solutions of the problem. While this does not mean there is nothing useful to say about homelessness at a provincial or national level, it does mean that good policy-making must allow for real flexibility in solutions and implementation at a variety of levels. 5. The public have new expectations: We’ve already seen that the public’s expectations around transparency and accountability have changed. We can add this to the list of four principles, to give us five in all. Recognition and acceptance of these five principles is growing. Taken together, they combine to form the starting point for the argument in this book that policy must be developed and delivered in a new way—one that rewards governments, stakeholders, communities and ordinary citizens for working together to find shared solutions to complex issues. And, indeed, a new way of doing policy has been emerging for some time. It responds to issues around the Big Ideas and consumer approaches by rethinking the public policy process to make it more open, inclusive, transparent, accountable, and “bottom-up,” or collaborative. We call it public engagement, which, in effect, is a process, or methodology, for collaboration. Without some such alternative, we think political parties and governments will simply continue to ramp up their capacity for consumer politics. In Chapter 7 we will revisit this list of the five principles of public engagement to provide a modified and more comprehensive list that can help guide practitioners, as they try to put the theory into practice. This book starts from the premise that Canadians are approaching a fork in the political road. One path takes us deeper into the technocratic world of political marketing and consumer politics. The other aims at a renewal of the role of ideas, values
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