 Seeing you slowly come into the room. Awesome. Yeah, we'll go ahead and get started in just a second once the attendee list stops populating a little bit. My name is Linda Kellum. I'm the chair of the Help, a Godort Help. I'm in an accidental government information librarian webinar series committee. I'm the committee chair. So thank you for coming. Okay, so we can go ahead and get started. Thanks for everybody for coming. I hope you are having a wonderful Monday. So this is the Help. I'm an accidental government information librarian webinar series brought to you by the ALA government documents round table. And we are very excited for our webinar today. We do have, we're taking our usual hiatus in June and July. In June, we will have our ALA government documents round table meetings from June 13th to 17th. And then during ALA, if you're actually going to the ALA conference in person, we will have some sessions there. It's really cool sessions actually. It's like, and it's our 50th anniversary. So we will have a party. So you should come to our party for our 50th anniversary. The Help, we, the committee will have a meeting on June 17th at 2 p.m. central. It's on Zoom. So if you are interested in the work of the Help committee or the work of the Help webinar series, please come to the committee. That'd be great. We'd love to see you all there. Part of that's going to be talking about things you would like to do for webinars for the coming year. And unfortunately, Larry, Larry is our incoming chair of the committee and he is sick today. So unfortunately, he cannot be with us, but I'm here. So yay. So stay tuned for our upcoming webinars for the next year. We're really excited about some of the ones we have in the works. You can see more of our webinars on our YouTube channel, which I'll put in chat for a second. And today's webinar is called Finding Canadian Government Policy and its Analysis. And our speaker today is Helen LeBlanc. Helen has been an academic government information librarian for over 25 years and a Canadian federal government librarian before that. She is currently the government information and political science librarian at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. And she's done sabbaticals at the foreign affairs and international trade library in Ottawa, the European Commission Library in Brussels and at the Library of Congress in the European Reading Room in Washington, DC. Thank you very much, Helen, for the webinar. And we'll go ahead and switch over. Thank you very much. And I'll share my screen now. Great. So I have quite a lot, probably too much to say today. First of all, I guess I'll have to tell you that I'm really hoping that it is my American colleagues on here because I dare say if I have any Canadian colleagues on our call today, they know all this for sure. The other thing is I focused on the accidental part of the accidental librarian piece. So I am speaking somewhat to an audience that I don't know. I really don't know as far as government information librarians or people with this interest if what your experience is with government information, if it's really expertise. And I'm presuming there's a lot of expertise here too. But I did focus on trying to make it fairly basic for people that may have not gone into this aspect of government information. So yes, this is me. And my email's at the end. I will probably go over a lot of time so if I don't finish my presentation, please do contact me if you have any questions or you just wanted to catch another one of those sources I might have been talking about. So today, it's pretty ambitious, but I'd like to make sure I touch on at least these five points. Some basic points about public policy, which would just be those things as a librarian. I'm not a professor and I don't write books on as an expert in public policy. But these are some of the things I found along the way more like tripped over when I'm trying to look for public policy. And they're pretty basic again. I tried to keep them that way in case you haven't really done this type of searching. Then I'll just touch on some of the background information and current events sources that I am heavily relying upon. Government information and policy in general. And again, these are just some of the examples from the Canadian context. And then again, within that, some examples, you'll see a lot of screenshots today. I apologize. My internet connectivity is very flusy through, first of all, through PowerPoint and then Zoom. It just doesn't work well on my computer. So I've had to rely a lot on these shots so that my computer doesn't die in the middle of presentation. And then again, the last piece is touching on the analysis of government and its policy. So in my world as an academic librarian, and I'm sure that any academic librarian would tell you that there's one thing about finding a source, or in this case, government policy, but the flip side, of course, in a lot of academic pursuits is getting into not just the source, but why, right? So that's that whole analysis piece. There are tons and tons and tons of definitions out there on the web, in books and journals. So I'm just going to pick a very simplistic one. And one of those things is just understanding a bit about government policies being this collective of, I like that phrase, authoritative, decisional output. So that collective of all the rules and programs, services, all the things created to address a particular issue in a system. The problem I find is this day and age, we are encountering, of course, on the internet, when you come to a government site, or if you're just doing a search, millions of hits, right? Millions of hits for many people across the world trying to find a government policy piece. And so a lot of the times, again, students that come to me, I'm not quite sure, have I got a page here that talks about policy? Is this the policy right here? So one of those things I just wanted to touch on is often these days, when you're on the websites, it's as basic for us is looking at perhaps the language. We may not be able to find a website or document that is so interface that this is what this is a policy piece. But this language, I just wanted to emphasize a lot of times those positive language words, words such as framework, initiatives, service, program, all those sort of actual tangible guidelines, these help us know that this is a policy, small p policy. So again, the other words that are great are those positive verbs like promoting and growing and putting in place, new, new, new, you know, promoting new things that are coming. So in some ways, is again, when you're approaching a website, it's just to realize the