Clerk of the Privy Council John Hannaford relaunches ethics and values discussion in the public service

2023/09/25 Leave a comment

Count me among the sceptics despite the need and I share the concerns and questions raised by others. The Tait report was written by one deputy working full time on the report rather than having a committee of deputies, likely accounting in part for its clarity and sense of purpose:

Canada’s top bureaucrat is making values and ethics a top priority, striking a task force of deputy ministers to lead a “broad conversation” on reaffirming the core values of a non-partisan public service in a changing world where crises never stop.

John Hannaford, named clerk of the Privy Council Office three months ago, put together the five-member task force with marching orders to “bring our collective values and ethics to life within a dynamic and increasingly complex environment.” He sent notice of the new task force to all departments last week and outlined the plan in a keynote speech at recent conference that was closed to the media.

“As head of the public service, fostering a renewed conversation on values and ethics will serve as one of my priority areas of focus over the next year and will support the effective management and renewal of our public service,” he wrote in a letter to public servants.

Hannaford said the task force will spend the next several months conducting outreach with public servants, networks and communities — both inside and outside the public service. He expects a “milestone report” by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, he wants every department, branch and division to come up with activities and ways to discuss public service values and ethics and what they mean in today’s world.

The task force will be chaired by Catherine Blewett, a former top bureaucrat in Nova Scotia who is now deputy minister of Economic Development and president of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency.

Other members include: Stephen Lucas, deputy minister at Health Canada, Christiane Fox at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and Caroline Xavier, the chief of the electronic spy agency Communications Security Establishment (CSE). Donnalyn McClymont, PCO deputy secretary for senior personnel and public-service renewal, will support the task force as an ex-officio member.

A first in 30 years

This marks the first major values and ethics review since the groundbreaking report A Strong Foundation, by former deputy minister John Tait nearly 30 years ago.

That report was also built on a conversation with public servants. It laid the groundwork for values-and-ethics code that came into effect in 2003 to govern how public servants work, behave and their relationship with Parliament, ministers and Canadians.

Tait’s report also grew out of a task force of deputy ministers appointed by then-PCO clerk Jocelyne Bourgon at a time of huge flux. She created nine task forces to study the big challenges for public servants in the aftermath of the  Chrétien government’s historic program review. That review completely rethought the role of government and wiped out more than 50,000 federal jobs to beat a crushing deficit.

Times have changed, but Hannaford said the core values outlined in Tait’s report — respect for democracy, respect for people, integrity, stewardship and excellence — are enduring and are still the compass to guide public servants’ behaviour.

“Our world is increasingly dynamic, complex, and ever-changing,” Hannaford wrote in a letter to departments.

“As public servants, we play an important role in the Canadian democratic system. We continue to rise to the occasion to serve Canada and Canadians. Our public-service values and ethics serve as an important compass to guide our actions and behaviours, particularly as we adapt and evolve in times of change.”

He said the task force’s work will complement other ongoing priorities to improve workplace wellness, accessibility, anti-racism, equity and inclusion and reconciliation. 

Public servants work in much different circumstances today, but like 30 years ago they face challenging questions about what they do and how they do it.

Public servants feel besieged these days by everything from workload to hyper-partisan politics. Federal executives report high levels of stress and burnout with rising levels of cynicism and mental-health problems. A Top of Mind report found public servants at all levels of government worry they can’t speak truth to power and have to toe the party line in giving advice

They’ve come through a pandemic, the convoy protest, service-delivery fiascos, the biggest strike in 30 years, working remotely and are now in the throes of a $15.4-billion spending review. The public service, at 350,000 people, has never been so big, so diverse, and millennials now dominate the workforce with very different attitudes than their baby-boomer predecessors.

Then there’s climate and geopolitical crises after crises. There is war and floods and fires, soaring inflation and housing shortages compounded by the day-to-day distractions of social media, hyper-partisan politics, and the 24-hour news cycle.

Questioning “moral fibre”

Stephen Van Dine, who led the Top of Mind study, asks why the clerk is focusing on values and ethics when public servants are worried about basics like giving fearless advice, eroding policy capacity and the impact on governance. He said this is sure to raise alarms among public servants who will be asking, “What did we do wrong?”

