Yes, certainly. Thank you.
First of all, let me say that I'm not here representing McGill, of course. I was asked to show up and participate. I'm obviously very happy to do that.
Secondly, let me say that program evaluation is a very substantial area of research in economics at the moment, and a lot of progress has been made in methods for providing much more credible evaluations. In a sense, what one would like to do in evaluating a program is to ask the following question. It's a counterfactual question: how are things, and how would things have been without this program?
Now, it's notorious that counterfactuals are very difficult to evaluate, but many people, particularly over the 15 or 20 years, have been working on ways of providing more credible answers to questions of this type. I think there is some expertise within the federal civil service in this area, and there are many people within the academic sphere who are specialized in this area. It's also employed a great deal in the area of health economics, for example, where people are interested in the impacts of programs and how scarce dollars can be well allocated in making expenditures in hospitals or what have you.
The day when one can simply guess whether a program is a good idea or not has passed, I think, and regular formal evaluations by people outside the interested groups should routinely be incorporated. It would be very easy.... I think you already have expertise within the federal civil service, both in the people who could do such things and in the people who know the relevant parties within, for example, the academic community.
But I think this should become the norm at this point: that on some schedule—I'm getting used to saying that word in the American way since my speech recognition software doesn't get my Canadian accent anymore—the government might want to routinely evaluate all programs of this type that come up. I could easily put you in touch with some good people that could do that, but again, there is expertise within the civil service. We should not, I think, at this point in time, simply be guessing about whether money is well spent or not.