Ottawa hoping to convince reluctant civil servants of the benefits of working from the office

2024/08/27 Leave a comment

Good luck trying to convince public servants that this is good for them even if it likely is in terms of career advancement.

But would be better for Christians Fox to be upfront and just tell public servants to “suck it up” given the realities of public opinion and that most private sector companies have also been introducing back to the office policies:

The federal government is preparing to welcome a frustrated workforce back to its offices on Sept. 9.

Under a new policy announced in May, federal civil servants will have to spend at least three days per week in the office, while executives will have to spend at least four. Currently, civil servants are required to be in their offices only two days per week.

Federal employees’ unions say most civil servants oppose the planned reduction in telework and report struggles with transportation and work-family balance. Many also say they’re more productive when they work from home.

Hoping to cool the discontent, a senior civil servant is making the case for spending more time at the office.

Christiane Fox, deputy clerk of the Privy Council Office, told Radio-Canada the new policy will improve the overall performance of the federal public service and help individual civil servants advance their careers.

“It’s to build a sense of teams that collaborate towards difficult public policy challenges,” she said.

Fox added the goal is to ensure that new public servants “understand the role of a public service and [are] in a position to learn by observation, by the things they see happening in their workplace.”

The government may also be hoping that bringing civil servants back to their offices can improve the public service’s reputation — which has been damaged by a perception in some quarters that employees are taking it easy when they work from home.

“Of course, we can’t ignore the perceptions and the comments that are made about the public service,” said Fox, adding that is not the rationale for the decision….

Source: Ottawa hoping to convince reluctant civil servants of the benefits of working from the office

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Ibbitson: With human rights chief debacle, the Liberals continue their string of blunders

2024/08/15 Leave a comment

Unfortunately accurate:

…On Monday, Mr. Dattani agreed to resign. The Trudeau government’s slipshod vetting process had once again turned what looked like an innovative choice for an important position into an embarrassment.

I say “once again” because hiring, discovering and then backtracking has become something of a pattern with this government’s appointments.

There was the unfortunate decision to ask the Community Media Advocacy Centre to conduct anti-racism seminars. Everything was going fine until reports surfaced that Laith Marouf, a senior consultant at the centre, had posted vile antisemitic comments on Twitter. The government cancelled the contract.

Then there was the famous case of Julie Payette, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s choice for governor-general in 2017. On paper, she looked perfect: an engineer, scientist and former astronaut. But a proper background check would have revealed past accusations of workplace harassment. After similar complaints surfaced at Rideau Hall and following an investigation ordered by the government, Ms. Payette resigned.

The Liberals’ missteps extend beyond poor hiring decisions…

Source: With human rights chief debacle, the Liberals continue their string of blunders

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‘The trust has been broken’: accountability for racism in PCO requires resignations, says Black Class Action lead Thompson

2024/08/08 Leave a comment

Usual over the top rhetoric and expectations. Good that reporting is including relevant data from the PSES and EE representation data.

For Thompson to claim that PCO is not providing the numbers, these are available in Table 1 in the annual reports, albeit not disaggregated by visible minority or indigenous group or level.

Given the relatively large numbers (March 2023, 252 visible minority employees, or 22.8 percent), it should be possible to request and obtain disaggregated numbers for most groups, and for the larger groups, executives):

…The report—released on July 29 by the Coalition Against Workplace Discrimination, which obtained the document through an access to information request—said that Black, racialized, and Indigenous employees experienced “racial stereotyping, microaggressions, and verbal violence,” and a workplace culture where that behaviour is “regularly practiced and normalized, including at the executive level.” 

The report also found that PCO’s culture discouraged reporting and that “effective accountability mechanisms are currently non-existent.”

Rachel Zellars, an associate professor at St. Mary’s University, produced the report following interviews she conducted with 58 employees from November 2021 to May 2022 as part of the PCO’s “Your Voice Matters” Safe Space Initiative, and her work as the inaugural Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar for the Canada School of Public Service. 

