Salgo: What if Canada’s public service is actually too accountable?

2024/12/10 Leave a comment

Has a point. Too much largely process accountability, too little substantive outcome accountability:

In the wake of this finding, it may sound foolhardy to ask whether there’s such a thing as too much accountability in the federal public service.

But yes, Virginia, such a thing exists, and it hurts the interests of Canadians.

To be clear, I’m not arguing with the AG. Accountability is a core tenet of good governance. Oversight and controls are essential, and when things go wrong, someone has to explain, take corrective action — and face the consequences.

What’s more, the public sector has a unique responsibility to be accountable. Citizens who feel ill-served can’t just take their business elsewhere, and last time I looked, paying for government services wasn’t voluntary. Still, when it comes to ensuring accountability, more is often less.

How so? First, more rules do not necessarily translate into better outcomes; the opposite is sometimes true. Many public sector controls are aimed at demonstrating good conduct rather than getting better results, as anyone who’s dealt with government procurement or staffing knows. Piling on rules doesn’t improve performance, and beyond a certain point it doesn’t improve public trust.

Second, rules are a lot more costly than people tend to realize – not just the cost of people who run accountability systems but the time of people who comply with them, who could be doing something more productive instead. Such costs are particularly onerous for small agencies. No one in the government of Canada knows the full measure of these costs and no one seems to want to.

Third, and perhaps most damaging, is the impact too much accountability can have on public service behaviour and culture. People who say there’s no accountability in government typically mean that heads don’t roll (or don’t seem to) when things go wrong. But when most of the rules are either proscriptions or exercises in box-ticking, and real-world outcomes aren’t your responsibility, avoiding blame gets easier, while innovation looks more risky and less urgent than it actually is. When your briefing note to a senior manager goes through 17 sign-offs (as I recently heard one deputy minister acknowledge) it’s a little hard to take full ownership of any slipups.

As Exhibit A, I offer the Federal Accountability Act, which I once described as “the definitive legislative monument to risk-averse, blame-avoiding institutional rigidity in the government of Canada.”

Enacted in the early days of the Harper government, the act did some good or semi-good things to hold public servants to account. Unfortunately, it also included a host of dubious measures such as redundant anti-fraud penalties, the judicialization of ethical regimes, and a series of increasingly detailed behavioral constraints.

But what was remarkable was how little connection the act had with the reality on the ground. We usually require any expenditure of public resources to address a demonstrated need. But in the case of the Accountability Act, there was often no evidence that the problems it was meant to address actually existed, or that the purported solutions would help.

The government talks a lot about risk but no risk assessment was conducted here.

This worst thing about the Accountability Act and its ilk is the missed opportunity to help modernize the public service: to streamline decision-making, encourage collaboration and innovation, and recast accountability in terms of achieving results for Canadians.

To-date, there has been no systematic assessment of the act, and the rules remain in place, as such rules usually do. Yet an underlying takeaway from COVID is actually that bureaucrats can be nimble when they are focused on outcomes and the political leadership seems to have their back. That may seem odd to say given the AG’s findings, but the scale of COVID payouts ($360 billion) was extraordinary and the government’s express goal was to get money out the door asap and ask questions later. The tolerance for error quickly snapped back, and rightly so, but the basic lesson holds.

So, yes, public servants are subject to too much of the wrong kind of accountability, and this isn’t likely to change through purely internal processes. We need an independent, public review of our accountability rules and of the opportunities to build a public service that will better serve a new and differently minded generation.

Source: Salgo: What if Canada’s public service is actually too accountable?

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Globe editorial: A Trudeau government trademark: Act now, mop up later

2024/12/06 Leave a comment

Cutting and accurate for the most part:

…This is what happens when politicians devote themselves to generating talking points and social-media content instead of making sound policy. Good governance requires serious planning and execution, something obviously lacking in this late-stage Liberal government.

Source: A Trudeau government trademark: Act now, mop up later

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Beech | The federal government is spending millions fighting a discrimination suit by Black employees. This is what it should do instead

2024/11/22 Leave a comment

Reminder that the public sector employment equity numbers for the past 6 years have shown Black Canadians having better hiring, promotion and separation outcomes than whites and most visible minority groups (Executive Diversity within the Public Service: An Accelerating Trend and How well is the government meeting its diversity targets? An intersectionality analysis):

…Knowledge of Canada’s legacy of racism against Black, Indigenous and other people of colour needs to become as mainstream as the multiculturalism that masks its existence.

Acknowledging anti-Black racism while simultaneously attempting to dismiss a class action lawsuit about anti-Black racism within the federal public service is an example of the paradox of progress that fuels the relentless cycle of performative politics. Working conditions in the federal public service are so hostile toward Black employees that it led to mental health challenges resulting in the use of antidepressants and suicide attempts.