language, if it's informing you that if it's not the actual policy document, it's telling me something very important about policy. And government policy can be often, we talk about all this stuff that's written down, but often it is the inactions, it's the stuff that's not written down. So again, in my world, academics often want to look at those two things, the actual tangible in the sense of the information that they can find, that the real bare bones, this is what the policy is. But what are governments not doing to address an issue? So some people like to follow the policy in the sense of finding the data. So this day, actually, I wrote this before, I use this example many, many, for many years, actually. So way before whatever is going on down in, of course, DC right now, in front of the Senate, excuse me, the Supreme Court. But also, it's beginning to be discussed here too, you know, trying to reopen an issue, of course. But so we may have a political party that says, for example, that a woman's choice for abortion is her right, because perhaps it's in law. But what do our actual governments do to help this policy go through? So sometimes studying government policy might be simply, not simply, it's part of it is researching the data. So how many clinics are out there? Or how far away do women live from the clinics? There was a popular program many, many years ago in our province, but it's not new, of course. And that's the idea of, for example, sending children, children get sent to school, but giving them breakfast in the morning to, of course, help the learning process. So a government may be very quick and easy to say, oh, my goodness, we totally support this policy. We're all for it. But when you start digging in, perhaps, to the financial data, so how much money was actually spent this year on these programs? Or how many schools have these programs are getting the money to have these programs? So sometimes this can tell us a lot about the actions or inactions. Basically, is this a policy for this government or not? Another point I wanted to say is how do we actually find it, like when we're researching it? So I've found there's there's two ways and you're not really going to do one or the other. It's usually a mix of both. So one of them is just simply researching what are the stated things in printer by mouth that a government says they're going to do to deal with an issue. So it's one thing, of course, to say something. It's quite another thing to do it. So often researchers will need this idea of the chronological, the actual factual things that were done. And we can find those things, of course, in media, we can find those things following in Canada, the debates, for example, what we're actually said, but actually noted that we did this. But usually it's the combination of the two things. And definitely that first point uses this is what we're going to do. We can definitely find that in the debates. So both sides of that coin usually are what are looked at when we're trying to research our government policy question. Another point I wanted to say is sometimes it's really hard depending on the jurisdiction we're looking for to find the policy. What is the policy? Much less a policy document. So often we'll have to think about, well, the hierarchical structure of our jurisdictions. This is the same for all sorts of, well, all around the world, of course. So if you are looking for, for example, in our country, provincial policy, we'll just use Ontario. So if Ontario, you have a sense they've got a policy, what are they're doing, but you can't seem to get your hands on much, you know, but when you start digging around, you realize pretty quickly, perhaps this policy is being pushed down by mandates from our federal government. And so if the federal government is expecting something or there's sort of the bigger umbrella overseer of the issue, we might step up to that level, see what the policy is, what we can find on it. And within that and everything that's produced by the federal government, they may actually talk about what the individual provinces are doing. Likewise, it's down to the down to the municipal or regional level. If they're battling with something that they're trying to deal with, we just have to not just but often we can step up to the province or the territory to see, well, what is that policy statements? What type of things can we find about this topic in that level of policy? And within those, we can either gather what regions and municipalities have to do with this policy, or they actually refer to individual actual geographic places. So when we're looking at something like poverty reduction, as I said, there's all these levels I'd like to think about, what are we doing in these different levels in Canada policy wise. But I'd also want to look at the on the federal level, we can often get these ideas and that's what governments do too. There's a lot of reinventing of wheels, but there's a lot of trying to save that extra time. And so they will study what other peer to peer you could call them countries are doing, such as the US or the UK or Australia. We look at what these other places are doing to address the same issue. So we might borrow their policy because it's great. We might study their policy. Well, how's that going for you? The other aspect that we all know about, I'm sure in this talk today, of course, are international government organizations and of their influence on countries and what they're going to do. So often, we will have to be at a, if we are part of a member, a member nation of part of a group, an international government organization group, we have certain things we are committed to, and we have to follow in the sense of policy kind of directions. So that when we look at these international government organizations, what are the kind of the rules to sit at that table? And that can direct our policy decisions and our formulations to within within Canada. So there are so many examples out there. I just wanted to show you here was one example of the federal government looking at the Ontario government's basic income model to get ideas. So again, they borrow ideas, they look for ideas. We have an international government organization that looks at Canada or looked at Canada and was making an observation about how our African Canadians were being treated basically. And from these outside looking in documents, they may not actually state the policy what what you what you are doing, but they often do say that current jurisdiction is doing this, this and that. But of course, recommendations to make things better might be added to these outsiders looking in. So that helps us to get an idea of what