Equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility principles are embedded in how we design research, who we partner with, how we build our team, and how we engage with our discipline — not treated as a checklist applied after the work is done.
Our engagement with EDIA has not been static. It has evolved — through the frameworks we have adopted, the partners we have sought out, the communities we have listened to, and the reflexive critique we apply to our own work and institutions.
The core framework that now shapes everything we do is intersectionality — the recognition that people experience policy through multiple overlapping identities simultaneously, and that analysis which treats these dimensions separately produces systematically worse policy. This is not an analytical add-on applied at the end of a project. It has shifted how we approach research design, data strategy, partnership structures, and the questions we consider worth asking in the first place.
Intersectionality has led us to a central conviction: policy analysis that aggregates across groups, or that treats equity as a distributional footnote, systematically produces worse policy. Heterogeneity is not noise — it is the signal. Our work is built around surfacing it.
Lindsay also brings a personal dimension to this work. Living with chronic illness has provided a direct, embodied understanding of accessibility barriers, under-representation, and structural exclusion — an understanding that has shaped her scholarship, her teaching pedagogy, and her approach to building research environments that genuinely accommodate difference.
Our goal is to disrupt and transform mainstream frameworks and discourse — to drive agendas focused on equitable access and inclusive growth, and to give recognition and voice to underrepresented populations in the research and policy processes that shape their lives.
— Lindsay M. Tedds, EDIA StatementForegrounding EDIA in research design means asking different questions before a project begins: whose experience is invisible in existing data? Whose preferences and constraints are averaged away in standard economic models? Who is harmed by a policy that looks neutral in aggregate?
These questions are particularly urgent in tax and transfer policy. Standard policy analysis often models a representative household, optimizing across a smooth distribution. But the people most affected by income support design, benefit cliffs, and tax complexity are precisely those whose lives diverge most sharply from that stylized model — people with disabilities, caregivers, single parents, precarious workers, recent immigrants, and those navigating multiple overlapping systems simultaneously.
Our microsimulation work is built to disaggregate. Rather than reporting effects at the mean, we model distributional impacts across family types, income levels, and demographic characteristics — making the equity dimensions of policy design visible rather than assumed away.
A persistent structural barrier to this work is the state of disaggregated data in Canada. Meaningful intersectional analysis requires data that captures multiple identity dimensions simultaneously — and Canada's administrative and survey data infrastructure has long failed to provide this at the necessary level of granularity, particularly for small populations and those at the intersections of equity-deserving categories.
We actively work to identify these gaps, to advocate for improved data collection and stewardship, and to build research designs that draw on qualitative, participatory, and community-held knowledge when administrative data is unavailable or inadequate.
Our team brings an unusually broad disciplinary foundation to this work. Lindsay's training spans economics, law, and political science — giving her a distinctive capacity to analyse policy as it moves through institutional, legal, and political systems, not just in its technical design. Gillian's background in both economics and law adds a further lens for tracing how policy intent interacts with legal structures, administrative practice, and institutional design — revealing how programs that look equitable in legislation often produce inequitable outcomes in implementation.
Developing a critical mass of diverse expertise and connection requires intentional partnership — not just formal consultation, but ongoing, substantive relationships with communities, organisations, and scholars who work with and advocate for equity-deserving groups. We have consciously built these relationships as a core part of our research infrastructure.
Representation without inclusion fails. Diversity in hiring is only meaningful if the research environment itself is structured to ensure all members feel valued, supported, and able to contribute fully. Our approach to team building tries to address both simultaneously.
Economics has significant and well-documented diversity problems. Addressing these requires more than individual good intentions — it requires active participation in institutional structures that shape who enters and advances in the discipline. Lindsay has been, and continues to be, actively involved in that work.
We work with governments, civil society organisations, and research partners across Canada. If you have a project in mind — or want to discuss how EDIA principles can be better embedded in your own research or policy work — we'd like to hear from you.