Zellars said she conducted 13 interviews with racialized employees and eight with Black employees, the latter accounting for half of the total Black employees in the PCO at the time. 

Those employees shared experiences of their managers and supervisors using the N-word “comfortably” in their presence, and expressing surprise and ignorance when informed it was a pejorative term, as well as Islamophobic remarks and “feigned innocence” when white employees were promoted over them.

In contrast, white employees had worked at PCO for longer periods, and were clustered in higher-level positions than Black, racialized, and Indigenous employees. Those white employees also detailed experiences and career-advancing opportunities “in stark variance” to their non-white colleagues.

The Safe Space Initiative was launched following a Call to Action by former clerk Ian Shugart in January 2021. The call urged public service leaders to take action to remove systemic racism from Canada’s institutions. 

According to the 2022 Public Service Employee Survey results for the PCO, seven per cent of the 710 employees who responded said they had been the victim of on-the-job discrimination in the previous 12 months. Of the 35 respondents who identified as Black, 12 per cent said they had been the victim of discrimination. Ten per cent of the 145 racialized, non-Indigenous respondents indicated they had been the victim of discrimination, and five per cent of non-racialized, non-Indigenous employees did as well.

Of those who said they had been the victim of discrimination, 31 per cent said it had been targeted at their national or ethnic origin, followed by age-based discrimination at 30 per cent. Twenty-nine per cent said the discrimination they faced was based on their racial identity, 25 per cent said it was due to sexism, and 23 per cent said the discrimination was based on skin colour.

The vast majority of those employees who said they experienced discrimination—75 per cent—said the source had been a supervisor or manager, followed by 19 per cent who said it came from coworkers, 18 per cent who said employees from other departments, and three per cent who indicated they had been discriminated against by their subordinates.

Nearly half of the employees—47 per cent—who said they had been the victims of discrimination said they had taken no action in response due to fear of reprisals or expectations that doing so would be futile.

In an interview with The Hill Times following the Aug. 1 march, Black Class Action Secretariat CEO Nicholas Marcus Thompson questioned how the government can be trusted to implement any measures regarding the International Decade for People of African Descent, or even lead its own call to action to address anti-racism in the public service when the leadership responsible for doing so are themselves perpetrators. 

During this year’s official Government of Canada Black History Month reception on Feb. 7 at the Canadian Museum of History, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) announced that Canada would extend its recognition of the decade until 2028, giving Canada the “full 10 years.” Trudeau’s government officially recognized the UN General Assembly 2015 proclamation of the decade in January 2018.

Since 2019, the federal government has announced several measures and investments attributed to Canada’s recognition of the decade, including $200-million over five years for the Supporting Black Canadian Communities Initiative, $265-million over four years to the Black Entrepreneurship Program (BEP), $200-million to establish the Black-led Philanthropic Endowment Fund, and the development of Canada’s Black Justice Strategy to address anti-Black racism and systemic discrimination in the criminal justice system. The strategy “aims to help ensure that Black people have access to equal treatment before and under the law in Canada.”

Thompson noted that the PCO’s response to the report did not include an acceptance of responsibility or an apology. 

“No apology for the pain they’ve caused their employees … for the microaggressions or the use of the N-word,” Thompson said. “The first step should be an apology.”

In response to the coalition’s publication of the report, the PCO issued a similar statement to the one it sent to The Hill Times, highlighting the steps its senior management team has taken to “reinforce” its commitment to Shugart’s call to action, and pointing to the increases in representation within its workforce and executive since 2020. 

Between March 2020 and 2024, the PCO says that of its 1,200 employees, Black representation increased from 3.4 per cent (29 employees) to 5.8 per cent (66 employees). It also noted an increase from 2.7 per cent to 2.9 per cent for Indigenous employees, 16.5 per cent to 23.9 per cent for racialized employees, and an increase in women employees from 53.9 per cent to 57.8 per cent.

