the enterprise, finding the language too bureaucratic and disagreeing with some of the characterizations of whether commitments had been met or not. Mendelsohn himself dismissed these criticisms, insisting that tracking mandate letter commitments was an important part of transparency and accountability. Independent academic research later concluded that the Trudeau Government had done a better job of keeping its commitments than any government in Canadian history. Mendelsohn also insisted publicly that the culture change, focus on outcomes, capacity building on implementation and new investments and governance on data were the most important aspects of the work of the Results and Delivery Unit and the Impact and Innovation Unit. He argued publicly that the focus of the Trudeau government on building capacity around data analytics, digital infrastructure and project execution paid off in 2020 when the government successfully rolled out new programs in response to COVID-19. Mendelsohn’s team at the Impact and Innovation Unit (IIU) oversaw the creation of the Impact Canada Platform, which experiments with outcomes-based funding approaches to program delivery. Most of its most successful projects have been Prize Challenges, including Canada’s Smart Cities Challenge. The IIU also led the Government of Canada’s work on behavioural science and experimented with using behavioural insights to increase take up rates of benefit programs for low income Canadians. Mendelsohn spoke publicly that the role of the IIU was to measure whether program dollars were having maximum impact. Mendelsohn wrote that the IIU and the RDU were complementary by relentlessly focusing on implementation, measuring outcomes and using evidence to inform policy and program decisions. The IIU oversaw the development of the Government of Canada’s blog on innovation, which showcased the government’s efforts on human-centred design, data analytics, impact measurement, co-creation, outcomes-based funding and behavioural science. During his time in Ottawa, he was identified as one of the most powerful people in the government and referred to as ‘the policy guru’ while being the person responsible for ensuring the Government delivered on its campaign manifesto. Justin Trudeau Campaign Mendelsohn took a leave from the Mowat Centre during the spring of 2015 and during that time wrote the first draft of what would become the Trudeau platform, which included key elements of Trudeau’s pitch to Canadians, like enhanced child benefits, Senate reform, aggressive action on climate change, improvements to unemployment insurance, pension enhancement, more activist industrial policy, deficit spending and tax fairness. Following the election campaign,