Ifill: The curse of unserious politicians

2023/07/20 Leave a comment

Interesting mix of self-awareness in terms of her positions/identity/branding and obliviousness of how some of her critiques (e.g, “ludicrous solutions,” “misinformation”) can also be applied to her along with many politicians, not just the arguably more egregious example of Pierre Poilievre:

I’m back as the award-winning journalist and economist you’ve come to love or hate, but can never dismiss. In my fourth year of this column, I will continue to regale you with news stories and political and policy analysis from an intersectional feminist lens, which also includes analyses of equity and power. I’m not your friendly gender-based analysis plus co-ordinator who is only interested in the check-box exercise of performative policy analysis done by the federal public service. No, policy and politics need to be done differently for the times we are in and beyond.

We are not a homogenous society, and post-pandemic, we need better tools to determine how we’re heterogenous and how to deliver public services to disparate communities. Politics continues to be a white man’s game, and policy decisions continue to be made by people who lead homogenous lives and lifestyles of privilege. If we are not centring the vulnerable and marginalized—i.e. those without power—we’re doing politics and policy wrong. The results of that are growing chasms of inequalities that will upend society and polarize our politics, which one can observe is already happening.

Unfortunately, in these serious times we are besieged by unserious people who have been instrumental in the memeification of politics and political discourse. And this is dangerous.

In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins defined a meme: “Memes (discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes and so on) are to culture what genes are to life. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.” However, an internet meme does not mutate according to evolutionary standards of random change and Darwinian properties; it is made to deliberately be manipulated through the creativity and purpose of the creator. In both instances, the resulting effect would be to go viral.

For the 2018 Ontario provincial election—the one in which the Ontario NDP could not capitalize, and the Ontario Liberals collapsed—much of the success of the Progressive Conservatives had been predicated on the success of Ontario Proud, a meme factory. It was given credit, though without much evidence, by Ontario news media for its alleged success in dethroning Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal party. It did so through the creation of memes and other online content, as reported by the Toronto Star: “It unabashedly promoted Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives in last spring’s Ontario election, using social media to create viral videos and memes that mercilessly mocked Wynne before shifting to attack the NDP once polls showed the premier’s party cratering.”

In contrast, its sister organization, Canada Proud, has not been able to scale this effect nationally. The organization wanted to replicate its success for then-Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer, only we all know how that turned out. More recently, founder of Ontario Proud and Canada Proud, Jeff Ballingall, was the digital director of councilman Brad Bradford’s ignominious run for mayor of Toronto. Ballingall’s candidate ended that run with only 9,254 votes, or 1.3 per cent. In the June 26 election, Bradford made himself into a caricature with his insistence on filming himself holding a Jamaican patty all under the auspices of his digital director.

Unfortunately, meme culture has ushered in the rise of unserious people. People who can’t be taken seriously every time they open their mouths because what they propose are ludicrous solutions to important problems, and thereby wasting our collective time. Typically, their brand of unseriousness is coupled with misinformation and based on irrelevant contextualization, bigotry, and general asininity. Imagine how far we could’ve gotten on climate change policies had we not been held back by unserious people. Imagine how far along we’d be as a society if we didn’t have these time-wasters holding us back. It’s maddening and frustrating.

The most unserious person in Canadian politics is Pierre Poilievre. After revealing himself to be a capable politician, through his victory speech after his Conservative leadership win last fall, one would think he would’ve continued along that trajectory. But unserious people can’t be serious for long. Instead of building political capital, he squandered it by reducing himself to his own meme, much like Bradford. His showing at Calgary’s Stampede, which showcased a new look—one without glasses, pumped up, and photographed alongside homophobes—demonstrated the lengths Conservatives will go to alienate the general voting public. They will then whine and complain about imaginary media bias against them when all Canadians can see throughout social media is their latest bigoted attack. What’s dangerous about this is the platforming and integration of bigotry, misinformation, and general farcical nature of Poilievre’s brand of politics. He’s not here to solve problems, like a serious person committed to the betterment of all in this country. In contrast, he’d rather sully his assumed intellect for the next viral moment like the shallow, unctuous man he’s shown the Canadian public he is.

Source: The curse of unserious politicians

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Legislation changes to address discrimination in the public service ‘a good start’, union says

2023/07/13 Leave a comment

Of note, relatively positive commentary on the planned changes. Some of the accommodations may result in challenges further down the road, however:

The federal government recently put into effect the last set of amendments to the Public Service Employment Act, which the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) said is “a good start” to addressing barriers faced by equity-seeking groups.

The Public Service Commission of Canada (PSC) said last week that the newest updates to the legislation aim to tackle biases in the hiring and staffing of public servants, with the ultimate goal of creating a more inclusive and diverse public service. Roughly 80 departments across the federal government are subject to the act.

Under the new legislation, federal departments and agencies are now required to evaluate how staffing processes, such as interviews and written exams, could disadvantage people belonging to equity-seeking groups, including women, people with a disability, or those who identify as Black, Indigenous or LGBTQ+, and take steps to remove or mitigate any biases or barriers within their practices.

Michael Morin, PSC’s acting vice-president of the Policy and Communications Sector, said the agency has been developing a guidance workshop tool over the past year to help hiring managers and human resources staff identify potential biases and barriers in staffing methods, such as screening, written tests, exams, interviews, reference checks and performance reviews, and see what strategies can be implemented to make them more inclusive.

For example, Morin said that some assessment strategies could be found to offer insufficient preparation time, which could be a detriment to people with disabilities, people who talk or type slowly, or people with little experience with the government’s hiring practices. If that was the case, PSC’s tools, he said, would encourage managers to provide applicants with more time to prepare and deliver their response, and might suggest departments provide questions in advance.

“The key part is that the evaluation has to take place before an assessment method is conducted,” Morin said, adding that the evaluation tool can be used more broadly by a department’s human resources team or by individuals like a hiring manager. “A hiring manager, if they’re conducting an interview, can sort of review that guide to consider how they are conducting the interview and do some sort of course-correction along the way.”

