The Giving Review: A conversation with Cardus’ Andrea Mrozek and Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard – Part 1

This interview first appeared in the Giving Review

A June report from the Canadian think tank Cardus, From Advocates to Insiders: Government Funding and Advocacy Groups in the Child Care Debate, envisions a healthy civil society that depends on voluntary organizations rooted in the citizenry, funded primarily by it and thus from private sources, and able to speak independently of government. As a specific case study of the state of civil society in Canada, using parliamentary hearings on legislation that passed and greatly expanded the Canadian federal government’s role in child care, the report examines the 44 groups invited to testify on the measure, comparing their positions on the bill with their federal funding. Thirty-eight groups supported the bill; six opposed.

Nearly two-thirds of the organizations had received federal funding from 2020 through 2024, when the measure became law, From Advocates to Insiders finds. During that period, those supporting the bill quite lopsidedly received more than $1,300 (in Canadian dollars) in federal funding for every dollar received by those opposing it, as reflected in the AI-generated figure below. “In 2023, the year in which the hearings were conducted,” according to the report, “none of the six groups that opposed the bill received any federal dollars, whereas twenty-three of the thirty-eight groups supporting the bill received some.”

Some witnesses from groups supporting the measure participated in developing the policy they were asked to evaluate.

This kind of “circular lobbying” is concerning, according to From Advocates to Insiders, by Andrea Mrozek, Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard, Jenna Lodder, and Lisa Richmond. “Since civil society is by definition a sphere distinct from government, public funding transferred to civil-society organizations puts at risk their ability to function independently and serve as a countervailing force,” they write. “Furthermore, when the line between the state and civil society is blurred, public trust in society’s institutions can suffer.”

Mrozek and Beauregard were nice enough to join me for a recorded conversation last month. Mrozek is a senior fellow in Cardus’s family-policy program and one of Canada’s best-known critics of universal government child-care policy. Before joining Cardus, she served as executive director of the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, after earlier working as a journalist in Canada and Europe.

Beauregard is a Québec-based Cardus researcher who previously served as a speechwriter and strategic-planning adviser to the Québec Premier. He is the author of three books on political thought, including the forthcoming Anti-Civilization: The Collapse of Society & the Case for the Common Good.

The just less than 13-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here. During the first part, we talk about the Cardus report and what it can tell us about the state of Tocquevillian civil society in Canada.

“[T]he child-care policy sector has really changed over two decades,” Mrozek tells me. “I had begun to see that the policy landscape was diminishing” as time went on. There used to be “many, many options that people would consider and debate in the media in the policy realm. Those options have become diminished. You could plainly see how government funding was flowing to certain groups,” some of which have taken on “a lobbying role. They weren’t providing child care, nor were they even doing, particularly, research on child care.”

Beauregard says, “from a civil-society point of view, to me, it’s really an issue … of pluralism in the public sphere.” Alexis de Tocqueville—a Frenchman, he lightheartedly underscores in response to a later question—

really envisioned these associations as a way for different points of view to be expressed in the public sphere. So when we see a narrowing of these options, especially when it’s the government that’s kind of putting its finger on the scale to tip it, then we should be worried. Because if we still believe in a pluralistic democracy where different constituencies can form groups in order to put their visions of the good forward, then we should be concerned about having as many of those as possible around the table and especially not narrowing it through government funding that can orient the debate and then produce … imperfect debate.

According to Mrozek, “disclosure should be present if you’re coming to speak and you’ve been involved, particularly, in the process of developing the child-care policy. Even if you didn’t receive money, you should probably be disclosing that you helped to create the policy” being considered. “But certainly on the financial side, I would say disclosing that you’ve received government money would be important, and I’m not aware of any group that did that.”

“[I]t becomes very circular indeed,” Beauregard says. If “you want to have a public debate that is pluralistic, it’s perfectly fine that groups that are for or against speak up in the public sphere. That’s the point,” he continues.

But if some are involved in the drafting and they kind of, they get both sides, right?—they have the independence of being able to have this credibility in the public sphere where they say the government’s plan is good, but then they also have the insider aspect that helps put forward the government plan—… then you kind of have to pick a lane. You can’t be in between, because then you’re in this very uncomfortable territory. This is why we said there’s an ethical problem with circular lobbying.

More broadly, if government “funds the majority of what you do, then you don’t have this degree of independence,” he says. Private voluntary associations

should be able to determine their own views and positions representing their supporters. … [T]he whole relevance of civil society really comes from the fact that it has a base of people who have a vision of the good and who want to put it forward. But if this representation, this grassroots’, well, rootedness is no longer there, then it just loses its purpose.

In the conversation’s second part, Mrozek and Beauregard talk more about the risks of government funding of private groups in civil society—to their independence in particular and democratic pluralism in general.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-giving-review-a-conversation-with-cardus-andrea-mrozek-and-etienne-alexandre-beauregard-part-1/