Chronique | Experts sur le banc des accusés

2026/07/23 Leave a comment

Good distinction between experts and deciders:

…“Les experts ne sont ni infaillibles ni élus. Ils peuvent se tromper, débattre, diverger et réviser leurs conclusions. C’est ainsi que la science progresse, par la confrontation des hypothèses et l’accumulation des connaissances. Cette capacité à remettre constamment les connaissances à l’épreuve est aussi l’une des grandes forces de la démocratie. Le rôle des experts n’est pas de dicter ce que la société doit vouloir, mais de nous aider à mieux comprendre les conséquences des choix qui s’offrent à nous.

C’est précisément parce que la science accepte la contradiction qu’elle constitue un outil précieux pour la démocratie. Elle ne prétend pas détenir une vérité absolue ; elle cherche continuellement à améliorer notre compréhension du réel.

Une démocratie mature n’oppose pas les élus aux experts. Au contraire, elle reconnaît que chacun a un rôle bien distinct à jouer. Les chercheurs produisent et interprètent les connaissances. Les citoyens expriment leurs besoins, leurs valeurs et leurs préférences. Les élus arbitrent entre les options et assument les décisions.

“Lorsque les experts se retrouvent sur le banc des accusés, ce n’est pas seulement leur crédibilité qui est mise en jeu. C’est aussi notre capacité collective à prendre des décisions éclairées. Car une démocratie qui cesse d’écouter ceux dont le métier est de produire des connaissances ne devient pas plus démocratique. Elle devient simplement moins bien informée. La science ne remplace pas la démocratie. Elle lui donne les moyens de mieux décider.”

François William Croteau P.-d.g. de l’IRIU, professeur associé à l’UQAM, l’auteur a été maire de Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie. Il a publié «Nos villes au front» chez Atelier 10.

Source: Chronique | Experts sur le banc des accusés

…“ Experts are neither infallible nor elected. They can be wrong, debate, diverge and revise their conclusions. This is how science progresses, through the confrontation of hypotheses and the accumulation of knowledge. This ability to constantly put knowledge to the test is also one of the great strengths of democracy. The role of experts is not to dictate what society must want, but to help us better understand the consequences of the choices available to us.

It is precisely because science accepts contradiction that it is a valuable tool for democracy. It does not claim to have absolute truth; it continually seeks to improve our understanding of reality.

A mature democracy does not oppose elected officials to experts. On the contrary, it recognizes that everyone has a very distinct role to play. Researchers produce and interpret knowledge. Citizens express their needs, values and preferences. The elected officials arbitrate between the options and assume the decisions.

“When experts find themselves in the dock, it is not only their credibility that is at stake. It is also our collective ability to make informed decisions. Because a democracy that stops listening to those whose job is to produce knowledge does not become more democratic. She simply becomes less informed. Science does not replace democracy. It gives him the means to decide better.”

François William Croteau P.-d.g. of IRIU, associate professor at UQAM, the author was mayor of Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie. He published “Our cities at the front” at Atelier 10.

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Government of Canada announces new members to be appointed to the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments

2026/07/17 2 Comments

Of note: Gender parity, 2 visible minorities, 1 Indigenous.

Comparison table below:

….The new members bring a sound understanding of the parliamentary and legislative process, which will allow them to provide high quality recommendations to the Prime Minister about who could contribute to the work of the Senate. Adding to the constitutional requirements, the members will be focused on recommendations that will achieve greater expertise in the Senate on the emerging issues and challenges facing Canada including trade, finance, artificial intelligence and technology, diplomacy and foreign affairs, criminal justice and community safety and strategic Canadian capabilities and industries.

This is especially important following the expansion of the criteria for new applicants to the Senate, and the removal of the non-partisanship criterion for Senate appointments, recognising the valuable contributions made by Canadians who have chosen to serve in elected office or in other partisan roles…

Source: Government of Canada announces new members to be appointed to the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments

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ICYMI: Applications for federal public service jobs drop by almost 30 per cent

2026/07/15 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see overall impact on hirings, separations and promotions by group in next year’s report:

The number of people applying for a job in the federal government plummeted last year as Ottawa works to slash the size of the public service.

Two years ago, there were more than a million applications for jobs in the federal public service.

But between April 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026, that number fell by nearly 30 per cent, to less than 735,000.

The number of job ads the government posted was also down almost 40 per cent, while the number of people who left the public service, including retirements and resignations, increased 12 per cent.

There were also around 52 per cent fewer promotions within the public service in 2025-26, compared to a year earlier. 

In Budget 2025, the Liberal government committed to cutting the number of public service positions by about 40,000 people by April 2029 from a peak of almost 368,000 in 2024. …

Source: Applications for federal public service jobs drop by almost 30 per cent

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ICYMI – Globe editorial: The return of a Liberal Senate in all but name

2026/07/15 Leave a comment

Will continue to track nominations. As mentioned, selection of non-partisan appointments equally telling of government priorities:

…Now here we are in 2026, with a majority Liberal government and a Senate stacked with Liberal and Liberal-leaning senators, and Mr. Carney has made it clear that the good old days of unapologetic partisanship are back. 