our policy is. Another point I wanted to make is policy can is often laid out in a variety of what you'll see that word. Keep doing these stupid air quotes, sorry, instruments and often needs to be compiled from a number of resources. So this is from the Correctional Service of Canada as an example. And on this list, even though there's different names here, directives, there's a policy bulletin but standards, a document that talks about the roles and responsibilities guidelines. I think you get it. There's a lot of different, they're all different, they all have a slightly different, they're all slightly different in some ways, many very different in others, but they all have that same guiding thing together. They're stating what the policy is on a topic. But the other side of it, this is just again an example shot from the Correctional Service of Canada. You can get, I'm not expecting to see all the little detail of the print, this is a flow chart though. So we had a policy trigger right down to the policy instrument being created. And it was just to give you a sense that complexity and the detailed interconnectedness of all the steps. So again, depending if you are helping somebody research policy, it's one thing to be aware of the different documents and we collect them all together and maybe have a read, but you may have researchers that need to also understand how did that policy come about by formulation, something that tells them a protocol, policy on policies, and there's literally something I once found a policy on policy creation, so that that might be an angle of the study to it gets very difficult, very fast. So again, gauging on that researcher, you may want to be going down this route at all. But it's good to know that that sometime is a need for our researchers. And the last little point here is the word policy with the capital P is so rarely used, at least in the titles of documents. So as noted here, sometimes what we're looking at is staring us right in the face, but because capital P, capital P policy isn't in the title, we didn't even know it. Alright, so moving on. The next part of my little talk was just to talk to remind especially the American audience, to be aware of some of the new sources I've used I am working in an academic library. So I'm at the privilege of working with many subscription databases. At least in the Canadian context, I know more and more of these are available through our public libraries. So it might be a balance that way. And of course anybody across the globe could have different subscriptions to other things. So the ones I like to use a lot for policy research would be pro quests, Canadian business and current affairs and the Canadian news stream. And there's a couple of other products from them here with our key or large newspapers. My colleagues at West Coast, for example, might have a subscription, of course, to Vancouver Sun that sits on its own. So everybody's got access to something, we hope, in Canada at least. But there's other databases too, which also furnish us a lot of information about the Canadian media context. So I use those a lot. When I am searching, I just wanted to point out for that jurisdictional level, I often use it as a subject. I don't want to get it bogged down to a keyword anywhere because of course a lot of these, especially Toronto Star, if I was looking for something about Toronto policy from the city, I don't want the three million hits that are going to come back just because Toronto is in the name of the publication. So I will use that as a subject or in the title headline lead paragraph. This may be very obvious to you, but it's to keep in mind sometimes we just forget to tweak that and we come back with a lot of false hits. And then finally the different words that I've used, this is just a smattering of the collection, but these are the basic ones that we're throw out into our searches and pull back in because they all kind of net or snag those results that do end up talking about policy in one way or another. The last few words, of course, you'll see on that little cluster are the law or legal side. So you may or may not want to be going down that rabbit hole with a policy topic. However, just keep in mind they can pull in results again, simply about media story searching, but those words like legislated and regulated can also be these verbs that are used as you know by many as a way of just saying the government made us make this policy. And there's not much talk about the legal ramifications or the law making behind it. So just so they can be a common parlance word almost those two words. So I often will throw those in there too. In Canada, if you don't, especially if you don't have access to subscription databases, definitely media websites, just put two up there for example, cbc.ca is one that I find really easy and nice to search, there's ctv.ca, there's several out there. So that when you are doing a search, I'm heavily reliant on advanced Google. I don't know if you use it or not a lot, but when you do open it, you've got an ability to make the or search of course in the phrase a year ago and then you just choose the little root of cbc.ca. And in this way, I will get back many hits that are current in that I begin to start seeing indicators of things that government is doing, if not outright policy. It's going to point me towards what a policy is. And in case you haven't used this before, once you've done that search, then you can go back up to past year, choose a custom range, especially if it's really important for you to get back to another kind of section of time. And this is just one of my tips that I like to show people that you can tweak these advanced Google searches. I'm not a sophisticated Google searcher as you can probably tell, but it's just one of those tools that I have to try to round up background information on policy. And many us doesn't matter what jurisdiction we come from in this world, know that if we have a government online, most likely it is divided up with all sorts of information. I tend to go to the departments and agencies link straight up or ministries link. So what I do is I like to find them, for example, on the federal website, I'm just giving you the screenshot, because unfortunately you do have to miss lots on there, it's pretty, but we have to remember, of course, websites are primarily made for the public, right? For the public they're serving. So they have to be all things for all people. And on an academic end of things, sometimes it's just so basic, it doesn't help us, it doesn't help us when we're trying to get into the nitty gritty. So as we all know, we have to burrow down a lot. So the actual department