When one must go: The Canadian experience with strategic review and judging program value

Abstract

This chapter reviews the Canadian experiment with assessing the worth of public programs and policies and using the resulting value judgments to drive funding decisions. The author provides a brief overview of the Canadian Strategic Review initiative, and considers implications of this federal government approach to valuation. The author argues that never before has the evaluation function within the federal government been so directly linked to an expenditure management system that requires such a definitive valuation of programs and initiatives. The author concludes that for the evaluation function to meet expectations and maintain its fundamental purpose of being a participatory process to assist program managers in learning and improving their programs, some fine-tuning will be necessary. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.