “the enactment of

legislation is a powerful resource… to the extent that law translates aspects of a

governmental programme into mechanisms that establish, constrain, or empower certain

agents or entities” (1992: 189). Thus, it is government departments that implement or

operationalize policy that may offer an opportunity for research to have an additional

effect, as it may inform the ways in which policy is enacted as a program.

The implementation of policy is also, according to political scientist Stephen Brooks, “not

a neutral one. The departmental bureaucracy regularly is assigned discretion in

interpreting how the law is applied” (1993: 93). After the implementation of policy, in an

attempt to measure its performance, it is compared against the objectives that formed the

basis of its framework by in-house program evaluation bureaus or, more broadly, by the

Auditor General (PCO 2001, Brooks 1998: 84, Pal 2006: 319).

To return to the idea of policy communities as composed of individuals with the

ability and power to research and draft policy, it is important to recognize that policy-

making is a value laden exercise (Kenny-Scherber 2003: 270). As a value laden exercise,

it is worth inquiring as to the types of values implicated in the policy-making process.

The values of policy-makers reflect the myriad of influencing and embodied social and

cultural factors that have shaped them throughout their lives and may reflect the gendered

and class-based segment of society from which they enter the public service. According

to a report published in 2003 by the Public Service Commission of Canada, the

characteristics of the policy community in Canada include some revealing insights into its

composition. The survey reveals that the community is largely located in the Ottawa area,

which the authors call the National Capital Region (NCR 82%) (Public Service
 70

Commission 2003). John Shields and B. Mitchell Evans concur that, as a product of new

public management, ideas resulting from a shift to a neo-liberal paradigm have caused

decision-making in Canada to be increasingly centralized in a “centre”, so to speak, while

the management of government operations has been decentralized and deregulated (e.g.

downloading of settlement services onto non-governmental Organizations [NGOs] that

have to compete for project-based funding) (1998: 74-5). The community also consists of

a larger proportion of women than men at a rate of forty-four percent and the

“respondents from the policy community primarily belonged to occupational groups such

as economics, sociology… statistics… and programme evaluation” (Public Service

Commission 2003: 1). Yet, the aspect of the report that relates to the types of cultural and

social values that infuse the policy development process is the most troubling finding of

the report. It suggests that fewer than ten percent of policy-makers could be classed as

“visible minorities” and there are even fewer Aboriginal people involved (Public Service

Commission 2003: 2, 7). Thus, a picture emerges of the policy-making community in

Canada as one composed of individuals, mainly women, from the majority groups (as

opposed to visible minorities) who inflect the policy-making process with values of the

majority. As a value laden exercise, the policy-making process serves and reinforces the

values of the majority through translating values into policy, while masking those values,

norms, and morals within a seemingly technical and rational language, itself a product of

the intellectual technologies and histories of those with decision-making power.

Policy-making occurs, as the above discussion demonstrates, “within a complex of

technologies, agents, and agencies that make government possible” (Rose and Miller

1992: 189). Although Rose and Miller suggest that a centre emerges from its position

within a complex of technologies such as this, there is an obvious tension in Canada

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under neo-liberalism and new public management regimes between centralization and

decentralization which vests a select few with the control of knowledge and decision-

making power and divests the operational side of the bureaucracy of its capacity to

deliver programs by transferring responsibilities for implementation to private

organizations outside of government (Shields and Evans 1998: 111). Furthermore,

Shields and Evans suggest that “policy decisions, made at the centre and apex of the

administrative state, are implemented by agents acting on behalf of the state. These

agents may be lower levels of government or some form of private-public partnership.

Accountability for fulfilling the state policy-makers’ intent is ensured by means of a

contract between the state and the delivery agents” (1998: 111). Citizens are recast as

clients, and while breaking down boundaries between the public service and citizens

through the provider and payer relationship, the new public management reflects the shift

from a welfare to a neo-liberal state that values efficiency, effectiveness, and value-for-

money in service delivery and policy development (Savoie 2003: 247). However, this

shift to a managerial, business oriented paradigm has opened government to the expert

advice of private consultants (and academics in the Metropolis Project) who benefit

financially from providing advice on policy issues (Savoie 2003: 253). In addition to the

paradoxical centralization and decentralization identified by Shields and Evans, Donald

Savoie, on the current state of policy-making and operationalization, provides a

convincing assessment of how power and influence within government have been

recently reformulated. His analysis is worth quoting at length:

The new policy environment groups together numerous departments, agencies,

and stakeholders to pursue shared objectives in both policy formulation and in
program delivery…. Hierarchies have been decoupled, and there is plenty of
evidence of this. They have given way to hierarchies of documents (strategic,
corporate, and business plans), centres of influence (lobbyists, think tanks,
 72

research institutes), oversight bodies and processes (access-to-information

legislation, commissioner of official languages, Office of the Auditor General),
and centres of political power (the prime minister, his or her office, and the
Department of Finance and its minister) (2003: 266).

Donald Savoie draws attention to an alignment of interests which manifest as

shared objectives, yet the process through which shared objectives become shared is still

elusive. It conceivably originates in the ways in which hierarchies of documents circulate

between centres, distributing knowledge throughout the network that is taken-up by those

with either influence or power. Thus, the relay of knowledge, especially with the

adoption of world wide web based technologies, enables the government (those with

decision-making power) to act at a distance, relying on the inscriptions or documentation

generated by individuals at various locations to provide them with translations of

localized and regional realities. These delicate networks link together political

rationalities with government technologies establishing, through shared sets of objectives,

a tenuous alignment that results from the informality of the exchange of knowledge that is

fundamental to the operation of governing at a distance. A further translation of

objectives occurs when, through the inclusion of government representatives on the

management and governance boards of the Metropolis Project and through the process of

setting the policy priorities for the Project, the issues and ideas of relevance for

government enter the research funding process of the Project. Problematizing policy, as a

product of particular social and cultural circumstances, leads to the recognition that policy

(and the policy-making process) can “reveal the structure of cultural systems” (Shore and

Wright 1997: 8). Thus, an analysis of the Metropolis Project, its formal structure that

facilitates its informal operation, akin to the process of making policy in Canada, will

demonstrate that the alignment of interests between academics and the Metropolis Project
 73

results through a process occurring within a cultural system using terms, concepts, and

shared objectives translated through informal person-to-person interaction.

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Chapter Four: Making the Metropolis Project: The Bridge over Divided Shores

The Metropolis Project commenced operations in 1996, and unlike the modest

ambitions of its organizers, has grown into a substantial national and international

initiative that boasts five regional Centres of Excellence in Canada, and in more than

twenty countries as members of the international arm (Metropolis Project 2005b).

Following an examination of the origins of the Project, the International, National and

Regional structures of the Metropolis Project will be analyzed in succession. Concluding

this chapter will be an in-depth consideration of the Joint Centre of Excellence for

Research on Immigrant and Settlement Issues (CERIS), in Toronto Ontario, Canada.

The founders of the Project, Meyer Burstein, the former head of research for

Citizenship and Immigration Canada and initial Head of the Project, and a U.S. colleague,

Dimetrios Papadimetrios, former head of U.S. Department of Labour, began discussing a

plan to create a small international research project while attending a data committee

meeting of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in

Paris in the early 1990s (Interview December 2, 2005). The initiative they envisioned

would provide a platform to share best-practices internationally between member

countries on immigration and refugee topics (Interview December 2, 2005). The

Metropolis Project, after two program reviews, entered its second phase of operation in

2002, the funding for which will be complete in 2007.

The Project was shaped at a time when Immigration issues were split between two

departments: one responsible for operations, the other for delivery of programs. In 1994,

Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) was created bringing together the research

and policy side of federal immigration with the program operationalization arm. After
 75

significant cutbacks to funding and a reduction to research capacity during the early

1990s, the government faced public criticism over the handling of national immigration

issues (Interview 9). As a researcher for CERIS shared, “Immigration is the favourite

‘whipping boy’ [and the] Metropolis Project was seen as a saving grace” (Interview

August 15, 2005).

The idea to rebuild research capacity through creating a small project began to

take shape (Interview December 2, 2005). As it concerns research capacity, according to

the Overview of the Project, the idea came from the:

recognition that there existed a pressing need to come to grips with the challenges
and to capitalize on the opportunities associated with migration and the integration
of ethnic and religious minorities in large cities around the world. The Project
was shaped by the understanding that… they would need the active and co-
ordinated support of all levels of government, NGOs, the private sector and the
public at large…. What they lacked was knowledge and, consequently, the ability
to operate from a shared strategic platform. [Also] affecting the Project’s design
was a sharp curtailment in public spending which forced governments everywhere
to reevaluate their priorities and to seek strategic alliances that would rationalize
scarce resources and leverage help from other sectors (Metropolis Project 2005b
emphasis added).

Insofar as the Project had the potential to create a shared platform, it was designed from

its inception to mobilize the knowledge resources, in a decade of cutbacks, of academics

working on immigrant and refugee issues. The strategic alliances in conjunction with the

creation of a shared platform had the effect of bringing together “help from other sectors”

(Metropolis Project 2005b). Academics, who could provide help through the operation of

the Centres of Excellence and knowledge through research, would be knowledge workers

in Metropolis, not unlike the knowledge workers in the civil service. Creating strategic

alliances, in effect, was not only a way to maximize scarce resources but to, in a

hegemonic sense, bring within the policy development process the anticipatory

knowledge of academics that, through their connections to communities, could channel

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valuable (and potentially cost saving) knowledge directly into the hands of decision

makers. This could potentially create a clear line of knowledge dissemination that would

save CIC and the government from embarrassment with regards to their position and

action on immigration and refugee issues, in addition to centralizing the flow of

information. By involving academics, bringing them within the confines of the

government organization, not only could Metropolis strategically direct the research, but

could anticipate and respond to academic critiques of immigration and refugee policy,

which could be described as a hegemonic incorporation process, or the creation of a

“common discursive framework” that incorporated the knowledge of academics into the

policy and program design process (Roseberry 1996: 81). The idea was pitched to

government departments affected by migration, but not necessarily involved in the

provision of services. After Citizenship and Immigration Canada, SSHRC was one of the

first to be contacted, followed by Human Resources Development Canada, Department of

Canadian Heritage, Justice, Health Canada, Corrections Canada, Statistics Canada,

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the Solicitor General Canada, and Status of

Women Canada. A large coalition of departments agreed to contribute money into a

central funding pool which totalled eight million dollars for the first six-year phase of the

Project (Metropolis Project 2005b, Interview December 2, 2005). It was the organizers’

persuasiveness that encouraged departments to work together and “at the core is the fact

that everyone recognized that it was a good idea” (Interview December 2, 2005). The

ability to draw from a central research pool, no matter who contributed the funds, was a

unique feature from the start. Timing was also a factor, as one organizer suggests:

“getting SSHRC was timing and luck–the language we used meshed with what SSHRC

was trying to do at the time–they [SSHRC] wanted more money and were being called to
 77

be more policy relevant at the time, through interdisciplinary and international research,

both of which Metropolis had” (Interview 2, 2005). Creating, developing, or drawing on

a common language, even during the design of the Project, facilitated its creation.

Additionally, the Metropolis Project provided a framework to legitimize and rationalize

the social science research by virtue of its design which cohered well, as the organizer

suggested, with the demands placed on SSHRC to provide policy relevant research. The

international component of the project, called Metropolis International, proved to be a

good selling feature in that, remarked a civil servant who worked with the Metropolis

Project for several years, “it had panache” (Interview December 2, 2005).

