Ivison: Quebec shows Scotland how to get everything you want without separating

2022/11/26 Leave a comment

Valid commentary:
Canada’s exports extend beyond hockey players and cold fronts, as Pierre Trudeau once said. It turns out we are also traders in world-class constitutional jurisprudence.
The U.K.’s Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the Scottish government cannot hold a second independence referendum without the consent of the British Parliament and based its decision, in part, on Quebec’s past constitutional experiences.

Source: Quebec shows Scotland how to get everything you want without separating

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Ditchburn: What should be on Canada’s policy radar?

2022/11/25 Leave a comment

Good overview on the IRPP discussions on policy challenges. Striking that neither labour challenges nor immigration were raised by the policy and public administration schools consulted, perhaps because the issues are not considered emerging:

Leadership is a series of strategic choices: picking where to focus your attention and finite resources. Now, consider the meteor shower of complex challenges that is raining down on Canada—from an increasingly precarious geopolitical environment, to worsening climate change, to nagging labour shortages. How do governments decide what to prioritize?

To lend a hand to our beleaguered leaders, the Institute for Research on Public Policy marked its 50th anniversary by asking schools of public policy and public administration: “What emerging issue do you think should be on the radar of decision-makers?”  

We visited nine schools in six provinces. Here’s some of what we heard.

Eroding public trust and deepening cleavages

The word “polarization” is tossed around a lot, but that doesn’t quite capture what’s happening. It’s not that Canadians are split into two distinct political or social camps, like our neighbours south of the border. Rather, there are tensions around issues, and a growing antipathy toward or distrust of governments and institutions—think of Hockey Canada, the RCMP, or the passport office.

These cleavages aren’t just between Freedom Convoy supporters and detractors, but are also felt by those who believe themselves estranged from the sites of power and opportunities. This can include racialized and Indigenous people, who see little progress in dismantling the systemic racism that keeps them from access to jobs, health care, and upward income mobility.

Still, regional resentments are a thing. Data collected and analyzed by the IRPP’s co-led Confederation of Tomorrow project suggests that Quebecers feel the rest of the country looks down on them. The project’s “resentment index” noted that people in Saskatchewan and Alberta feel they contribute more than their share to the federation and are most likely to disagree that Quebec does.

Resilient and coherent climate policy

We heard stark messages about how Canadians will need to adapt and become more resilient to storms, droughts, fires, heat events and other calamities. Dealing with these climate disasters requires governments to plan and invest much further into the future. 

A core theme that came up repeatedly was the feeling that there is a lack of a coherent pan-Canadian plan for getting to net zero, one that acknowledges that different regions have different realities and incorporates a wide spectrum of views. Meanwhile, the United States is pouring billions into new technologies and clean manufacturing through its Inflation Reduction Act. 

“Canada has emissions reductions targets, and they’re good, but what we don’t have is the techno-economic policies that are going to help us make those targets happen,” said Maggie Hanna, president of Alberta-based Common Ground Energy. 

Housing

Perhaps some of the most astonishing stories we heard were from a panel convened at Dalhousie University on housing challenges in Nova Scotia.

Lisa Ryan, executive director of the South Shore Open Doors Association, said her organization had recorded 167 people experiencing homelessness in Lunenberg County in September 2022—63 of them children under the age of 16. Families were living in cars and tents, after their long-term rentals suddenly turned into short-term rentals. People move to Halifax in search of housing, only to face long waits and rampant discrimination from landlords.

Housing is a pivotal policy challenge. It can impact economic growth if companies cannot house workers, and it can start a multi-generational spiral of poor health and poor economic outcomes.

Governance and challenges to the federation

The COVID pandemic did much to bring federal, provincial, territorial, and Indigenous governments together. They were able to act fast and decisively and forge strong new personal relationships. There was also incredible creativity—such as the rapid deployment of remote health care services.

But then there’s the ugly truth of the federation’s weaknesses: poor data sharing, overlapping programs and regulations, unequal access to technology and inconsistent channels of communication. As Canada moves forward with trying to create an east-west electricity grid, address labour and supply chain problems, and reform its relationship with Indigenous nations, attention must be paid to the health and mechanics of intergovernmental relationships.