More broadly, what are Black Canadians supposed to feel when a federal government seems so keen to avoid taking responsibility for bigotry in its own service? If we truly want to become the Canada we claim to be, and who Canadians believe themselves to be, we must live up to our stated ideals.

The federal government must stop fighting for a dismissal, and the Federal Court should greenlight the lawsuit and reckon with this country’s legacy of anti-Black racism. Only then can we build a future rooted in truth, transparency, equity and inclusion. Until then, Canada will remain a hostile homeland.

Source: Opinion | The federal government is spending millions fighting a discrimination suit by Black employees. This is what it should do instead

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Sean Speer: Pierre Poilievre should follow Elon Musk’s lead and bring his own Department of Government Efficiency to Ottawa 

2024/11/21 Leave a comment

While I get the attraction of the Citizen Musk approach, the lack of rigour in assessing its practicality in both the US and Canadian contexts is disappointing. The most effective exercise I have seen was the Chretien-Martin program review in the 1990s that addressed some structural issues and had a major impact, more so arguably than the Harper government exercise.

The risk of course of the Citizen Musk approach is that his cuts will be so ideologically driven and so drastic that worthwhile programs and capacity will be cut, with significant impact on the more vulnerable and core expertise (e.g., CDC, FDA and other necessary regulatory bodies).

The other question is what has Canada learned in the IT space, having a number of high level private sector interchanges (e.g., Alex Benay: the public service’s disruptor-in-chief). To what extent have they succeeded, and how effective were they in removing barriers etc. Some case studies here would be helpful in terms of what worked, what didn’t, and why:

…The D.O.G.E. exercise may therefore represent something of an inspiration. Its mandate to go beyond immediate-term savings and ask more structural questions about the operations and role of government is precisely the type of exercise that Ottawa needs. It should be understood as an effort to get out of counterproductive activities and boost federal state capacity where necessary. The Trudeau government has been a renewed education of the old conservative adage: limited government is better government.

As for who ought to lead such an exercise, my former colleague Rachel Curran has rightly argued that you probably don’t want to fully outsource it. Information asymmetries and the need for bureaucratic and political buy-in require that ministers and their departments be actively involved.

But there is something to the idea that entrepreneurs and technologists can bring a different perspective to the ones represented within the government or the management firms that are typically tapped to advise it. They bring a creativity and energy that’s often undersupplied in government. They’re unconstrained by bureaucratic assumptions and thinking. And they tend to have better track records of successfully overseeing structural reform.

Put simply: Outsiders like Musk and Ramaswamy may come with risks but they may also be more likely to overcome the public choice barriers (including confirmation bias and sunk-cost fallacy) to serious public administration reform.

Who then should lead the Canadian version of D.O.G.E.? How about Shopify’s co-founder and CEO Tobi Lutke?

Not only is he arguably the country’s most successful technologist and is increasingly commenting on Canadian public policy, including its state capacity and poor productivity performance, but Lutke’s background and experience make him an ideal candidate to deliver on a D.O.G.E.-like mandate in time for the 160th birthday of Canadian Confederation.

Source: Sean Speer: Pierre Poilievre should follow Elon Musk’s lead and bring his own Department of Government Efficiency to Ottawa 

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Public service job cuts loom as Ottawa misses spending and deficit targets

2024/11/18 Leave a comment

Will likely be brutal with a change in government:

…Some argue part of the problem is today’s bureaucrats aren’t used to austerity and have only known growth for the past decade.

Today’s leaders may have been in the public service during the Harper government’s downsizing, but few were in senior positions directly responsible for managing those cuts. Back then, the government did regular strategic reviews, which were key to identifying budget cuts and the thousands of jobs that were eliminated. The Liberals had pledged a similar strategic review in their election platform, but it has yet to materialize, leaving some to question how prepared departments are to tackle current fiscal pressures.

It’s unclear what progress the government had made on these reductions. In fact, a PBO report that tracked the Liberals various spending reviews flagged the difficulty tracking the “overall plans, progress, and results” because there is no central document publicly available…

“There’s a coming squeeze here…and something has to give,” said Khan. A Liberal or a Conservative government in the future is “going to face the same stark choice. Before you cut programs that people want or need, the outsized growth of the public service has to be on the table. The unions will face this no matter who’s in power. It’s not going to go away.”

Source: Public service job cuts loom as Ottawa misses spending and deficit targets

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Layoffs on the table for permanent government employees as part of spending review

2024/11/11 Leave a comment

These will be mild compared to what is likely coming under a likely Conservative government:

The federal government has been looking for ways to tighten its budget and curb the size of the public service, which has swelled in recent years. While the Liberal government has said it would do so through attrition and hiring freezes, cutting the jobs of permanent government employees wasn’t on the table.

But Canada’s biggest public sector union, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), says that no longer seems to be the case.