While money was being collected to launch the Project, organizers held large

meetings to set the initial research scope; one was held with academics working on

immigrant and refugee issues, where they were asked to identify the key areas in which

more research was needed. Other meetings were held with the federal funders and with

federal government representatives to identify the key issues for policy research from

their perspectives. The international section of the Project was consolidated after, as one

organizer relates, meetings were held across Europe to “frame the international project

with a steering committee to build… [it] something like Canada’s” (Interview December

2, 2005). As a component of the burgeoning structure of the Project, a national

competition was held for universities to submit applications to host Metropolis research

centres and partner with the Project. Initially, there were only three Centres of Excellence

proposed, but as an organizer remarked, “the prairies provided a superb bid and CIC had

to ante up more money than they had anticipated spending” (Interview December 2,

2005). Thus, during the initial phase of the Project there were four Centres. The Atlantic

Centre was the most recent centre to be created. In all, there are currently five research
 78

centres across Canada, located in Atlantic Canada, Montreal, Toronto, Edmonton, and

Vancouver.

The universities were required to have certain structures in place in their bid for a

centre to receive funding: structures such as “committees that involved a representative

from the policy community, administrative and management structures, [and] all must

have a Metropolis Team member on the management committee in either a voting or ex-

officio position” (Interview December 2, 2005). The university structures would be the

regional component of a national structure and partnership orchestrated by the Metropolis

Project Team based in Ottawa. Each Centre was designed to consist of a partnership of

local universities, while each management or governance board was to include partners

from all levels of government, NGOs and community representatives. The significance

of the regional partnerships between universities lay in their parallel of the national

partnerships between the Project and its federal funders which was about cost-sharing and

spreading the financial responsibilities between multiple departments, each with its own

allotment of federal money. The regional centres, with management boards operated by

academics, was cost-saving regionally and nationally insofar as release time was granted

by the universities for academics to sit on Centre boards and thus they received no

additional income from involvement.

Nationally, Metropolis was formed around the central unit of the Metropolis

Project Team. An organizer suggested that:

what is unique about Metropolis, what has led to its success is the existence of the
Metropolis Team…. The Metropolis Team was involved from the beginning with
conceptualizing the project, promoting it, and creating opportunities for
meetings… and for haranguing the Centres to open up and change whatever
needed changing…. All those tasks by the project team make the Metropolis
Project (Interview December 2, 2005).
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The Team coordinates and sets the strategic direction of the project and attempts

to facilitate opportunities for stakeholders to meet often at the national and international

conferences. The Team itself is constantly involved in national committee meetings and

as a liaison for the regional centres. Through consistent opportunities to meet and discuss

issues, information is shared among all involved, including the community partners and

the Team’s contacts in government. Metropolis, according to a project organizer,

has more structure than any other program, and the investments in communication
and planning are key…. Metropolis is really about… develop[ing] the capacity to
address issues… [which is] required on both sides of the divide; research and
policy have to learn to engage each other…. Sometimes we act as ‘goat-herders’
fostering long-term relationships and leveraging support… with enduring
structures you can get people to invest in the brand,… [and] create partnerships
(Interview December 2, 2005).

As this organizer suggests, Metropolis’ structure facilitates communication and exchange

(although the quality or openness of that exchange is a complex matter, one worthy of

analysis elsewhere) by building long-term relationships and opportunities for discussion

through committee meetings or conferences. A significant drawback of the Project, as a

social scientist who has completed research for CERIS suggests, is the constant

movement of civil servants to different positions within government (Interview July 21,

2005). This movement of people disrupts relationships that are a key component of

creating alignments between individuals.

Metropolis was designed to succeed where the Ethnic Studies Chairs had failed by

providing a durable framework that would bring stakeholders together and that had the

potential to deliver policy-relevant knowledge through strategically directing social

science research. A Metropolis Team member observed that there was also the view

within government that the Ethnic Studies Chairs program had not delivered policy-
 80

relevant research because the research was scholar-generated and for the most part was

not suitable nor amenable for policy development (Interview August 12, 2005).

On the ability for Metropolis to accomplish its goals, a Project Team member

remarked that “success depends on connecting people in a meaningful way… face-to-face

interaction works the best, we’ve found, at conferences and in smaller venues” (Interview

August 12, 2005). The formal structure of the project, made up of the national and

regional Centres, a variety of committees and sites for interaction, and the conferences,

facilitates the informal sharing of ideas, the articulation of interests, and the establishment

of a common set of terms, concepts and frameworks within which to address issues

regarding the integration of immigrants and refugees. “Networks and rapid

communication is a strength of Metropolis,” remarked a Project Team member, who

continued by suggesting that “the lines between sectors are permeable, boundaries fluid…

it’s [i.e. research] not just curiosity driven anymore… all three sectors sit together and

discuss research questions” (Interview August 12, 2005).

The aim of the Metropolis Project, according to Project documents, is to change

“organizational cultures” by bringing together academics, decision-makers, and

community partners through opportunities for face-to-face interactions that facilitate

dialogue. Presupposing the existence of two distinct organizational cultures, the Project,

through creating the conditions for exchange, discussion and alignment of academics and

decision-makers, recognizes the nuanced meanings, attributes and ways of thinking and

speaking attached to differences in cultural practices and processes. Insofar as Metropolis

can “bridge the divide”, so to speak, to align the interests of those involved, depends in

large measure on the persuasiveness and capacity of individual agents (or groups of
 81

agents) involved in the Project to convince other parties that their way of apprehending an

issue is indeed the best way to conduct and produce policy relevant research.

Also in play and necessary for interests to be aligned is the capacity for a

consensus to be formed (see Nader 1997). The consensus (as an organizational dogma or

moral imperative) within the Metropolis Project is reflected upon by one Team member

in the following way: “It is politically expedient and morally indefensible that so many

refugees wait in camps where they are in danger and someone coming from the U.S., not

in danger gets in quickly…” (Interview August 12, 2005). Moreover, agreeing to agree

on the moral indefensibility of the status of refugees who wait in camps to enter the

country is proceeded by the assertion that social, economic and cultural integration is the

best method for alleviating or forestalling the hardships of immigrants and refugees.

Thus, if a common framework for discussion emerges, based initially on the consensus

(however fragile it may be) that there is a moral imperative to act, to help, to assist those

in need through the development of policy and programs, a discursive involution and

translation facilitates the alignment of interests.

Metropolis is presented in a style that makes it possible to imagine a space for

dialogue and exchange existing between two organizational cultures separated (if we

reflect on the logo of the Project, a span bridge) by a vast expanse that can be crossed,

joined, and overcome through informal person-to person contact made possible by the

formal structure. To the extent that dialogue occurs, so too the possibility increases that

the interests of parties involved will be allied towards common goals, especially when

they are phrased in terms of the common good through a common discursive framework

(Roseberry 1996: 81). With allied problems and concerns, the parties involved can count

on each other to think about problems in familiar ways, so that they become bound up
 82

together in devising solutions to social problems (Miller and Rose 1990: 10). The

opportunities for informal exchange between stakeholders facilitate the alignment of

interests not unlike the informal knowledge-sharing that generally facilitates the process

of creating policy.

The International, National, and Regional Structure of the Metropolis Project

The central ideas that underscore the strategic direction of the international arm of

the Project are focussed on the relationship between research and policy, and do not stray

from the ideology of the Canadian National Project. Specifically, these ideas include the

belief that research, if done well on timely issues, informs and strengthens the policy

creation process. Through the research to policy-bridging process, made possible by

conferences, an international journal, and seminars, an effective exchange of ideas for

policy solutions to current issues and problems is designed to occur. Creating an

international platform for sharing information was, according to Metropolis International

and consonant with the idea for Metropolis generally, to encourage comparative projects

that connect countries, universities and organizations interested and engaged in research

on the global movement of immigrants and refugees through an interactive and

interpersonal approach to problem solving (Metropolis Project International 2005 and

Metropolis Project International 2005a).

The international arm of the Metropolis Project is operated through the

International Steering Committee and Secretariat, and, through these operational

assemblages, the most significant feature, from a knowledge dissemination and best-

practice sharing standpoint, is the international conference held annually (SSHRC 2000:

3, Metropolis Project 2002: 14). The International Steering Committee, chaired by the

Executive of Canada’s Metropolis Project and a representative from a European partner,

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coordinates the facilitation of networks of international academics and policy-makers and

through consultation with member countries decides where the annual international

conference will be held, the theme, and the type of content included. The conferences are

a site for the interaction of upper-level government officials to meet and discuss with

academics the important aspects and growing concerns of immigration. Through this

person-to-person contact, the common languages and set of terms, concepts, or theories

that are used as the basis for moral imperatives that induce states to act through the

development of policy, are extended out spatially to multiple international sights (Miller

and Rose 1990: 10). The effect of a deportation of ways of thinking and talking about

immigration and refugee issues has significant consequences for the ways in which policy

and programmatic responses are drafted. Thus, the implicit endorsement of both research

knowledge and paradigmatic conceptualizations, through the Metropolis Project, as it

travels across borders, deports a specific kind of conceptualization of the relationship

between the Canadian government and newcomers, specifically, and citizens, generally.

The international conferences are a venue for the export and import of what

Edward Said called travelling theories, uprooted from their original contexts and

transplanted onto foreign situations; consequently, this movement has a greater

significance than that of merely sharing information (1983). It represents a processual

hegemonic dispersion of intellectual technologies. Moreover, international sharing of

knowledge and best-practices has the potential to create an ontological alignment, where

a theory of reality is constituted through the contribution of academic expert knowledge

that renders social problems in such a way that they are amenable to the intervention and

direction of policy and programs. Miller and Rose indicate the possibility of an

ontological alignment when they argue that the programmatic designs of technologies of
 84

government presuppose “that the real is programmable” linking “systems of thought…

[with] systems of action” (Rose and Miller 1992: 183, 177). The international conferences

are also an opportunity for the Canadian Centres of Excellence and their affiliated

academics to present their research projects, as successful examples of the transfer of

knowledge to the policy development process, to an international audience which

emphasizes the capacity and potential of the Canadian section of the project to translate

thoughts into action (SSHRC 2000: 10; SSHRC 2000a: 15). Insofar as the international

section of the Project “has panache,” as one organizer suggests, it does so by virtue of its

capacity to establish, disperse and translate a distinctly Canadian comprehension of the

problems and issues posed by immigration (Interview December 2, 2005).

At the national level, the Metropolis Project is housed in Ottawa with Citizenship

and Immigration Canada. The Metropolis Project Team coordinates and facilitates all

national research priority setting, conferences, and knowledge-transfer initiatives, and

acts as a liaison with the regional Centres. The national structure of the project facilitates

communications among stakeholders through their participation in committees. The

robust structure of eight national committees ensures the informal exchange of ideas

through regular meetings. Additionally, the Metropolis Project Team oversees the

knowledge dissemination activities of the Project which include setting the national

policy priorities which form the basis of a portion of the research activities of the regional

Centres (Metropolis Project 2002a).

The Metropolis Project Team provides the strategic leadership for establishing the

direction for the Project. Its members are involved in planning, maintaining partnerships

and projects, and promoting Metropolis. Their responsibilities include fostering

opportunities and demarcating sites for interaction among academics, decision- and
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policy-makers. The Metropolis Project Team currently consists of a minimal staff of

eight members: the Executive Head, Financial and Administrative Officer, Director of

Partnerships and Knowledge Transfer, Director of International and Francophone Liaison,

Director of Metropolis Institute and Justice Portfolio Liaison, a Senior Project Manager, a

Policy Research Analyst, and an individual responsible for Document Management and

Distribution.