Within the executive, PCO says it has increased its representation in all those categories as well, but did not provide the underlying number of employees those percentages are based on, which Thompson said helps mask the reality of the situation. 

“They rely on percentages when it suits them because they could say they had a 50 per cent increase, but that could just represent one more employee if they only had two before,” Thompson explained. “We want to see representation increase, but it must be done proportionately.”

As for the steps the PCO says it has taken in its response, Thompson said many of those were performative “events,” and lack the depth required to comprehensively tackle the systemic issues identified in Zellars’ report and Shugart’s call to action. 

However, Thompson said the “trust has been broken,” and the coalition no longer believes the PCO can “fix itself.” 

“If we want to see accountability, we need resignations,” Thompson said. 

Alongside its reiteration of the long-standing calls for the creation of a Black Equity Commissioner and the settlement of the class-action lawsuit filed against the federal public service in December 2020, the coalition is also calling for the resignations of deputy clerk Natalie Drouin, who was responsible for the discrimination file since 2021, and Matthew Shea, assistant secretary to the cabinet, ministerial services and corporate affairs, and the head of PCO corporate services since 2017.

“The PCO can’t fix itself on this issue, so we need an arm’s-length commissioner to audit and direct it,” Thompson said, suggesting that one of the reasons so little action had been taken on Zellars’ report was because it had been “optional.” 

Thompson also noted that while the government has created commissioners or special envoys to tackle issues of antisemitism, Islamophobia, or anti-LGBTQ2S+ hate, there is “no such thing” to address anti-Black discrimination. 

“We’ve been needing specialized solutions to addressing anti-Black discrimination, recognizing that it’s unique from all other forms of racism and discrimination,” Thompson said, adding that the federal Anti-Racism Secretariat does not even have a mandate to investigate the public service. 

“It’s an outward-facing secretariat,” Thompson said. “It has no mandate to investigate, audit, or examine any forms of discrimination in the public service.”

Thompson said that the Black Equity Commissioner would also need structural support, including the creation of a new Department of African Canadian Studies to function similarly to Crown–Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, and the changes to the Employment Equity Act suggested by the federal task force earlier this year.

Last December, the Employment Equity Act Review Task Force presented its findings to then-labour minister Seamus O’Regan (St. John’s South–Mount Pearl, Nfld.), recommending that Black and LGBTQ employees should be recognized as separate groups under the Employment Equity Act, instead of falling under the label of “visible minority.”

When it was implemented in 1986, the Employment Equity Act was intended to dismantle barriers to employment for minority communities. The four groups the act recognized as facing those barriers are women, Indigenous people, people living with disabilities, and visible minorities.

Speaking with reporters on Dec. 11, 2023, O’Regan said he was personally “delighted” by the recommendation, and the government has said it “broadly supports” it, according to reporting by CBC News.  

In a statement to The Hill Times, the office of current Labour Minister Steve MacKinnon (Gatineau, Que.) said his predecessor’s initial commitments are only the “first steps” in the government’s work to transform Canada’s approach to employment equity.

“We look forward to tabling government legislation that is comprehensive of the needs of marginalized communities across Canada, and knocks down the barriers that prevent people from achieving their full potential in the workplace,” the statement reads.

Consultations on the Equity Act Review Task Force report will continue until Aug. 30.

Source: ‘The trust has been broken’: accountability for racism in PCO requires resignations, says Black Class Action lead Thompson

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Will A.I. Kill Meaningless Jobs?

2024/08/05 Leave a comment

Hard not to think of government having a preponderance of “meaningless jobs,” such as drafting talking points, Q&As, along with basic application processing, call centre and chat routine enquiries etc:

…Kevin Kelly, a Wired co-founder who has written many books on technology, said he was somewhat optimistic about the effect A.I. would have on meaningless work. He said he believed that partly because workers might begin probing deeper questions about what made a good job.