and agencies, I just wanted to show you, you would have to sort of scroll down to find them. I mean, you can find lots of information on a policy topic in anywhere on this starting page. But it's one thing I'll just straight up go to, because often I just want to know what is going on. And when I do open them up, this is just a freeze frame for example. When I took this shot of the federal government, there was 204 departments, for example, they're now over 206. So they grow, they grow where they could lessen. And I like to do this on a regular basis is what I mean, like the numbers can grow, and they can lessen, they can be there, but they've changed their name. And of course, they can amalgamate together or just disappear. The Ontario government, for example, at the time I took this picture, it was 24 ministries and of course a region. But again, the departments. So I like to be aware, I liked that that's one of my tips to myself at least is to see what ministries and agencies, boards, commissions, departments have been set up to address different issues. And when I do that, whoops, sorry, excuse me, I keep a couple of things in mind. And again, I apologize if you do this all the time. But I'm always thinking of not just one agency, I'm always thinking who, who does what but who has a stake in this game, right? So and then when I do think of that, I sort of make a shopping list. And I like to do that because I like to search them separately. So in my example here with homelessness and housing, there's a variety, this is not the finite list by far. But these were top five ones, for example, that, that, that I could find that dealt with this topic. So then there's others. So another point, of course, you don't know this already. Here are some of my strategies. I just going to suggest if you're not doing them already and I love to hear others because I this is again just what I've sort of stumbled on over the years. When I am when I do pick and choose a particular departmental website to search when I will look around and I will look for those key links for publications, news, media, A to Z index, if you happen to have it. And, and of course, more and more, we're going to see these word policy and policies. And that's a, that can be a problem. And the reason it can be a problem, they're great. Click away, explore what I've discovered. And it's been the hard way, of course, is that they're often not complete, much less up to date. And the URLs could be dead. And, and why is this, we might ask ourselves. Well, one thing to remember is let's call this young woman here, Janet, and say Janet is actually the person who creates the content for a website for a particular department. And while Janet's doing all that, she, she happens to either know she's been given, or she's found them herself as some public servant for some department. And she pulls them into her page. Oh yeah, these all look good. They're all to do with the policy of my department. I'm shoving them in there. And then of course, Janet has built the content. But there may be someone else, another team, actually building the structure of the websites. So we often, and this is, this happens a lot. There's maybe not a miscommunication, but lack of communication, perhaps. So Janet may have said, hey, team, put this up on the website. But maybe Janet said that in 2019. And no one's checked Janet's work since no, and perhaps more policy, she missed some policy, didn't know she'd know, but there's others out here. She didn't know it was replaced, that policy, it had to come down. Sometimes as we all know, things disappear off the web on an oops factor. So someone took it down. I've definitely heard that from government bodies where they say, well, we took it down because it was last year, who cares? So it's like, oh my gosh, we care, of course, in the academic world, we want to do that historical perspective. So people might take it down because they think it's not timely. And of course, we have the on on on purpose factor, if you want to be cynical or a conspiracy theorist, you know, maybe the government doesn't want you to see that. So came down. So so we don't know why things necessarily disappeared off the web. All we should keep in mind is that good chance it is not complete. And so what do we do with that? Well, one way to make it a robust catch when you're doing the search is is not to forget, believe it or not, that of course, we've got our 1-800 lines and we have email inquiry. And I'm pushing this here again. And again, you might think this is obvious, but a lot of our researchers don't think it's obvious. They just don't. And in fact, in my world, I have a lot of undergrad students that first of all, they think probably it's a lot of work, perhaps. But I think they're intimidated by the idea of that. They're intimidated by telling anybody they don't know or even to ask for just simply help. I think I've got all this. Does it look good? And a lot of them actually feel that somehow it's cheating. There's my air quotes again. It's cheating. So is it cheating to ask for help that you haven't actually found directly? And of course it isn't. But so again, it's all there that I will reach out and I'm sure we all have. And it's amazing. It's amazing how disappointing it's been. You know, I may not get an answer at all or I may not get an answer in a timely fashion. Or it's just so lackluster what I get back. But other times equally, just amazing amount of information back that I could never find online. And of course, that's to remind us that there's a lot of things that of course aren't online. So we either cannot find it because it has never been put up there back to Janet. She never had that content added to her page. But there's of course, as we know, if we think of government information as a huge iceberg, the top above the water is usually what I'd say most people will find stuff under the surface. The biggest part is so full of nooks and crannies, of course. So then it could be as convoluted as databases within databases. So if a web crawler can't reach those particularly, you have to know that they actually exist. So asking for help from our governments, keep that in mind. And of course, we've always got the advanced Google search up our sleeve. So this is an example. I'll show you.gc.ca is the route for the Canadian government. If you weren't aware, this is a search for multicultural policies. The way I went. This is another tip I have for you. If you don't already do it, when I bring back results, then I start to look. I don't get into the weeds very often for the first two pages of results. I like to keep my eye on the level of the URL. And I like to see, well, what department