The current Executive Head, Howard Duncan, has a background in academia as

well as in government, in program evaluation, strategic planning and policy development

(Metropolis Project 2006). With multiple social science degrees to his credit and a

background working with Canadian Heritage, the Director of Partnerships and

Knowledge Transfer, John Biles, coordinates the Interdepartmental Committee; “he is

[also] the Project Team liaison with the Atlantic Centre, the Department of Canadian

Heritage, the Policy Research Initiative, Social Development Canada, the National

Secretariat for Homelessness, and two branches at Citizenship and Immigration Canada

(Integration, and Research and Evaluation)” (Metropolis Project 2006). Mr. Biles also

works to disseminate Metropolis research as widely as possible. The Director of

International and Francophone Liaison is Julie Boyer. The Senior Project Manager,

Nathalie Ethier, develops and promotes the Metropolis website and is engaged in an

administration program at the Universite du Quebec (Metropolis Project 2006). Barry

Halliday, the Policy Research Analyst, completed a federal policy development program

before joining the Metropolis Project Team. He is the liaison for the Vancouver Centre of

Excellence (RIIM) and also works to “strengthen linkages between research and policy on

various facets of immigration, by sharing research findings and policy work, bringing

together key players for Metropolis Conversation and other events” (Metropolis Project
 86

2006). The Director of the International Project, Erin Tolley, came to Metropolis from

the Canadian public service through the Policy Research Development Program after

finishing a degree in political science. She is the Team’s liaison with the “Prairie Centre

of Excellence, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, Statistics Canada, the

Metropolis Data Committees, and the Selection and Communications branches of

Citizenship and Immigration Canada” (Metropolis Project 2006). She is also involved in

planning the international conferences. The Director of Metropolis Institute and Justice

Portfolio Liaison, Steven Morris, has had a career in the public service in a variety of CIC

divisions. He is also the liaison to the Toronto Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on

Immigration and Settlement (CERIS). In addition to directing the Metropolis Institute, he

also liaises with Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada, Justice Canada and

the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Metropolis Project 2006). Currently, the position

for Document Management and Distribution is vacant.

Clearly, many of the Project Team members have experience in both government

and academic domains which may facilitate their ability to translate the objectives of CIC

into thematic issues that form the basis of research questions. As liaisons to the regional

Centres, Project Team members connect and network the central national office with the

locales in which knowledge is generated; in effect, the Project Team is loosely aligning

individuals by traversing formal organizational boundaries through informal person-to

person interaction (Miller and Rose 1990: 10). Furthermore, the committees operated at

the national level are designed to encourage a discursive framework through which issues

and problems can form the basis of allied interests.

There are eight national committees that ensure that the Metropolis Project Team

meets regularly with federal funders and with academics and community members at the
 87

regional Centres. Regular opportunities for exchange is said to build and facilitate

partnerships, part of the enduring structure of the Metropolis Project. Committee

meetings provide an opportunity for dialogue on pressing and potential social issues, the

transmission and flow of information up from communities through NGOs and academics

and down to academics from government representatives through the Project Team. The

committees involve the federal funders, for example, on the Interdepartmental Steering

Committee (ISC); the chair is either the Executive Head of the Project or the CIC's

Assistant Deputy Minister for Policy and Program Development (depending on who is

delegated for the position). This committee provides a direct link in the network of

exchange for the translation of CIC’s current policy issues into potential research

questions in the regional centres (Metropolis Project 2002: 8)

The Interdepartmental Working Committee (IWC) is called to order roughly every

three months by the Chair, Metropolis’s Executive Head. This committee brings

together representatives from the federal funders and other federal ministries with the

Metropolis Project Team. The Metropolis Project Team is a secretariat for this

committee. Invited to committee meetings, yet unable to participate during the meetings,

are representatives from the Centres of Excellence. The purpose of this committee is to

open a forum for discussion of policy directions and priorities and to provide funding

partners with information on Metropolis’ new research activities (Metropolis Project

2002: 8). This is accomplished through the efforts of this committee to:

develop and maintain effective ways to share information on immigration and

integration, within the federal government, with other levels of government in
Canada, and non-government organizations; to identify, on an on-going basis,
common policy issues requiring scientific research; to identify further
opportunities for mutually beneficial joint research; to facilitate linkage between
research conducted in the Centres and the respective departmental policy agendas;
to provide input regarding Canada's participation in the international Metropolis
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agenda; and to provide key information, make recommendations regarding the

need for research in respect of strategic immigration, integration and citizenship
related public policy issues (Metropolis Project 2005: 1).

Together, the ISC and IWC are forums for developing and modifying the strategic

direction of the project while facilitating the translation of political rationalities into

policy priorities and their transmission to the regional Centres through the efforts of the

liaising of Metropolis Project Team members.

Other national committees, like the Joint Metropolis-SSHRC/Centres’ Directors

Committee, National Data Committee, and National Web Committee, coordinate the

strategic direction of the Project, meet to discuss the statistical needs of the Centres of

Excellence and any issues pertaining to the operation of the Metropolis website

respectively. Committees proposed for the second phase of the Project are the Metropolis

Advisory Committee, and the Inter-centre Planning and Exchange Committee. They are a

means to coordinate, strategize, and facilitate the transfer and exchange of data and

knowledge across the country. The Advisory Committee brings Metropolis Project

partners, both organizational and governmental, together to discuss the strategic direction

of Project, while the Inter-centre Planning and Exchange Committee is designed to

provide an opportunity to plan comparative inter-Centre research projects and to

exchange information among Centres, effectively creating the conditions for the

development of projects which will inform national policy (Metropolis Project 2002: 9-

10). As one Project organizer suggests, while reflecting on the formation of policy, “it’s

hard to base national work on a small group, [although] we need to know what the voices

of six people say, [it] has no influence…. National policy is based on large data sets”

(Interview December 2, 2005).

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The dissemination of knowledge on a national level includes initiatives such as

The Metropolis Institute, the publication of the Journal of International Migration and

Integration (JIMI), and the annual national conference. The Metropolis Institute is a

training platform for civil servants, NGOs, and members of the policy-creation

community. It is partnered with immigrant-serving organizations such as the Ontario

Administration of Settlement and Integration Services (OASIS) and federally with CIC.

Courses offered by the Institute aim to provide innovative and expert research on

immigration and settlement issues. Through the use of multiple methods of information

delivery, students of the courses are connected with valuable information and experts in

the field. The Program of Migration and Diversity Studies, launched in 2002, is designed

based on both academic and practice-oriented experience and is available to government

civil servants and NGOs upon successful registration through the Institute (Metropolis

Institute 2005). The courses provide an opportunity for participants to create networks

and connections with other practitioners in the policy or NGO field (Metropolis Institute

2003).

The Journal of International Migration and Integration is co-edited by a Canadian

and international academics; this peer-reviewed journal brings together scholarly articles

on current immigration and refugee settlement, integration and social issues (Metropolis

International Background 2005a). JIMI is designed to promote the exchange of research

among stakeholders; as a traditional means of dissemination, it provides an opportunity

for interested parties to become acquainted with key debates on migration and

(re)settlement.

The annual national conference is hosted by a regional Centre of Excellence and is

a venue “to identify critical issues, our state of knowledge and gaps in our research; to
 90

establish strategic directions for the Project; to build a network of researchers and

decision-makers; [and] to create momentum for the Metropolis Project attracting the

attention of stakeholders and decision-makers, researchers and research funders”

(Metropolis Project 2006a). Attended by academics and stakeholders, the conferences

can open a forum for discussion of current issues affecting immigrants and refugees and

their relationship to Canada (Metropolis Project 2006b)

The national structure of the Metropolis Project, composed of multiple

committees, is based on the idea that face-to-face, person-to-person interaction is the most

effective method to translate the objectives of funders into the research themes that guide

the Centres. The members of the Metropolis Project Team, as they liaise with the Centres

of Excellence, link the national centre with the regional centres facilitating the exchange

of information and knowledge among them and the transmission of knowledge to centres

of calculation, through the federal government department representatives who sit on the

national committees. Regular contact also facilitates the multidirectional flow of

information, both between community organizations and political decision-makers and

amongst regional Centres, which ideally enables policy-relevant research to be generated

for the process of governing at a distance. Committees also function as a means to

advance particular objectives throughout the Metropolis organization by directly

involving federal funders in the operation of the project. Although the knowledge

dissemination activities of the national centre listed above provide an indication of the

types of opportunities for exchange that are facilitated by the Project team on a national

scale, they are not meant to represent all initiatives undertaken through the national centre

at any given time. What the Metropolis Institute, JIMI, and the national conference

indicate is that, through an educational and discursive framework, knowledge about

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immigrants and refugees is prized as the central component enabling the exercise of a

governmental power that constructs objects of analysis through strategic consultation and

the translation of political rationalities into policy priorities.

The direction of research, funded through regional annual competitions, is

adjudicated in principle based on a list of policy priorities. During the renewal of funding

for the second phase of the Project lasting from 2002-2007, new priorities were

established nationally with advice garnered though consultation with federal partners and

academics, both at a national conference and in a focused meeting. Eleven priorities

emerged from these consultations and were distributed to the regional Centres which are

expected to devote fifty percent of their research budget to examining these priorities.

Of particular importance are pan-Canadian projects amenable to national policy

development which coincides with the creation of the Inter-centre Planning and Exchange

Committee. The principles guiding these new priorities emphasize that research should:

be based on good science; investigate the role of policy in intervention; regard migrants

(and the social contexts within which they live) as legitimate objects of study; examine

groups and organizations in addition to individuals; take account of gender in research

studies; identify best practices; be interdisciplinary whenever possible; and maintain a

balance between small-scale qualitative and large-scale quantitative research (Metropolis

Project 2002a: 2 emphasis added). Identifying migrants as objects of study reflects the

process by which they are made calculable as objects, and, thus, immigrants and refugees

can become the basis for the development of policy and programmes that govern at a

distance. As a process of translation, the policy priorities are discursively constructed

using language indicative of positivist science owing, in part, to the correlation of large-

scale statistical data with the creation of national policy (Interview December 2, 2005).
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Inasmuch as good science produces policy-amenable research knowledge, it does so

through the endorsement and utilization by academics, at least implicitly, of methods that

render knowledge in such a way that it may be translated into a calculable form, opening

the subjects of research to intervention. However, the process through which political

rationalities are translated into policy priorities that form the basis for research questions,

insofar as they undergo multiple processes of translation through the consultation process,

opens up the possibility that they may be again reformed and shaped through the

individual actions of Metropolis regional Centre researchers, shifting the strategic

direction of the Project ever so slightly through an additional process of translating

political ambitions into suitable social science research questions.

The creation of regional research Centres was based on the understanding,

according to SSHRC and CIC, that cities that experience rapid demographic and social

change as a result of immigration face challenges with regards to planning, service

provision, and maintaining peaceful, ethnically-diverse neighbourhoods amidst the

tension of rapid influxes of people. In order to understand the needs of cities:

[t]he Centres will promote, coordinate, conduct and communicate

multidisciplinary Canadian research in the areas of immigration and integration.
Research conducted by the Centres will guide public and private institutions in
developing effective approaches to managing immigration and integrating
immigrants as full and equal members of society. They will also serve as focal
points for research on immigration in Canada, providing the requisite
infrastructure for such research (Metropolis Project 1998: 1).

In the original proposal for the creation of regional Centres of Excellence, it was

proposed that centres be established in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, as the main

immigrant receiving cities in Canada. When the Prairie universities provided an

outstanding application, according to Metropolis organizers, CIC was inclined to fund an

additional Centre (Interview December 2, 2005). After outlining the common features of
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the regional Centres, an elucidation of the locations, partnered universities and unique

features (with the amount of information provided being dependent on the information

publicly available on each Centre’s web site), is then preceded by a detailed analysis of

the Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement (CERIS)

located in Toronto Ontario, Canada at which I completed the majority of my research.

