Advocacy and Academia: Considering Strategies of Cooperative Engagement

In March 2009, Ian Brodie, former chief of staff for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, spoke at a McGill University conference on role of in government policymaking. His appraisal was frank and candid. He stated that government, specifically Conservative government that was in power until defeated by Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party in October 2015 election, really had to engage properly in question of what actually shows about various approaches to (Brodie 2009). Indeed, fact that various academics were speaking out against Conservative government's tough on policy reforms was politically advantageous for government: During my time as a practitioner of policy in Mr. Harper's government I was piqued, from time to time, to see our government attacked by students of policy for embarking on policies that some of them thought lacked a firm basis in evidence. Every lime, for example, we proposed amendments to Criminal Code, sociologists, criminologists, defense lawyers and liberals ... attacked us for proposing measures that evidence, apparently, showed did not work. It was a good thing for us politically that sociologists, criminologists, and defense lawyers were and are all held in lower repute than conservative politicians for voting public. Politically it helped us tremendously to be attacked by this coalition of university types. So we never really had to engage properly in question of what actually shows about various approaches to crime. And Canadians who noticed rising rates of youth and violent crime came to common sense conclusion that whatever was being done to tackle it was not working. (ibid.) This antipathy toward criminological knowledge has concrete effects. Since taking power in 2006,Canada's Conservative-led federal government has introduced more than 80 criminal justice, sentencing, and corrections reform bills. (1) In 2011, during first parliamentary session after successfully forming a majority government. Conservative majority passed 70 percent of criminal justice-oriented bills, including Bill C-10, an omnibus crime bill that combined amendments from nine separate bills that had failed to pass in previous sessions of Parliament. Legislative reform has continued in recent years. In January 2015 (an election year), government introduced new sweeping anti-terrorist legislation and signaled arrival of Criminal Code amendments to allow for life sentences without chance of parole (Anti-Terrorism Act 2015; see Fine 2015). As described in a letter from office of Justice Minister Peter Mackay to Ottawa Citizen, federal government's legislative agenda aims to transform justice system so that it is no longer centered on welfare of criminals and instead to refocus it on the protection of society and redress of victims-even if these measures run contrary to research and about expected outcomes of this policy (Seymour 2015). The irony of federal political antipathy toward criminological is that it occurred within a policy context saturated by calls for evidence-based practices. Although evidence-informed policy reform is now tightly linked to research funding, (2) criminologists are more preoccupied than ever about gap between criminological research findings and political policy prescriptions. Researchers have long grappled with related issues (Brodeur 1999; Rock 2014). For example, criminologists have tried to address troublesome nature of criminological knowledge, role ought to play in discourse, and impact of perceptions and political partisanship on various forms and levels of policy. More recently, various authors have advocated public criminology as one particular response to apparent disconnect between and policy. Advocates of a typically acknowledge that politics of crime policy are intrinsically controversial and deeply contested, that criminological evidence is always partial and conditional, and that policy prescriptions are often disputed and contingent on epistemological positions (Currie 2007; Garland and Sparks 2000; Tonry and Green 2003; Turner 2013; Uggen and Inderbitzin 2010). …

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