Governments will need to ward against regulatory shortcuts, where the speed of getting things done trumps other core principles such as transparency, coherence, and the respect of Indigenous rights. Collaborating and communicating with Indigenous communities will require a deeper understanding of governance systems.

“A lot of that is happening through women, youth and elders, our knowledge-keepers, where we’re starting to recognize their roles. Those roles were taken away from us, without our consent,” said Danette Starblanket, an executive-in-residence at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy in Regina.

Travelling the country, what stands out is just how much core policy challenges overlap with one another. Climate resilience is intimately tied up with housing, as poorer Canadians will be most at risk of displacement. Distrust of institutions grows as existing governance structures fail to include different perspectives and communicate transparently. If the country does not invest in both people and technologies along the path to net zero, the negative economic impacts will also affect our ability to fund aspects of our social safety net. 

What was also abundantly clear in our conversations is how much willingness there is in the country to work across sectors and across geographic boundaries to come up with good policy and ensure that there is a feeling of common cause and inclusion. 

But who will bring Canadians together around these tough questions? This overarching challenge calls for both good governance and strong leadership. The mechanisms that different levels of governments have for connecting with one and other, with experts (including at think tanks and universities) and with the public must be updated and improved if we’re going to address myriad other policy problems. We need leaders who can see the bigger picture of how different systems fit together and do the unglamourous behind-the-scenes work to get us ready for the next challenges that will pop up on the radar.

Jennifer Ditchburn is the president and CEO of the Institute for Research on Public Policy. She’s on Twitter @jenditchburn.   

Source: What should be on Canada’s policy radar? 

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Proportion of women civil service leaders improves internationally – but only one G20 country [Canada] has achieved gender parity in top jobs

2022/11/25 Leave a comment

Of note. When I last looked at EX breakdowns a number of years ago, there was, as one would expect, greater representation at more junior levels (directors and DGs EX1-3) than at the ADM level (EX4-5):

Less than one in three senior civil servants across the governments of G20 countries are women, new research from Global Government Forum has found.

The latest Women Leaders Index found that only one G20 country – Canada – has reached gender parity in the top five grades of its public service (at 51.1%), and just four more are within 10 percentage points of doing so.

However, there has been improvement – the G20 mean (29.3%) has increased by 1.6 percentage points since our last Index in 2020 and by 6.0 points since our first 10 years ago.

The long-running Women Leaders Index is a league table ranking G20, EU and OECD countries on the proportion of women in senior roles within their national civil services. As well as tracking progress over time, it includes comparisons with women in government, women politicians, and women on private sector boards, alongside interviews with public service leaders in two of the top performing countries – Canada and South Africa.    

Those leading the G20 pack behind Canada, are Australia and South Africa – which tie in second place – the UK, Brazil, and Mexico and the European Commission, which tie in fifth place. Mexico has increased the representation of women in civil service leadership positions the most of all G20 nations, by a dramatic 24.3 percentage points over the last decade, while South Africa has made the most improvement in the two years since the last Index – a jump of 7.2 points.

Bringing up the G20 rear are Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea, China and Turkey, in which representation of women in the senior civil service is between 2.5% and 11.7%.

Countries including Germany, Italy, France and the US reside in the middle of the G20 ranking, with women accounting for between 32.0% and 38.0% of top roles in each.   https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/rr33B/4/

EU and OECD countries faring better than those in the G20  

Though the G20 has traditionally been the main ranking in the Women Leaders Index, it also analyses representation of women in the highest grades of national civil services in EU and OECD countries.

The Index found that overall, EU and OECD countries are doing better on representation of women in senior positions in government departments and agencies – for which the mean proportions are 42.7% and 36.2% respectively – than those in the G20*.

The mean across the European Union’s member states has improved by 0.8 percentage points since 2020, and by 7.5 points since 2012, with nine of the EU’s 27 member states having reached gender parity in the top two tiers of their civil services. Bulgaria tops this ranking, with women accounting for 59.5% of those running government departments, followed by Croatia, Slovenia, Greece, Finland, Latvia, Romania, Lithuania, and Portugal.https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/GU3A7/4/

Read our Canada perspective from seasoned public service leader Yazmine Laroche, including transferable lessons on how to make progress towards gender parity

Croatia has made the most improvement of all EU nations since 2012 – a rise of 21.1 percentage points, while Bulgaria has made the greatest improvement since the 2020 Index, of 7.8 points.

