Thank you for the question.
I think ethical space is a useful methodology, because it is not a prescriptive approach. It is co-created by the parties who have chosen to enter into an ethical space together, so it has been very useful in arriving at some very rich outcomes.
For example, we utilized ethical space in the province of Alberta in some of the work that I did there on health. We worked with the province and the federal government through the methodology of ethical space to arrive at some very significant outcomes of a trilateral nature in the context of policy-making and standard setting around indigenous health.
We also used it in the Joint Committee on Climate Action, which is a committee that was co-appointed by the Prime Minister and the Assembly of First Nations. It was used to talk about how to understand the integration of indigenous knowledge in the context of climate policy and climate action in Canada.
We have also seen it used in a number of research fields. It is formalized in the context of the tri-council guidelines on research with indigenous peoples. It's in the first part of the chapter on indigenous peoples. I think it actually used to form part of the CIHR guidelines that predated the tri-council guidelines as well.
Ethical space is not really a new concept in Canada by any means. It's been used quite broadly and widely. There are a lot of different iterations of what ethical space might look like, and I don't think that's something to be concerned about. In fact, ethical space is something that is intended to be co-created for a specific outcome or in a specific process, understanding that different parties come from different perspectives, and to help create institutional change to work toward reconciliation.
It is not about privileging one party over another. It is actually about trying to create a mechanism that prevents the problem we've seen—I think this forms part of your mandate—which is the possibility of systems clash.
The Alberta example that I raised, which has a parallel advisory panel approach, is also reflective of ethical space, because the same issue is presented to both panels, which will consider them in the context of their own chosen mandate and roles in accordance with their own expertise and practice. The outcomes of both panels are then presented to the chief scientist in the Government of Alberta as a way of informing policy development and implementation and, in ethical space, in a context of dialogue and cross-validation of those outcomes.