The Centres all have similar structures, in accordance with funding guidelines.

Each must involve a collaborative working relationship between universities, include a

partnership with community organizations (NGOs) (where partnership is defined as

“ongoing, active working relationships with organizations in the private and/or public

sectors, excluding post-secondary institutions” [Metropolis Project 1998: 8]), and involve

the funders in the operation of the Centre, including the setting of themes for research-

funding competitions. The host universities must all contribute financially to the

operation of the Centre, either through providing space and infrastructure for the offices

or release time for directors, and university library access (Metropolis Project 1998: 6).

The management of the Centres depends on the creation of boards of academics from the

consortium of universities, community organization participants, and stakeholders from

the funders that oversee the direction and dissemination of research funded through the

Centre (Metropolis Project 1998: 6). All the Centres must have opportunities for training

the next generation of scholars and plans in place for the dissemination of research

findings which is mainly accomplished through a website. At the Centres, research areas

are divided into domains decided upon by Metropolis in the initial plan for the

organization of the Centres. Although not all domains proposed by Metropolis need to be

covered at one time, several should be. The original domains proposed covered topics

such as: economics, education, social issues, citizenship and culture, public services and
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politics, and a physical infrastructure domain (Metropolis Project 1998: 3-5). The

Centres have had some discretion in setting the areas for domains as the research focus of

the academics and funders involved has changed.

All the Centres, through committee, governance/management, or national

meetings, regularly have an opportunity to become acquainted with the policy and

program priorities of funders from all levels of government which “allow(s) the Centres

to rationalize their research and to use scarce resources wisely” (Metropolis Project 1998:

2-3). Research priority-setting meetings are held annually at the Centres to provide an

opportunity for academics, policy-makers, funders and community organization

representatives to come together and discuss the priorities for the upcoming research-

funding competitions. Also annually, Centres must prepare extensive reports on their

operations, dissemination of research including participation in public (rather than

academic) dissemination activities, training opportunities for graduate students, research

projects funded and completed, the annual budget and expenditures, and the future plans

for the Centre. This yearly audit report is presented to Metropolis’s main funder,

SSHRC, and in the case of some of the Centres, is also posted on the website.

Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia and the University

of Victoria partner to form the Vancouver Centre of Excellence (RIIM - Research on

Immigration and Integration in the Metropolis). The focus of research projects at RIIM

concerns the movement of immigrants and migrants through Pacific Rim countries; hence

the relevance of the acronym (RIIM 2005). As of 2004, the research priorities of the

Centre included investigation into issues around migration, economic integration of

immigrants and refugees, and the social, political, and educational participation and

citizenship of immigrants and refugees (RIIM 2004: 1-2). The Centre currently has four
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domains in operation: Economic, Education, Social, and Housing and Neighbourhoods

(RIIM 2005).

RIIM is partnered and affiliated with nationally and internationally-based

institutes, networks, and institutions that focus on, among other issues, international

labour markets, micro- and macro-economics, political economy and science, and

demography (RIIM 2005a). Nationally, RIIM is affiliated with the Centre for Refugee

Studies (CRS) at York University, the Laurier Institution (a group of community and

business leaders in the Greater Vancouver area), and MOSAIC (a settlement organization

which provides a variety of job placement and language services to new immigrants).

RIIM is also affiliated with the Carnegie-endowed Migration Policy Institute which is an

independent policy development organization (RIIM 2005a).

The Prairie Centre of Excellence (Prairie Centre of Excellence for Research on

Immigration and Integration – PCERII) is located at the University of Alberta, Edmonton,

and acts as a central connection point for the consortium of affiliated universities. The

Universities of Calgary, Regina, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Winnipeg all possess links

to the main Centre at the University of Alberta. PCERII’s administrative space consists

of twelve offices that are distributed between staff of the Centre, graduate students,

visiting academics and associates, and a Reference Library (PCERII 2002b). The

objectives of this Centre are to direct research activities to address the need to develop

strategies to effectively integrate immigrants and refugees (PCERII 2002).

There are six domains at PCERII with only five in active operation at one time.

PCERII domains are divided into areas such as: Education, Social and Cultural, Health,

Citizenship and Political, and Economic Domains (PCERII 2002). Domain leaders lead

activities in their domains and attempt to encourage intra-Centre research projects. They
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monitor the progress of projects within their domain, and among other important duties,

provide reports on the annual research activities in the domain for inclusion in the report

to SSHRCC submitted every year (PCERII 2002a).

Immigration and Metropolis (IM), the Metropolis Centre of Excellence in

Montreal, includes the partnered universities of Université de Montreal, the National

Institute for Scientific Research - Urbanization (INRS-UCS), and McGill University. The

central office is maintained at Centre d’études ethniques des universités montréalaises

(CEETUM), with subsidiary offices at the two other institutions. The detailed objectives

of this Centre are to:

1) Intensify exchanges and collaboration among the three institutions with regard
to immigration and integration research and graduate student supervision; 2) To
promote the development of innovative, multidisciplinary research on these issues
in the Canadian and, in particular, the Quebec contexts; 3) To develop
comparative studies with other metropolitan areas, in Canada or elsewhere,
selected for their relevance to the targeted problematics or actions; 4) To intensify
or formalize existing links between researchers or organizations and public or
non-governmental partners in these areas; 5) To ensure wider and more effective
dissemination of research findings to decision makers, professionals in the field,
and the general public (IM 2005: 4).

The domains at IM have been significantly restructured since the program’s

inception in 1995. The current domain structure is divided into five areas plus a sixth

data analysis group. The domains are divided as follows: 1) Demographic, economic and

linguistic aspects of immigration, 2) Neighbourhood life, residential trajectories, social

networks and management of community resources, 3) Education and training, 4) Health

and social services, public safety, and justice, and 5) Citizenship, culture and social

climate (IM 2005: 5-7). Each of the first five domains is again divided into sub-domains

that address narrower themes related to the main domain topic (IM 2005: 9-11).
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The Statistical Observatory acts as a sixth domain run from INRS-UCS by domain

and partner representatives. It is tasked with creating a dynamic picture of the results of

immigration by undertaking a review of statistical information. In particular, this

committee is expected to:

(1) conduct research projects based on analysis of data exclusive to the Metropolis
Project and innovative data on immigration (especially administrative data banks
and longitudinal surveys); (2) encourage Immigration and Metropolis researchers
to utilize research data on immigration and allow a fairly broad public fast access
to immigration-related data; (3) disseminate the results of Observatory research
projects, particularly on-line (IM 2005: 39).

Each partnered university administers the funds for research projects in the

domains associated with the institution. Domain administration is divided as follows: two

domains are associated with Université de Montreal, two with INRS-UCS, and two with

McGill. Each university also contributes in-kind support to the operation of accessory

offices, administrative supplies, and resources at each of the three universities; the current

exception being one of the two Domain leaders of domain number one, who is from the

Université de Sherbrooke. The main Centre is linked with the domain-divided subsidiary

Centres whose researchers benefit from the resources of their own and the main Centre

and between which the sharing of staff resources and joint events are organized (IM 2005:

5-8).

IM is unique among Metropolis Centres in that it considers the funding sources

from CIC and SSHRC as supplemental; these sources of funding allow the Centre to fulfil

strategic obligations, yet are not the sole sources of funding to satisfy the additional

research objectives of the Centre. By garnering and utilizing a variety of funds from a

mixture of sources, IM is not limited to funding strategic, policy oriented research and

can fund other types of research on immigrant and refugee issues (IM 2005: 7-61).
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The Atlantic Metropolis Centre (AMC) opened in January 2004, and operates with

two offices, one in Halifax, Nova Scotia and the other in Moncton, New Brunswick. The

four lead universities that share responsibility for forming the AMC network are Saint

Mary’s University, Dalhousie University, Universite de Moncton and Saint Thomas

University; additionally, Acadia University and Mount Alison University also maintain

an accessory relationship within the network. In a similar fashion to the other four

Centres of Excellence, the Atlantic Centre attempts to foster the capacity of research on

immigration and refugee issues that permeate the policy-creation process. The focus of

the Centre is to:

1) Develop the Centre as a regional clearing-house for research on immigration

and diversity; 2) stimulate capacity-building for policy-relevant research on these
issues in the region, train graduate students, and create forums and materials for
public education and debate; 3) enhance recognition of the rich history of
migration and of cultural diversity in Atlantic Canada; 4) investigate the complex
relationships between the size of immigrant communities, the rate of integration,
and the degree of cross-cultural dialogue; 5) ensure that federal partners and
policy makers and service providers in Atlantic Canada are provided with timely
research drawing on experiences in other regions and/or other countries; [and] 6)
provide a window on global developments that might impact the region, such as
refugee flows, attitudes towards multiculturalism in other countries, and images of
Atlantic Canada abroad (AMC 2004: 1-2).

NGO involvement is more prominent than municipal government participation

with all the Atlantic areas providing a grass-roots, community-based insight into the

needs and lives of immigrants and refugees. NGO partners include: Metropolitan

Immigrant Settlement Association (MISA), MultiCultural Association of Nova Scotia

(MANS), New Brunswick Multiculture Council, PEI Association for Newcomers,

Multicultural Association for the Greater Moncton Area, Association for New Canadians

(ANC) of Newfoundland, Moncton Intercultural Heritage Association (IHA), Canadian

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Council for Refugees (CCR), Halifax Immigrant Learning Centre (HILC), Halifax

Refugee Clinic, and the YMCA Newcomer Service (AMC 2004b).

There are eight domains at AMC: Economics; Penser L’intégration: Discours,

valeurs et attitudes; Culture, langue et identité; Citizenship, Security and Justice;

Education; Gender, Migration and Diversity/ Immigrant Women; Health and Well Being;

and Human Rights and Social Justice (AMC 2004a). Recorded for each domain are the

results of the networking activities the researchers linked to that domain have undertaken

to date. The dissemination activities and knowledge transfer initiatives, despite the short

length of time the Centre has been open, have been numerous and actively promote the

vision of AMC specifically and Metropolis generally (AMC 2004c: 1-5).

Synoptic view of a Regional Centre: the Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on
Immigration and Settlement

The Toronto Centre of Excellence (Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on

Immigration and Settlement – CERIS) was established in March, 1995. It is located on

the seventh floor of the Faculty of Social Work building on the University of Toronto’s

St. George campus.

CERIS is a collaborative partnership between the University of Toronto, York

University and Ryerson University. Each university contributes support to the operation

of the Centre, either directly in terms of office space or indirectly through granting release

time for academics to pursue opportunities on the Governance Board of the Centre

(CERIS 1997). The objectives of the Centre are to “promote research about the impact of

immigration on the Greater Toronto Area and on the integration of immigrants into

Canadian society;… [provide] training opportunities; and… [disseminate] policy and

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program relevant research information” (CERIS 2005h. In an Immigration Legislative

Review the mandate of CERIS is elaborated through the recognition that:

Canada's immigration and refugee policies must be grounded in our national

values, most particularly recognition of the value of immigration, a commitment
to equity and mutual respect, and compassion for the persecuted and threatened.
We must explicitly articulate a theme that, to date, has received insufficient
recognition: our obligation to newcomers does not end after they arrive in Canada.
There must be an ongoing commitment that will help ensure successful
resettlement. Principles to help guide this commitment include a recognition of the
importance of family, and of the need to actively promote integration (CERIS
1997a).

