In The Tank

Opinion is divided about the importance of Canadian think tanks, those private sector “institutes,” most of them funded by large corporations, that seek to influence governments in matters of public policy. For example, historian Michael Bliss, writing in the National Post, argued that “for some years Parliament, the universities and the national civil service have been increasingly upstaged as centres of political discussion by organizations such as the C. D. Howe Institute, the Conference Board of Canada, the Institute for Research on Public Policy . . . the Donner Canadian Foundation.” Indeed, it is from such private research groups, not from elected representatives, senior civil servants, or cloistered academics, that most advanced policy prescriptions seem to come. But John Ibbitson of the Globe and Mail dismisses them. “Most think tanks in Canada are a waste of time,” he has written. “Those on the right twist and distort data to prove the country is overtaxed and underproducing. Those on the left use the same data to prove that society is increasingly unequal and unjust.”

Think tanks use a variety of media to spread their messages — the Internet, in-house publications, conferences, forums, even radio — but they tend to concentrate on Canadian newspapers, which often report the release of a new think tank report as though some actual news event had taken place. And the papers give the think tanks access to op-ed pages as well, where mere opinion doesn’t need to disguise itself as news. Many or most newspapers, and the news services that supply so much of their content, often (but not consistently) try to provide readers with a little context by describing a particular think tank as either politically left or right. I’ll apply the same principle here in taking a look at how a representative cross-section of think tanks — the right-wing Fraser Institute, the more moderate C. D. Howe Institute, and the left-of-centre Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives — fared in three similarly diverse newspapers over a two-year period. I chose the dates May 1, 2003, to May 1, 2005, because the stretch of time seemed long enough to reveal general trends, and because it was largely free of economic downtowns, terrorist attacks, or other calamities that might skew the results.

During the period in question, the National Post, in one context or another, mentioned these three think tanks a combined 373 times, with the C. D. Howe getting the most hits. The moderate Globe was no slouch either, mentioning one or another of these think tanks 305 times. The liberal Toronto Star, the country’s highest-circulation daily, ran 210 mentions of various sorts, including 41 for the Canadian Centre on Policy Alternatives. Taken together, the three think tanks got space in these important newspapers — whether positively or negatively, with or without contextualizing adjectives — more than once each day. If one takes into account not only the other media, but also the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, the David Suzuki Foundation, the Pembina Institute, the Parkland Institute, the relatively new Martin Prosperity Institute, or any number of the hundred or so Canadian institutions generally referred to as think tanks, one sees that they blanket the landscape like a heavy snowfall covering the Prairies.

Given their corporate funders and ideological leanings, most Canadian think tanks tend toward predictable viewpoints. Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa put it well in the Globe last February when he wrote, “Take the Conference of Defence Associations, a think tank that got $500,000 from dnd [Department of National Defence] last year. That money comes not with strings, but with an entire leash.” Whether you believe think tanks encourage or limit democratic action, individually and collectively they certainly nudge public opinion (and hence politics) this way and that. To which one might add that they also offer homes for former politicians to retire to — and for newer ones to incubate in. Stephen Harper’s opponents often charge that he never held a real job before entering Parliament. Not true. For years, he headed up the National Citizens Coalition, a think tank.

The term “think tank” has traditionally been associated with the rand Corporation. Founded in 1945 by Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, the commanding general of the US Army Air Forces, and a group of defence personnel and contractors, it offered advice to the Pentagon about the development and procurement of new weapons systems. rand contravened the perception of think tanks as clusters of benign scholars musing about the state and the universe, or of disparate intellectuals who could be retained by those wishing a fresh perspective on some matter of public concern. From the beginning, think tanks have been more focused than that.

Most of the serious research on Canadian think tanks has been done by Donald E. Abelson, chair of the department of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His groundbreaking book Do Think Tanks Matter? Assessing the Impact of Public Policy Institutions has proven enormously influential since its appearance in 2002. Part of its appeal is the way it brings Canadian think tanks into sharper focus by comparing them with those in the US. This and Abelson’s other works on the subject have led some readers — this one, certainly — to infer that whereas US think tanks, historically, have often been contracted to do work on long-range projects in defence and foreign policy (that the American government felt unable to undertake efficiently), Canadian think tanks have generally dealt with economic affairs. Founded in 1954, the Conference Board of Canada is a good example. It now has hundreds of staff and an annual budget of nearly $36 million, and is Canada’s largest such institution.

The great boom in think tanks came in the 1970s and 1980s, which Abelson calls the “advocacy think tank era.” He writes:

What distinguished advocacy think tanks from the earlier types . . . was not their desire to study public p