“Why in heaven’s name would you start with values and ethics unless you believe the root problem is the moral fibre of the public service at this stage,” he said. “Why not examine what public-service leadership looks like in the 21st century?”

Senior officials say Hannaford isn’t re-opening the code or picking between new and traditional values. Hannaford also isn’t sounding the alarm about the public servants’ integrity. They say it is about adaptability: he wants public servants to better understand how to apply long-held  values in a rapidly changing world.

Alasdair Roberts, a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and former visiting scholar at the Canada School of Public Service, studies how countries can adapt and thrive in this turbulent century.

Roberts point to a number of threats to Canada’s adaptability, but the health of the public service and its ability to execute quickly is a key one.

The mountain of controls, rules and new parliamentary watchdogs built up over the decades – all in the name of accountability – stifles innovation and makes publics servants risk averse, he said. On top of that, they face a new layer of political control – which he calls the “political service” of ministerial staffers.

And then there’s the shift to remote work, which raises big questions for leaders on how to build common purpose and values when people are rarely working together in-person.

Although Hannaford is tying the exercise to a renewal of the public service, the preliminary plan falls short of the kind of major reform critics have called for over the years.

Donald Savoie, considered the éminence grise of public administration in Canada, argues the public service has so lost its way that only an independent body like a royal commission could fix it.

Roberts, who supports the call for a royal commission, called Hannaford’s task force worthwhile and well-timed, but five busy deputy ministers, under-the-gun in their day-jobs, will be constrained in what they can do.

They can’t really tackle legislative barriers, the morass of controls, rules and structures and outdated processes that need to be fixed. They also can’t grapple with the vexing question about the role of the public service, especially its strained relationship with ministers, Parliament and political staff.

Many argue the clerk simply doesn’t have time for the kind of review needed. With an election two years away, if not sooner, he has to be deep in transition planning. And if polls hold out, a Conservative government could come to power with a very different view of the public service and the role of the state.

Others, like Alasdair Roberts, question whether values and ethics can be discussed without sorting out the role of the public service: “I don’t want to diminish the significance of doing this, but it can’t be a substitute for a broader, bigger and independent review about the role and structure of the public service.”

Source: Clerk of the Privy Council John Hannaford relaunches ethics and values discussion in the public service

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In Reversal Because of A.I., Office Jobs Are Now More at Risk

2023/08/25 Leave a comment

Implications for governments are immense, given the large number of clerical and administrative jobs. However, given government inertia, bureaucracy, unions and other interests, will likely lag private sector significantly, to the likely detriment of citizen service:

The American workers who have had their careers upended by automation in recent decades have largely been less educated, especially men working in manufacturing.

But the new kind of automation — artificial intelligence systems called large language models, like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard — is changing that. These tools can rapidly process and synthesize information and generate new content. The jobs most exposed to automation now are office jobs, those that require more cognitive skills, creativity and high levels of education. The workers affected are likelier to be highly paid, and slightly likelier to be women, a variety of research has found.

“It’s surprised most people, including me,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered A.I., who had predicted that creativity and tech skills would insulate people from the effects of automation. “To be brutally honest, we had a hierarchy of things that technology could do, and we felt comfortable saying things like creative work, professional work, emotional intelligence would be hard for machines to ever do. Now that’s all been upended.”

A range of new research has analyzed the tasks of American workers, using the Labor Department’s O*Net database, and hypothesized which of them large language models could do. It has found these models could significantly help with tasks in one-fifth to one-quarter of occupations. In a majority of jobs, the models could do some of the tasks, found the analyses, including from Pew Research Center and Goldman Sachs.

For now, the models still sometimes produce incorrect information, and are more likely to assist workers than replace them, said Pamela Mishkin and Tyna Eloundou, researchers at OpenAI, the company and research lab behind ChatGPT. They did a similar study, analyzing the 19,265 tasks done in 923 occupations, and found that large language models could do some of the tasks that 80 percent of American workers do.

Yet they also found reason for some workers to fear that large language models could displace them, in line with what Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, told The Atlantic last month: “Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.”

The researchers asked an advanced model of ChatGPT to analyze the O*Net data and determine which tasks large language models could do. It found that 86 jobs were entirely exposed (meaning every task could be assisted by the tool). The human researchers said 15 jobs were. The job that both the humans and the A.I. agreed was most exposed was mathematician.