The Centre is operated by a Governance Board although the Management, Human

Resources and Data Committees are also responsible for significant aspects of the

Centre’s operation. Unique to CERIS is the Partnership Advisory Council that is a

Council premised on the exchange of ideas and information between community partners

and CERIS. The research focus of the Centre is currently organized into six domains that

have grown from the original three with which the Centre started. The domains are: 1)

Citizenship, Religion and Culture, 2) Community, Neighbourhoods and Housing, 3)

Economics, 4) Education, 5) Health, and 6) Justice and Law (CERIS 2006). Research

results from domain-specific funding competitions compose one type of knowledge that

is disseminated by the Centre through a variety of means including conferences, internal

publications and workshops.

The Centre was established, like all the Centres throughout the country, through a

proposal process. On this process, an academic on the Governance Board at CERIS

explains:

I was actually involved at the very beginning… the international [arm] I guess
would have just been born. CIC had an arrangement with SSHRC in terms of
funding the Centres of Excellence across the country. Initially the idea was to
fund three Centres of Excellence and… of course none of these things is
predetermined, they are predetermined because they want one in Vancouver, one
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in Montreal, one in Toronto, and we all wrote proposals, amalgams of universities,

and also community organizations, the prairies did one and they were so
impressed with it that… they actually landed on funding four Centres of
Excellence (Interview June 30, 2005).

While speaking to another academic involved with the Centre about the creation

of CERIS, it was made clear to me that the collaborative partnership between universities,

the government funders and academics had been crafted according to a particular vision.

On the development of CERIS he says that:

I was part of the… team initially that was developing the idea of Metropolis here
in Toronto and of course it was a top down sort of thing, it came from the federal
government to the university environment. So I was involved at that point, I then
went away… and I came back and things changed quite dramatically in terms of
the early evolution of CERIS in Toronto, and I came back and found something
rather different than what was envisioned at the outset, and I guess the key thing at
the outset [was] the requirement for the federal government that the universities
cooperate, U of T, Ryerson and York, and this is not always a happy marriage
shall we say (Interview July 21, 2005).

Currently each university is represented by three academics who sit on the

Governance Board alongside the ex officio members from SSHRC and the Metropolis

Project Team. The board is composed of voting and non-voting members. Members with

the vote include three representatives from each university, one representative from the

Community Social Planning Council of Toronto, the Ontario Council of Agencies

Serving Immigrants, and the United Way of Greater Toronto. Both Citizenship and

Immigration Canada (CIC) and the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration have one

seat each. Representing the Centre’s Domain leaders and the Partnership Advisory

Council, are two additional voting members. The City of Toronto has one voting seat for

a representative (CERIS 2005a: 1-2). Academics with the power to vote total ten, while

community organizations with voting privileges total three. The government stakeholders

are represented by only two votes. The Partnership Advisory Council, composed of
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community sector, planning council, and local representatives from federal funding

bodies, has one vote as does a representative from the City of Toronto. Despite an

unbalanced partnership in board members with the power to vote, members without

voting privilege may voice their opinions, carry and second motions, and otherwise

participate in discussions during board meetings (CERIS 2005b: 2-3). Even without

voting privileges, members contribute to the functioning of CERIS as the structure is

premised on its partnerships. In a 1998 Annual Report to SSHRC from CERIS, it is noted

that:

[the] success of [the] CERIS research program depends on active support from a
network of partnerships locally, across Canada and internationally. The past year
has seen our links with potential partners begin to turn into productive
collaboration in a number of areas including joint activities at the municipal level
and invaluable input into our research agenda from community and government
partners (CERIS 1998).

This excerpt indicates that community organizations act as relays for information

on local grass roots issues; they enable, through their participation with CERIS, the fluid

transmission of information from communities into the CERIS structure. Community

organizations, to the extent that they transmit information, are also a means for the

collection of information which is one aspect of the process of knowing a community that

enables Centre board members to be in the know (Miller and Rose 1990: 5; Miller and

Rose 1992: 186). More broadly, the governance structure of the Centre has been built on

the premise of partnership or a shared strategic and discursive platform which is designed

to reflect the mandate and vision of the Metropolis Project (Metropolis Project 2004).

Speaking on the distinctiveness of the project, a board member offered that:

It [Metropolis] is not just a federal government initiative that brings in academics,

but in fact it is founded in terms of a partnership between government, the Social
Science and Humanities Research Council and then sort of at arms length funds
the Centres of Excellence…. I think it’s a fairly unique type of structure that I
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don’t think has parallels elsewhere, at least not in Canada. So I think that makes it
different from the Policy Research Initiative which… bends itself to government
priorities… very directly and explicitly (Interview June 30, 2005).

The non-voting section of the board demonstrates the limited influence

government department representatives have in the voting system of the Centre. One

Director from each university also sits on this part of the board. Additionally, one

representative from the Metropolis Project Team, SSHRC, HRDC, Ontario’s Ministry of

Training, Colleges and Universities, the PAC, the Chair of the CERIS Data Committee,

and the Centre Coordinator comprise the non-voting section of the board (CERIS 2005b:

1-2). With powers of voice, but not voting in meetings, these members can inform voting

members of their concerns and otherwise participate in discussions bringing their own

perspectives to bear on the operation of the Centre.

Over and above the fiduciary responsibilities for managing the finances of the

Centre, including setting funding levels and adjudicating proposals during the six annual

meetings, the board attempts to focus the vision of the Centre, to direct research in such a

way that it falls within the themes of the Centre and Metropolis nationally, and to ensure

that the Centre is operated in accordance with the mandate of Metropolis as a standard of

purpose (CERIS 2005b: 1). This standard of purpose extends to the comportment of

board members as they pledge in an oath to the Centre that they will represent “CERIS in

a positive and supportive manner at all times and in all places” (CERIS 2005c: 1). In

order to encourage the support of research on immigrants and refugees through funding

provided by CERIS, academics on the board must align themselves with the oath of the

board at least in principle. Although written by the board, members who adhere to the

oath must pledge an allegiance to the decisions of the board regardless of their agreement

or support, while also “[c]ommitting to uphold CERIS’s mission, mandate, values and
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ideology” (CERIS 2005c: 1). Board members must additionally be transparent and open

with the Centre’s stakeholders, ensure the fiscal integrity of the Centre, comply with all of

the policies that govern their action and educate “the local and wider communities about

CERIS’s goals, objectives and functions” (CERIS 2005c: 2). The oath acts as a means to

define the limits within which Governance Board members are expected to communicate

about the Centre. They must relay a positive image, conduct themselves within the

governance structure of the centre in accordance with the mission, mandate, values and

ideology of the Centre, and publicize the Centre to the wider community. The oath also

defines ways of talking about the activities of the Centre in an attempt to control the

language that describes it. This may contribute to forming loosely aligned networks by

delineating a shared set of terms, a common language for description that if all Centres

were to adhere to would ideally cohere the idea and image of the project publicly (Miller

and Rose 1990: 7).

Periodically, the board assesses the effectiveness of its operations. This is

accomplished in principle when the board can “establish what they need to put in place

for optimal effectiveness and then to regularly monitor themselves against these criteria”

(CERIS 2005b: 2). Criteria have been established to guide the successful operation of the

board. These criteria are designed to ensure effectiveness and, as such, set out the

standards for assessment. Evaluated are the strengths of board leadership and

management, the understanding of all members of the scope of their power and source of

their legitimacy, their roles and responsibilities, and the competence of the board (CERIS

2005b: 2). The final criteria for effective management rests on the acknowledgement of

the board’s culture or on the extent to which “members share their beliefs, norms,

attitudes, values and expectations for the organization and for their role as a board
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member” (CERIS 2005b: 2). Based on these criteria, the board is to discern its particular

formulation for effectiveness and audit its performance regularly. Nikolas Rose suggests,

drawing from Michael Power, that the “audit is transformed from a relatively marginal

instrument on the battery of control technologies to a central mechanism for governing at

a distance…. Audit, as Power puts it, is the control of control” (Rose 1999: 154).

Moreover, Rose, following Power, argues that:

audit transforms that which is to be governed. Rendering something auditable

shapes the process to be audited…. The logics and technical requirements of audit
displace the internal logics of expertise…. Audits… have come to replace the
trust that social government invested in professional wisdom and the decisions
and actions of specialists (1999: 154).

The emphasis on increasing the effectiveness of the Governance board, through consistent

monitoring, may stem from a report presented in 2004 by a sub-committee of the

Management Board that recommended that many CERIS operating documents be revised,

in addition to the codification of practices (CERIS 2005d: 40). In addition to the

assessment of the board, the Centre presents a yearly review to SSHRC which details the

activities of the boards, committees, adjudication process, research outputs, knowledge-

transfer initiatives, and any other centre events.

There are three central committees that complement the Governance Board: the

Management, Human Resources, and Data committees are tasked with different aspects

of the operation of the Centre. The ad hoc committees for Fundraising, Communications,

and the Standing Committee, appear in the overview of the organization of the Centre but

are not mentioned in the 2004/2005 report to SSHRC. The Management Committee,

formerly named Executive Committee, supports the operations of the Governance Board.

Headed by the Governance chair, the committee drafts policy documents for the Centre

based on the deliberations of the board. In addition, the committee drafts the yearly
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budget report and organizes the annual retreat. Support for the chair is provided by the

three Directors from their respective universities, a chair-designate or academic

representative, and a spokesperson from one of the affiliated community organizations.

These members have voting privileges while the only member to be ex-officio is the

CERIS Coordinator (CERIS 2005f: 1-2).

Reporting on and the assessment of staff and Centre activities is completed by the

Human Resources Committee, a sub-committee of the Governance Board. The Directors,

who are academics from one of the three founding universities, are subject to review by

the Human Resources Committee regarding their activities (CERIS 2005f: 2). In addition

to establishing criteria of evaluation for the Coordinator, CERIS directors and Domain

Leaders, the committee is also tasked with creating a working policy for the treatment of

volunteers and employees. A main preoccupation and function of this committee is the

measurement and evaluation of performance of fellow employees. Chaired by the chair

of the Governance Board, it is solely made up of board members, including two

academics from partnered universities and a stakeholder from the community (CERIS

2005g: 1).

The Human Resources Committee has the direct responsibility for assessing the

duties and tasks associated with the Director position. This committee also amends the

description of the position in the process of determining the eligibility for re-election of a

current director, or when initiating the nomination of a new director (CERIS 2005f: 2).

Potential Directors are nominated by the Vice-Presidents of their university and must be

approved by the Governance Board. The Directors are elected on a three-year term with

the possibility for re-election for an additional three years (CERIS 2005f: 2). In order to

ensure the effective leadership of the Centre, the Governance Board drafted a mandate to
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guide the Directors in their tasks. Ideally, Directors should be dedicated to applied

immigration research that is collaborative in focus and involves community organizations

or agencies. They are also “jointly responsible for research oversight, the coordination of

the grant adjudication process, fund-raising for grants, and sustained communication and

collaboration with the local communities, policymakers in the municipal, provincial, and

federal governments, researchers in the Greater Toronto Area and across Canada, and the

international community of immigration researchers” (CERIS 2005f: 1).

Additionally, Directors must follow and implement the policy guidelines

established by the Governance Board and provide annual reports that detail the activities

of the Centre. If approved by the board, the reports are forwarded to funders such as

SSHRC and CIC. Copies are also sent to the three partner universities (CERIS 2005f: 1).

The tasks Directors are expected to undertake require a significant investment of time.