During a meeting on Thursday between Treasury Board officials and PSAC, the union said it was told the government will be  “widening the net” to reduce its spending, looking to cut term and casual employees and “opening the door for departments to slash permanent employees” through layoffs.

The union said the Liberal government has assigned budget reduction targets “in salary line items” to federal departments. But it has not released those targets, claiming they were protected under Cabinet privilege and would only be made public in June 2025.

“It’s just really disappointing that, once again, there’s this doublespeak from the federal government,” said PSAC’s national executive vice-president Alex Silas, who noted that the government said the meeting was not a consultation.

Silas said the idea of cutting casual and term positions “is bad enough,” but the idea of cutting permanent positions is “shameful.” He said there was a lack of detail in the government’s presentation about the potential cuts, but that departments and agencies were coming up with their own plans and were “encouraged” to consult with unions.

In April, the federal government announced it would seek to cut the size of the public service by 5,000 full-time positions primarily through natural attrition over the course of four years, as part of an effort to save $15.8 billion over five years and reallocate it elsewhere.

According to the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, the size of the public service in 2024 is 367,772—up from 300,450 in 2020….

Source: Layoffs on the table for permanent government employees as part of spending review

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Internal report describes a ‘cesspool of racism’ in the federal public service

2024/11/11 Leave a comment

Similar to an earlier report by Zellars on all PCO employees (Privy Council Office workers face culture of ‘racial stereotyping’: internal report). Given the same methodology and consultant, my earlier comments still broadly apply..

Took a look at the Public Service Employee Survey results for PCO. In most cases, broadly comparable to the public service as a whole, with some exceptions. But interestingly, some slippage between the 2020 and 2022 surveys results in harassment and discrimination, perhaps reflecting a mix of greater awareness following the Clerk’s Call to Action and the broader social context.

19.2 percent of PCO are visible minorities, 3.0 percent Indigenous peoples, broadly comparable to other departments [for executives, the numbers are 15.2 percent, 5.2 percent respectively]. Unfortunately, don’t have desegregated data by visible minority and indigenous group.

As to the Zellars report, based on interviews, we see a similar pattern in that the surveys indicate that there are issues, a consultant with experience in diversity issues is engaged, has discussions with a number of employees, many who feel aggrieved by remarks and/or treatment. But the nature of such consultants, given their career, is to have an implicit bias of highlighting discrimination and prejudice rather than a more neutral approach. Doesn’t mean of course findings are not valid but need to be assessed accordingly.

And of course the usual groups of organizations and activists use the survey to further their political aims:

An internal report on workplace racism and harassment at the highest levels of the federal public service shows that not even the federal government’s top executives are immune to the problem.

The government-funded report on the experiences of Black public servants in the senior ranks of government — obtained by CBC News — includes first-hand accounts of racist remarks, harassment, intimidation and threats that have harmed the mental health of public servants, especially Black women.

“Crucially, Black women detailed workplace conflicts so severe that they led to chronic depression, the use of antidepressant medications, and suicide attempts,” the report says.

The report also documents instances of Black public servants being called the N-word at work, sexual harassment and even threats of physical violence. It also raises concerns about internal complaint processes being weaponized against Black executives.

The report was initiated by the Black Executives Network, a support group for Black executives in the federal public service. The network is funded by multiple government departments.

CBC obtained a copy of the report and an email from the country’s top public servant — Clerk of the Privy Council John Hannaford — addressing the report’s findings and providing a preliminary response plan.

“What is relayed in the report is deeply concerning and we are distressed to think that some members of the Black executive community have reported that they have lived or are living through these kinds of experiences,” Hannaford said in the email.

Hannaford and several other senior public servants sent the email to all deputy ministers and the Black Executives Network….

Source: Internal report describes a ‘cesspool of racism’ in the federal public service

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Class action lawsuit alleging racism against Black public servants heads to court

2024/10/29 Leave a comment

We shall see if certified or not:

A $2.5-billion class action lawsuit brought by Black public servants claiming systemic discrimination in the federal government is set to go to court on Monday.

In Federal Court in Toronto, the plaintiffs will make their case that the government owes them damages for salaries and pensions they never received because of anti-Black racism in hiring and promotion practices.

The class action lawsuit would cover around 45,000 Black government workers and job applicants, as the alleged discrimination occurred across dozens of federal departments and agencies dating back to 1970.

“It is not only about financial compensation, but also about holding the government accountable and building a more equitable public service,” Nicholas Marcus Thompson, the lead plaintiff, wrote in an emailed statement. “The significance of this case goes beyond individual plaintiffs — this is about creating institutional reform so that future generations of Black Canadians do not face the same barriers in employment.”