Just 4 percent of jobs had zero tasks that could be assisted by the technology, the analysis found. They included athletes, dishwashers and those assisting carpenters, roofers or painters. Yet even tradespeople could use A.I. for parts of their jobs like scheduling, customer service and route optimization, said Mike Bidwell, chief executive of Neighborly, a home services company.

While OpenAI has a business interest in promoting its technology as a boon to workers, other researchers said there were still uniquely human capabilities that were not (yet) able to be automated — like social skills, teamwork, care work and the skills of tradespeople. “We’re not going to run out of things for humans to do anytime soon,” Mr. Brynjolfsson said. “But the things are different: learning how to ask the right questions, really interacting with people, physical work requiring dexterity.”

For now, large language models will probably help many workers be more productive in their existing jobs, researchers say, akin to giving office workers, even entry-level ones, a chief of staff or a research assistant (though that could signal trouble for human assistants).

Take writing code: A study of Github’s Copilot, an A.I. program that helps programmers by suggesting code and functions, found that those using it were 56 percent faster than those doing the same task without it.

“There’s a misconception that exposure is necessarily a bad thing,” Ms. Mishkin said. After reading descriptions of every occupation for the study, she and her colleagues learned “an important lesson,” she said: “There’s no way a model is ever going to do all of this.”

Large language models could help write legislation, for instance, but could not pass laws. They could act as therapists — people could share their thoughts, and the models could respond with ideas based on proven regimens — but they do not have human empathy or the ability to read nuanced situations.

The version of ChatGPT open to the public has risks for workers — it often gets things wrong, can reflect human biases, and is not secure enough for businesses to trust with confidential information. Companies that use it get around these obstacles with tools that tap its technology in a so-called closed domain — meaning they train the model only on certain content and keep any inputs private.

Morgan Stanley uses a version of OpenAI’s model made for its business that was fed about 100,000 internal documents, more than a million pages. Financial advisers use it to help them find information to answer client questions quickly, like whether to invest in a certain company. (Previously, this required finding and reading multiple reports.)

It leaves advisers more time to talk with clients, said Jeff McMillan, who leads data analytics and wealth management at the firm. The tool does not know about individual clients and any human touch that might be needed, like if they are going through a divorce or illness.

Aquent Talent, a staffing firm, is using a business version of Bard. Usually, humans read through workers’ résumés and portfolios to find a match for a job opening; the tool can do it much more efficiently. Its work still requires a human audit, though, especially in hiring, because human biases are built in, said Rohshann Pilla, president of Aquent Talent.

Harvey, which is funded by OpenAI, is a start-up selling a tool like this to law firms. Senior partners use it for strategy, like coming up with 10 questions to ask in a deposition or summarizing how the firm has negotiated similar agreements.

“It’s not, ‘Here’s the advice I’d give a client,’” said Winston Weinberg, a co-founder of Harvey. “It’s, ‘How can I filter this information quickly so I can reach the advice level?’ You still need the decision maker.”

He says it’s especially helpful for paralegals or associates. They use it to learn — asking questions like: What is this type of contract for, and why was it written like this? — or to write first drafts, like summarizing a financial statement.

“Now all of a sudden they have an assistant,” he said. “People will be able to do work that’s at a higher level faster in their career.”

Other people studying how workplaces use large language models have found a similar pattern: They help junior employees most. A study of customer support agents by Professor Brynjolfsson and colleagues found that using A.I. increased productivity 14 percent overall, and 35 percent for the lowest-skilled workers, who moved up the learning curve faster with its assistance.

“It closes gaps between entry-level workers and superstars,” said Robert Seamans of N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, who co-wrote a paper finding that the occupations most exposed to large language models were telemarketers and certain teachers.

The last round of automation, affecting manufacturing jobs, increased income inequality by depriving workers without college educations of high-paying jobs, research has shown.

Some scholars say large language models could do the opposite — decreasing inequality between the highest-paid workers and everyone else.

“My hope is it will actually allow people with less formal education to do more things,” said David Autor, a labor economist at M.I.T., “by lowering barriers to entry for more elite jobs that are well paid.”

