Each record describes something a country built that the indicators do not capture. The source provides the published number; the mechanism is our interpretation.
Scores describe outcomes. These records describe how a country acted, what it needed and what happened. 742 of 742 records include a mechanism. They do not affect scores.
Policy Horizons Canada, which describes itself as the Government of Canada's centre of excellence in foresight and reports through the Deputy Minister of Employment and Social Development Canada, published Disruptions on the Horizon 2024, which identified and assessed 35 possible disruptions using survey input from around 500 stakeholders, colleagues and foresight experts across the Government of Canada and beyond.
A small dedicated foresight unit inside the federal public service, governed by a deputy minister steering committee, runs recurring horizon scans and surveys hundreds of officials and outside experts to rate disruptions by likelihood, impact and timing, and trains and networks foresight practitioners across departments.
Preconditions
A permanent home and budget line inside the public service that survives changes of government
Senior sponsorship at deputy minister level so departments answer the survey and read the result
A network of departmental foresight practitioners to carry the work into policy files
Where else it has been used: Policy Horizons' published foresight training manual is listed as a toolkit by the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation; this was seen in search results only and not verified at source.
Limits: The unit is reporting on its own work, and the 500 is stated as 'around 500', an approximate count of survey inputs rather than a measure of whether any department used the scan; the report itself says its content does not necessarily represent the views of the Government of Canada. The description as centre of excellence is in the report's disclaimer; the reporting line through the Deputy Minister of Employment and Social Development Canada is stated on the unit's about page (https://horizons.service.canada.ca/en/about-us/index.shtml), not in the report. Both figures appear on the web version at the source URL and in the PDF edition (pages 5 and 7 of https://horizons.service.canada.ca/en/2024/disruptions/Disruptions_on_the_Horizon_2024_report.pdf). No published budget, staff count or uptake figure was found: Employment and Social Development Canada's 2024-25 Departmental Results Report does not mention the unit, so the record evidences a standing federal function producing a dated whole-of-government scan with a deputy minister steering committee named in its acknowledgements, not the influence of that scan on policy. Whether the Disruptions report is annual was not verified: no 2023 or 2025 edition was found at the corresponding addresses. Started is 1996, when secondary histories place the unit's predecessor, the Policy Research Secretariat, in the Privy Council Office, renamed Policy Research Initiative in 2000 and Policy Horizons Canada around 2011 to 2012; that lineage was not verified on an official page today and the foresight mandate as now worded dates from the later renaming. The unit sits inside a line department rather than at the centre of government, which limits its reach.
Canada's federal Crown corporation PPP Canada, operational from 2009, committed over C$1.3 billion through the P3 Canada Fund to 25 public-private partnership projects across the country before the government dissolved it, with operations ceasing at the end of 2017 and the corporation dissolved effective March 31, 2018.
The federal government created a Crown corporation with a dedicated fund that paid up to a quarter of eligible costs to provinces, municipalities and Indigenous communities that procured infrastructure as public-private partnerships, plus template contracts and screening of federal projects; once it judged the market mature, it folded the corporation into the infrastructure department.
Preconditions
Provincial P3 agencies and a domestic market of builders, financiers and advisers already able to bid long design-build-finance-maintain contracts.
A federal transfer large enough to change a smaller jurisdiction's procurement choice without paying for the whole asset.
A department able to absorb the portfolio and its long-dated payment liabilities when the agency closed.
Limits: This is a dismantling by decision, not a collapse. The government's stated reason was that PPP Canada had 'successfully fulfilled its mandate', and its files were transitioned to Infrastructure Canada. The corporation carried performance-based payment liabilities of approximately C$1.3 billion over five years. A hostile reviewer would say the record shows a federal agency closing, not a national capability lost. The C$1.3 billion is commitments rather than disbursements (the audited statements show far smaller annual payments to recipients) and is a federal top-up of up to 25% of eligible costs, so it does not measure the scale of the joint delivery, its value for money or whether the 25 assets performed. The narrative and the figure are the corporation's own annual report; only the financial statements carry an Auditor General audit opinion.
๐จ๐ฆCanadasince 2003still operatingbears on University-industry collaboration
Mitacs, the federally and provincially funded not-for-profit, placed 4,859 students, recent graduates and postdoctoral fellows in Accelerate research internships with 2,314 host organisations under 2,406 professors in 2024-25, out of 20,885 internships across all its programmes that year.
A national intermediary splits the cost of a graduate student's or postdoc's research project inside a firm with the firm, using federal and provincial money, and uses the student's supervisor as the university link.