is actually putting out this material? So I get a lot of frequent flyers or repeat offenders, you might want to call them, of these departments that Google has, of course, with their algorithmic launch of the results have somehow warranted one way or the other. They're going to be displayed this way. That's another issue altogether of what Google is presenting us. However, over and over, I'll begin to see the sort of top notch, top numbers of these particular departmental URLs. And one of them, for example, we have the Commissioner of Official Languages is here. We have the Prime Minister's Office. That's the top one. We have Stets Canada, our statistical national statistical agency. We have the Canadian Radio Television Communications Agency here. Something's there. And we have something, for example, from what we call Canadian heritage. So if I do do this, try to get back to my little screen here. If I find something that I like, oh, that looks very interesting because I keep seeing a lot of good looking hits. This is where I'll tighten up my search. So I go back to Google, the advanced search, and now I'm going to take that URL and make it right on point for that department. Then I run the search again. And this is when I start coming up in this example with lots of good looking hits that are going to darn well tell me a lot about policy, if not a policy directly. So that's just another idea I have about using advanced Google. The next several screens will be giving you just again some chit chat about key information products out of their governments. There's so many that are exactly they can map out exactly they can find the same thing in the US, UK, other domains. But I'll just sort of show you where they are in the Canadian context, the federal government. So one of those and they're my top kind of go twos when I am doing my beginning policy search. The first one to make it easy on myself perhaps is going straight to the news, the news but coming from the government. And that's again on the main page, scroll down, you'll find it actually on news. That makes sense. When you open up, you do have a variety of different types of news products. They all do something slightly different. The search interface, even though there's an advanced search there, I hate it. So if there are other Canadian colleagues on here, they may have a way better way of searching it or be way more sophisticated with me. But I absolutely have a hell of a time trying to do any sort of control search with that site. Anyhow, so it does make it worth it though when I can find a news release that's on my topic, because especially if it's timely, of course, and we know news releases are succinct, they give us a lot of facts, they give us a lot of what I like to call proper nouns. So people are named, reports are named, I can take those things and go further with the research of course. And in these case in the federal government in Canada, they like to give us some quotes, I can take it or leave it, those quotes. But I do like to know who's being quoted. So often it's our ministers, but sometimes we'll actually get non-government organization actors in here being quoted, which helps because that tells me where to go outside of the government to get opinions on my analysis piece on government policy. And of course, quick facts here. And then way at the bottom they have things called related products, perhaps associated links. So again, these are links into actual perhaps policy documents. Again, keeping in mind they're not complete. Someone's just picked and chosen them to launch to be linked to from a news release. But there's a contacts. And I love that part, because that again gives us that information of someone else's contact to make sure if I really got it all. So it's something to keep in mind that the news sources can give us those primary contacts. The second thing of course, and these are the million or billion out there are the actual unique reports or websites that are built at the time or written at the time of an actual event or a policy that's being looked at. We have royal commissions in Canada. And of course, there's commissions of inquiry. And these tend to be just to be blunt about it. Or as we talk about in my classes, they're not happy usually not happy events at all. So I think we all know that about about commissions of inquiry that usually something pivotly bad has happened. And hence a commission is struck to look at it to learn from it. But they are awfully, they can be awfully huge, like that the end result of published material, they take an enormous amount of time for many of them, they can be very expensive. And a lot of people come together to make them happen because experts are being asked to come forward and give their testimonials and everything else or research time and depth into into the actual issue at hand. But if you do have one of these these sort of reports, any of these reports that are structured or the online websites, you can open them up a course and you'll find oodles out there. These are just three or four that I have here, the interior government Halifax or our commission Aboriginal peoples. And this is something from OECD looking in at Canada. But of course on the topic. And in any of these topics, when you open up the actual report, you start looking around for the key word of policy or policies. And you can pretty well quickly find a report has a lot. So using this way in it's probably very obvious to you, this is one way to find about out about policy. And of course, often the reports will have the footnotes, the references, the bibliography to our primary primary sources, and you can go there and grab that what they're calling the actual policy. We have, of course, a parliament in Canada, House of Commons and Senate. So parle.ca, just in case you didn't know, we have the debates or some people will call them of course, Hansord, that's the other name. And then we have committee proceedings and reports there. So within the actual legislative committees, we have all the minutes and proceedings. So that's what the verbiage of what was set. And we have reports that are generated from the study of the topic at hand. And within those reports, we have what we call witnesses. So that's the testimonials of experts coming forward, talking about the topic, and submitting perhaps a reporter presentation. These inform our policies and they definitely talk about what the policy is at hand within these departmental, sorry, within these committee reports, depending on the topic that you're studying. So in any given standing committee report, for example, you can find recommendations. And usually at appendix at the back, there'll be