Source: In Reversal Because of A.I., Office Jobs Are Now More at Risk

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Terry Beech’s tall order: revamping service delivery

2023/08/11 Leave a comment

Count me among the sceptics on this one. My experience with Service Canada 2004-7 and efforts to implement a citizen-centred approach ran into resistance from the policy hierarchy and its original vision of being a one stop shop shrunk into remaining service delivery of ESDC services. The one non ESDC service, passports, was poorly managed by the policy centre, IRCC, and ESDC service delivery, with the large backlogs when predicted travel resumes.

Given the complex nature of government responsibilities and accountabilities, not to mention the concrete challenges in any modernization effort, I wouldn’t expect any significant results before the election:

Terry Beech claims his new job as Canada’s first ever minister of citizens’ services shows the government means it this time. Delivering services to Canadians is a longstanding weakness of government, and he says a big problem is that politicians have had little interest in it.  

“I think first and foremost, we just haven’t focused enough of our attention and time on it,” Beech said in an interview.  

“This is an opportunity for us to better understand all the systemic challenges that exist, but also to say our government and prime minister is committed to high-quality service delivery. We are so committed, in fact, that we are setting up a new ministry.” 

Service delivery has been an Achilles heel of government for 30 years. It’s why Service Canada – which Beech is now responsible for – was created as a one-stop shop for all government services to focus on delivery and citizen satisfaction.    

Service has always taken a back seat to policy. Prime ministers, ministers and even deputy ministers pay little attention until a crisis hits. That approach was on full display as Canadians eased out of the pandemic and faced shambolic lineups for passports, immigration and air travel.   

Beech acknowledges cabinet ministers haven’t kept a close enough eye on the “end-to-end customer experience.” Cabinet puts all its effort into making policy decisions and assumes they will be implemented and delivered the best way possible.  

As minister, he will make sure delivery will be part of policy discussions from the start. That way, ministers will have a better handle on what government does well and what it doesn’t, which will reduce snags or setbacks when services are rolled out.  

“Without cabinet ministers having an eye to potential constraints or opportunities to provide exceptional levels of service, those opportunities get missed. Now those opportunities will be front and centre in the discussion.”  

Beech founded the company HiretheWorld.com. He understands tech and is customer-oriented, and sees his new job as a natural fit. “This is really an entrepreneurial opportunity.”  

He said Canadians’ user experience is his priority, making sure their needs are first and at the centre of all services. (Critics have long argued departments tend to design services around what government does rather than what Canadian want.) 

And what do citizens want?  

Canadians live digitally when they shop and work and expect the same when dealing with their governments. They want single IDs, digitally issued permits, applications, approvals and information. And they want it fast on their personal devices, 24/7.  

They roil when they can’t get the same service ordering a passport as they do when buying from Amazon. Why can’t government track Canadians’ interactions with departments and use that information to improve or customize services?  

Beech wants to do all that and more.  

“My number one priority probably goes back to my vision for this role, which is waking up every day thinking about how I can improve customer service and the customer service experience for every Canadian,” he said. “That’s literally what’s going to be on the piece of paper that I pull out of my desk every morning and think about as I go into every meeting,” he said.   

Waiting to see 

All this should be music to the ears of critics who have long pressed for government to put the customer back into service and bring it into the digital age.  

So far, reaction is mixed. Public servants are waiting to see what levers and authority Beech will have. The pieces of this new portfolio have started to come together, but there are more to come, including ministers’ mandate letters. 

Service Canada opened in 2005 with the vision of a one-stop shop for all government services. It is housed at Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) and most of the services it offers are bundled around the benefits ESDC provides – EI, OAS, CPP and disability benefits.  

Service Canada also includes the team that runs Canada.ca, the government’s website and digital home. A new order-in-council transferred the Canadian Digital Service (CDS), a swat team of tech geeks, from Treasury Board to ESDC.  

A chief service czar with access to the government’s digital swat team, “could be a pretty big deal,” according to Aaron Snow, the former CEO at the digital service.  

But the devil will be in the details, tweeted Ryan Androsoff, founder and CEO of Think Digital, a consulting firm on digital transformation.  

“I think even the most well-intentioned person is being set up to fail if they don’t actually have the authority to make change across that entire service spectrum,” he said in an interview.  

It’s unclear whether Beech will have authority to direct departments, such as Canada Revenue Agency, Parks Canada or the Canada Border Services Agency, which also provides services. As services improve, Beech hopes other departments will want Service Canada to deliver its services.  