Preconditions
A large pool of graduate students whose supervisors accept industry-defined projects
Firms willing to pay a fixed partner contribution per internship unit
Stable federal and provincial co-funding, since unit caps follow budget cuts directly
Where else it has been used: Close relatives are France's Cifre and Spain's Doctorados Industriales, which fund a whole doctorate inside a firm; Mitacs uses short, stackable units instead, which scale fast but tie volume closely to each year's budget.
Limits: This is Mitacs reporting on itself to its federal funder: the Accelerate counts are on PDF page 28 and the 20,885 total on PDF page 2. Mitacs is a not-for-profit rather than a government body; ISED funding was 48 percent of its income in 2024-25 and the rest came from provinces and partners. Host organisations include not-for-profits, hospitals and municipalities as well as firms, so 2,314 overstates the firms involved. An internship is a funded unit of four to six months and one intern can hold several, so internships and interns are different counts; the 20,885 total also includes Globalink internships that bring international students to Canadian labs with no firm involved. The next report (2025-26, July 2026) gives 20,819 internships in total, against 21,432 in 2022-23. The capacity is now shrinking by plan: in 2024-25 Mitacs capped Accelerate units per university for lack of federal money, and its 2026-27 corporate plan (PDF page 9) foresees 12,540 internships on a 120 million dollar ISED grant, against more than 200 million of federal support in 2022-23. If that plan is delivered this record becomes an erosion. The 2003 start year, the first Mitacs research internship program, comes from ISED's evaluation of its funding to Mitacs, not from the cited report.
Canada's provinces and territories delivered 154,892 employment-benefit services under the federally funded Labour Market Development Agreements in 2024-25, 92 percent of them Skills Development training, in a year when Part II funding fell by $425 million as a temporary top-up in place since 2016-17 ended and Skills Development spending fell 19.7 percent to $798.9 million.
The federal government channels Employment Insurance Part II money to provinces and territories through bilateral agreements, and each province buys or delivers skills training and apprenticeship support for EI-eligible workers, reporting to a common monitoring framework.
Preconditions
A contributory unemployment insurance fund large enough to finance active measures
Provincial employment services able to deliver training under federal money
An annual monitoring report that counts interventions the same way across 13 jurisdictions
Where else it has been used: Temporary federal top-ups raised volumes for eight years; when the top-up sunset the training budget fell with it, which is the usual fate of active measures financed as supplements rather than baseline.
Limits: The counts are services (interventions), not people: one client can hold several, and the department reports 502,007 clients across all LMDA services, most of them in employment assistance rather than training. The erosion rests on money, not on a measured fall in training: the chapter's introduction says Part II received $425 million less in 2024-25 because the temporary additional funding in place since 2016-17 sunset, and Skills Development spending fell 19.7 percent. Employment Benefits services also fell, from 192,365 in 2023-24 (Table 3.1.2.3) to 154,892, but nearly all of that is Skills Development Regular falling 37.8 percent to 62,084, which the table note attributes to a coding correction that moved provincial workshops out of that category; the services fall is therefore not counted as the loss here, and apprenticeship services rose 3.2 percent to 80,376. 2023-24 is the previous year, not a demonstrated all-time peak. The programme reports on itself, and the 92 percent share is stated by the department (62,084 plus 80,376 of 154,892). The started year is the date the first bilateral agreements were signed (Alberta and New Brunswick, December 1996, per the LMDA page on canada.ca), not stated in this chapter. The training is for EI-eligible workers, a subset of all adults, and the record says nothing about outcomes.
Canada's provincial securities regulators, acting jointly as the Canadian Securities Administrators, authorised 13 firms through the CSA Regulatory Sandbox between 2016 and 2021, before it was succeeded by the CSA Financial Innovation Hub and its decision list stopped being updated in December 2023.
Thirteen provincial and territorial securities regulators agreed to process fintech registrations and exemptive relief faster and on a time-limited basis through a shared sandbox, then folded it into a broader innovation hub once crypto platforms moved to their own registration track.
Preconditions
A passport-style system letting one principal regulator's decision apply across provinces
A wave of novel business models (crypto funds, token offerings) that did not fit existing categories
Regulators willing to publish each decision so the sandbox could be audited
Where else it has been used: Canada shows a sandbox absorbed once its main user group gets a dedicated rulebook: the crypto platforms that filled it moved to a pre-registration undertaking regime.
