We all benefit when governments make policy decisions informed by the best available evidence. Importantly, recent years have seen an increase in the call for evidence from policy actors across all levels of government in the Canadian federation. But conversations about evidence-informed decision-making tend to devote little focus to the public’s ability to understand the relationship between evidence and policy decisions. Without transparency, the public cannot scrutinize the rationale behind government decisions and political commitments to evidence-informed decision-making remain difficult to assess.