The updates will also expand the capability of PSC and departments’ deputy heads to investigate “errors, omissions or improper conduct” resulting from biases or barriers in staffing processes.

“Anyone can submit a request for investigation regarding irregularities or issues in a hiring process, and this now includes any concerns related to biases and barriers,” Morin said. “What we’re looking at is an added emphasis on minimizing trauma for investigations participants, and also really looking at how can we increase transparency and flexibility as the investigation process unfolds.”

The updates are building on previous amendments made to the act first introduced in the 2021 budget implementation process.

Other updates included revising job qualifications for members of equity-seeking groups, expanding the PSC’s authority to audit for biases or barriers in appointment processes that disadvantage members of those groups and providing permanent residents with the same preference as Canadian citizens when appointments are made through external advertised hiring processes, which Morin said has already led to a shift in the number of permanent residents applying and getting hired.

Morin said changes to the act were made with consultation with employee diversity networks, bargaining agents and federal departments.

In an emailed statement, PSAC said the latest amendments are “a good start”, arguing that more support, resources and legislative changes are needed to address systemic barriers in the public service.

In the past couple of years, PSAC and other unions representing federal workers made several recommendations to update the act, with the union calling for increasing centralized staffing oversight and for the government to address the “use and abuse” of discretion powers in hiring.

PSAC said the union continues to maintain its recommendations, noting that the commission should have the authority to ensure transparency and make changes to hiring practices within departments, and that it must ensure that investigators have the necessary experience and knowledge to identify bias and barriers in hiring.

“Ultimately, our members file staffing complaints with the Public Service Labour Relations and Employment Board,” the statement read. “This bill’s proposed amendments do not address the barriers in the Board complaint process which has become more legalistic, cumbersome, ineffective, and intimidating with limited remedies.”

Morin said “a lot of departments” have already taken measures to implement the changes, adding that the PSC will oversee government hiring practices through audits, surveys and continued engagement with employee diversity networks.

“It’s not sort of the full suite of work that’s underway across the public service or through the PSC in terms of supporting diversity and inclusion and equity,” Morin said, noting the Clerk of the Privy Council’s Call to Action on Anti-Racism, Equity, and Inclusion and the federal accessibility strategy. “We see it as a foundational piece to really support a lot of those initiatives.”

Source: Legislation changes to address discrimination in the public service ‘a good start’, union says

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Mandates aim to tackle discrimination in public service, unions say it’s not enough

2023/07/07 Leave a comment

Well, of course it isn’t. But it reflects continuous improvement as hiring, promotion and separation data attests (How well is the government meeting its diversity targets? An intersectionality analysis) while the media generally only reports on the activist perspective:

Federal government departments and agencies will now have to evaluate whether their hiring practices are discriminatory after changes to the Public Service Employment Act came into effect this week.

Public Service Commission spokeswoman Elodie Roy said the changes will strengthen diversity and inclusion in the federal government workforce.The amendments were first introduced in the budget implementation process in 2021.

They require the public service to evaluate how staffing methods, such as interviews and written exams, might discriminate against women, people with a disability, or those who identify as Black, Indigenous or LGBTQ.

The Public Service Commission will also have more resources to investigate mistakes or misconduct that affect hiring processes.

Previous amendments revised the job qualifications for members of equity-seeking groups and ensured permanent residents were given the same hiring preferences as Canadian citizens.

But a group representing thousands of Black public servants who filed a class-action lawsuit against the government alleging decades of discriminatory hiring practices said the changes do not go far enough.

The Black Class Action Secretariat, which formed when the $2.5-billion suit was filed in 2020, has been calling on the federal government to settle claims for financial compensation and to create a mental health fund for trauma caused by racial discrimination in the public service.

The creation of that fund, which was promised in the 2022 federal budget, has also been mired in complaints of racist behaviour.

Back in March, the Treasury Board Secretariat ruled that the Canadian Human Rights Commission discriminated against Black and racialized employees.

Nicholas Marcus Thompson, the executive director of the Black Class Action Secretariat, said the agencies responsible for implementing the new changes have also contributed to systemic discrimination within the workplace.

“Frankly, there’s no trust,” said Thompson.

He pointed out that individual employers within the government separately control their staffing processes.

“If you look at the legislation, and if you look at the direction that the Public Service Commission is now empowered to take action on, it doesn’t appear to have any teeth,” he said.

“It’s mind-boggling that employers who have discriminated against workers — you have employers like the Canadian Human Rights Commission that has been discriminatory towards its own Black employees — would now be the subject of this system.”

Thompson called for more accountability in the public service, and said agencies that have engaged in discriminatory practices should take responsibility.

He said the government and public service sector have displayed that they have the willpower to make meaningful changes toward diversity and inclusion, citing the increase of women in the federal workforce.

“So the excuse that there is no magic bullet to this problem, it’s quite frankly nonsense,” he said.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada, a union that represents more than 120,000 federal workers, called the changes a good start but said more is need to address systemic barriers.

In a written statement, the union said legislative changes are also needed to overhaul to managerial powers in hiring practices, and that the Public Service Commission should have the authority to ensure transparency and make changes to hiring practices

Source: Mandates aim to tackle discrimination in public service, unions say it’s not enough

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Should we replace some public servants with computerized agents?

2023/07/05 Leave a comment

Yes, as a means to improve citizen service and reduce wait times for routine applications and services. But prior to doing so, do the hard work of reviewing programs and opportunities for simplificant and streamlining rather than assuming tech is a solution to address program complexity, duplication and incoherence between programs.

Most of us have experience with chatbots, who are likely to become more effective given advances in large language models such as ChatGBT:

Take a moment to imagine your next application for passport renewal. Rather than heading to a passport office, the government now allows you to apply online. If the passport office wants to follow up, instead of inviting you to visit in person, they send you a text, asking you to call a number.