the list of witnesses. And I like those because those names are further names. They can be academics, other government people, non-government organizations who have submitted. So I'll go to their websites or I'll go to their body of work to find out more about my topic. And again, if we start looking through it, we can easily find examples of policy. If you haven't been to our website in Canada for the Parliament of Canada, it looks like this, a lot of quick shots here. It's because the Senate and the House of Commons are two separate kind of ways we're going to go, but they're not designed the same and that bugs me. But if we click on committees for the Senate of Canada, for example, you'll be able to find all sorts of committees. I just highlighted this one, for example, as one with that NATO example document. So for example, in the Senate, there might very well be a committee setup structured along that topic area that I'm interested in. And in the House of Commons, you would go under the parliamentary business. So when you click on parliamentary business, that's where you'll see our list of committees from the House of Commons. And again, there's studies and reports. You can go in different ways. And again, these are just the list of the current House of Commons committees, of which I think four of them have been sort of highlighted as ones that would probably be interested in NATO or topics around that are falling out of NATO, including our policy implications and decisions. So again, helping to go into those A to Z kind of soup to nuts, subject borders of the different committees, both for the House of Commons and the Senate, you might find more information about policy in Canada. Our legislative libraries are, in my opinion, heroes. We have many, of course, around the world, not many, but you know, there are several around the world. Of course, in Canada, we do have a Library of Parliament. They do put out research publications. When you do go to that site, you'll see that there are several. Sometimes they're not as up to date as you wish, but they are working. They're working away, producing these things. And I'll just leave it like that. You can certainly go and explore it. When you do open one up, for example, here's one on again, homelessness. They usually are short and sweet. If you've never looked at these things, they summarize what's going on in Canada. They summarize what the government is doing at currently the issues. And of course, within it, this is just one blow up of one of the pages, we get what I said to you before, we get named proper nouns. So that's what I really, really like. Again, directive strategy initiative. These are policies so that we can take those, quote them as a phrase. You can do it through Google, if you want. You can put that back into Google and pull it back out or find information around it. And again, we get the actual department in Canada, for example, if it's in a footnote here, but, you know, key departments that are at play with these policies and exam lots and lots of examples of the non-government organizations that are responding to this policy, either saying we need a policy or we need to change this policy or we need to get rid of this policy. So you'll get all of those mishmashed into these types of documents if you haven't already explored them before. And likewise, as we probably all know, the Congressional Research Service, of course, has their own research publications for the U.S. side of things, but the European Parliament does too. It's called Think Tank. And I like actually, on my Canadian policy topic, just to keep in mind, I like to look at my peer governments. So what's nice is often I can find, if it's especially something Canada's involved in with it at an international level, I can find, you know, a report about what we're doing, even though this is the U.S. of A and the European Parliament for this topic, Canada is mentioned throughout. So that I can actually, it's interesting to see what another government is thinking or looking in on us on our policies. So they all round out really quite nicely. And of course, they're short and easy to read and give us lots of ideas of where to go for further information. Legis Info is one of my top, I think everybody in the Canadian government information seen knows of a Library of Parliament's Legis Info. It's a database that's done by the Library of Parliament and summarizes our legislation, the bills. And I think it goes back to 1995. So it's great. It sort of summarizes one place, a particular bill in all its stages it went through through both houses. It also includes background information. So it looks like this, if you haven't seen it before, you get into it. Here's my bill on the medical assistance and dying. I can start opening it up, read the second readings, look at all of the debates, what was going on. And the second reading, of course, for many of us in our different countries, the second reading is where the nuts and bolts of what people think. Excuse me, what people think about a proposed piece of legislation. So this is where we're going to hear a lot of discussion or see a lot of discussion or read a lot of discussion, depending on your format of accessing the debates within the second, for the second reading. So this is all included in Legis Info. It's very handy. When I do click on the about tab at the top here, it also gives us more information though, too, I like. And so again, this goes back to that content like press releases. There's a bit of further reading, but any sort of, perhaps there's other policy documents that they have nicely tied to. Again, not complete. So don't think it is. But the legislative summaries are here. Again, another type of document, research document written by the Parliament, the Library of Parliament. This is an example of one. And when I open it up, of course, it does take that in this case, because it's a legislative summary, it takes it clause by clause changes, proposals, all that sort of thing. But the commentary is kind of neat. So commentary at the end often talks about the policy implications of a law coming through. So something to definitely explore. And we all know about annual reports coming out from many different government bodies. In Canada, we have two that that I kind of I find federal that I just love the department, the departmental performance reports. Actually is like what I said, like, or departmental results reports, they changed their name, but never quite enough. So we all get mixed up what they're called. But it's basically what I call a report card of the last year. So it does the typical annual report that tells us what they've done, full of information