Mr. Kelly has laid out a cycle of the psychology of job automation. Stage 1: “A robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do.” Stage 3: “OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often.” Skip ahead to Stage 5: “Whew, that was a job that no human was meant to do, but what about me?” The worker finds a new and more invigorating pursuit, leading full circle to Stage 7: “I am so glad a robot cannot possibly do what I do.”

It’s demoralizing to realize that your job can be replaced by technology. It can bring the pointlessness into sharp relief. And it can also nudge people to ask what they want out of work and seek out new, more exhilarating pursuits.

“It might make certain things seem more meaningless than they were before,” Mr. Kelly said. “What that drives people to do is keep questioning: ‘Why am I here? What am I doing? What am I all about?’”

“Those are really difficult questions to answer, but also really important questions to ask,” he added. “The species-level identity crisis that A.I. is promoting is a good thing.”

Some scholars suggest that the crises prompted by automation could steer people toward more socially valuable work. The Dutch historian Rutger Bregman started a movement for “moral ambition” centered in the Netherlands. Groups of white-collar workers who feel that they are in meaningless jobs meet regularly to encourage one another to do something more worthwhile. (These are modeled on Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” circles.) There’s also a fellowship for 24 morally ambitious people, paying them to switch into jobs specifically focused on fighting the tobacco industry or promoting sustainable meats.

“We don’t start with the question of ‘What is your passion?’” Mr. Bregman said of his moral ambition movement. “Gandalf didn’t ask Frodo ‘What’s your passion?’ He said, ‘This is what needs to get done.”

What will need to get done in the A.I era is likely to veer less toward sustainable meat and more toward oversight, at least in the immediate term. Automated jobs are especially likely to require “A.I. babysitters,” according to David Autor, an M.I.T. labor economist focused on technology and jobs. Companies will hire humans to edit the work that A.I. makes, whether legal reviews or marketing copy, and to police A.I.’s propensity to “hallucinate.” Some people will benefit, especially in jobs where there’s a tidy division of labor — A.I. handles projects that are easy and repetitive, while humans take on ones that are more complicated and variable. (Think radiology, where A.I. can interpret scans that fit into preset patterns, while humans need to tackle scans that don’t resemble dozens that the machine has seen before.)

But in many other cases, humans will end up mindlessly skimming for errors in a mountain of content made by A.I. Would that help relieve a sense of pointlessness? Overseeing drudge work doesn’t promise to be any better than doing it, or as Mr. Autor put it: “If A.I. does the work, and people babysit A.I., they’ll be bored silly.”

Some of the jobs most immediately at risk of being swallowed up by A.I. are those anchored in human empathy and connection, Mr. Autor said. That’s because machines don’t get worn out from feigning empathy. They can absorb endless customer abuse.

The new roles created for humans would be drained of that emotional difficulty — but also drained of the attendant joy. The sociologist Allison Pugh studied the effects of technology on empathic professions like therapy or chaplaincy, and concluded that “connective labor” has been degraded by the slow rollout of technology. Grocery clerks, for example, find that as automated checkout systems come to their stores, they’ve lost out on meaningful conversations with customers — which they understand managers don’t prioritize — and now are left mostly with customers exasperated about self checkout. That’s partially why Ms. Pugh fears that new jobs created by A.I. will be even more meaningless than any we have today.

Even the techno-optimists like Mr. Kelly, though, argue that there’s a certain inevitability to meaningless jobs. After all, meaninglessness, per Mr. Graeber’s definition, is in the eye of the worker.

And even beyond the realm of Mr. Graeber’s categories of pointless work, plenty of people have ambivalent relationships with their jobs. Give them enough hours and then years clocking in to do the same things, and they might start to feel frustrated: about being tiny cogs in big systems, about answering to orders that don’t make sense, about monotony. Those aggrieved feelings could crop up even as they jump into new roles, while the robot cycles spin forward, taking over some human responsibilities while creating new tasks for those who babysit the robots.