Latvia, where women account for 56% of the top tiers of its civil service, tops the OECD ranking, while six more – Sweden, Iceland, New Zealand, Greece, Canada and Slovakia – have reached or exceeded gender parity.https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/wpOb5/2/

Regression in some countries – but public services performing better overall

While most G20, EU and OECD countries have improved the representation of women in the highest grades of their civil services in recent years, some have regressed.

The G20 data shows that in Russia and Argentina there are fewer officials in senior positions now than in 2020, while China, Turkey and South Korea have regressed since 2012.  

Six EU countries – Sweden, Poland, Cyprus, Italy, the Czech Republic and Luxembourg – perform worse in terms of representation of women in the top two tiers of the civil service since 2020, while Hungary is worse off now than 10 years ago.  

However, on a positive note, when looking at the means across the G20, EU and OECD, it is clear that civil services are doing better on representation of women in leadership roles compared with ministerial cabinet appointments, elected politicians and the boards of publicly-listed private sector companies.

Read our South Africa perspective from Zukiswa Mqolomba, deputy chairperson of the country’s Public Service Commission, on why making real and positive change isn’t just a numbers game

“Many governments have made impressive gains on representation of women in leadership positions in recent years as a result of concerted efforts to make change and should be applauded,” said Mia Hunt, author of the Women Leaders Index report and editor of globalgovernmentforum.com. 

“However, while it is widely accepted that civil services with diverse workforces that resemble the populations they serve turn out better policies and better outcomes for citizens, the mean proportion of women in top civil service positions across G20 nations is still less than 30%. Clearly, there is much more work to be done.

“We hope this Index gives the countries that have made progress the recognition they deserve, whilst serving as a wake-up call for those most in need of improvement. Let us see what’s changed when we publish the next in this Women Leaders Index series.”

*Please note that grade definitions vary between the G20, EU and OECD datasets. Caution should be exercised when making comparisons – see methodology here.

Source: Proportion of women civil service leaders improves internationally – but only one G20 country has achieved gender parity in top jobs

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How to reduce citizen harm from automated decision systems

2022/11/18 1 Comment

While more at a local level, some good basic guidelines:

For agencies that use automated systems to inform decisions about schools, social services and medical treatment, it’s imperative that they’re using technology that protects data.

new report finds that there’s little transparency about the automated decision-making (ADM) systems that state and local agencies use for many tasks, leading to unintended, detrimental consequences for the people they’re meant to help. But agencies can take steps to ensure that their organization buys responsible products.

The findings are shared in “Screened and Scored in the District of Columbia,” a new report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). Researchers spent 14 months investigating 29 ADM systems at about 20 Washington, D.C., government agencies. They chose that location because it’s where EPIC is located, said Thomas McBrien, law fellow at EPIC and one of four report authors.

The agencies use such systems to inform decisions about many activities, including assigning children to schools, understanding drivers’ travel patterns and informing medical decisions about patients, so it’s imperative that they’re using technology that protects data.

“Overburdened agencies turn to tech in the hope that it can make difficult political and administrative decisions for them,” according to the report. But “agencies and tech companies block audits of their ADM tools because companies claim that allowing the public to scrutinize the tools would hurt their competitive position or lead to harmful consequences. As a result, few people know how, when, or even whether they have been subjected to automated decision-making.”

Agencies can take four steps to mitigate the problem, McBrien said. First, agencies can require data minimization through contract language. “That’s basically the principle that when a company is rendering a service for an agency using its software, the agency should really ensure that the company isn’t taking more data than it needs to render that service,” he said.

That connects to his second recommendation, which is monitoring the downstream use of this data. Some ADM system vendors might take the data, run their services with it and that’s it, but others may share the data with their parent company or a subsidiary—or sell it to third parties.

“That’s where we see a lot of leakage of people’s personal data that can be really harmful, and definitely not what people are expecting their government to do for them,” McBrien said.

A third step is to audit for accuracy and bias. Sometimes, a tool used on one population or in one area can be very accurate, but applied to a different context, that accuracy may drop off and biased results could emerge. The only way to know whether that’s happening is by auditing and validating the system using the group of people you’re serving.