On becoming a Director and reflecting on the financial resources of the centre, one

respondent commented:

I guess I got my arm twisted a bit…. I knew the governance structure of the
organization quite well…. I had a lot of close community contacts…. It was
suggested that in terms of senior scholars I guess I was one…. I got convinced to
run, to put my name in the hat for the position. Then I became [a] director…. We
don’t really have a lot of money where we can entice people with in terms of
research grants or anything like that. We have nice offices [but] the budgets
aren’t really very great for the Centres, so what gets done by the Centres each
year, because we run an operating budget of around $320,000 which is really not
very much money…. So I mean it’s pretty thin funding; now there’s support from
the universities.… I get some relief time from my university to participate of
course, but it’s still pretty thin on financing so it’s really kind of translated into a
much bigger impact that those dollars would suggest (Interview June 30, 2005).

As this respondent reflects on becoming a Director, it is evident that for this

individual, financial compensation was not a motivation as there was little available; thus,

with release time being the main reward for participation, one wonders what other
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motivations may exist for committing time to an organization that does not necessarily

financially reward its operators. I would suggest that a willingness to commit time to

operating the Centre is based on the shared and endorsed understanding of the goals of

the Centre. These goals suggest that by completing quality research, it is possible to

alleviate economic inequality through market inclusion, generate equitable housing, and

advocate for minority rights, thus enhancing social justice. The interests of both the

Centre and individuals who participate in governing it are ostensibly consonant, which

provides the basis for an understanding, “that each can solve their difficulties or achieve

their ends by joining forces or working along the same lines” (Miller and Rose 1990: 10).

This suggests that the alliances formed are based on the articulation of the social

problems facing immigrants and refugees and become shared by both CERIS board

members and Directors and appeal to potential members.

The third committee that operates at the Centre is the Data Committee. The task

of this committee is the “dissemination of statistical information about immigrants for

research and teaching purposes” (CERIS 2005e: 1). It is a responsibility of the

Governance Board that a Data Committee operates within the Centre to distribute data in

an appropriate way. An ex officio member of the Governance Board serves as chair of

the committee. This person is also an academic from a partnered university and must

represent the committee at meetings of the National Data Committee. Two additional

academics, each from one of the other two universities, join the chair. A City of Toronto

representative and a community organization member fill out the committees membership

(CERIS 2005e: 1). It is not clear from which City of Toronto department, or from which

community, these two members come. It is expressly the responsibility of the chair to

“facilitate linkages among community researchers and appropriate academic partners

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regarding CERIS data analysis” (CERIS 2005e: 1). Moreover, the chair must also ensure

that information about CERIS data sets is publicized via the CERIS website. Above all

other tasks, this committee is mandated to respond to and approve requests for CERIS

datasets, plus to manage, promote, and develop policies for the dissemination of CERIS

data sets. The committee comes to a decision on the dispersal of the statistical data sets

according to license agreements (CERIS 2005e: 1). Through this committee, control of

the release of statistical data, such as the Metropolis core data sets available to CERIS, is

left within the charge of academics, a City of Toronto representative and one community

member. The policy governing the use and distribution of data sets may not, when put

into practice, play out in predictable ways when the use of the data is not entirely

straightforward. Take, for example, the experiences of one academic with whom I spoke.

In the process of getting a research project underway that was funded by a crown

corporation and undertaken by an academic affiliated with Metropolis, access to the

Metropolis core data sets was needed. Additionally for this study, statistics from regional

Statistics Canada offices was needed. Attempting to encourage the regional Statistics

Canada centres to cooperate with each other, with the crown corporation, and with

Metropolis was a challenge according to this academic. He says that:

Dealing with that project and the data, the so-called Metropolis core data that I
need access to, the 2001 census Metropolis core data... and Metropolis negotiated
this with Statistics Canada, this was Statistics Canada’s contribution to
Metropolis, as a partner of the Metropolis organization, they would produce some
tabulations and cross-tabulations of the 2001 census that were not otherwise
available- fine, these have been produced, the research from the study I’m
engaged in is being funded by [another Metropolis partner], now when it comes to
making use of the core data… this is terribly frustrating for an academic that is not
getting paid to do this research at all, I mean there is no compensation for me,
money to hire research assistants but no compensation at all, it’s an extremely
frustrating situation. The use of the longitudinal survey of immigrants to Canada
and the so-called core data, Metropolis core data has been a struggle on two
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fronts, in terms of access to the data, use of the data and so on…. It’s a real
struggle (Interview July 21, 2005).

Although it is likely that not all requests for the use of data sets result in

frustration, it is clear that in this case the commitment to the research was not premised

necessarily on receiving compensation during the research process; rather, it concerns the

interests of the academic insofar as the research may prove beneficial for immigrants. In

other words, the potential benefit for the segment of society on which the project was

based may outweigh the aggravation of the research process, at least in the mind of this

academic.

The transfer, dissemination, and exchange of knowledge are central to the

Metropolis Project. At CERIS a Partnership Advisory Council (PAC) is composed of

representatives from agencies and organizations that serve immigrants, “school boards

and the education sector, municipal government, and local representatives of the

(Metropolis) federal funding partners” (CERIS 2005i). The council is built on a mandate

of encouraging exchange between CERIS and community agencies, counselling the

Governance Board on “research priorities and on the research process including

adjudication, dissemination, and community/academic partnerships” (CERIS 2005i).

This forum for discussion has identified the inability for some community organizations

to access and effectively utilize the research products on immigrants and refugees in their

program and service delivery. Emerging from this relationship is the CIC-funded training

project that is designed to ensure an increase to the “access by community organizations

and their clients to immigration and settlement research resources, deliver[y] [of]

specialized group training to help community agencies, [to] assist… agencies in the use of

research for program planning and service delivery, [and to] increase the capacity of
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community groups to participate in the priority setting processes to identify potential

CERIS funded immigration and settlement research” (CERIS 2005i)

The training program named Knowledge for Action – Action for Knowledge is

designed for settlement agencies and community organization volunteers and employees.

With training programs that teach participants how to develop “Management Information

Systems”, create “Client Databases”, conduct “Valid and Cost Effective House

Research”, and acquire and interpret census information, these programs are a means to

share methods developed to manage information on immigrants and refugees (CERIS

2005i). Such education programs have the potential to equip the Non-Governmental

Organization (NGO) sector with state-like management techniques which reflect the new

roles and responsibilities of the civil society sector. The academic member of the

Governance Board with whom I spoke noted the changing nature of the NGO sector when

he spoke about his own research on the “impact of government restructuring on NGOs

and the effects that has had in terms of settlement” (Interview June 30, 2005). With

increasing downloading of government-provided services onto NGOs in conjunction with

new types of funding regimes, from what was previously a stable and long term base to

short term project funding, the NGO sector has suffered. My respondent suggests that,

with regards to project funding:

Increasingly almost all of the government money is directed in that way and it has
really sort-of de-stabilized the sector. We talk a lot in the international
community and Canada about the Canadian model and how good the Canadian
model is in terms of the use of NGOs and in terms of settlement and state
sponsored… but through the third sector… what is usually not talked about,
especially in the international circles, is what a state of crisis that system is in,
because of what I would argue is because of some of these changes that have
occurred (Interview June 30, 2005).
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The Knowledge for Action – Action for Knowledge program is thus an attempt

through training to help stabilize the NGO sector, to provide service providers with the

tools they may need to cope with the new challenges of increased competition for funds

and responsibilities regarding service provision. Other training modules, including Using

Research for Advocacy, Introduction: How to Apply for Research Funds, Building Closer

Academic – Community Collaboration and Introduction to Research Methodology in

Immigration and Settlement, demonstrate the role and power of generating, collecting,

analysing and distributing particular kinds of knowledge about immigrants and refugees

(CERIS 2005i). As this specific kind of information, generated through utilizing certain

methodological techniques, is shared through collaboration between NGOs and

academics the network of affiliated agents is “brought into a loose and approximate, and

always mobile and indeterminate alignment” (Miller and Rose 1990: 10). Furthermore,

NGOs become a node in a circuit “through [their] position within the complex of

technologies, agents and agencies that make government possible” (Rose and Miller

1992: 189). Through a shift to project based funding schemes the federal government is

established as centre, as

a particular locale [which] can ensure that certain resources only flow through and
around these technologies and networks, reaching particular agents rather than
others, by means of a passage though ‘the centre’…. Hence the threat of
withholding of funds can be a powerful inducement to other actors to maintain
themselves within the network, or an incentive for them to seek to convince the
centre that their concerns and strategies are translatable and mutual (Rose and
Miller 1992: 189).

This is not to suggest that agents within the network are solely relays for information or

that they do not employ strategies and means for their own purposes. Agents, suggest

Rose and Miller,

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utilize and deploy whatever resources they have for their own purposes, and the
extent to which they carry out the will of another is always conditional on the
particular balance of force, energy and meaning at any given time and at any
point. Each actor, each locale, is the point of intersection between forces, and
hence a point of potential resistance to any one way of thinking and acting, or a
point of organization and promulgation of a different or oppositional programme
(Rose and Miller 1992: 190).

As an example of the potential for resistance, an advocate of equitable child care

with whom I spoke rested her autonomy, despite government funding, on the shelter of

the university. She indicated that the university ensures her freedom from state

intervention and interference, while she advocates to government officials and policy-

makers about child care issues through creating and maintaining an informal relationship

with them (Interview August 2, 2005). Through creating a network of contacts within the

government, she suggests that using research for policy is really about the relationships

between people. In the process of maintaining a relationship, she can make her research

on the benefits of state-funded child care known even when the political climate does not

warrant that particular course of action, thus providing an oppositional and alternative

program for consideration (Interview August 2, 2005).

Domains at CERIS

Social issues addressed by the research programs at CERIS, such as those that fall

within community and housing sectors, for example, are divided into domains. Currently

at CERIS there are six research domains which are an elaboration of topics from the three

domains established at the outset. The current domains are divided as follows: 1)

Citizenship, Religion and Culture, 2) Community, Neighbourhoods and Housing, 3)

Economics, 4) Education, 5) Health, and 6) Justice and Law (CERIS 2006). Each one of

the domains is led by an academic nominated by the Governance Board to coordinate the
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research and knowledge dissemination activities of the domain. When I asked an

academic, who had been a domain leader, about the domains at CERIS he responded that:

The domains at CERIS to be honest never really amounted to much, shall we say,
and perhaps that’s a negative statement. Metropolis has evolved in different ways
at the various centres, particularly at the four major Centres, I wouldn’t include
the Atlantic because it’s just getting under way, but at the four Centres that have
been there from the beginning these domains have evolved in quite different ways
at various Centres…. In the case of CERIS there was nothing here, there was no
infrastructure, there were some academics working on various issues concerning
immigration and settlement, but… there was nothing to build on and I think for
that reason it has become very difficult to establish any meaningful kind of
domain structure in the CERIS operation (Interview July 21, 2005).

The domains in particular and CERIS in general, through the establishment of set

topics for inquiry, define the limits within which research will be funded, based on the

degree to which a proposed project is representative of a domain category. Domains, to

the extent that they operate successfully, also centralize participating researchers, creating

infrastructure where there was none before, in a sense revealing those academics who are

working on domain-specific issues. During my research and volunteer activities at

CERIS I was asked to do just this. I was instructed to prepare extensive bibliographies to

identify academics conducting and publishing research in Canada on topics that, if

divided by subject, would fall within the domains. These bibliographies were going to be

distributed during a board meeting to give board members a clear picture of potential

academics to invite to the Centre to deliver lectures on their work. Once familiar with the

Centre and the domains, it was possible that the academics might apply for funding, and

if successful, this would link them into the network. In addition to centralizing

participating researchers, the domains have the potential to rationalize the investment in

categorical research through explicitly excluding potential research projects that do not

fall within the limits of a domain by merely identifying specific areas of inquiry. In other
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words, potential research projects that are premised on the investigation of topics that do

not fall within the domains may be excluded from funding, or academics may be inclined

to tailor their projects to appear applicable. As one academic who had received funding

for a project from CERIS explained to me, “nearly all funding in Canada is controlled by

the government, there are very few endowments and they are usually very particular, so

sometimes it is necessary to tailor a project to fit the funding source” (Interview August

15, 2005). The interests, in this case, of this particular academic were aligned only

insofar as was necessary to secure funding. This example reveals, however, that through

the control of funding both to CERIS and SSHRC, the government has made it

increasingly necessary for academics to “tailor” their projects, to align their interests with

those that fall within the funders’ purview. I would suggest additionally that the flow of

ideas, of what constitutes a relevant and fundable idea or issue, does not solely go in one

direction. The exchange of ideas can have as much influence on funders as on academics

looking for funding, yet the problem then becomes the relationship between power and

knowledge and the ability for those with power to define the criteria for fundable inquiry.