Some people will look for new roles; others might organize their workplaces, trying to remake the parts of their jobs they find most aggravating, and finding meaning in lifting up their colleagues. Some will search for broader economic solutions to the problems with work. Mr. Graeber, for example, saw universal basic income as an answer; OpenAI’s Sam Altman has also been a proponent of experiments with guaranteed income.

In other words, A.I. magnifies and complicates the social issues entwined with labor but isn’t a reset or cure-all — and while technology will transform work, it can’t displace people’s complicated feelings toward it.

Mr. Wang says he certainly believes that will hold true in Silicon Valley. He predicts that automating pointless work will mean engineers get even more creative about seeking out their promotions. “These jobs exist on selling a vision,” he said. “I fear this is one problem you can’t automate.”

Source: Will A.I. Kill Meaningless Jobs?

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Chris Selley: Can Quebec’s language vultures not leave hospitals alone, at least? ATIP translation

2024/08/01 Leave a comment

On ATIP, the government should just move to automated translation as it is getting good enough to be used for ATIP. From a client service perspective, would address timeliness, from a government perspective, would address costs:

…In other bilingualism news, journalist Dean Beeby reports that federal official languages commissioner Raymond Théberge has launched an investigation into the CBC proactively posting online its responses to journalists’ access-to-information requests.

That’s an undisputed best practice in the world of access-to-information, a field in which Canada (and the CBC in particular) ranks somewhere below South Sudan and Myanmar: If you’ve released information to one journalist, there’s no earthly reason to make other journalists request it again and go through the whole rigmarole. Just send them a link to the response, or they can find it themselves.

But federal government institutions are required to publish everything in French and English; the CBC’s responses are in English. So now we have a federal appointee considering whether this rare attempt at transparency must be published in both official languages.

That would amount to thousands upon thousands of pages of documents. They absolutely will not be translated. The only practical outcome is not to publish the documents at all. I’m quite sure CBC would be happy with that.

And without getting too melodramatic about it — official bilingualism is totally sustainable, in a rational form — I feel like we’re at a crossroads here. There was a time when Canada was fat and happy enough that doing arguably weird and excessive things in the name of official bilingualism didn’t seem like too much of a burden or a hassle. We had plenty of money, debt-to-GDP was fine, pretty much everyone with a decent job had a decent place to live.

That time is not now. This is a broke and broken country, requiring generations of punishingly expensive fixing — not least on the most basic issue of housing — that actually made a controversy out of children’s medicine delivered to Quebec, during a children’s medicine shortage, on grounds the labels weren’t bilingual.

It’s enough, already. Someone just has to say it: “enough.” But no one with the power to change anything ever, ever will.

Source: Chris Selley: Can Quebec’s language vultures not leave hospitals alone, at least?

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Ibbitson: Pierre Poilievre makes his case for dismantling what the Trudeau government has built

2024/07/30 Leave a comment

Of note and very likely (employment equity excerpt):

…Mr. Poilievre said he wanted to live in a country where people pay lower taxes and are burdened by fewer rules, but also where they “have freedom of speech, where they’re judged on their merits, not their ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc., where parents have ultimate authority over what their kids learn about sexuality and gender, where we go after criminals not after hunters and sport shooters, where we rebuild our military to have strong standing in the world.”

The Liberal agenda of promoting diversity within the public service – gone. Protections for gender-diverse youth – gone. Efforts to combat discrimination in the criminal justice system – gone.

Pretty much every major element of the Liberal environmental, social and justice agenda – gone….

But there is a reason the Conservatives are so far ahead in the polls. Things don’t feel right. Even the most fervent supporter of open immigration (and I am one) is alarmed by the out-of-control flood of people coming into the country. Inflation and high interest rates have lowered the standard of living for millions of people. The regulatory environment has become far too complex. And the Liberals have failed to persuade most of us that they get all this and are working to fix it….

Source: Pierre Poilievre makes his case for dismantling what the Trudeau government has built

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McLaughlin: There’s a troubling amount of churn at the top of Canada’s public service

2024/07/19 Leave a comment

Valid commentary.