about policy, full of statistics, financial information, sometimes pretty charts and graphs and pictures. The plans and priorities or departmental plans, again, depending on what what era you're looking in, because they changed their title. But that basically means this is the plans for the coming year. And that's kind of neat too, because it talks about what they hope to do policy wise. There's lots of departmental annual reports out there, depending on the level of government. And of course, you can do an advanced Google search to try to find an annual report from Ontario government body. It is just to sort of show you where to find them because they are really hellish to try to find if you don't know about them again, on that main government of Canada page, and do by all means, explore the page, go down to the bottom, the government wide reporting. When you click on that, you're going to choose plan government spending. And there on that page, you'll find departmental plans by listed by the departmental me. So again, it's just a screenshot. I was looking for indigenous, anybody looking after indigenous, and this sort of shows you, you know, just some of them we have. I think there were three or four in there. But anyhow, when you open one up, it tells us this is the plan, the coming year, this is already updated, shows us the plan though. When I open that up, and I start looking for policy, you get a workload. Okay, so it's really these really, really pinpoint what our government is doing policy wise on these topics by subject. Number seven, official information directives. These are quite new for us to be able to get hands on in Canada. New in the last couple of years, the mandate letters are one, I just found if we had a government information day in British Columbia on Friday. And I thought, wow, it's fascinating, somebody mentioned one of the speakers that we really had to be aware though that these mandate letters or any of this stuff that's becoming more and more open. I never even thought of this, but how sanitized it could become to. So if a government knows they have to share these previously cloistered information vehicles to this is the most case mandate letters to Prime Minister telling you know the walking orders what his ministers or her ministers are going to do for each of their departments. And that was clandestine information before now it's open. It's very interesting that this could actually now be buffed up and they become sounding like motherhood statements. So I thought that was very interesting like they rather it might take the edge off the nitty gritty of what you might be able to find in these about what our governments are doing or what our government is doing on a policy. But we have question period notes to that tells helps guide the ministers in the House of Commons or what they should or shouldn't say. And we have an open government portal like many jurisdictions do now under open information, you'll find briefing packages, you can find this all wedged in different places within our open government pages, it's just really hard to find them. This comes off of the Prime Minister of Canada's government website. These are or the official website. These are the mandate letters, for example, just a screenshot. And if you hadn't seen them before, when you open them up, for example, for the Minister of Immigration and Refugees and Citizenship, what they are supposed to be doing, which can be very interesting. This obviously helps us know what the policy will be set. If you go again down onto the main or onto the main Canadian government webpage down to open government and data, this is where you will find very busy pages. There's just so much to click. And every time you get used to where your cheese is laid out in the maze, they're going to change the maze, right? You hope you can always find your cheese, like it exists somewhere, but has it been put in a fridge? Is it on a shelf now, or it's been shoved under a table? Like these moves around all the time. But of course, if we if you clicked on the open information here, you should say, of course, you hope it looks like this, you'll have an ability to get into their information portal. And there, you have a lot of other types, these briefing packages. So it just is endless, I know, and there's just more and more and more to be aware of, aware you can find information about policy. But as I'm just trying to sort of give you guys an idea, there's, there's many I use in my classes and research support when I'm teaching. And of course, we have to change all the time. So it's like I have to refresh every couple of months, if not earlier, to be aware of like what else has been rolled out or what's been taken down, not taken down. It's kind of different convoluted route. But this is an example of question period notes, again, suggesting what ministers should say. I really like it. The sort of thing if pressed, what you should say if pressed. So it can be interesting, you know, these are opinions about the policy of what they have to do to financial reports are great. Again, follow the money, follow the data, so to speak. But we can find unique budgetary documents. I know all of our jurisdictions can about devoted to a topic. So of course, if this is what my policy research is going to be about Indigenous people and what we're doing about, you know, repairing our relationships, I want to look at that budget, particularly to see what where the money is going to be put to help roll out these policy decisions. Public accounts, of course, very detailed can tell us what's been going on. And my favorite is, of course, my favorite because it can be very juicy and it can be really critical, of course, is the auditor general out there. And they can tell us how things are doing well or not. So that when we look at these things, again, if we do a search for the word policy, we can find a lot in a tiny little report that indicates what the government's policy is and what they should be doing and how well they're doing it. I just a couple of points in case you hadn't thought of this before, when you are looking for their last points, when you are looking for government policy, to be aware that our policies, government policy is often influenced by interest groups. So those could be the big corporate or special interest or lobby groups out there that will push a government, obviously, to make certain things go a certain way. We do have a lobbyist registration site in Canada, federal, if you want to see who's lobbying, which part of our government, we can actually look that up. And they have to be registered. But we can also have that whole lobbying thing, in a sense, the smaller, the