The growing fear among digital-government advocates is that CDS, created to help all departments improve their services, will move to ESDC and die.  

The big question is whether CDS will remain independent and report to Beech or be folded into ESDC’s IT branch – which one IT expert called the most risk-averse and “slowest moving IT division of any department I know.” (Beech says ESDC is a department that jokes its archaic computer system is nearly old enough to collect old-age benefits and uses so much paper it has to be stored in the basement because it’s too heavy to be stored on the floors above.) 

Looks like 1998 

Ralph Heintzman, a former senior bureaucrat, said many of the problems with service delivery are the same as in 1998, when he first presented Treasury Board ministers with a plan for Service Canada.  

On top of disinterest among politicians and senior bureaucrats, there are all the systemic reasons – chronic underfunding, old technology systems that need replacing; outdated procurement, poor trained and disengaged staff, lack of planning and little accountability for poor service.  

The Service Canada rollout was billed as the single biggest operational reform in federal history. It was the first agency to cut across the government, creating much debate over how traditional ministerial accountability squares with the way government works – a conundrum that continues today. 

The Trudeau government took several stabs at fixing service delivery, including a ministerial task force to deal with fallout over passport delays. But the government is now in its third term with trust falling like a stone and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre jumping on any botched service as another sign that government is broken. 

Former Treasury Board president Scott Brison took a big step to fix things when he pressed to have digital minister in his title and to have departments use technology to change the way government does business and serves Canadians.  

He pitched it as central to making government relevant and restoring Canadians’ confidence. He set up the Canadian Digital Service, modelled after a service in the U.S. The American service recruited top Silicon Valley talent and embedded its own start-up in government, known as 18F, to help improve services. 

Beech’s appointment also comes at a time when some Liberals feel the public service dropped the ball on service and let them down in executing their policies. Former top bureaucrat Janice Charette said in her annual report that the public service is focused on upping its game.  

“I know there were moments when the public service fell short of Canadians’ expectations on service. In these instances, we faced the situation humbly and adjusted how we did things to improve results. We remain steadfast in our commitment to learn from these experiences and continually improve how we deliver,” she wrote.

Ambition exceeded capacity 

Sahir Khan, executive vice-president at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy, said the Liberals’ activist agenda was simply too ambitious for the capacity and capability of the public service.  

“The Liberals count on the state being able to deliver. The Harper government did not. It was trying to shrink the state, but a progressive ideology that enlarges the state depends on that state being able to deliver, and it is difficult to do.”   

Michael Wernick, a former clerk of the Privy Council Office and now Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management at University of Ottawa, said the Liberals “lost their focus and traction on public service capability” and “if you don’t invest in capability, you can’t deliver.” 

But Androsoff worries the cultural and organizational changes needed to improve services, from the way it hires, recruits, manages and procures, are getting lost.   

The service conundrum is wound up in the way the government is organized, its structures and rules. It’s built on a Westminster principle of ministerial accountability, in which ministers are responsible for their departments, but policies and services straddle all departments.  

Some argue the heart of the passport fiasco is that the program is run by three departments with no one ultimately responsible.  

“You’ve got a bunch of very complex governance arrangements shared between a variety of actors across boundaries,” said Androsoff. “That situation makes it almost impossible to drive change. That’s the core structural piece that has to change if we really expect government to make dramatic progress on service delivery.”  

Many argue that Beech’s success could hinge on what kind of role Treasury Board takes under its new president, Anita Anand.   

Anand holds many of the cards. She oversees spending, has the chief information officer reporting to her and has all the policies governing digital and service, people management and information. Beech didn’t land a seat as a member or an alternate on the powerful Treasury Board cabinet committeethat Anand chairs.  

“She can be the gigantic rubber stamp of a cabinet committee or be air traffic control that keeps a third-term government out of trouble,” said Khan. “You’ve got to figure out which one you want to be. (Treasury Board) has all the tools, legislative and otherwise, to do it. It’s a matter of capacity and will.” 

Source: Terry Beech’s tall order: revamping service delivery

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Annual public service report to PM should prompt ‘serious conversation’ about bureaucracy’s future, says former PCO clerk Wernick

2023/08/01 Leave a comment

Civil service renewal is ‘fairly low down on the political radar screen,’ says bureaucracy expert Andrew Griffith. 

