Maytree has published a feature interview with INCLUSIECON researcher Selvia Arshad, spotlighting the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) project and its argument that Canada needs a better way to measure what public spending is actually worth — not just what it costs.
On April 20, 2026, Maytree released an in-depth interview with Selvia Arshad — Invest in people, strengthen finances: How a new measure can lead to better policy — as part of its ongoing publications series on evidence-based social policy. The piece walks readers through the core premise of the MVPF framework: that Canadian governments currently evaluate programs and services primarily by their price tag, with no comparable measure of the social and economic value those programs return. MVPF is designed to close that gap.
The interview situates the research in this fiscal moment. With federal and provincial governments navigating tough budget conversations and a shifting geopolitical environment, the framing matters: social spending has long been treated as a cost to minimize, yet many of these programs function as investments that strengthen long-term public finances. MVPF gives decision-makers a unified way to compare very different programs on their actual return.
The MVPF project is INCLUSIECON's flagship ENABLE-stream initiative, building the conceptual and empirical infrastructure needed to apply marginal welfare analysis to Canadian tax and transfer programs. Maytree's role goes beyond funding: as strategic partner, Maytree brings the policy audience, the knowledge-mobilization reach, and the civil-society perspective that makes this research usable in real budget debates.
Mitacs Accelerate supports Selvia's graduate research internship, enabling the sustained, full-time empirical work the project requires. Together, the three-way partnership — INCLUSIECON at the University of Calgary, Maytree, and Mitacs — is what allows MVPF to move from academic framework to applied policy tool.
Selvia's research sits at the intersection of public finance, welfare economics, and tax policy. She is the lead author on the MVPF-TAdmin framework paper (forthcoming, Canadian Tax Journal) and a co-author on the forthcoming basic personal amount (BPA) analysis. More at selviaarshad.com.
The conversation surfaces three ideas worth highlighting for Canadian policy readers. First, that the absence of a value-based evaluation tool has let governments treat any social program as a line item to cut in lean years — regardless of whether the program actually saves money over time. Second, that MVPF integrates the benefits people receive with the true cost to government, including downstream revenue effects from improved employment and child outcomes, which lets very different programs be compared on the same terms. Third, that this is not only a government tool: civil-society organizations can use MVPF to anchor advocacy in rigorous evidence about return on public investment, not only in moral argument.