Limits: The 13 is ours, counted from the firms the page lists under 'Former CSA Regulatory Sandbox'; the crypto trading platform decisions on the same page belong to a separate pre-registration process and are not counted. Most authorisations were crypto funds and token offerings from 2017 to 2019, and the page says nothing about outcomes. The sandbox was succeeded by the CSA Financial Innovation Hub, whose page lists research, workshops and 'testing environments' among possible activities, so the testing function may not be wholly gone; what ended is the named regime and its public register, which is why the record is concluded rather than dismantled. The earliest listed decision (AngelList, October 2016) predates the sandbox's 2017 start and is listed under it by the CSA. The site sits behind a JavaScript challenge that blocks simple scripted fetches.
In December 1993 the Chief Actuary projected that the pay-as-you-go contribution rate would reach 14.2% by 2030 and that the fund would run out by 2015. The federal and provincial governments agreed a reform package in 1997. It took effect on 1 January 1998, raised the combined contribution rate in steps to 9.9% by 2003, replaced pay-as-you-go financing with steady-state funding and invested net cash flows through the CPP Investment Board. The 2024 valuation puts the minimum sustaining rate at 9.19% from 2034, below the legislated 9.9%, with assets of $651 billion.
The Chief Actuary's statutory triennial reports put a dated number on the funding gap. Federal and provincial finance ministers then negotiated one package that raised contributions, trimmed benefit growth and moved new money into market investment under an arm's-length board, and wrote into the statute that any future benefit increase must be fully funded.
Preconditions
An actuarial office whose projections both orders of government accept as the shared baseline
A joint amendment rule that forces federal and provincial governments into one negotiated package
Enough time before the projected exhaustion date to phase in a contribution rise
Where else it has been used: The 1997 package required any future benefit increase to be fully funded. The additional CPP in force since 1 January 2019 is fully funded, and the 32nd report sets its own minimum contribution rates on that basis.
Limits: The construct is speed, and this reform was not fast. Four years passed between the December 1993 warning and the amendments taking effect in January 1998, and the rate took until 2003 to reach 9.9%. Whether that counts as responsive depends on a comparison the record cannot supply: it shows a rule changed in time, before the projected 2015 exhaustion, and not that it changed quickly. The headline numbers are a legislated rate and a projection, not an observed outcome. The evidence that the reform held, a 9.19% minimum rate against 9.9%, is the Chief Actuary's model under his own assumptions. That office sits inside OSFI, so this is a federal body assessing a federal-provincial plan. The fix was paid for mostly by workers and employers through a contribution rate up about 70% from 1997, plus slower benefit growth, which a reader may count as a cost of the delay as much as a sign of capability. Quebec runs its own plan, so the CPP covers the rest of Canada. The amendment formula requires the agreement of provinces holding most of the population, and that slows any reform as well as stabilising it.
๐จ๐ฆCanadasince 1970still operatingbears on Disaster preparedness and recovery
Public Safety Canada's Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements paid $1.84 billion in contributions to provinces and territories between 2011โ12 and 2015โ16, almost 45 percent of everything paid since the programme began in 1970, while 53 disaster events were approved by the Governor in Council between 2011 and 2016.
Ottawa cost-shares provincial and territorial response and recovery spending on a sliding scale above a per-capita threshold, triggered by an order in council, so that a single large disaster does not fall on one province's budget.
Preconditions
Provinces and territories with their own disaster assistance programmes to reimburse
A federal audit and acquittal process that provinces accept, even when it takes years
Fiscal room at the federal level to absorb a spike like the 2013 Alberta floods
Where else it has been used: Australia runs the same move as the DRFA. The Canadian expert panel's 2023 report and the 2025 redesign moved money toward mitigation and earlier support for survivors, which is the usual lesson of a long-running reimbursement scheme.
Limits: This is the department evaluating its own programme. Payments follow disaster losses, so a high figure is partly a record of bad luck: the 2013โ14 year alone (about $1.02 billion) carries more than half the five-year total. The same evaluation shows the money arrives slowly: for the 53 events approved in 2011โ2016 the estimated federal share was $3.8 billion against $1.6 billion actually issued, because provinces have up to five years after approval to request final payment, and before 2008 there was no time limit at all. The figures are nine years old; a 2025 parliamentary briefing note on the Public Safety site puts the cumulative total since 1970 at $8.9 billion, and the programme was redesigned from April 2025, so this record documents the arrangement as it stood in the evaluation period. Provinces and territories design and run the assistance; DFAA reimburses part of it.
Canada rolled out the Phoenix federal pay system in 2016, then spent more than C$2.6 billion by April 2022 to support and stabilise it and correct pay-file errors, with a further roughly C$1 billion allocated through the 2024-25 fiscal year.
A central agency replaced a complex government-wide payroll system through a schedule-driven rollout with insufficient independent oversight; once errors spread across departments, the state converted the project into a permanent stabilisation operation while designing a successor.