Your call is connected immediately, and the agent is pleasant, speaking your language fluently with a slightly hard-to-identify accent. She asks you benign but interesting questions about your upcoming trip. At the end of the conversation, she lets you know that your application will be approved. You thank her enthusiastically, and she wishes you a safe journey.

This scenario is the kind of ideal government interaction that Canadians dream of. But what if that pleasant person who helped you was in fact a highly intelligent computer? Would it change our feelings about the level of service?

What if, instead of a passport application, you were interacting over a medical need; a question of a child support payment; or a request for employment insurance after a job loss? What if you were trying to speak to your local member of Parliament, asking them for assistance in a public matter or to express your opinion on an issue

The reality is that governments are not far from having access to such services. Large language models – made famous by OpenAI’s ChatGPT – are improving at a breathtaking pace. Speech technology and voice recognition are developing at a similar rate. When the linguistic fluency of a language generator is combined with speech technology, the capacity exists to have a conversation with a computer that differs undetectably from one with a human. These digital agents can seamlessly incorporate the information they are receiving in real-time to make judgments that their owners – in this case, the government – program them to make. A world of digital agents who can replace public servants is closer than we think.

Should we help that world develop or hold it back? Of course, we would all rather deal with a real human who behaves like our imaginary artificial agent – quickly, empathetically and accurately. But for many users of government services, that’s not the right comparison case. Which would you prefer: The scenario we described above with an intelligent chatbot? Or the scenario in which you get a notification that you have to head to the passport office (which involves finding it and either securing an appointment or waiting in line) to talk to someone? Or the alternative – to wade through phone trees and hold music to talk to someone who may be at the end of a difficult day and not all that interested in solving your problem, not able to speak your language idiomatically, or unable to explain things in terms you understand?

In the passport example, the constraint on providing better services with an intelligent chatbot would not be the availability of workers to process passport decisions, but the capacity of this technology to scale up. Marginal costs are low here.

To be sure, there are challenges in using these technologies. Their advantages are only realized when more discretion is given to the digital agent. We would have to allow it to make decisions. How do we audit the decisions of robots? And who is accountable for the decisions which they make? What is the recourse when they make the wrong calls, or even do harm through their choices?

These are the kinds of choices governments will need to make about how they are willing to deploy digital agents to deliver services. There will come a moment in the future, perhaps the near future, where the cost of such agents will be low enough and the need for more government services will be high enough, that saying no to such machines will be impossible. Before that time comes, governments ought to decide what principles will guide their use.

There are multiple ways to achieve this. Governments could engage in substantial public consultations and hearings, with both experts and regular citizens. They could convene groups of citizens to deliberate over the principles and rules for the deployment of digital agents. They could run small, open trials, where citizen use of these technologies is entirely voluntary and the results of decisions are open to public scrutiny.

However governments decide to tackle these future choices, the decision must be made a priority now. The aspiration of democracies has long been a government for the people, but also by the people. And it’s up to democracies to decide if the same rule should apply to public services.

Peter Loewen is the director of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Gillian Hadfield is the director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

Source: Should we replace some public servants with computerized agents?

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The public service is ailing. Janice Charette says organizational health is the next big challenge

2023/06/30 Leave a comment

Perennial challenge, diagnostic easier than solutions given size, complexity and diversity of government programs along with the political-public service interface:

Janice Charette left the job as Canada’s top bureaucrat stressing that the public service must turn its attention to “organizational health” so it can manage in a world seemingly gone haywire with one crisis on top of another.

Charette, who retired last week as clerk of the Privy Council Office, called organizational health the “new frontier” in renewing the public service, which emerged from a once-in-a-century pandemic with its management performance – the good and the bad – fully exposed.

Every part of society, every family, every employer is dealing with significant changes to the way we live, socialize and interact because of the pandemic, she said in an interview.

“But the conversation we need now is around organizational wellness. How are organizations dealing with one crisis after another, with workload pressures 24/7 and in the complicated and somewhat conflictual operating environments governments are functioning in?”

That conversation is a tall order. Critics and observers say there’s so much that needs fixing in the way human resources, technology and finances are managed. They were built for another time and are out sync with the speed and expectations of the digital age.

The public service, with 350,000 employees, is also as big as it has ever been, and the social and economic problems it tackles more complex.

Organizational health is one of those corporate buzzwords that boils down to how effectively an organization manages and adapts to change.

“An enterprise focus on organizational health is exactly what this government needs because the need to be adaptable, resilient, and engaged is not going away,” said Stephen Harrington, Deloitte’s workforce strategy advisory leader.

He likens it to training for a marathon. You have to prepare, eat, train, and sleep right.

Charette and her predecessors have spent years working on ways to support health and wellbeing of their employees – with varying degrees of success. They’ve made mental health, accessibility for persons with disabilities, reducing anti-Black racism and increasing diversity and inclusion top management priorities. They’re all linked and part of recruiting a public service that reflects the country.

The shift in emphasis must come as workloads are increasing, stress is high and disability claims are climbing. Workplace issues have a disproportionate impact on the mental health of Indigenous, Black and racialized workers, those with disabilities, and those from religious minorities and the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.

Charette said examining organizational health means analyzing how structures, controls, rules, processes and oversight is contributing to work overload, long hours, and stress, as well as turning off the skilled workers it needs to keep and attract.

Charette recently told a mental-health conference that Canada’s largest employer needs a reset.

“You can’t boil an ocean”

“Leaders need to think about how we pivot now to support organizational wellness. COVID also gave us some not-so-great work practices – workers were at home and available to work 24/7. That is wonderful and essential in a crisis.  But it is not sustainable.”

She argues a key part of the next renewal is figuring out what issues to focus on because “you can’t boil an ocean.” Charette, however, steers clear of prioritizing what should be tackled first, leaving that up to her successor, John Hannaford, who takes over this week.

“How do you make sure that public service is fit for purpose in a very different world going forward? That is a timely question, and that’s going to be a question for my successor,” she said.

“I’m going to leave to John to define what his priorities are going to be and how to approach them.”

Clearly, the big issue is workload.