This leads us to the way in which funding is distributed at CERIS, through the

adjudication, by domain, of research proposals.

Adjudication and Selection of Research Proposals

Research projects at CERIS are adjudicated by domain by the six domain leaders

and four representatives from community organizations who compose the Adjudication

Committee. The process begins when the call for proposals is posted on the website,

elaborating a particular theme for the competition (CERIS 2004: 7). Themes are

developed at the annual research retreat often attended by academics, representatives

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from the federal funders, Metropolis Project Team members, and community organization

representatives (CERIS 2004a: 1).

In the 2005 Request for Proposals (RFP) competition process for example, the

theme was set around issues of “Immigration and Settlement” based on the outcome of

the consultations and presentations during the research retreat in 2004. Topics given

priority, but not exclusivity, for funding include proposals that deal with the assessment

of the economic performance of immigrants and refugees, the state of current

immigration policies, the role of and challenges faced by Immigrant Serving

Organizations (ISO), and what role information about Canada’s job market and

employment opportunities could play pre-migration (CERIS 2004: 7). Above all this

RFP theme was designed to direct research, although not exclusively as other topics

would be evaluated, towards issues on the factors and processes of integration and on the

institutions and organizations that provide settlement services and their difficulties in

doing so (CERIS 2004a: 1). Among a total of nine funded projects during the 2005

adjudication process, the projects reflect the RFP guidelines with titles such as, “Local,

Regional and Transnational Networks” and the “Integration and Settlement Dispersal of

Filipino Immigrants”, “Filipino Labour Market Integration and Workplace Experiences in

Toronto” and “Women’s identities and food: Practices of settlement and resistance in

immigrant Toronto”. There is thus, in this instance, a measure of consistency with

regards to the degree to which proposals submitted adhered to the theme indicating, at

least provisionally that academics did during this research funding competition submit

proposals that adhered to the general outline of the competition.

Each domain leader reviews all the submissions to their domain and then the

Adjudication Committee meets to review all submissions in accordance with the terms in
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the Request for Proposals which includes some important guidelines. Proposals are

appraised for scholarly merit and applicability for policy development. Interdisciplinary

and comparative proposals during the 2005 competition were encouraged. Community

collaboration and participation was a key component during this competition.

In particular, scholars new to the funding process at CERIS were strongly encouraged to

participate (CERIS 2004: 1-2). Describing the criteria for adjudicating research

proposals, an academic on the Governance Board commented that:

what we call for in proposals is that we strongly encourage but don’t necessarily
require, but very strongly encourage and look on very favourably that they have a
community, strong community linkages, a community partnership. So that’s very
much been a central feature of our Centre from the beginning. On the
adjudication committees we have academics but also members from community
agencies and what not, and sometimes local government bodies that sit on those
bodies, as long as they’re not funders, because there would be a contradiction
there. So, it’s highly informed by that, but also do absolutely require that the
research be policy, have a policy focus to it… how does one define that is another
issue… that is very much part of our mandate, that the piece that is going to be
researched doesn’t have a policy focus, it is unlikely that we’re going to… fund
such a thing (Interview June 30, 2005).

Although only described as a “strongly encouraged” aspect of the proposal,

community involvement was perceived as a necessity for another academic with whom I

spoke. He notes that he “submitted a proposal and the first one was rejected on the

grounds that I didn’t have a community partner, but the work was with labour unions

who, for good reason, didn’t want to affiliate themselves with the contents of a report that

they had no control over… [so] it didn’t meet CERIS criteria” (Interview November 25,

2005). Necessary for governing at a distance, experts of community, in this instance

experts linked with communities, reveal the dynamics of local values, codes of conduct

and practices essential for making communities real for those in the know to govern
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through communities; thus revealed is the pivotal role as sources of expert knowledge

academics play when they contribute research to policy development (Rose 1999: 189).

After receiving and reviewing all the proposals, the committee then ranks them.

In the case of a Committee member who may be in a conflict of interest position with an

academic submitting a proposal, the member is to withdraw from ranking and

commenting on the proposal. In the post-adjudication phase of deliberations, ranked

selections are passed to a Selection Committee which completes another ranking process

whereby some proposals are recommended for funding. This two-tier selection process

results in a group of proposals being delivered from the Selection Committee to the

Governance Board for the final selection and distribution of research funding (CERIS

2004: 7).

Submissions are judged according to a SSHRC-approved process. It consists of

three sets of criteria on which the submissions are evaluated: the scientific merit, the

support of CERIS’ Mandate, and format of the submission are judged to be aligned with

the CERIS vision. This vision emphasizes the necessity of partnership and collaboration

among academics, communities, disciplines, and universities on immigration and refugee

issues. Most proposals include a budgetary provision for hiring either a university- or

community-based research assistant to assist the principal investigator. It is also an

opportunity for a student to learn about the research process which is part of the CERIS

and Metropolis mandate (CERIS 2004: 6). Researchers, if funded, are required by CERIS

to submit both a final report and “a paper for consideration for the CERIS Working Paper

series within one year of the completion of the funding period. CERIS also requires

that… the Centre [be acknowledged] in all published works flowing from the funding

source” (CERIS 2004: 3).

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In addition to the RFP program, CERIS, beginning in 1998, has also funded Major

Research Initiatives (MRI). MRI are projects that are either too large in scope or are not

appropriate for the RFP competition. The MRI committee meets when needed to assess

potential projects. The funding for MRI projects may come in part from CERIS but, in

the case of large proposals, also from external funders upon application. These projects

are chosen to address current policy needs and anticipate future concerns through

consultations between the domain leaders (Metropolis Project 2003).

Knowledge Dissemination at CERIS

The dissemination of knowledge from CERIS occurs in a number of ways.

Information is available at specific sites: the Resource Room, the website, and national

and international Metropolis conferences provide sites through which research can be

circulated. Like all of the regional Centres, CERIS produces Working Papers, often

reporting the results of RFP competition research.

The dissemination of research is a central component of not only the CERIS

mandate, but also of the Metropolis vision. This is again reflected in the statements of an

academic on the Governance Board:

We want to encourage… obviously the widest dissemination of the material that

comes out of that, now obviously that differs from project to project and how
much we can entice the researchers to do it and tracking it sometimes, beyond the
sort of initial reports can be a little tricky as you lose track of people and then we
have to bug them to tell us what they’re doing, but basically what happens is that
of course there’s the traditional academic routes in which these things get
published, in journal articles, books, book chapters and so forth. The academic
conferences and of course the national Metropolis conferences and the
international conferences are extremely important venues for dissemination….
But I guess more explicitly for us are the reports available on the website, but we
also encourage people to convert their initial research into a working paper series,
as a part of the working paper series… and we’ve published quite a few of them
now, thirty-nine, forty…. (Interview June 30, 2006).
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The Working Papers at CERIS are written both by academics on their funded research

and by academics who submit their papers to the Centre to be published, however,

preference is given to papers that emerge from funded research. The papers, available for

purchase at CERIS or for download on the website, are often under one hundred pages in

length and address issues central to the Centre’s concerns. Drafts are submitted to the

editor, an academic affiliated with the Centre, who selects manuscripts for publication.

After publication, the copyright is maintained by the author of the paper (Springer et al

2006).

Unique to CERIS, and an example of a process of translation of academic research

into a policy-friendly format, is a publication called Policy Matters. Policy Matters “is a

series of reports on key policy issues affecting immigration and settlement in Canada.

The goal is to provide accessible, concise information on current immigration research

and its implications for policy development” (Yee et al 2003: 1). On the appeal of the

Policy Matters Initiative, a Director from the Centre relates that:

A lot of policy-makers for example, or community folks, even reading a

research–a working paper, is, given the work they need to do, it doesn’t always
happen, so how can we sort of transfer that knowledge in a more readily
accessible, useful fashion…. They’re reduced existing work that’s being done, or
been done. A large number of them were out of the working papers, although
that’s not the only source in which we’ve done these and we’ve been publishing
them on a monthly basis, so I think we’re up to nineteen or something of that
nature…. Up to now we’ve been doing them monthly, so last year we did twelve
issues, that’s been an important source of dissemination… we select the ones we
do, we want them to have some currency, some obvious policy relevance…. The
reaction we’ve gotten is that this is quite an important initiative that seems to have
a big uptake among government and community folks, but also academics as well
who are busy…. The other thing we’ve done to sort of facilitate the Policy Matters
piece is that we don’t let the authors do it themselves, we actually have a graduate,
a PhD student has been doing these who was actually a senior policy advisor…
that I employed… to… translate them, now often using the author’s own words…
so it’s still the author’s work and they double check it of course…. We wanted to
distance it from the academic or community person whoever happens to be doing
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the research… because it’s difficult… if you’re that closely involved to sort out…
what are the bare essentials, and what are- then of course the thing we do very
consciously, very deliberately, is highlight the policy relevance, policy
implications, and so we really do pull that out of the literature, and if it’s not
explicit we make it explicit…. Everybody’s been wildly enthusiastic about that
because… it’s difficult for many people to find the time to do that kind of
translation, it’s difficult work (Interview June 30, 2005).

Perhaps translating research into a form that informs policy is understood by no

one better than a former policy analyst who has been working towards a PhD. What is

clear through the process of translating research into a Policy Matters document is that,

although the words may stay roughly the same, the policy relevance is made explicit.

What is significant about that process is the emphasis and attention accorded to those

aspects of the research that can inform technologies of government, that enable the

exercise of a power to govern at a distance through the inscription, and in this case

distillation, of mobile and comparable information. Policy Matters make knowledge

dissemination a rapid, reliable, and “systematic flow of information from individual

locales… to a centre” (Rose and Miller 1992: 186). To the extent that the Policy Matters

documents identify problems it becomes possible for decision-makers to judge the state of

the problem and devise ways to get from one state to another through devising policies

and programs.

The features common to all the Centres (management boards, committees, and

stakeholder involvement) are operationalized in regionally unique ways. Also common to

all Centres are initiatives to disseminate research knowledge through the publication of a

working paper series and the contribution of research reports to the online web library.

Each of these Centres attempts to combine a national and regionally specific research

funding plan by coordinating, through committees and regular meetings, with the

Metropolis Project Team. By formalizing regular meetings between stakeholders in both

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the national and regional structure of the project, the result is the informal exchange of

knowledge between academics and decision-makers.

Regular contact is meant to collapse the organizational culture divide by creating

working relationships that are designed to enhance and bolster research capacity

(Metropolis Project 1998a: 1). Regular contact and discussion also facilitate the

alignment of interests insofar as political rationalities can be translated into an idiom that

is both amenable to the creation of technologies of governing and to the generation of

research themes and questions that fuel the funding process (Rose and Miller 1992: 179).