“The gold standard here would be to have an external auditor do this before you implement the system,” he said. But it’s a good idea to also do audits periodically to ensure that the algorithms the system uses are still accurate “because as the real world changes, the model of the real world it uses to make predictions should also be changing.”

Fourth, agencies should inform the public about their use of these systems, McBrien said, adding that it’s a good way to build trust. Meaningful public participation is the No. 1 recommendation to come out of a report by the Pittsburgh Task Force on Public Algorithms.

“Agencies should publish baseline information about the proposed system: what the system is, its purposes, the data on which it relies, its intended outcomes, and how it supplants or replaces existing processes, as well as likely or potential social, racial, and economic harms and privacy effects to be mitigated,” according to the report’s second recommendation.

It’s also important to share the outcome of any decision being made based on ADM systems, McBrien added. “People who are directly impacted by these systems are often the first ones to realize when there’s a problem,” he said. “I think it’s really important that when that outcome has been driven or informed by an algorithmic system, that that’s communicated to the person so they have the full picture of what happened.”

He added that privacy laws such as the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 support transparency, as does an effort in that state to redefine state technology procurement as well as a bill in Washington state that would establish “guidelines for government procurement and use of automated decision systems in order to protect consumers, improve transparency, and create more market predictability.”

Although he couldn’t say how prevalent such systems are among state and local agencies—in fact, EPIC’s report states that researchers couldn’t access all of the systems in D.C. because many agencies were unwilling to share information because of companies’ claims of trade secrets or other commercial protections—there are examples of their use elsewhere.

For instance, in 2019, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed an executive order establishing an algorithms management and policy officer to be a central resource on algorithm policy and to develop guidelines and best practices on the city’s use of them. That move follows a 2017 law that made the city the first in the country to create a task force to study agencies’ use of algorithms. But that group’s work led to a shadow report highlighting the task force’s shortcomings.

“We definitely urge people to think of other solutions to these problems,” McBrien said. “Sometimes agencies implement that system and are locked into them for a long time and spend enormous amounts of money trying to fix them, manage the problem, ameliorate the harms of the system that could have been used to hire more caseworkers.”

Source: How to reduce citizen harm from automated decision systems

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Wernick: Leaving the comfort zone: Difficult issues in public sector reform

2022/11/14 Leave a comment

Good diagnostique by former Clerk. If any of these were easy to resolve, they would have been addressed.

The one I am not sure of is the degree to which pay is an issue at senior levels. What does the data say about separations (departures) from the public service at the EX and DM levels? Is that really that much of an issue, particularly for the policy folks who are attracted by the influence they can have on policy? Do departures vary by level and department and, if so, what are the motivators? Money and/or others? I don’t believe it was money that attracted Barton or Sabia, to highlight two of the more prominent examples.

On classification, I remember the Universal Classification System attempt in the 1990s. A lot of work and effort that was abandoned and no doubt other former colleagues have similar scars or wasted time that went nowhere.

And yes, get rid of the bilingualism bonus although Francophone public servants will likely complain given their higher levels of effective bilingualism:

Much of the commentary on the public sector stays at the level of generalities. Exhortations to become more strategic, more inclusive, bolder in advice and better in delivery are impossible to contest. Too often, the discussion stops short of analyzing resistance or tradeoff among objectives. As in so many things, we are much better at diagnosis than agreeing on the remedies.

The list of issues in play these days for the federal public service is already daunting. As well, provincial, territorial and municipal governments have their own agendas. On top of the formal reviews of service delivery and spending launched earlier this year, an incomplete list would include: a new round of collective bargaining just as inflation has spiked; figuring out the post-pandemic workplace; replacing retirements and departures; fragile legacy IT systems; the reverberations of Black Lives Matter and Indigenous reconciliation; cybersecurity and foreign interference; and a trendline of eroding trust in public institutions.

What follows is a brief thought experiment. If the federal government took the advice – something that is unlikely in my view – to create some sort of royal commission or advisory panel on its public service, what are some of the more difficult or “wicked” questions – that would surface? We do not have to wait; we can start debating these issues now. There are more, but I set out just a few of the most uncomfortable ones here.