Perhaps the recent example of Christiane Fox, who spent less than two years at IRCC, implemented a major reorganization at IRCC, and then left for PCO without having to live through the implementation nor see whether it was successful, provides an illustration:

…Fresh perspective on a task or mission is always useful, and promoting people into senior ranks is necessary for talent-building. But rampant shuffling has consequences. It commodifies deputy ministers. It devalues subject matter expertise and institutional wisdom in favour of management and system conformity. It weakens the crucial minister-deputy relationship that comes from longer periods of working together, and it does the same for the extensive stakeholder and delivery apparatus that surrounds modern government. It undermines the institutional memory and corporate knowledge that underpins the whole ethos of an independent, permanent public service.

Most importantly, it divorces senior officials from results. Individual responsibility for seeing things through is diminished when you know it will be your successor who will be carrying the can. This accountability serves as a form of collective protectionism – a kind of omerta – for the public service system as a whole.

Post-pandemic, Canadians are expecting that the institutions of government perform better. Right now, that is wanting. From procurement to service delivery to appointments, there are obvious institutional failures.

As voters increasingly clamour for change and accountability at the highest political levels, now is the time for the highest public service levels to adopt this same attitude as their own. Arresting the churn at the top should be at the top of that list.

Source: There’s a troubling amount of churn at the top of Canada’s public service

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Wernick: Can angst about productivity lead to serious public-service reforms?

2024/06/29 Leave a comment

Quite a good list along with good advice. The degree to which a Conservative government will not only have the courage to engage in public service reforms but equally important the intelligence and sophistication to ensure effective and sound reforms remains in question. And yes, of course, avoid across the board cuts and focus on programs that are lesser priorities or of questionable value:

…Borrowing the language of the productivity economists, the agenda that flows from a serious discussion of public-sector productivity would include:

  • The quality of the labour input – and whether there is enough investment and effort put into training and enhancing skills;
  • Management acumen – and the effort and investment put into developing the capabilities of middle and senior leadership;
  • Substitution of capital for labour – and the effort and investment put into continuous upgrading of technologies used for external and internal services;
  • Process efficiency – and the scope for gains in time and quality that are still to be harvested by pushing farther on end-to-end digital and harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to assist humans;
  • Stripping out layers of middle management but equipping those who remain with the training and tools to do their jobs;
  • Shedding assets and right-sizing the physical footprint: spoiler alert: this will encounter stiff political resistance from MPs and mayors;
  • Enhancing the quality and timeliness of information for decision-making;
  • Streamlining the heavy burden of internal controls and reporting that has accreted over the years;
  • Reviewing the oversight system of incentives and disincentives to intelligent risk-taking that shapes behaviours;
  • Hacking away at barriers to faster hiring, redeployment and termination of staff;
  • Reviewing which functions can be outsourced and which should remain in-house, while making sure there will be adequate training in effectively managing external contractors.

These happen to be many of the issues that a serious attempt at public-sector reform would want to tackle.

One key difference between a serious productivity-centred approach and the simple across-the-board austerity that governments tend to use is that it could draw attention to the high cost of neglecting the internal government-to-government functions such as finance, human resources, information management, procurement, comptrollership and oversight.

These are functions that in past periods of fiscal retrenchment have taken a heavy share of cuts because they are glibly labelled as “overhead,” with unfortunate consequences.

The growth in the number of people employed by the public sector, especially at the federal level, has drawn a lot of attention. There are better and worse ways to think about bringing the number down. Hoping for the best from random attrition isn’t a good one.

The best approach, in my view, would be to recognize that those numbers are attached to specific programs, services, functions, occupations and locations.

Simply ordering an arbitrary across-the-board cut to operating budgets may achieve short-term fiscal results but will be laden with unintended consequences, sowing dragons’ teeth and causing damage to the longer-term capabilities and effectiveness of the public sector.

If the courage is there, the 2026 budget that follows the next federal election is the next window of opportunity for a thorough program review along the lines of the ones in 1995 and 2012.

