CAPP's 10th Anniversary.

• Position: Canadian-American Public Policy - Brief Article - Editorial

In the spring of 1990 Peter Morici, a professor of economics at the University of Maine who had published widely on cross-border trade policy, launched Canadian-American Public Policy (CAPP) with the help of the Business Fund for Canadian Studies in the United States and the University of Maine's Canadian-American Center. "Within the U.S. and Canadian academic communities," Morici observed, "the expertise potentially available to sensitize public officials and opinion leaders and help resolve disputes fairly and in a mutually acceptable fashion has grown with the increasing number of university scholars studying bilateral relations in economics, political science, business and management, history, geography, the physical sciences, and the humanities." Morici chose a 'working papers' format so that each number of CAPP, devoted to a single but substantial essay analyzing a bilateral issue or comparing public policies in an issue area, could be edited, printed and disseminated quickly, enabling this growing bod y of academic work to reach an audience that included members of Congress and Parliament, cabinet and senior administration officials, journalists, academics, public policy research groups, and other opinion leaders. In short, CAPP would bring scholarly analysis directly to bear on the processes of policy formulation and dispute resolution. So that partisan advocacy would yield to academic integrity, balance and fairness, each essay was accepted for publication in the CAPP series only after it had received rigorous evaluation by recognized scholars.

Barely a year into the CAPP series, Peter agreed to assume new administrative burdens as director of the Canadian-American Center. When he asked me to assume the editorship of CAPP, it seemed at first to be a modest and relatively short-term chore. But it soon grew when Peter left Maine for...