Insourcing, outsourcing and offloading 

The core question of what we should ask the public service to do for us usually comes up only in formal spending reviews, such as the Chretien government’s 1995 program review or the Harper government’s 2012 deficit reduction action plan. They sometimes provoke a re-examination of whether this area of responsibility should be done by public servants, rented from outside contractors, or offloaded to the private sector and civil society.

Sometimes, the federal government retreats from an area and leaves it to provincial and local governments. The mix has shifted and the federal public sector has waxed and waned. The truth is that there is no right answer and we will get an outcome heavily driven by the ideological and political preferences, and the view of federalism, of the government of the day. The point for public sector management is that you can drive for effectiveness or drive for spending cuts, but realistically you can’t do both well at the same time.

Dealing with poor performers 

An uncomfortable truth is that not every hire works out and not every employee or executive contributes as much as they should. Some are not effective and some actually drain energy and poison their workplaces. Many people are squeamish about discussing poor performers and toxic employees, and deny they exist in any significant numbers.

It is far too difficult to demote or terminate the small number of truly poor performers. An employee can use the multiple recourse processes to drag out proceedings for as much as two or three years. Instead of taking on the exhausting challenge, managers either do their best to work around them or sometimes try to fob them off on others with less than honest references. Colleagues see team members coast along as passengers without consequences and lose motivation.

The solution lies in changing the legal standard for dismissal to a lower bar than the current definition of “cause.” However, it is a wicked problem in practice because making it easier for managers to terminate employees may give some of them an instrument for bullying and harassment that may be wielded with bias. Striking the balance won’t be simple.

No longer letting middle managers do all the hiring

As long as I can remember people have lamented the slow pace of hiring, whether from outside the service or moving people within. The managers and the human resources community point fingers at each other. The uncomfortable truth is that not every middle manager or front-line supervisor is good at hiring – even the ones who struggle to find the time to wade through the huge pools of candidates. They default to looking for credentials and past experience because it is much more effort to assess future potential, but the tools for doing so aren’t very good.

The solution to slow staffing, and to recruiting more talent from outside, could lie in a more directive approach that gives much more authority to the human resource community or a central staffing agency to do the screening and proactively match candidates with vacancies. This is a really uncomfortable topic because the main bottleneck has been a cultural one – middle managers believe they should pick every person on their team, no matter how long it takes. Departments and agencies are culturally averse to shared hiring processes or relying on others. They are scared of false positives and believe they would do a better job. More leeway to remove poor performers could also be a key to faster hiring.

Which forms of inclusion matters more?

Bilingualism has been a cornerstone inclusion policy since 1968, a mindful strategy to ward off Quebec separatism by ensuring that the one-quarter of Canadians who are francophones see themselves in the federal government. The future of bilingualism is a wicked problem in the 2020s, not for externally facing services ­– which are now largely delivered on websites, apps and call centres – but for the workplace.

Requirements for a degree of proficiency in both of our official languages by supervisors and executives raise uncomfortable issues, including that they have come to be seen as a barrier for some racialized communities and for Indigenous peoples. Should the public service give in to pressure to loosen requirements for French-language proficiency in the pursuit of inclusion? Or would that marginalize francophones and harm recruitment, lead to a downward spiral in language capacity and erode national unity? The uncomfortable truth is that the subtle pressure to work in English is relentless unless the people convening and chairing meetings, asking for documents and performing basic supervision are mindful and proactive.

Even more baffling, why are we still paying bonuses to people who are bilingual instead of investing the same millions of dollars in language training for people who are not?

How flat can you go? How thin is too thin? 

One of the common criticisms of the federal public service is that there are too many managers in too many layers. It is contended that there has been a proliferation of new half-steps such as assistant directors, associate assistant deputy ministers and associate deputy ministers. The cumulative effect has been identified as a “clay layer” of management and it is widely believed that the leadership cadre could readily be made leaner, flatter and thinner.

It is an uncomfortable issue because many of the remedies that have been tried or suggested would make it more difficult for the most senior leaders to solve workload and personnel problems for which they are accountable and to keep their organizations up to date with evolving challenges. More constraints means less organizational agility. Any arbitrary reductions, caps or buyout schemes tend to land unevenly and unfairly. The larger organizations are always much more capable of coping than the more numerous smaller ones.

