Joanna Massie

Canadian Public Administration: This article seeks to understand why deliberative civic engagement is chosen as a method of engagement by policymakers, using two jurisdictions as exploratory cases: the Nova Scotia Health Authority's Community Conversations about Collaborative Family Practice Teams and Algoma Ontario Health Team's Citizen Reference Panel on Integrated Care. The paper finds that in both instances, policymakers chose deliberative civic engagement largely because of situational factors, rather than through the theoretical claims of different methods of engagement and the goals of the engagement activity.

Alana Cattapan, Julianna M. Acker-Verney, Alexandra Dobrowolsky, Tammy Findlay, April Mandrona

University of Toronto Press: This article examines the significant constraints on, the necessity for, and the opportunities around community engagement in a time of confinement. We consider the compounded challenges faced by marginalized communities in the context of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, and we follow this with reflections on the triumphs and tensions of emergent engagement practices. We then describe four exercises that we conducted before the onset of the pandemic in a research project exploring public engagement from the ground up in relation to policy-making, and we suggest how the lessons learned may be applied to contemporary decision making.

Kimberly McGrail, Jeffrey Morgan, Arjumand Siddiqi

The Lancet Regional Health - Americas: We will likely look back on 2020 as a turning point. The pandemic put a spotlight on existing societal issues, accelerated the pace of change in others, and created some new ones too. For example, concerns about inequalities in health by income and race are not new, but they became more apparent to a larger number of people during 2020. The speed and starkness of broadening societal conversation, including beyond the direct effects of COVID-19, create an opportunity and motivation to reassess our understanding of health.

Alpha Abebe & Rhonda C. George

The Conversation: It is time for us to accept that policy failure and lack of community engagement in policy decision-making go hand-in-hand. The fact that the communities with the worst health outcomes are also the communities least likely to be meaningfully engaged in health policy decision-making should not be a surprise. As it stands, a growing body of evidence suggests that while many decision-making bodies proclaim publicly that they want input from racialized and other marginalized communities, many institutions are not willing to listen to, accept or integrate what those communities have to say.

This is a revised version of the blog, Unpacking the ‘Public’ in Public Engagement: In Search of Black Communities, previously published here.

Laura Tripp, Meredith Vanstone, Carolyn Canfield, Myles Leslie, Mary Anne Levasseur, Janelle Panday, Paula Rowland, Geoff Wilson, Jeonghwa You, Julia Abelson

Health Expectations: The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on all aspects of the health system. Little is known about how the activities and experiences of patient, family and caregiver partners, as a large group across a variety of settings within the health system, changed due to the substantial health system shifts catalysed by the pandemic. This paper reports on the results of a survey that included questions about this topic. This study provides a snapshot of Canadian patient, family and caregiver partners' perspectives on the impact of COVID-19 on their engagement activities.

Ambreen Sayani, Alies Maybee, Jackie Manthorne, Erika Nicholson, Gary Bloch, Janet A Parsons, Stephen W Hwang, Aisha Lofters

Healthcare Policy: The unequal social and economic burden of the COVID-19 pandemic is evident in racialized and low-income communities across Canada. Importantly, social inequities have not been adequately addressed and current public policies are not reflective of the needs of diverse populations. Public participation in decision-making is crucial and there is, therefore, a pressing need to increase diversity of representation in patient partnerships in order to prevent the further exclusion of socially marginalized groups from research and policy making.

Ludo Glimmerveen, Sierk Ybema, Henk Nies

Administration and Society: Highlighting public-service actors’ deliberately tokenistic or self-serving efforts, existing literature has shown that public participation often involves the co-optation of sympathetic citizens. In contrast, our study demonstrates that participatory advocates may discredit and marginalize critical voices despite their own inclusive, democratic ideals. We analyze the entangled legitimacy claims of participating citizens and “inviting” public-service actors, capturing (a) the often-unintended dynamics through which the inclusion of particular participants legitimizes the exclusion of others, while illuminating (b) the tenacious propensity of participatory initiatives to establish “constructive cooperation” as the norm for participation and, subsequently, to normalize exclusionary practices.

Chelsea Gabel, Nicole Goodman

The Conversation: Indigenous communities should be able to vote using the voting methods they choose, especially during a pandemic. Online voting is a method many Indigenous communities have deployed in recent years and others are looking to use. Our report, Indigenous Experiences with Online Voting, provides eight best practices for communities wanting to use online voting as the COVID-19 pandemic lingers. The report also puts forth eight recommendations, which are the result of longstanding research collaborations with Indigenous communities as part of the First Nations Digital Democracy Project.

Alison Thompson Paula Chidwick Lisa Jennifer Schwartz Stephanie Nixon Lisa Forman Robert Sibbald

Healthy Debate: COVID-19 has highlighted the ethical challenges in our health-care system, and nowhere is this more apparent than in an overcrowded intensive care unit. ICUs are where the sickest of the sick receive life-saving treatments and where their crashing bodily functions are taken over by high-tech machines.

Chandrima Chakraborty, Fallon Hewitt

Hamilton Spectator: A report about anti-Asian racism across Canada, published by the Toronto chapter of the Chinese Canadian National Council (CCNC), is the first of its kind to detail the nature of racist attacks that have escalated during the pandemic. Chandrima Chakraborty, a researcher and professor at McMaster University, is working separately to “trace back” the reasons behind the rise of anti-Asian racism in Canada and uncover the unconscious biases in society that “allow for us to quickly point a finger at racialized minorities.”