grassroots of public opinion, right? So that may very much sway our policy, or not our research, but sway the policy the way it goes. So governments, of course, it's again, maybe a cynical view, but if they have to be voted in again, how much does that have an impact on the ability of public opinion to pressure from the public to make a policy get changed? Or to go a different way? Or to be dropped? Again, policy, opinion, analysis, whatever words you want to call it, these are sort of the four areas, just to refresh. I know you know this, but in the media, instead of just factual articles about this, this and that, we often will rely on editorials or opinion or column pieces from journalists, tell us, you know, their analysis of policy, we have official government sources, of course, other government jurisdictions writing reports, their reactionary critical about a policy at hand. Of course, our academic journals and books are out there, especially in the academic library context, we can look at policy, the history of it, all sorts of things. And then our activist think tank, non-government, not-for-profit, opinions of the people, grassroots, whatever you want to call that cluster at the end, so that these can be very informative, even if they can be ill-informed or just really evil or wrong from the public. I like to also be aware of that aspect of the grassroots kind of thing for the gutry, I say often to my students, taking a pulse point, right? So what are some of the ways people are reacting to a proposed policy or what at play or a lack of policy? So again, those are those four areas I really want to touch on of where I'd research to find analysis. The political party's point of view, don't forget, within the ledges info, you have the major speeches at second reading. Well, if I do one more click on that screen I originally showed you, I can actually get, they've divvied them out, the speeches based on the political party's point of view. Lovely, it's so informative. So again, that's ledges info, you certainly can check out the election and platform documents that are out there and political party documents. This is just an example from 2016 of a candidate that wanted to run for the leader of our federal conservative party and she was, she probably was not the first, but she certainly was grabbed by the media to say that she wanted to look at screening immigrants, refugees and visitors for anti-Canadian values. And of course, it created a firestorm here. I don't know how much she was influenced by Mr. Trump, but there you go. There's that idea of you get an idea if they're not in power, what a leader would do, especially as far as policy goes. Or if a leader is in power and they want to be reelected, that's a great source too to see what they have said they will do and they are doing perhaps. Other sources for background information, not background information, excuse me, other sources for opinion that come from government are basically those parliament committees. Again, you're going to look up perhaps the witnesses and their submissions. You can see those online consulting with Canadians. I have a screenshot in a moment to show you, but those are actual active exercises the federal government and other levels of government will go out and ask the public, hey, we're thinking about doing this. What do you think? We have, of course, the more traditional, they've been around a couple of hundreds of years, especially in the US, sorry, in the UK, in Canada, green papers and white papers, and there's slight difference between the two, but they also are getting at people's opinions. This is consulting with Canadians. It's a mess to try to find again, try to search it. It's half the time as a hell just trying to search these things. It's just so basic, but if you know they're there, you give a better chance of digging around and finding something perhaps. Again, a screenshot on the homelessness initiative, but it's very interesting what we can find, people's opinions, reports, what we heard, this type of thing, and it'll talk about the policy at hand and then perhaps what we're going to do later. All of that's consulting with Canadians. We have think tanks, of course. As I said, the grassroots and non-government organizations. McGill University maintains a nice list of Canadian think tanks. You're welcome to go there. Harvard has a list too that has international components. Canada might be listed there. A lot of times, they just start to reiterate each other. You can certainly do, again, an advanced Google search based on the URL of an institution, but always with think tanks or any of these organizations, read the about us. You need to know what angle that these people are coming from. Again, a call out for statistics and data. Yay, who likes them? A lot of people do, but finding the effects of government policy by looking at stats again. Little bit like following the data, following the numbers, looking for the financial information, the before and after state, really cool, but the non-government organizations, lots of them do the same sort of thing. Be aware. Be aware of bias and inability to correctly gather information. We have legal databases, of course. We have tons of blogs out there. Law blogs is one of my favorite for legal aspects of a topic in Canada. Lots of things to look through by topic. We have awards going on here for different blogs, so they can tell us everything too. Not everything, we can tell us a lot about opinions in regards to the big cities. We have something called the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and they have a very basic website, but when you get into it, you can actually find some very interesting reports, again, referring to the way of policies impacting them at a municipal level, be it a federal policy or provincial policy. So very interesting resource, and that's me. So I was trying to hurry up to get under the one o'clock mark. I see my clock says it's one-on-one, but yeah, I think that is it for what I would have to say. I don't know if anyone's left, because I can't see anything on Zoom here. So we don't have time for questions, but I want to thank you, everyone, for participating today. This recording will be posted on our YouTube channel, and I pop that into the chat. And you can also, just if you Google help, I'm an accidental government information library, and we have a website that has upcoming presentations. So thanks again, Helene. I don't know if you want people to email you as questions or not, but yeah, so you'll be able to see her emails on the presentation. So thanks, everyone. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Have a good rest of the week, everybody.