The Liberals have an ambitious agenda with big plans for climate change, transition to a clean-energy economy, and reconciliation – not to mention cabinet ministers loaded up with hundreds of must-dos in their mandate letters. Then there’s the impact of crises erupting around the world and all those day-to-day issues that crop up.

And she’s lived it. As she says, whatever issues landed on the prime minister’s desk landed on hers.

As clerk, she stickhandled the emergence from the pandemic, a shift to hybrid work, service delivery cockups with passport and immigration backlogs and the biggest public-service strike in 30 years. There is the war in Ukraine, a trucker protest, the invoking of the Emergencies Act and the machinery-of-government crisis over foreign interference. Don’t forget floods, fires, soaring inflation, housing shortages and all the day-to-day distractions of social media, partisan attacks and 24-hour news cycle.

Everyone talks about the world being in  “polycrisis,” the term popularized by historian Adam Tooze to describe the coming together of multiple crises at once with the ensuing damage greater than the sum of each part.

“I’m a believer that the polycrisis is here to stay. I think that is a feature of public administration,” Charette says.

The government has enduring priorities, she says, that include addressing inequality, fixing climate change, Canada’s economic growth, prosperity and role in the world.

“All those (priorities) don’t change. It’s the layer of stuff that’s sitting on top of it, and then the crises,” she says.

“The questions for renewal going forward are whether we are affectively organized for that world. Are we trying to do that and everything else at the same time?”

And Charette worries the public service is not ready.

She said it’s as if everyone thought that once the pandemic was over, we would get back to the way things were. She likens it to waiting for “regular programming to resume after this special broadcast.”

“You know what?” she said. “There is always going to be a new special broadcast. I think the world of ongoing special broadcasts in a world of regular programming is here to stay.”

A more permeable public service

During Charette’s final days as clerk, senior bureaucrats, academics and politicians were blocks away in an Ottawa hotel at a conference talking about governments’ institutional resilience during COVID-19. They talked about lessons learned by governing in a crisis and how to adapt for the next one.

They rhymed off examples of governments pulling off feats unimagined pre-pandemic – and in record time. But there’s a lot that needs fixing for public servants to do their jobs better: procurement rules, an outdated job classification system and staffing rules. It can take nearly a year to hire someone. Unions are stuck in an industrial labour regime. There’s too much reliance on contracting. Old legacy IT systems had to be tricked to get out COVID-19 benefits.

A key piece of a reset should be driven by skills, Harrington of Deloitte argues. The government needs to “upskill and reskill” because the skills the government needs will change rapidly. Generative AI alone is going to replace tasks, eliminate jobs and even create new ones.

Charette acknowledged it may also be time to re-think a career public service and make it more “permeable.” Rather than spending 35 years in the public service, people could work there for a few years, move to the private and nonprofit sectors, and perhaps return to the federal government.

Alasdair Roberts, a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts, just finished a stint as the Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar at the Canada School of Public Service, where he studied adaptability as key to countries’ survival in this turbulent century.

He argues one of the big threats to Canada’s adaptability is the health of the public service. Public servants’ risk aversion stems from a 50-year build-up of controls with new oversight watchdogs to improve accountability, he maintains. On top of that, bureaucrats face a new layer of political control, the growing arm of ministerial staffers he calls the “political service.”

“A country cannot be adaptable if its public service is incapable of taking new ideas and translating them into action efficiently,” he said.

Charette cautions a big challenge in sorting out the obstacles is “how we put a bias on agility and responsiveness without losing the due diligence we need as stewards of public resources and the public interest.”

Roberts joins Donald Savoie, Canada’s pre-eminent scholar on public administration, in calling for a royal commission on reforming the public service.

“We can’t expect public-service managers to have the kind of oversight bodies we have now looking over their shoulders every single day,” said Savoie.

The clerk’s role comes with the power and influence to lead a major reform, but Hannaford won’t have the time to do it, Savoie argues.

“It’s not that the incoming clerk is not up to it, but he is too busy. Too many crises thrown at him. Too many issues. Ministers bouncing around to keep under control. So many issues. I think what you needed is a parallel process, call it what you want, to look at these fundamental issues.”

…

Source: The public service is ailing. Janice Charette says organizational health is the next big challenge

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As the Canadian population passes 40 million, fast-growing provinces gain relatively fewer seats in Ottawa 

2023/06/27 Leave a comment

Will accentuate regional tensions over time:

When Canada’s population hit 40 million last week, it was a reminder that representation in the House of Commons will have to keep pace with the growing country. But although the number of MPs from Alberta and Ontario could grow over the next 20 years, those provinces risk becoming even more underrepresented as special clauses protect other provinces, such as Quebec.

Last month, the Journal de Montréal published a series of articles claiming Quebec will eventually become “trapped” by Ottawa and lose political power as immigration rates increase in the rest of the country.

“Quebec will find itself drowned in a sea of 100 million Canadians by the end of the century, if the massive immigration targets announced by the Trudeau government last fall materialize,” it said, referring to Ottawa’s plan to welcome as many as 500,000 immigrants a year in 2025. Premier François Legault said this was a threat to Quebec and the French language.

Even though the 100-million figure came from the Century Initiative advocacy group, not the federal government, Canada is well on its way to this kind of growth and could exceed 50 million people within the next 20 years.

Demographic growth, already overwhelmingly dependent on immigration, will be even more so as the population ages and birth rates remain low across all provinces, explained Marc Termote, an associate professor of demography at the University of Montreal.

Because Quebec’s share of immigration is and will likely remain much lower than its share of the Canadian population – the province is considering increasing its immigration target to 60,000 a year, about half of what it needs to keep up with the rest of the country – “Quebec will continue to lose demographic weight, and therefore political weight,” Prof. Termote said.

The Constitution requires that the number of seats in the House of Commons be recalculated every 10 years to reflect changes in Canada’s population according to the representation formula, which takes into account demographic growth and special clauses.