Little boxes 

The box-by-box model of jobs dates backs decades and is taken as a given. It is used to define in excruciating detail the duties and accountabilities of each individual position, which then is used to assess what it is worth and therefore what it should be paid.

That model and especially the job classification system used by the public service is well past its best-before date. It slows down staffing, falls behind the shifts in skills and competencies in the real-world labour market, adds enormous complexity to the pay system, and has long favoured policy-related jobs over operations and services. It creates a lot of unproductive busy work.

Past attempts to fix it or to negotiate change through collective bargaining always turned into a quagmire. There are no evident paths forward, but arguably we need a public service that is more nimble and able to shape shift – to move people more easily and to quickly create jobs around specific projects. The daunting and truly wicked challenge is to find a thoughtful approach to streamlining how jobs are classified and paid, and the courage and persistence to look at the core software of the employment model.

Are we serious about leadership or not? 

It is common to point to the crucial role of leadership but we don’t back up the rhetoric in practice. We need to find better tools for classifying and compensating executive positions than the ones that have caused us struggles for the past decades. We need to invest heavily in learning and development of the leadership cadre. Politicians are squeamish about what a serious review would tell them – that generally public service jobs are well-paid with attractive pension coverage and benefits, but the higher you go, the less compelling the comparisons with the private sector become. The uncomfortable truth is that compared to the private sector, the public sector underpays its leaders and underinvests in leadership development.

Part of it is ideological – some politicians are so averse to government that they don’t see what public sector leaders do as value-added. This is reinforced by a relentless flow of hostile punditry and media stories about executive “bonuses,” travel expenses and leadership programs. Some politicians are beholden to the public service unions who would balk at higher compensation for managers.

Is better possible? 

These are just some highlights of the challenges that would face serious public sector reform. My hope as a new academic is to provoke some research and dialogue that may create actionable options for a future government. As for a royal commission, why wait? Take up any of the issues or go even deeper into structural reforms and propose solutions, not just diagnosis. We can start by leaving the comfort zone.

Source: Leaving the comfort zone: Difficult issues in public sector reform

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Rubin: Exposing Library and Archives Canada’s dismal transparency record

2022/11/01 Leave a comment

Another illustration of how broken ATIP is:

When I first came to Ottawa in the mid-1960s, I started going to the National Archives to access government records. I met Archives personnel who were trying to get the federal government to adopt better electronic record management to meet the growing demands for information.

But their efforts were largely ignored as more and more government record management came under the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) authority. There, record retrievals became more difficult and descended into a confusing and conflicted state of instability.

This was at a time when government department libraries were disappearing. My ability to freely wander the shelves and stacks and to get reference help ended when the access-to-information regime took over in the mid-1980s. Agency record collections became secret and inaccessible to the public.

By then, the Treasury Board Secretariat had firmly taken control of overall information management policy, with National Archives playing second fiddle. TBS sought to “standardize” and sanitize federal information holdings at a cost of many millions of dollars.

With the 2004 merger of the National Archives and the National Library, the new Library and Archives Canada (LAC) took on the attributes of a regular government agency under the Treasury Board’s tight control, driven by the latest software and ever-increasing secrecy practices.

Just another obedient agency

When Daniel Caron—neither a professional librarian, nor archivist—was put in charge at the LAC in 2009, he accelerated this deference to government powers, acting more like a TBS lieutenant.

He pressed for greater “modernization,” clumsily and at great expense transmitting LAC holdings into electronic file holdings. Caron didn’t fight the cuts imposed on LAC’s professional archivists and librarians, and seemed to relish reining in any staff’s independent actions to help the public. Nor did he fight the Public Works demand that LAC’s auditorium and meeting facilities be reserved only for federally sanctioned events and not for public use (Justice Paul Rouleau’s inquiry on the use of the Emergencies Act is currently taking place in the Library and Archives Canada building on Wellington Street).

Caron’s end came in 2013 after I obtained access to records that showed he was, at taxpayer expense, taking Spanish lessons. When he refused to end the language training, the heritage minister at the time fired him.

Eventually, LAC got a professional head and some of their former information reference service capacities were restored. But it was much too late for LAC to gain an influential central role under the Access to Information Act.