And yet there is still no Liberal caucus in the Senate to identify those past and future Liberal appointees as what they are: an extension of the government of the day, waiting for its marching orders.

The Senate may have finally reached its nadir – an unelected house stuffed with political appointees who can feign independence and thus shield the government from the consequences of their decisions. 

If Liberal senators are going to function as Liberal senators, Canadians deserve the honesty of calling them that. Mr. Carney has cheapened democracy with his actions. He needs to restore the Liberal caucus in Senate to undo the damage. 

Source: The return of a Liberal Senate in all but name

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Clerk Report to PM: Less Emphasis of Employment Equity

2026/06/26 Leave a comment

Quite a shift from the previous Clerk and government. The annex A extensive data on public service representation and diversity have been replaced by Public Service Employee Survey Responses centred around the Clerk’s priorities of focus, simplify, accountability and Inclusion and values-based culture.

Given a shrinking public service and concerns among advocates that this may affect representation (no sign of it yet), an odd decision rather than just adding an annex.

While the report makes the standard references to inclusion, the “How we work” Annex B limits inclusion to regional aspects: “A values-based, inclusive public service where all public servants from all regions feel valued, supported and empowered to contribute.”

Was it a conscious decision not to include “all backgrounds” or an oversight? Hard to know but it does suggest an overall decreased interest in employment equity at a time when the public service is shrinking. We will see if TBS continues its detailed annual reporting or simplifies.

32nd Annual Report to the Prime Minister on the Public Service of Canada

33rd Annual Report to the Prime Minister on the Public Service of Canada



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Grant: The Real Reason Bosses Want You Back in the Office Full Time (It’s Not Productivity) 

2026/06/23 Leave a comment

Although the analysis is based upon the private sector, parallels in the public sector as well, although the public sector has to address perceptions of public service as being coddled compared to the private sector:

…There are limits to the benefit of flexible office policies. Research suggests that working from home for more than half the week can be isolating — it’s harder to build connections and cultures. It’s also more difficult to encourage creative collisions, informal learning and mentoring. But it doesn’t take five days a week to accomplish these goals. In fact, it turns out that people are most collaborative and creative when they work remotely part of the week. They can use a day or two at home to focus on individual deep work and reserve the rest of the week for communication and collective problem-solving. It’s well documented that too much togetherness breeds groupthink (not to mention germs). When we spend some time apart, we actually generate more innovative ideas and make smarter decisions.

Hybrid work does have its own challenges for leaders. It’s not fun to try to inspire through a recorded video message or lead a brainstorming session on a digital whiteboard. But to maintain a competitive advantage in an increasingly flexible world, it’s time for leaders to put their egos aside and master the art of managing from afar. Evidence supports a few basic guidelines.

One: Coordination counts. Teams need anchor days when everyone shows up — especially to welcome newcomers and mentor junior people. At Microsoft, new hires who spent at least a couple of days a month with their manager and their teams were more satisfied with their early experiences, which in turn meant they were more likely to stay over the next year and a half.

Two: Intensity beats frequency. The software company Atlassian has found that spending a few days with your team at a well-designed quarterly team gathering does more for connection and belonging than daily schleps to the office.

Three: Hybrid work is not one-size-fits-all. Different jobs require different amounts of time in person. So do different people; for example, flexibility proves particularly important in attracting and retaining women. And you need to gather together more if your staff operates like a basketball team passing the ball back and forth, rather than a gymnastics team whose members do their own individual events. (This explains why fully remote teams struggleto patent new technologies, but the people who examine patent applications are more productive when they can work from anywhere they like.)

Four: Most people care more about when they work than where. If they can choose the hours, they’re more willing to let leaders pick the place.

Organizational policies shouldn’t be vanity projects. The responsibility of leaders is not to mold the world to their needs. It’s to adapt themselves to the world’s needs, even if it means learning to live without the thrill of a live audience.

Dr. Grant, a contributing Opinion writer, is an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Ms. Shandell and Ms. Elliott are Ph.D. candidates there.

Source: The Real Reason Bosses Want You Back in the Office Full Time (It’s Not Productivity)

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Dissecting 2024-25 data on the public service, early cuts, and equity goals (paywall)

2026/05/12 Leave a comment

My latest analysis. Short version in the Hill Times.

Source: Dissecting 2024-25 data on the public service, early cuts, and equity goals

Full detailed version below:

EE – Analysis of disaggregated data by group and gender 2025 Draft SubmissionDownload

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Carney to continue using Trudeau-era advisory board to suggest Senate appointments

2026/05/08 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see whether there is any impact on the diversity and political leanings of Carney appointments. Trudeau appointments: 55.2 percent women, 19.8 percent visible minorities, and 12.5 percent Indigenous:

Prime Minister Mark Carney said Wednesday he will continue to rely on the independent advisory board created by Justin Trudeau to suggest Senate appointments, but gave no timeline for filling a growing number of vacancies. 