Under current law, provinces don’t lose seats – even when their share of the population falls. At the same time, the number of MPs is restricted by the formula, so fast-growing provinces gain relatively few seats.

“Quebec is ever so slightly overrepresented at the moment, but that’s going to become a flashpoint over the coming years if Quebec doesn’t grow faster than it has been,” said Richard Johnston, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia’s department of political science.

In late 1997, as Canada was about to reach 30 million people, Ontario had 11.3 million residents while Quebec had 7.3 million, British Columbia had almost four million, Alberta had 2.8 million and Nova Scotia stood at fewer than a million.

During that year’s federal elections, Canadians voted in 301 electoral districts, carrying Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s Liberal Party to a second majority government. At the time, Ontario had 103 seats, Quebec 75, B.C. 34, Alberta 26 and Nova Scotia 11.

That meant Ontario, even though it had the highest number of seats of any province as the country’s most populous, was underrepresented in Parliament. The same was true of B.C. and Alberta, while Quebec was slightly overrepresented and Nova Scotia more so.

Seats added in 2013 to Ontario, B.C. and Alberta as a result of the last decennial revision did not match their fast population growth, as Atlantic provinces, along with Manitoba and Saskatchewan, remain overrepresented in today’s 338-seat Parliament.

This dynamic will continue when Parliament grows to 343 seats, following the 2021 census, which should come into force in September.

Quebec, initially set to lose one riding with the revision, will keep 78 seats. Mr. Legault pushed back against the planned reduction at the time, saying that “the nation of Quebec deserves a certain level of representation in the House of Commons, regardless of the evolution of the number of inhabitants in each province.”

The federal government obliged and passed a bill amending the Constitution Act last year. It provided that no province can have fewer MPs than it had in 2019, which could lead to severe distortions in the decades to come.

According to Statistics Canada, the country’s population could hit the 50-million mark by 2043 if current immigration levels stay in place. In projections released last year, a high-growth scenario put it at 52.5 million people 20 years from now.

Under that scenario, Ontario (projected to reach 21.1 million), Alberta (7.2 million) and B.C. (7.4 million) would continue to outpace other provinces, while Quebec (10.2 million) would be left behind, like Atlantic Canada.

The number of MPs for the fastest-growing provinces would go up, but that would be unlikely to cause a fundamental shift in Ottawa under the current rules, UBC’s Prof. Johnston said, because of the embedded protections in the representation formula. “In fact, the underrepresentation of Ontario, Alberta and B.C. is probably going to get worse,” he said, even as their numbers of MPs grow. “The critical question is whether the rules are politically sustainable.”

Using today’s rules to compute what this would mean for the 2040s’ Parliament, Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and the Atlantic provinces would keep their current numbers of MPs even as their demographic weight continues to decrease and more ridings are added to other provinces, for a total of 362.

It would mean that Alberta, set to reach 13.6 per cent of the population in 2043 under a high-growth scenario, would claim 44 seats (or 12.2 per cent of the ridings), while Quebec – whose population growth alone would warrant a diminished number of seats if not for the fact that it is protected, like other overrepresented provinces, by special clauses – will keep 78 seats (21.5 per cent) for 19.4 per cent of the country’s population. Ontario would claim 131 seats (36.2 per cent) for 40.3 per cent of the population.

The representation formula, however, is not immutable, and changes could induce faster growth in ridings during the next two revisions, as happened after the 2011 census under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in an attempt to “compensate for what was a systematic drag on the representation of the fastest-growing provinces,” Prof. Johnston said.

But demographic changes not only influence the number of seats in Parliament but many other resources as well. “Federal transfers – related to equalization, health care, postsecondary education, social assistance, child care – depend directly on the number of each province’s inhabitants,” Prof. Termote said. “As Quebec’s share in the total Canadian population will continue to decline, Quebec’s share in the total federal transfers will necessarily also decline.”

Source: As the Canadian population passes 40 million, fast-growing provinces gain relatively fewer seats in Ottawa

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Cappe and Mitchell: Fixing Canada’s access to information regime will require more than just people power

2023/06/26 Leave a comment

Starts with changing the default to being open, as open data illustrates. But the reality that politicians tend to support more open government when in opposition and be “less enthusiastic” when in government is likely the fundamental obstacle. But modernizing the process and digitizing holdings should be doable:

The Globe and Mail has done Canadians a service by exposing the serious shortcomings in federal and provincial freedom of information (FOI) regimes. The reporting done as part of the Secret Canada project has shown that Canadians cannot get timely access to the information held by governments that they need, and to which they are legally entitled. Either the governments are egregiously slow in responding to access requests or, in far too many cases, they simply fail to provide the information requested. These delays are not simply frustrating; in far too many cases, they affect the material interests of Canadians who need to know what the government knows about them.

This problem is an important challenge to democratic governance in this country. But the solutions may not be obvious.

For example, simply adding more people, working millions more hours, to beleaguered access/FOI units in the federal and provincial governments will not solve the problem. Moreover, our Westminster system of government differs in fundamental ways from the municipal-government-style model with which most Canadians are familiar: Westminster government is cabinet government, where there is a fundamental requirement for secrecy to enable frank discussion among ministers and collective responsibility before the legislature, while municipal councils do their business in the open, as they should. But the obligations of openness differ in important ways between these two forms of government, and this can cause confusion.

To figure out solutions, we must understand the source of our access/FOI problem – and that lies with two fundamental features of the current regimes operated by both the federal and provincial governments.

First, the system we have is governed by the assumption that documents belong to government and are protected unless they can be allowed to be released. The result is that officials are obliged to spend an enormous amount of expensive time examining and redacting documents to protect information that, frankly, has no need of protection. Instead, governments should accept that the information they hold is inherently public, unless it falls within a limited set of exceptions to that rule, and make this information easy to access for citizens.

The second and more fundamental problem is that the laws were written, and governments are operating, in an analog world of paper and paper-based processes, while the needs and expectations of citizens reflect their experiences in a 21st-century digital world.

