Study of A Proposal (and its alternatives) to Amend the Textile Labelling and Advertising Regulations: Applying the Conference Board’s Optimal Policy Mix Framework

6. About the Optimal Policy Mix

Public policy making has become increasingly complex over the past 10 to 15 years. This is largely because of the increasingly litigious nature of our society, and the fact that the policy toolkit now includes not only traditional regulatory approaches but also a host of complementary approaches such as voluntary and non-regulatory initiatives and economic instruments. How can policy makers ensure they select the best combinations of approaches—the optimal policy mix—to meet specific policy objectives? How can ends and means be best matched to contribute to better policy making?

The Optimal Policy Mix (OPM) Framework is a methodology for considering policy objectives (ends) and policy instruments (means) in the development of policy.

6.1 The OPM Framewor

The OPM Framework suggests that good public policy for any issues should embrace the following principal elements, or steps, as set out in the three boxes in Exhibit 1. These are:

• Develop policy objective/policy goal (end);
• Select policy instruments (means); and
• Evaluate impacts of alternatives and select preferred approach, including compliance issues.

These elements are preceded by the scoping of issues and risks and followed by the implementation of the preferred approach. Working through the elements of the OPM Framework is frequently iterative, involving revisiting ends, means, criteria, and impacts to identify a preferred approach. Stakeholder involvement at each stage is crucial. It ensures a shared understanding of the issues, objectives, assumptions and policy choices, along with their compliance implications. More importantly, the process informs stakeholders of the sometimes-difficult policy choices that are almost always made in any instrument choice situation. It is this level of broadly based understanding that makes the resulting instrument choices and policy outcomes more acceptable to stakeholders and so less likely to ;lead to litigation.

This type of policy setting exercise takes time, and a willingness to think outside the box in terms of policy instruments. In exchange for this, the process instills a level of rigour in the policy setting process that helps ensure that potentially more optimal policy decisions and alternative instrument choices are at least considered as part of the policy maker’s toolkit. In effect, it is the process that provides most of the value of OPM in policy setting.

This report describes the main elements of the policy objective and the OPM Framework as it applies to those objectives. Further information about the OPM Framework, about the scoping and implementing stages, as well as the stakeholder considerations that are integral to all parts of the process can be found in the Conference Board report entitled: The Optimal Policy Mix, Matching Ends and Means in Environmental Policy Making.²³

²³ The Optimal Policy Mix: Matching Ends and Means in Environmental Policy Making (Ottawa: The Conference Board of Canada, 2000).