Reshape the programs and the impacts on the public service would follow, but the impacts would be intended and proactively managed. There are many ways such a review could be designed.

Setting the table for this program review should be a serious exercise to delve into public-sector productivity that is honest about the longer-term goal of reducing staff numbers. Pretending that there won’t be job cuts in the next decade isn’t being honest with public servants or Canadians.

A bolder way to approach the inevitable downsizing would be to say clearly that we want the public service to be smaller, flatter and more agile.

The core idea could be to borrow the constructs from climate policy of setting targets that guide decision-making and investment, and incent technological innovation.

An ambitious version of this would be “20 by 30” – the government could set a goal to reduce the size of the federal public service by 20 per cent by 2030.

Using this target, it could then move on to seriously attack the issues of productivity and effectiveness, embrace the challenges and opportunities of AI and focus on strengthening the longer-term capabilities we need in our public sector.

Source: Can angst about productivity lead to serious public-service reforms?

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David Mulroney: The next PM must remind Canada’s public servants who really runs the show 

2024/06/27 Leave a comment

From former Harper era DM responsible for the Afghanistan Task Force and Ambassador to China. A mix of foreign policy advice and commentary on the public service as a whole. Should, as likely, the Conservatives win the election, the public service will face a considerable challenge, just as it did under Harper:

…Untangling this mess will require a combination of culture change and restructuring. We can no longer entrust our international affairs to ideologically rigid and determinedly non-accountable public servants. People need to be reminded that the price of fearless advice is loyal implementation.

We also need to recover the principle that foreign aid is an element of foreign policy, not the other way around.

Thinking about foreign aid should also include consideration of our own economic interests, opportunities for safeguarding Canadian health and welfare, and implications for Canada’s defence and security.

It’s also entirely reasonable to expect that our foreign aid will win us friends rather than lose them, something worth considering the next time we seek a non-permanent seat on the Security Council.

Repairing the damage will involve rebuilding capacity in the public service in general and in the foreign service in particular, something that will require vastly improved recruitment, personnel management, and training.

A new government should also commence replenishing the now almost empty pool of senior public servants with the experience in international affairs necessary to run the department whose business that is.

Above all, we need to recover some traditionally Canadian humility and respect for others. The objective of international assistance is not to transform a foreign country into a simulacrum of ultra-progressive Canada. We need to listen, to learn, and to help build local capacity, allowing our partners in the developing world to be responsible for their own futures.

Source: David Mulroney: The next PM must remind Canada’s public servants who really runs the show 

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Yakabuski: The federal public service is broken. Is it too late to fix it?

2024/05/27 Leave a comment

Good long if dispiriting read with no easy or quick fixes:

…Canada is hardly the only parliamentary democracy to witness the degradation of its public service and concentration of power in the prime minister’s office, with a resultant decline in the quality and effectiveness of public policy. Britain’s Commission on the Centre of Government recently released its own report on deleterious impact of this phenomenon. “The centre [of government] in recent years has become far too dominant yet far too ineffective. It has scooped out initiative and all but emasculated Whitehall departments, which alternately try to second-guess what the flip-flop centre thinks and are micromanaged by it,” the commission’s deputy chairman, historian Sir Anthony Seldon, wrote in The Sunday Times. (Whitehall is British shorthand for the public service.)

More than ever, in our darkening age of political polarization, we need a neutral and non-partisan public service to guide major policy decisions. And we need competent public servants to implement them without fear or favour. The Trudeau Liberals have done themselves and Canadians a disservice by failing to recognize that a policy-capable and operationally efficient public service is any government’s best asset. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who speaks disparagingly of “gatekeepers” of all sorts, has given no indication he understands that either.

What future does that suggest for a country that faces chronic (and related) budget and productivity deficits and desperately needs to develop sustainable, affordable and equitable policies to address them both? We cannot expect them to come out of the PMO. Its dominance is partly what got us into this mess.

Source: The federal public service is broken. Is it too late to fix it?

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