Mapping the civic education policy community in Canada: A study of policy actors’ attitudes

Although civic education in Canada is typically seen as the responsibility of the provincial public school system and despite the fact that youth disengagement is widely accepted as a problem, civic education is a policy area that does not receive sustained attention from either the public or government. However, attention to the problem of political apathy and ignorance in Canada continues to grow and the number of policy actors in both governmental and non-governmental settings is increasing. The growing civic education policy network and community is occurring in a vacuum of policy ambiguity and ambivalence. In an attempt to better understand the civic education policy network in Canada we surveyed both federal and provincial government and non-governmental actors. In our survey, we asked policy actors to rank other policy actors in terms of collaboration, trust, influence and reliance in the policy network. In addition to this we asked the actors about their attitudes on the policy outcomes of civic education policy in relation to political behaviour and political knowledge. Our findings suggest that the policy network is highly centralized with federal government actors and a handful of national non-government actors. Also, we found that civic education policy actors in Canada generally agree on both political knowledge and political behaviour policy outcomes.