The hearing, which could last up to 12 days, will determine if the lawsuit is certified, a hurdle that class actions must clear before they can go to trial. Thompson said the case was “the largest, broadest, and most high-profile employment-related discrimination case in Canadian history…

Source: Class action lawsuit alleging racism against Black public servants heads to court

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Number of federal executives grew by 42% since 2015 under Trudeau Liberals

2024/10/23 Leave a comment

Not sure whether this reflects time-challenged journalist that simply report what an organization says, or whether this reflects synergies between Postmedia and right leaning organizations.

The percentage of executives in the public service is largely unchanged since 2015, the last year of the Harper government: 3 percent:

The Trudeau Liberals added thousands of executives to the ranks of Canada’s public servants since 2015, government documents reveal.

According to human resources statistics published online by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Canada currently employs 9,155 public servants in the executive categories, responsible for interpreting policy and managing government departments and agencies.

That’s up from the 6,340 executives recorded in 2015….

Source: Number of federal executives grew by 42% since 2015 under Trudeau Liberals

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Federal public servants are to report back to the office again. Their bosses say they mean it this time

2024/09/11 Leave a comment

Unlikely that DM messaging will convince many and the unions risk attracting negative reactions given the prevailing practices in the private sector and setting the stage for even more rocky relations should, as likely, the Conservatives form the next government:

…A 2023 survey by Capterra found that 69 per cent of Canada’s hybrid workers are onsite two to three days per week; about 25 per cent have mandatory in-office days. In the U.S., Gallup found that 50 per cent are structured hybrid, with 22 per cent onsite a minimum number of days and 40 per cent are in the office 2-3 days per week.

But the government is different from the profit-and-loss-driven private sector. A non-partisan public service is built on an attachment to a mission, a public service ethos that Fox argues is best instilled by teamwork and working together.

The issue goes beyond worker and management rights. It goes to the core role of the public service.

Fox worries the sense of mission – which shone in the public service during the pandemic – will be lost if employees aren’t working together enough, raising questions whether they could handle another crisis on that scale.

“I think we do see a gap where people are not spending enough time together. That is big in terms of culture, and you’re not going to see productivity data (showing) how well you’re doing culturally,” said Fox.

The bureaucracy has also grown like gangbusters, with 80,000 people added over the past few years – many of whom haven’t worked in an office and haven’t been introduced to the culture in-person.

“There’s a risk that connections would be harder to establish in a crisis moment without that a basis of relationships and teamwork and things we had done together,” said Fox.

The compliance protocol for the return to office is onerous, with a heavy emphasis on protecting employees’ privacy while monitoring metrics like entry-card swipes at turnstiles and computer login locations.

The burden falls on front-line managers and supervisors, some of whom are not themselves keen on the mandate. Many of them, too, would prefer more freedom and flexibility and now must track daily attendance and ensure employees are where they should be, whether working in the office or from home.

Managers are expected to take daily attendance. The results will be compiled for bosses to monitor. If they spot anything that requires looking at specific employees, a whole process kicks in that can involve union representatives and privacy officials.

And those who fail to comply will face progressive discipline, including a warning, verbal and written reprimands, suspension without pay and, finally, dismissal.

It’s unclear how deep the resistance to the mandate runs. But what is clear is that the kind of workplace they are returning to has changed dramatically. Offices are being retrofitted or have disappeared entirely as the government pushes to cut its real estate portfolio in half.

While some junior employees have never worked in an office, others are going to  to workspaces with no assigned seating and personal space. Desks must be booked. Raffles are sometimes held to see who works on what day with their team to ensure there’s office space. Many pack up their equipment as they shuffle between office and home.

It’s a perfect storm for discontent.

At the same time, as one senior bureaucrat underscored, there may soon be a change of government. With Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s argument that the public service is too big and broken, the question won’t be whether they are at home or the office but rather whether they still have a job.

The Conservatives haven’t said anything about where they stand on return to office. They have been content to let the Liberals take the heat. Meanwhile, Liberals are dodging it by saying this is a public-service decision, not a political one.

Experts have also turned the spotlight on the bureaucracy, saying it is bloated, unable to deliver basic services, and is a drain on the country’s productivity.

Next week, Donald Savoie, one of Canada’s leading scholars on public administration, is releasing his latest book, Speaking Truth to Canadians About Their Public Service. He has long argued the public service has lost its way. The book chronicles how that has happened.

“I believe the federal public service is overstaffed; that it is providing a lower level of service to Canadians and that Canadians are losing trust in the institution,” he wrote. “I argue that it is the responsibility of the public service to provide evidence that I am wrong, not the other way around.”

Fox says that while public perception doesn’t factor directly into the return-to-office decision, decision-makers can’t ignore it, either. “It goes to trust: trust in government, trust in the public service, trust we are working to serve Canadians,” she said.

Source: Federal public servants are to report back to the office again. Their bosses say they mean it this time

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