The 2012 Cuts to Refugee Health Coverage in Canada: The Anatomy of a Social Policy Failure

What is it about?

In 2012, Canada's federal government announced cuts to health coverage for refugees, and this decision is widely regarded as poor public policy. We bring to light the faulty process by which the decision was made and implemented and propose a way to avoid such errors in future.

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Why is it important?

We provide a rare window into the process used by a federal government to define social problems and design policy to address them. We expose a lack of evidence to support that government's claims as well as important gaps in the policy process. These findings explain how social policy failures like this one come to occur and point to ways to avoid them.