After more than a year in office Mr. Carney has yet to make a single Senate appointment. Vacancies are mounting not just among senators but also on the board tasked with selecting new members of the Senate. 

There are currently nine vacancies in the 105-member Senate and another six senators are planning to retire by the end of 2026. The Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments, consisting of federal, provincial and territorial representatives, currently has just five members. It has 24 vacancies, leaving most provinces without representation on the board. 

At a Montreal-area press conference, Mr. Carney gave no indication of when he would begin addressing the vacancies in the Senate. “We will be appointing senators in due course, and I will take into account the advice of the independent advisory committee that was established by my predecessor,” he said. 

Source: Carney to continue using Trudeau-era advisory board to suggest Senate appointments, Carney not planning to allow senators in Liberal caucus, senior government official says


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Advocates push for ‘central tracking’ of job cuts by equity group as union warns public service gains at risk

2026/05/04 2 Comments

Have forthcoming analysis of the 2024-25 EE desegregated data, representation, hirings, separations, promotions that demonstrates that no negative impact compared to the previous year. So warnings may be overstated and public service may already considering equity impact:

As the public service moves to shed thousands of jobs, unions and a newly formed national coalition say equity gains may be more fragile than they appear, and warn leaving departments to monitor representation creates a “serious gap” in tracking where the cuts fall.

The federal public service entered 2026 looking more representative than it did a decade ago, according to the government’s latest Employment Equity Annual Report. The March report showed racialized workers made up 23.9 per cent of the core public administration in 2024-25, slightly above the 22.7 per cent workforce-availability benchmark. Black employees accounted for 5.1 per cent of the public service, up from 2.8 per cent in 2016-17.

Unions and advocates say the latest report can offer a useful snapshot, but it may not fully capture if employment equity efforts have been damaged. Their concern is less about whether the public service still looks representative on paper than about which workers are most exposed as job cuts deepen.

A newly formed group, the National Employment Equity Council, is calling on the government to require mandatory equity impact assessments before any further staffing decisions. Nicholas Marcus Thompson, its co-chair, warns the government’s current approach means signs of inequities tied to job losses may arrive “too late.”

Though departments have sent workforce adjustment notices tied to 17,000 job cuts, the federal government has not publicly released data to show if equity-seeking groups will be affected….

Andrew Griffith, a former senior federal official who has analyzed Treasury Board employment equity data for years, said the latest data does not support the conclusion that racialized public servants are being disproportionately harmed.

Representation of visible minorities rose slightly in 2024–25, while hiring rates for visible minorities and Indigenous staff remained above their internal representation.

Still, advocates say the TBS response to The Hill Times suggests a worrying approach.

“This doesn’t address the concern,” Thompson said by email. 

“It leaves departments to monitor themselves, with no central tracking, under a law the government has acknowledged is outdated. That’s how inequities continue, and by the time we see it, it’s too late.”…

The council’s central demand is implementation of the 2023 Employment Equity Act Task Force report, including formal recognition of Black workers and 2SLGBTQI+ people as distinct designated groups under the law.

For Thompson, one of the most urgent unresolved issues is how Black workers remain folded into the broader visible minorities category. Under that approach, the government can meet aggregate targets while leaving subgroup disparities untouched, he argued.

“When it is lumped in with everyone else, Black people almost always get left behind,” Thompson said.

Due to ongoing cuts, Thompson said Black workers contacting the council have described fear, declining trust in internal systems, and frustration with what they see as a lack of clarity and transparency in how restructuring decisions are being made….

Source: Advocates push for ‘central tracking’ of job cuts by equity group as union warns public service gains at risk

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Luciani: The rise of the progressive bureaucrat and the fall of the efficient state

2026/04/28 Leave a comment

A bit simplistic but the fundamental point, more public servants with experience in program delivery and client service than policy development.

And of course, previous generations of public servants reflected the attitudes of the day, whether respect to women, visible minorities, Indigenous, LGTBQ:

…Universities like to present policy training as politically neutral, but no school is neutral when its dominant assumptions are absorbed from the surrounding progressive culture in higher education.

Graduates with MPPs and MPAs are no different. They see the world through the values of their generation. They learn the language of inclusion and identity and bring those values to their work. When Statistics Canada asks in surveys what gender you were assigned at birth, you can be certain the department was influenced by a new generation of policy advisors. A public service staffed chiefly by people trained to think in slogans will inevitably produce a slogan-driven government.

Canada needs smart people less enamoured of theory and ideology, and more rooted in the unglamorous work of delivery. More importantly, we need to restore ministerial responsibility. MPs and ministers should be judged on what happens in their departments. And universities should stop imagining that another wave of credentialed policy analysts will repair what politics has allowed to decay.

Source: The rise of the progressive bureaucrat and the fall of the efficient state

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