Today, people expect that information will be available instantly online. The notion that the information that someone is seeking from government is sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere in a remote government building seems laughable – but sadly, it is accurate. The fact is that today, a request for information is, in most cases, actually a request for a paper document that must be located then examined by a government official, then perhaps redacted in some way or other, and then physically transmitted to the person who made the access request. That process takes a huge amount of time and effort, and what’s more, it’s expensive: A recent Treasury Board study revealed that the estimated per-page cost of a document released under the federal access to information program is $11.40, and pegs the total cost to administer the program at $195-million a year. Pro-active disclosure, by contrast, would cost a federal department or agency only $64,000 a year on average.

To solve the problem, we should first recognize a clear distinction between information that should be accessible – namely, almost all of it – and information that, for good reason, should be protected.

We should also recognize that different kinds of information require different forms of protection. Tax data require privacy protection, for instance; this is an essential obligation of government to citizens and is fundamental to our “self-reporting” system of tax collection. Discussions in cabinet and advice to ministers need protection to enable the giving of frank advice and to allow for candour around the cabinet table. National security and intelligence records need protection to protect the security of the country; commercial negotiations, as well as federal-provincial and international negotiations, require protection so as to protect individual and national interests.

All these protections should be pretty much absolute. After that, one can apply a harm test to protect the information, if that is necessary. Otherwise, the default position should be that the information held by governments is readily accessible.

Furthermore, in our digital world, not every digital artifact in government should be deemed a “record” for the purposes of access to information. For example, every e-mail and every telephone call inside government is currently regarded, in principle, as a digital record. These should not be considered a record, for the purposes of the Act. Why not? Well, not every request for access is benign; some requests are motivated, quite legitimately, by a political or journalistic interest in simply embarrassing the government or finding information on a competitor. And if all exchanges among public servants were made public, then people simply would not communicate digitally any more. If casual exchanges among public servants are to be accessible then fear of embarrassing the government or themselves would be a chill on frank exchanges.

So how can we best reform the access/FOI regime at the federal or provincial level to better respect the rights and expectations of citizens, while still protecting the legitimate interests of individuals, governments and the country?

Firstly, as noted, start by recognizing the principles of confidentiality of ministerial discussions that underpin Westminster parliamentary democracy.

Secondly, change the default position for access/FOI from one of protecting secrecy to that of making records releasable unless this would violate clearly defined principles of secrecy or privacy. In cases of doubt, apply a clearly defined justiciable harm test for disclosure.

Thirdly, set out well-defined categories of protected documents (e.g., cabinet confidences, national security and intelligence information, and tax information and other records protected by privacy concerns) in the law.

And finally – and perhaps most importantly – begin the essential task of changing the information holdings of government from analog to digital, and amend search and disclosure processes in the same manner. Emphasize the creation of searchable databases which allow for low compliance costs in government and what is equally important, low private search costs. Recognize the social and public costs of compliance in government (high) vs. the private costs of private search of public records (low).

The Globe is right – the system is broken. Canadians are not being well-served. But we can’t fix the system by simply opening it up. We must understand why it’s broken and what it should look like in future if the interests of Canadians are to be protected.

Mel Cappe is a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a former clerk of the Privy Council. James Mitchell is an adjunct professor at Carleton University and a former assistant secretary to the Cabinet, Machinery of Government.

Source: Fixing Canada’s access to information regime will require more than just people power

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Canada’s public service is stuck in ‘analog’ and the world ‘has moved on’: Former clerk

2023/06/26 Leave a comment

All too true but she was understandably more cautious when DM at ESDC and the initial vision of Service Canada was to move to digital and give greater priority to service delivery considerations and simplification centred around citizens, not programs:

The public service is not keeping pace with Canadians’ needs in a digital world, says the woman who used to lead it.

“The public service is still working in what I would describe as kind of analog ways and the world has moved on,” former clerk of the Privy Council Janice Charette, told Rosemary Barton Live in an interview airing Sunday.

“You can make a dinner reservation, you can book a cruise, you can move money in and out of your bank account, transfer between the two of us — it’s remarkable the things you can do in a digital world and the public service, and our service delivery infrastructure has not kept up with that.”

It’s a gap that Charette said was on display when the public service couldn’t deliver services such as passports once COVID-19 restrictions were lifted.

“In all humility, we know we have to do a better job there,” she said.

Proud of initial pandemic response

Charette, who refers to her job as being “steward of one of the most important institutions in our democracy,” retired Friday after nearly 40 years in the service, including stints as clerk for prime ministers Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau.

Reflecting on her tenure, Charette said she’s proud of the way the public service jumped into action during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, spending billions to support people and businesses.

“One of the things I completely believe about public service is that in a crisis we can be magnificent,” she said.

“Decisions had to move quickly, benefits had to move quickly … and the challenge is, how do you maintain that going forward?”

As the lockdowns lifted, services lagged and frustrations grew.

The government was put on the defensive last year when passport offices were overwhelmed by a surge of applications.

The immigration department was also caught on its back foot by demand. At one point last year more than 2.4 million applications were stuck waiting for processing.

“I think in the public service maybe we underestimated how quickly people were going to want to return to their lives, how quickly they were gonna want to travel and have their passports, and how quickly we were gonna start the immigration system, how much people were going to want to move,” Charette said.

“This was not the best of times for the public service because we underestimated that ramp-up.”

Charette defends outside contracts

Another issue for her successor, John Hannaford, will be how to handle procuring outside consultations.

The auditor general is reviewing the millions of dollars worth of contracts the federal government awarded to management consulting firm McKinsey & Company following news reports.

Charette said she believes there are times when it makes sense to bring in outside experts.

“The public service is not and never should be seen as a source of all knowledge,” she said.

“There are many cases where, whether it’s something which is a temporary need or a specialized kind of need, that we don’t want to build it inside the public service. It’s actually more economical and more efficient and maybe better for the public that we actually go out and get external expertise.”

Besides being the head of the public service, the clerk acts as the deputy minister to the prime minister and secretary to the cabinet.