Begs the question, if nobody in Parliament is paying attention, what is the value of the report? Part of the problem, as in many (most?) such reports, is the lack of frank language on failures and challenges and general bureaucratic tone (been responsible for comparable reports).

My comments on the relative success of government in increasing representation among the equity groups part of the article:

Michael Wernick, the former clerk of the Privy Council Office, says the annual report on the public service of Canada, released on July 19, should serve as a “jumping-off point” for a “serious, more grown-up conversation about the state of the public service going forward,” especially since the government has lost traction and focus on public-sector capability, but he says the report is usually ignored by Parliament.

“You want to tell a positive story. It’s a rare opportunity to push back against the usual negative feedback loops where people only pay attention to things that go wrong, and highlight some of the hidden stories and what’s going on and tell us the bigger picture,” Wernick explained to The Hill Times after last week’s massive cabinet shuffle. “The risk is always getting it right—you want it to also be candid about where there were issues, and you want it to sort of set up a conversation about the state of the pubic service ideally.”

Anita Anand (Oakville, Ont.), who most recently served as defence minister, was appointed as Treasury Board president in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s (Papineau, Que.) cabinet shuffle on July 26. Her arrival into the role comes not long after John Hannaford’s appointment as Clerk of the Privy Council following Janice Charette’s retirement.

Charette officially ended her time in the role and in the public service on June 24, telling The Hill Times that “anything that’s on the prime minister’s desk is on my desk; anything that he’s dealing with, I’m dealing with.”

Wernick told The Hill Times that, during his time in the top job, he signed off on annual reports four times between 2016 and 2019.

Wernick said his point was not to be critical of the report, given that “it’s a difficult balancing point.”

The former top bureaucrat called it “frustrating” that Parliament passed a law requiring an annual report on the state of the public service “and then has never shown any interest in it.”

The government first introduced the annual report in 1992, a requirement under section 127 of the Public Service Employment Act, according to the Prime Minister’s Office.

“I tabled four of them, and was never, ever asked to go to a parliamentary committee and discuss the report or the state of the public service,” said Wernick.

Wernick also said that there was nothing in the report about the service review which was alluded to a few years ago, and that digital government projects are “waiting in a queue.”

“And that’s where finance comes in—if you were going to be serious about public-sector capability, you’d have to spend money,” said Wernick. “You’d have to invest in training and leadership development, you’d have to put some money into it and buildings and equipment … it won’t come for free. And so far, this government has lost any sort of focus and traction on public-sector capability.”

“The idea of having a serious discussion at parliamentary committees about the public service would be a good start,” said Wernick, alluding to a Globe and Mail opinion article he penned earlier this year where he argued that the government “should work with Parliament to create a new Joint Committee of the House of Commons and Senate on the Public Service” as well as create a “permanent Better Government Fund in the care of the Treasury Board.”

“I’m not sure that the timing is great, which goes back to the cabinet shuffle, where we’re in this phase of the government where the hourglass sands are running out, there’s less than two years left, two budgets, maybe about 200 days of parliamentary time,” said Wernick. “The last two years of a mandate of a government that’s 10 points behind in the polls is probably not where you’re going to see bold ideas on the public sector.”

The disruptions caused by the pandemic were “enormous,” said Wernick, and the opportunities for some parts of the public service that hybrid work creates “are interesting.”

“Their promise in the strike settlement to add seniority to the algorithm for laying people off could be very relevant two years from now,” said Wernick. “If I was a younger public servant I’d be quite worried.”

Any return to the size of the public service when the Liberals took power in 2015 would involve tens of thousands of job losses, said Wernick. 

“Is this government going to try to tap the brakes in its last two years? I don’t know,” he said. 

But Wernick also noted that this government, at this point in its mandate, “wants to deliver stuff.”

“Climate change, green transition, hugely ambitious immigration numbers, housing, reconciliation, the defense policy review and implementing something out of that, the review of the foreign service—they’re going to run out of time in June of 2025, which is not so far away,” said Wernick. 

Data shows growth in public service, progress in diversity and inclusion

In terms of the diversity goals, Andrew Griffith, a former director general for Citizenship and Multiculturalism who keeps a close eye on public service survey results and reports, said that “virtually, for all visible minority groups, their relative share in promotions has increased.”

