When The Hub was launched two years ago, we aspired to elevate Canada’s public policy debate in two senses. The first was to raise the level of rigour and analysis found in much of contemporary policy reporting. We sought to go beyond the partisan spin and talking points that one too often finds elsewhere in the news media.
The second was to extend the time horizon from the short-termism that can plague our politics to a longer-term vision rooted in a different and better future for the country. The Hub’s motto, “Bold Ideas for a Better Future,” sought to capture these two overarching objectives.
Over our first two years, no initiative has brought greater expression to The Hub‘s mission than the recently-launched The Hunter Prize for Public Policy. The prize, generously supported by the Hunter Family Foundation, aims to shake up Canadian policymaking by marshalling fresh ideas, energy, and voices to take on a clearly-defined “wicked problem.”
Up to $50,000 in total prizes will be awarded each year to Canadians aged 40 and under for their innovative and practical policy ideas in response to a “wicked problem” that threatens the economic and social well-being of Canadians. The winning idea will ultimately be determined by an esteemed panel of judges. You can learn more about the prize here.
For the prize’s inaugural topic, we opted to target the wicked problem of reducing health-care wait times.
The case for prioritizing wait times seemed self-evident to us. It’s long been a serious problem across the country that’s only worsened in recent years. In 2005, when the Canadian Supreme Court said that “access to a waiting list is not access to health care,” the Fraser Institute estimated that the average wait time between referral from a doctor and treatment across the country was 17.7 weeks. In 2022, it was 27.4 weeks—the longest in the survey’s 30-year history.
The consequences of these long and growing wait times manifest themselves in lost economic output, significant pain and suffering, and even deaths. This ought to be unacceptable in a country as rich and prosperous as Canada.
Simply put, if there’s an issue in greater need of new voices and new ideas that transcend ideology, partisanship, and conventional wisdom, it would be hard to think of one. We couldn’t have come up with a better fit to reflect the underlying impulse behind The Hub‘s mission in general and The Hunter Prize for Public Policy in particular.
Close to six weeks into the eight-week period for submissions, we’ve learned that The Hub community agrees. We’ve received dozens of submissions from across the country. The Hunter Prize is also resonating on social media with already more than 1 million impressions.
As we enter the final two weeks of the intake period, there is still time to get your submission in. Don’t wait. The financial reward could be significant.
But as importantly, you can be ultimately part of the solution to Canada’s health-care wait time crisis and in so doing model a different and better approach to policymaking that elevates bold ideas for a better future.
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