“I have had the honour of sitting in the cabinet room for some of the most fascinating conversations about issues that really matter to Canadians,” Charette told Barton.

That would have included the tense discussions in February 2022 around whether or not the government should invoke the Emergencies Act.

Didn’t want to be ‘intimidated’ by Emergencies Act decision

As clerk, Charette recommended the government use the never-before-used law to clear anti-public health measure protests that had gridlocked downtown Ottawa for nearly a month.

That decision thrust her into the spotlight when she was later called to testify at the Public Order Emergency Commission last fall and defended her rationale.

While Commissioner Paul Rouleau ultimately ruled that the federal government met the threshold needed to invoke the Emergencies Act, the government’s decision remains polarizing for many across the country.

Charette said she couldn’t let the unprecedented use of the act scare her and other decision-makers away from using it if it was needed.

“I remember very much thinking we have never used this piece of legislation, so implicit in that is you’re going to make history, but you also don’t want to be intimidated by that either,” she said.

“The public service is known for being risk-averse. You don’t want to bring a bias, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s such a big thing. Oh, maybe we shouldn’t do it.’ Is it the right instrument at the right time with all the right protections around it?”

Charette said many protesters had “totally legitimate questions.”

“There’s only so long you can kind of hold people back. Then there’s like, OK, well, what about me? What about my interest in my family’s interest?” she said.

“The concern for me was this other element that we saw creeping into it and it almost felt like there some taking advantage of what was a widespread protest, a widespread debate going on, by people who had a different point to make.”

Source: Canada’s public service is stuck in ‘analog’ and the world ‘has moved on’: Former clerk

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Conservative MPs furious after e-mails show federal officials worked on ways not to answer their questions

2023/06/22 Leave a comment

Understandable (but have been guilty myself when in government):

Federal public servants worked on ways not to answer directly opposition MPs’ parliamentary questions, admitting that doing so raised a communication risk, internal government documents obtained under access to information show.

Civil servants in the Natural Resources Department recommended the use of “limitation language” to answer the written Commons questions from Conservative and NDP MPs, internal e-mails show.

The revelation prompted Commons Speaker Anthony Rota to issue a rebuke Tuesday over the failure to fully answer written questions, saying more and more MPs were complaining about the quality of replies.

He said all MPs, regardless of which party they are from, have a right to expect full and factual responses to requests for information from the government.

MPs deserved accurate answers “regardless of their name, reputation or political affiliation,” Mr. Rota said. “Written questions and the responses to them are central parts of the process of accountability,” he added.

MPs often table written questions to get information from the government, which has to respond within 45 days. But this week Tory MPs expressed dismay after internal e-mails, obtained through access to information, suggested politically neutral public servants had used evasive tactics when replying to their questions.

Calgary Conservative Michelle Rempel Garner tabled an access request after one of her questions to the Natural Resources Department was not completely answered. She asked for details about the U.S. military funding mining projects.

One Natural Resources official approving the response to Ms. Rempel Garner wrote: “Response does not answer questions directly, but provides a response to the spirit of the questions. PAU has confirmed that this approach is appropriate.”

The MP says she was shocked to discover that dozens of federal officials had been consulted in drawing up the response, including those from the communications department. Her question was branded “high risk” and the reply was framed using existing “media lines” used to respond to journalists.

The internal e-mails showed public servants referred to her position as a former opposition critic when framing the reply, saying because she was an “effective communicator” it raised a risk of her highlighting their failure to fully answer her question.

“There is some communications risk resulting from the use of high-level limitation language that does not answer the written question from an MP who is an effective communicator and former Natural resources critic,” says the communication assessment of Natural Resources’ response to Ms. Rempel Garner’s question.

The e-mails also discuss the prospect of the Speaker of the House of Commons ruling on the issue of her unanswered question.

“I’m expecting the Speaker to tut tut and then say it is not for him to judge the quality of a response but we will see,” said an e-mail from Kyle Harrietha, who is deputy chief of staff to the Natural Resources Minister.

Ms. Rempel Garner said the documents made it “very clear they factored in my partisan position” when preparing the reply to her question.

The internal e-mails include a table of questions to the Natural Resources Minister from MPs, including Conservatives Garnett Genuis, Dan Albas and NDP MP Blake Desjarlais, who asked about funding for First Nations. The communication assessments reveal that “limitation language” was used in framing their replies.

Mr. Albas told The Globe that replies are meant to be “fact-based” and it was wrong for government officials to apply a “communications lens” to responses.

One Natural Resources document discusses its response to the question from Mr. Albas.

“NRCan [Natural Resources Canada’s] answer uses limitation language and does not disclose specific cancelled contracts from the time period requested,” it says. “Communications risk appears low and depends on whether NRCan stands out among all departments answering.”

Conservative MPs Shannon Stubbs and Brad Redekopp also raised concerns Tuesday in the Commons about incomplete replies from government departments to their written questions, including those seeking facts to help their constituents.

Mr. Rota said the comments of public servants involved in replying to MPs’ questions, disclosed under access to information, were “troubling.”

The Speaker said he had noticed that MPs are questioning more and more the quality of answers to their questions. He urged ministers “to find the right words to inspire their officials to invest their time and energy in preparing high-quality responses, rather than looking for reasons to avoid answering written questions.”

A spokesman for Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said he had responded to Ms. Rempel Garner’s question about mineral projects active in Canada.

“The Minister did so in a way that adhered to the advice provided to him by officials with respect to sensitive information involving international affairs and defence, scientific and technical information, commercial sensitivity, and ongoing negotiations,” saidKeean Nembhard, the minister’s spokesman.

In the Senate, Conservative Leader Don Plett said he has been waiting since 2020 for answers to some of his written questions. He accused the government of a disregard for “proper parliamentary process.”