As systems of thought and ways of thinking act as intellectual machinery for government

to “render reality thinkable” (Rose and Miller 1992: 179), so too is the goal of

Metropolis, through its Centres, to create

a machine – an enduring research capacity that is external to government [in the

sense that research is completed by university affiliated academics], that
genuinely informs decision-making, that can phrase questions in ways which have
not yet engaged the bureaucracy or which may prove embarrassing to defenders of
the existing order (Metropolis Project 1998a: 1).

The Centres translate systems of thought through research with communities and

on immigrants and refugees and through collaboration with front-line NGOs and

community organizations, but also translate the political rationalities as expressed by

government department funders. Academic researchers, with an imperative through their

research to generate a positive impact for the communities with which they work, act as

cross-translators for both communities and government while standing between the two.

They act as facilitators for this translation process in fact enabling the thoughts, feelings,

aspirations, desires, and needs of immigrants and refugees to be understood by

government decision-makers. Such understanding has both positive and negative

connotations. Although sharing information may result in increased social service

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provision, policy reform, or local initiatives to increase the well-being of immigrants and

refugees, it also facilitates another process. Centres of Excellence as parts of a

knowledge-generating network facilitate the transmission of knowledge used, as Rose and

Miller suggest, for governing at a distance (1992: 181). The government, dependent on

knowledge for its operation, accumulates knowledge on immigrants and refugees for

purposes of devising policies that establish schemes for enabling the integration and

management of people. Knowledge thus enables the translation of political rationalities

into technologies of government (Rose and Miller 1992: 187). Government is capable of

mobilizing this knowledge only insofar as power can be stabilized in the enduring

network. This can occur:

to the extent that the mechanisms of enrolment are materialised in various more or
less persistent forms – machines, architecture, inscriptions… techniques for
documenting and so forth. These stabilize networks… [to the extent that] ‘power’
is the outcome of the affiliation of persons, spaces, communications and
inscriptions into a durable form (Rose and Miller 1992: 184).

The structure of Metropolis and the regional Centres satisfies these criteria. The

Centres have become part of a stabilized network through the development of a dense

infrastructure that facilitates contact between academics and stakeholders. The power to

extract knowledge from this network results from the coordinated effort of the Metropolis

Project Team to solidify the affiliations of the national and regional Centres through

consistent interaction to the extent that the relationships become durable.

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Conclusion

I began this thesis by inquiring about the limits within which it became possible

for social science academics to contribute to social policy and if they felt a moral

imperative to do so. I have attempted to argue and articulate the specific processes that

have facilitated a tenuous alignment of interests between academics and the Metropolis

Project. Since social science research was not readily recognized for its applicability to

policy development, I began by investigating the processes through which it became not

only desirable, but of strategic importance. Through the increasing control of funding by

the government, combined with the attempts of social scientists to demonstrate their

utility for government decision-making thereby legitimizing the necessity of their

funding, and processes that have rationalized social science research, there has been an

increase in government funding for strategic research (that is, research for policy

development or of use to decision-makers). I have also attempted to demonstrate that the

increase in strategic research funding has coincided with the increasing intervention of the

government into the areas of culture and ethnicity in accord with rising levels of

immigration and an interest in managing cultural diversity through policy development.

These themes are articulated in the federal policy priorities of the Project which provide a

framework for the research funding process at the regional Centres.

In this exploration of the ways in which political rationalities can become

technologies for governing at a distance through the utilization of knowledge about

communities, it was necessary to briefly reflect on the process of policy-making. Policy-

making, according to a federal civil servant, “is an art; there is no formula for it, nor can it

be assumed that anyone with the ‘right’ information and analysis is capable of making

decisions in the executive suite. Individual factors such as temperament affect the
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capacity to make policy. When it comes to rethinking policy, analysis and information are

important, but intuition and judgment are also important - and too often overlooked”

(Smith 1996: 12-3). As this civil servant indicates, policy-making is to some extent an

interpretive and artistic process whereby knowledge, in the case of immigrants and

refugees, is translated by the policy maker’s judgement and intuition and, I would add,

values, beliefs, morals, and a host of other factors. The process of rendering knowledge

into a course of action is inflected with the cultural and social moorings within which it

occurs. According to Shore and Wright, policies can “reveal the structure of cultural

systems” (1997: 8), yet they can also reveal the limits within which ideas have salience

for agents within both the political and non-partisan areas of government, and the

discursive frameworks that underpin them. The increasingly interventionist state has

made the development of effective policy of prime importance, and the result has been

the utilization of social science research which, when strategically-oriented, provides a

knowledge base.

The Metropolis Project epitomizes the ability to set the limits within which

strategic research is funded. The Project’s formal structure, comparable to the formal

structure of the policy-making process, facilitates the informal person-to-person or face-

to-face interaction of stakeholders, thereby opening a space for a discursive framework

(as limits within which stakeholders agree to discus issues) where social issues can be

translated into research questions. My analysis of the alignment of interests between

academics and the Metropolis Project has been based on the proposal that a moral

imperative to act and to assist the government in addressing social issues has become an

actuality. This moral imperative, although not the only reason why social scientists

choose to conduct research for the Metropolis Project, is with no doubt a potential
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incentive to conduct research for policy development. Yet, while I am positing that

interests are aligned through the processes mentioned above, I recognize that insofar as

this alignment is processual, discursive, and hegemonic, it is also fragile (Roseberry

1996). Akin to the suggestion by Miller and Rose that “ ‘government’ is a congenitally

failing operation” (1990: 10), I would hasten to add that the alignment of interests is ever

only provisionally successful insofar as they are susceptible to fragmentation and

rearticulation through the “flow of ideas” (Interview August 12, 2005) which open spaces

for alternative discourses, and the critique of state policy. Using the Metropolis Project as

a platform for publishing, the possibility exists that academics through strategic research

can contribute to the creation of new forms of state-craft that recognize a multiplicity of

social histories, values, and conceptions of morality.

The Metropolis Project, as I have come to comprehend it, occupies a point at

which two sets of processes converge. The first set of processes, represented by the

macro-social and historical information I provided in chapter two, have served to

increasingly, albeit tenuously, align the interests of academics with those of funding

providers specifically, and through the increase in funding for strategic research, with the

government generally. These processes, although conceivably articulated differently in

Quebec than the rest of Canada as a result of the Quiet Revolution, serve to identify the

pragmatics of the increasing control over funding by the government, and the utility the

social sciences have had for decision-making as the interests of the government became

directed away from idealistic encouragement of social responsibility to active social and

economic intervention (see Brooks and Gagnon 1988).

The second set of processes, borne out in chapters three and four, concern the

micro-local systems that, despite their formality, operate with some success as a result of
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their informality. In chapter three I attempted to problematize policy as a product of a

cultural system that is, lest we forget, produced by agents of the state who are citizens of

the country, and who, to some degree, inflect the policy process with their nuanced and

embodied selves as gendered, cultured, and situated individuals (see Heyman 1995). I

also endeavored to explore how the process of making policy is a value laden exercise

that is informed by knowledge. These become important considerations when analysing

the Metropolis Project in chapter four. As operators of the Centres of Excellence,

academics are more than solely researchers or experts of community in the Project;

academics have a responsibility to recognize the processes and means through which their

participation leads to the creation of policy and the potential impact it may have.

Moreover, their moral imperative to act must also include the identification and

exposition of structures and relations of power that underpin the use of academic research

for strategic purposes. Thus, these two sets of processes, the macro-social and micro-

local, have become centralized in the Metropolis Project which exemplifies neo-liberal

forms of knowledge (and resource) mobilization characteristic of the “new economy”

which recognizes knowledge as a fundamental resource for national economic success

(see Sweetman 2003).

The third phase of the Metropolis Project, if funding is secured, will begin in

2007. The recent announcement that the SSHRC is taking on the role of a “knowledge

council” rather than a “granting council” coheres with considerable ease with the

ideology of the Project, but it remains to be seen if this shift in perspective for the

SSHRC, as it is a majority funder, will affect the role and function of the Project. The

SSHRC, in its strategic plan for 2006-2011, outlines the plans to create the conditions in

which social science research can be utilized to its fullest extent by decision-makers faced
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with complex problems. A strong emphasis will be placed on the development of

strategic research plans that will mobilize knowledge, putting it to work. Additionally, it

is noted that the “complexity of global economic, political and social change has

convinced leaders in key sectors that social sciences and humanities research is vital to

building a just, prosperous and culturally vibrant world” (SSHRC 2005: 9). It is without

doubt that immigration and refugee issues will continue to occupy a prominent place on

the list of priorities for the government and political party in power and, as such, will

garner financial support in some capacity. Yet, what is unique about the Metropolis

Project is the recognition that informal dialogue and interaction facilitates the exchange of

knowledge, and, insofar as this occurs between academics and other stakeholders, there is

the potential that, more than developing the policy capacity of elements of governance or

the ability to govern at a distance, the transmission of knowledge will educate decision-

makers about the lived realities of migration. As an organizer of the Project suggests, the

virtue of the Project is its ability to circulate the tools to reformulate problems through an

educational framework (which, as happens, academics are well equipped to do, that

is–educate) (Interview December 2, 2005).

The translation of political rationalities into technologies of government through

the use of knowledge, generated by the Metropolis Project, has at its core the recognition

that policy is about social engineering through intervention; moreover, it is believed that

policy based on the knowledge and research of academics will be more effective,

innovative, and create a prosperous nation. In a speech for the Eighth National

Metropolis Conference in Vancouver, Canada, in March 2006, Minister of Citizenship

and Immigration, Monte Solberg, made a speech seductively espousing the duty and

responsibility of academics to contribute research to policy development. His discursive

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idiom, saturated with emotive language of a moral invective, elucidates interests that

breach the boundary between the organizational cultures of academics and decision-

makers. He states that:

This Metropolis conference is a good example of how we can bring people

together to talk about the issues and search for solutions that ultimately shape the
government policies that help people. The decisions the Government of Canada
makes today will affect Canadian society tomorrow. Which is why we can’t make
those decisions based on news-cycles or newspaper headlines. Canadians and
newcomers alike have a lot at stake in the issues you’ll be discussing. Their hopes
and dreams are on the line. Again, immigration policy is always about people
which is why I am so honoured to be the Minister, and I suspect it is why you are
here today. You care about those people, and you care about Canada. I thank you
for that… (CIC 2006).

To conclude, it is ironic to me, at least, that I draw from a political official to

conclude my research on the alignment of interests between academics and the

Metropolis Project; yet, his speech demonstrates unmistakably that the imperative to act

is felt deeply by academics and clearly understood by the political powers that be.

Rose and Miller suggest that “personal autonomy is not the antithesis of political power,

but a key term in its exercise, the more so because most individuals are not merely the

subjects of power but play a part in its operations” (1992: 174). In this attempt to

convince academic participants at the conference that their interests are best served

working together, Solberg does so without actually revealing the nature of the political

interests of the state; yet he does define the limits within which a coercive control is

enacted through consensus (see Nader 1997) and poses an agreement on a set of defined

terms of reference, the terms within which it has become possible for academics to

contribute research products for social intervention through policy development. In other

words, Solberg’s comments demonstrate clearly that the neo-liberal political rationalities

underpinning the centralization and mobilization of academic knowledge are premised on

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the tenuous control and subtle manipulation of discourses of moral ethics and values that

predominate in an era of state funding shortfalls and few alternative funding sources.

Therefore, the translation of political rationalities into an ethos that resonates in the social

science academic community is a key component in the operation of a political power

which is based within and materialized through neo-liberal discourses for the effective

mobilization of knowledge as a resource for state planning.

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