Canadian policy-makers are facing a polycrisis driven by many factors, including climate change, increasing social and economic inequities, government cutbacks, an unstable international order, and increasing denial of empirical evidence as a basis for decision-making. Relevant and influential evaluations can and must provide timely and insightful advice by addressing the relevant questions, gathering credible evidence, and producing impactful reports. CES’s Core Professional Values are foundational to this work, but what does it mean to apply those values in the real world?
Evaluators from across Canada and abroad will gather in Edmonton in May 2026 to strengthen their toolkit, learn new approaches, and establish new connections, leaving the conference more confident in their critical advisory role. This conference will be about learning, sharing experiences, recognizing diverse ways of knowing, and getting better as practitioners and as a profession at meeting the challenges of a complex world. We will explore the power of an inclusive “AND” when faced with the need to juggle competing considerations such as accessibility, diversity, economic growth, environmental responsibility and sustainability, equity, Indigenous sovereignty, and social cohesion. Participants will leave this conference better equipped to fully address the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency and impacts of local, national and international programs, activities, and initiatives in a variety of sectors.
Presenters and participants will jointly explore strategies to build more comprehensive evaluations, which effectively cover all relevant – but often ignored – considerations and impacts on both human and natural systems, Indigenous sovereignty, and policy commitments to inclusiveness, equity, and the environment.
Special consideration will be given to the concept of “evidence”, which is at the core of all evaluations, but whose nature, scope, and validity appear more volatile than ever as a result of technological and world-view pressures. Key considerations include how evidence reaches decision-makers and is used.
All conference participants will contribute to a much-needed effort to sort through our current toolkit as evaluators, figuring out what to keep, what to reinvent, and what to set aside, so that individually and collectively, we strengthen our ability to tackle complexity, provide sharp and salient advice that reflects the urgency to act and adapt, as well as implement value-based implications given the risks of inequity, power dynamics, and bias, among others.