MAiD as a case study in evidence for policy making: An account of the CCA assessment on medical assistance in dying.

In December 2016, the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) was asked by the Government of Canada to undertake an assessment on Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), following from Parliament's passage of Bill C-14: An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make related amendments to other Acts. The CCA was asked to undertake an assessment of the state of knowledge on three topics that Parliament excluded from C-14: requests for MAiD by mature minors, advance requests for MAiD, and requests for MAiD where a mental disorder is the sole underlying medical condition. Here, we describe the way that the CCA responded to the request from the Government of Canada using a multidisciplinary expert panel approach, how different forms of evidence were identified and used, the impact of the CCA assessment as part of the broader conversation occurring in Canada, and its implications for health leaders.

Sector connectors, specialists and scrappers: How cities use civic capital to compete in high-technology markets.

This article uses three cities in the same Canadian province (Ontario): Toronto, Ottawa and Waterloo, to examine how regions compete in high-technology markets. We find that regions use civic capital to leverage new, technological windows of opportunity, but they do so in very different ways. Tracing Toronto's evolution from a marketing hub for foreign multinationals into a centre for entrepreneurship, we illustrate how weak ties and cross-sectoral buzz created a 'super connector', scaling high-technology firms in a wide variety of areas. In Ottawa, task-specific cooperation in R&D, education and specialised infrastructure enabled the region to overcome the disadvantages of its small size as a 'specialist' in a single, capital-intensive niche, telecommunications equipment. Finally, entrepreneurs in Waterloo eschewed task-specific cooperation for peer-to-peer mentoring. By diffusing generic knowledge about how to circumvent the liabilities of smallness, mentoring networks enabled this 'scrapper' city to support smaller start-ups in a broad range of niches.