Preconditions
A payroll system serving many departments with different rules and legacy data
Central oversight strong enough to challenge a schedule and budget that look achievable on paper
A fallback payroll process that protects workers while the digital system is repaired
Where else it has been used: Phoenix is now used inside Canada's digital-government controls as a failure case. The transferable lesson is governance: independent review has to see the whole operating complexity before a government-wide launch, not after the backlog appears.
Limits: Spending on stabilisation and correction measures shows the scale of a delivery failure, not the total social cost of late or incorrect pay, nor whether a replacement will perform better. The Auditor General notes that the total implementation cost was still not known, and the figures combine technical support, error correction and later stabilisation rather than one clean project budget. The system continued to operate while the government explored its replacement.
๐จ๐ฆCanadasince 1998dismantledbears on Large project delivery
Canada began registering all firearms under the 1995 Firearms Act from December 1998. The registry's first information system, CFIS I, had an initial estimate of $13 to 20 million and had cost $190 million by March 2005. Its successor CFIS II rose from $32 million to at least $87 million and was halted. In 2012 Parliament ended long-gun registration and ordered the destruction of about 7.5 million non-restricted registration records, which the RCMP deleted from CFIS in October 2012.
The Department of Justice, and later the Canada Firearms Centre, built a universal national registry through contracted IT development while the regulations it had to implement were still changing, and reported the rising cost to ministers before Parliament. In 2012 Parliament ended the long-gun part by statute and had the RCMP destroy its records.
Preconditions
Legislation and regulations settled before the system is specified, so requirements do not move during the build
Cost reporting to Parliament that covers the full programme, not only what is appropriated each year
A political settlement on registration durable enough to survive a change of government, or a design that does not depend on one
Limits: The cost figure is a Commons committee's summary of the Auditor General's 2006 follow-up. The Auditor General's own 2002 and 2006 chapters no longer open at their published OAG URLs, so the record rests on Parliament's restatement of them. The $190 million covers CFIS I, the information system, and is not the cost of the whole programme. The often quoted figure of roughly $1 billion for the programme could not be verified at an official URL today and is not used. The baseline is a range of $13 to 20 million given at an early stage, so any overrun ratio, roughly ten times, depends on which end is chosen and on how far the scope of that early estimate matched the system that was built. The committee itself attributes part of the growth to things outside the project team's control: requirements kept changing, and Bill C-10 and its regulations were delayed by more than two years. The dismantling in 2012 was a political decision by a new parliamentary majority. It was not a collapse caused by the delivery, so the status records a policy reversal rather than a technical failure. Licensing and the registry of restricted and prohibited firearms kept running, Quebec residents' records were held back pending litigation, and public agencies still register. The 7.5 million records show the scale the registry reached and say nothing about their accuracy, which the 2006 audit questioned. Like can-phoenix, this is a public IT system rather than physical infrastructure.
๐จ๐ฆCanadasince 2015delivered and closedbears on Large project delivery
Infrastructure Canada delivered the Samuel De Champlain Bridge corridor in Montreal as a public-private partnership signed in 2015, opening the bridge in July 2019 against a contractual in-service date of December 1, 2018, at a total project cost the department reports as C$4.2 billion, after a C$235 million settlement in 2018 that paid for delay-recovery measures and oversized-part transport issues.
Infrastructure Canada replaced a failing federal bridge through a design-build-finance-operate-maintain contract with liquidated damages for late opening, then bought back schedule with a negotiated settlement when transport restrictions and disputes threatened the date.
Preconditions
A federal asset owner with an urgent safety case (the old bridge at the end of its safe life) that justified a fixed in-service date.
A mature domestic P3 market and an owner's engineer able to price and monitor a 30-year contract.
Budget room to pay a nine-figure settlement rather than litigate through the delay.
Limits: No published figure states the outturn against the baseline, so overrun has to be pieced together by the reader. The value-for-money report gives a 2015 total of C$4.239 billion and a contractual in-service date of December 1, 2018; the department's own story page gives a rounded C$4.2 billion total and a July 2019 opening; the 2018 settlement adds C$235 million and moved the delivery date to December 21, 2018, which was itself missed. The C$4.2 billion therefore cannot include the settlement and appears to restate the original envelope, so the true outturn is at least about 5.5% above it (a computed figure, not published) and the bridge opened about seven months after the contract date. Costs also bundle a 30-year operation and maintenance period and financing, so the number is not a construction cost. All figures are the department's own; the Auditor General's 2018 doubts about the schedule are reported only in the press here. The canada.ca news release refused a scripted curl request and was read through a browser-like fetch. This is one megaproject, not a national portfolio.