Advisory machinery for large-scale crises and a risky future

This short article provides a practitioner's perspective in response to Iacobucci and Trebilcock's (2022) article “Existential threats: Climate change, pandemics and institutions.” It offers some thoughts on: the many kinds of advisory bodies on whose advice governments can draw; the options for and constraints on institutional change; and what the federal and provincial governments could do to better equip themselves for dealing with the next “existential crisis.” The goal is to point to the full range of sources of scientific and policy advice for governments, to encourage better appreciation of when different sources of advice might be best served by different institutional underpinnings, and to emphasize the important role of the public service and “soft” machinery in fielding advice from diverse sources in an increasingly risky future.