Source: Conservative MPs furious after e-mails show federal officials worked on ways not to answer their questions

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Deputy minister left government weeks after Indigenous group privately called for his resignation, documents show

2023/06/21 Leave a comment

Cancel culture, Canadian government style…

A deputy minister’s recent departure from the federal public service occurred just weeks after a national Indigenous organization privately called for his resignation over an e-mail dismissing their description of colonialism as “a gross misreading of history.”

Timothy Sargent’s nearly three-decade career in the federal public service – which included representing Canada internationally on trade and finance files – ended without a public explanation in October when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a shuffle of deputy ministers.

The news release named a new deputy minister of Fisheries and Oceans, but made no mention of Mr. Sargent, who had been in that job since early 2019. Normally such news releases thank senior officials for their service if they are retiring or leaving for another position.

Internal e-mails and letters obtained by The Globe and Mail through Access to Information – as well as additional details provided by government officials – reveal his departure followed months of behind-the-scenes controversy over an e-mail he wrote in May, 2022.

Government officials told The Globe that Fisheries Minister Joyce Murray became personally involved in the matter, apologizing to the recipient of the e-mail and raising her deputy minister’s actions with Janice Charette, the Clerk of the Privy Council and head of the public service.

The controversy began in May when Mr. Sargent received a letter of invitation signed by Dawn Madahbee Leach, chair of the National Indigenous Economic Development Board, a small organization based in Gatineau supported financially by the federal government that provides advice to Ottawa on policy and ministerial appointments.

The letter invited Mr. Sargent to attend a luncheon hosted by Deloitte Canada to launch a National Indigenous Economic Strategy for Canada. The letter said “one of colonialism’s most nefarious objectives was the deliberate exclusion of Indigenous people from sharing the wealth of our country. This strategy is a path forward towards economic reconciliation that is both inclusive and meaningful.”

The letter was e-mailed to Mr. Sargent by public affairs consultant Isabelle Metcalfe on May 30, 2022.

Mr. Sargent responded the next morning with a one-sentence e-mail to Ms. Metcalfe and Mario Iacobacci of Deloitte.

“I shall certainly not attend an event which is premised on a gross misreading of history,” he wrote.

Ms. Metcalfe promptly forwarded Mr. Sargent’s response to Ms. Madahbee Leach, who then e-mailed Mr. Sargent that evening to express regret regarding his position.

“In the spirit of reconciliation, I would welcome the opportunity to discuss with you your response in an effort to salvage the opportunity for you to attend the event and learn,” she wrote on May 31.

About a month later, Mr. Sargent sent a two-page letter of apology to Ms. Madahbee Leach, dated June 29.

“I fully acknowledge that my response was inappropriate and illustrated a lack of awareness of and sensitivity to the many challenges and barriers, past and present, faced by Indigenous people to fully and equitably participate in Canadian society and the economy,” the letter stated. “I would like to make restitution for the harm that this has caused, both to the Department’s reputation but also to the fact that is exactly the kind of thing that points to systemic racism at the highest levels of government.”

The letter ended with a request for a meeting.

The documents show Mr. Sargent e-mailed a copy of the letter to Ms. Charette, the PCO Clerk, as well as Daniel Quan-Watson, the deputy minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, and Christiane Fox, the then-deputy minister of Indigenous Services.

“Colleague, you will find attached a letter I sent earlier today to Ms. Dawn Madahbee Leach expressing my sincere remorse over language used in a reply to an invitation to the launch of the National Indigenous Economic Strategy,” he wrote in the e-mail, which was released in a partly redacted form. “I also want to thank you for your support both over the past several years but also more recently through this time.”

On Sept. 9, the National Indigenous Economic Development Board (NIEDB) sent Mr. Sargent a new letter from Ms. Madahbee Leach, with copies to Mr. Trudeau, Ms. Charette, some federal ministers, the Assembly of First Nations, the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and the Métis National Council.

The letter acknowledged Mr. Sargent’s letter of apology but said his original comments appear to be at odds with the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner’s Report, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and many Supreme Court of Canada rulings.

“Your response to our invitation is particularly shocking in that, as a senior official, it appears that you do not agree with, or believe in, the findings of these vital and fundamental documents. The boldness with which you confidently and openly shared your thoughts that we were presenting a ‘gross misrepresentation of history’ is a prime example of systemic racism at the highest levels of government,” she wrote.

The letter said the sincerity of his letter of apology “is greatly diminished” by the fact that it was only received after his superiors had been informed of the e-mail. It said that after careful consideration and after receiving input from a variety of Indigenous leaders, the NIEDB “firmly believes that a senior official holding the views that you have expressed should no longer serve in any capacity in the federal public service, or in any other government or affiliated entity.”

Mr. Sargent declined to comment on the issue when reached by phone Thursday at the Centre for the Study of Living Standards, where he now works as the deputy executive director. He is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

Prior to leading the Fisheries Department, he was the deputy minister of International Trade during the negotiation of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement. He has also worked as a senior Finance Department official with responsibility for the G7 and G20.

In response to questions from The Globe, Jeff Woodland, a spokesperson for the Fisheries Minister, provided a statement saying Ms. Murray was “deeply disappointed” to learn of Mr. Sargent’s e-mail.

“The comments were unacceptable and inappropriate,” the statement said, adding that Ms. Murray raised the issue with the PCO Clerk and spoke with Ms. Madahbee Leach “to apologize on behalf of the government and department.”

PCO spokesperson Stéphane Shank said an acting deputy minister assumed Mr. Sargent’s role as of late June, 2022, before a permanent replacement was named on Oct. 31. The PCO said Mr. Sargent submitted his resignation effective Oct. 12.

“PCO cannot comment on individual circumstances in accordance with the Privacy Act,” Mr. Shank said.

In an interview, Ms. Madahbee Leach said Mr. Sargent’s initial e-mail was unsettling and he never took up her invitation to discuss the issue directly. She said she felt Ms. Murray and her office handled the situation well.

“They were also very shocked,” she said. “When they see something in writing like this, it was quite something.”

Source: Deputy minister left government weeks after Indigenous group privately called for his resignation, documents show

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