There has been significant growth in the size of the federal public service recently, with the report noting that the number of employees grew from 319,601 in March 2021 to 335,957 in March 2022.

The number of executives grew from 7,972 to 8,506 during that time period, with the number of deputy ministers increasing from 37 to 41. The number of associate deputy ministers fell slightly, from 39 in March 2021 to 36 a year later.

In the report’s “year ahead” section, Charette notes that the government’s agenda on diversity and inclusion “must be inclusive” and must advance commitments around reconciliation, accessibility, combating transphobia and better support for 2SLGBTQIA+ communities.

Charette also writes that the government must continue to prioritize the recruitment and retention of persons with disabilities, and “ensure employees in religious minority communities feel safe and supported in their workplaces.”

Griffith told The Hill Times that “the overall pattern of the public service becoming more diverse with better representation is there, at both the executive level and non-executive level.”

Griffith also said that based on the data he sees and analyzes surrounding the bureaucracy, the visible minority category as a whole is doing better in the last six years than the non-visible minority community—which applies to both men and women.

According to the report, which outlines disaggregated employment equity representation and workforce availability, the number of women in the public service increased from 127,043 at the end of March 2021, to 132,299 one year later.

The number of Indigenous Peoples in the public service increased from 11,977 to 12,336 over the same time period, with the number of persons with disabilities increasing from 12,893 in March 2021 to 14,573 in March 2022.

In terms of visible minorities, the total increased from 43,122 to 47,728, with Black employees increasing from 8,754 to 9,809. Non-White Latin Americans and persons of mixed origin both saw increases of 0.1 per cent in the public service population.

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and South Asian/East Indian employees also saw increases within the bureaucracy’s ranks, as well as Non-White West Asians, North Africans or Arabs, Southeast Asians, or other visible minority groups, according to the report.

At the executive level, the percentage of women increased from 52.3 per cent to 53.2 per cent, persons with disabilities increased 5.6 per cent to 6.5 per cent, and members of visible minorities increased from 12.4 per cent to 13 per cent.

Public service renewal ‘fairly low down on the political radar’

When asked about recent changes both at the top level of the public service with a new clerk, as well as a new Treasury Board president in Anand, Griffith said he thought “sometimes one reads a bit too much into these changes.”

“Public service renewal isn’t [something] that directly affects [most] Canadians,” said Griffith. “It’s fairly low down on the political radar screen—this is largely managed through the bureaucracy—there are checks and balances as there always are, but I don’t really think that any of these changes will drastically modify the path that the current clerk was on, and that likely the new clerk will have more important issues that take up his time.”

Wernick noted that the Liberals left Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne (Saint-Maurice-Champlain, Que.), Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland (University—Rosedale, Ont.) and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault (Laurier-Sainte-Marie, Que.) where they already were in cabinet, but “it doesn’t explain moving Anand out of defence, frankly, because now you’ve got to bring a new person in in the middle of a defence policy review.” 

Wernick also said going through the disruption of the pandemic and now trying to adapt in some places to hybrid work possibilities, there’s now a government “in the late stages, pedal to the metal, trying to deliver stuff.”

“So it’s going to be hard to pay attention to its actual capabilities,” said Wernick, who added that he agreed with what is flagged in the report in terms of organizational health, burnout, mental health, and diversity.

“But there’s not a lot in there about the basic capabilities of the public service,” said Wernick.

‘I know getting here has not always been easy,’ writes Charette on hybrid work

The report also highlights the shift in the past year towards a hybrid work model, a change that made headlines for months and raised the ire of many public servants both in mainstream media and on social media. 

“Once we were able to safely welcome more employees back into the workplace, I outlined my expectations for deputies, including that they encourage employees to test new hybrid work models, wrote Charette in the report. “The shift to a hybrid model was about putting our effectiveness first and making a change that would best enable us to support government and serve Canadians, while giving employees flexibility to support their well-being.”

Direction on the common hybrid work model was released in December 2022, which set out guidelines requiring that employees work on-site at least two to three days per week.

“I know getting here has not always been easy,” wrote Charette, noting that the public service is the largest employer in the country and is made up of hundreds of thousands of public servants in a wide range of roles across Canada and abroad.

Source: Annual public service report to PM should prompt ‘serious conversation’ about bureaucracy’s future, says former PCO clerk Wernick

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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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