One example of how LAC had become just another obedient agency is how it took little interest in even housing or publicly listing and preserving past completed access-to-information requests.

That task, ignored for 20 years, was eventually done though the so-called open government portal, though the actual records received under access requests were never posted, just the titles of thousands of requests. The result is that much of the unofficial—at times very valuable and of historic record—of what the government did was destroyed without Canada’s retainer agency or historic records, LAC, giving one iota.

Not so well known was that for many years archive authorities had secret deals. One such arrangement that I have written about previously was that ministers’ “personal” and “political” past records deposited at LAC were allowed to remain secret for multiple years—even permanently—as demanded by ex-ministers and prime ministers.

LAC continues to make available public funds, office space, and staff to past prime ministers who assemble their so-called “personal” and “political” records. Such “private donations” get charitable income tax receipts. It’s not clear whether LAC has ever pushed back on prime ministers on ministerial claims made, Trump-style, about those records really being their personal property, a highly questionable practice in the first place.

Another long-standing deal is with the House Speaker, allowing in-camera parliamentary committee records to be hidden and housed at LAC for long periods of time.

A more recent 2018 secrecy arrangement with the Supreme Court of Canada favours many of the judges’ deliberation records remaining secret for a minimum of 50 years or more.

If that were not contentious enough, LAC has also turned its back on acquiring and preserving residential school records. Instead—and likely a better arrangement—many of those government records were sent to the University of Manitoba’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in 2015. LAC, however, still has many residential school records in its possession and has been slow to get those and other federal records processed and out, especially those records held tightly by the federal Indigenous departments.

Which brings us to the 2018 Dagg case where LAC issued consultant Michael Dagg an 80-year wait-time, given the estimated 780,000 records dealing with the RCMP’s Project Anecdote, a 10-year investigation on secret commissions, money laundering and corruption, including in real estate, an investigation which ran out of steam and from which no charges were ever laid.

Dagg complained about the excessive delay to Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard, who then requested LAC take a mere 65 years to respond. The delay issue went to the Federal Court for appeal. Sadly, it was discontinued upon Dagg’s death this past September.

Faster info declassification a good first step to change

LAC, as Dagg, I, and others well-discovered, has become a typical unresponsive and obstinate bureaucratic agency quite willing to severely censor our tax-paid records under legislated secrecy claims.

Maynard’s scathing investigation report on LAC, released on April 26, 2022, readily confirms LAC’s unacceptable long wait-times to access requests, amounting to LAC regularly not meeting its legal obligation under access legislation.

The minister responsible for reporting on LAC activities, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, responded to Maynard’s report recommendations by refusing to take responsibility to correct LAC’s poor access-to-information services. He declined to put forward a strategic plan to quickly correct LAC’s laggard and disgraceful access-to-information record.

Maynard’s report scolded LAC and the Government of Canada (read the Treasury Board Secretariat, the Privy Council Office, and the Prime Minister’s Office) for not taking the lead to quickly declassify records it holds and receives from government agencies. Maynard recommended that the federal government establish a strong declassification directive as a crucial element to the functioning of access legislation.

However, LAC no longer seems up to the task of promptly declassifying those records it has in its possession. That’s even if agencies send any those records at all.

It would be helpful if the information commissioner could get tough on LAC for failing to declassify their records for public use on a timely basis, and if she, along with a rejuvenated LAC’s help, could penalize those government agencies that don’t bother to keep written records, that alter them, or that refuse to hand over records to LAC.

Another serious problem is that LAC quietly follows TBS’s 40-year practice of massive record destruction. Hundreds of thousands of draft records annually don’t make it at all to LAC as TBS orders agencies to regularly destroy draft transitory operational records.

One thing that LAC still does a relatively good job doing is collecting outside legally required deposited information from those publishing and that includes letting the public know about those published records.

Once seen as an arm’s-length agency keeping check on the PMO and the Treasury Board Secretariat’s all-powerful grip on federal records has simply wilted and been cast aside by the same cabal.

LAC has fallen in line with the centralized secrecy commands that rule Ottawa, and has even outdone many other government agencies in their dislike to giving Canadians access to their records on a timely and fuller basis.

Can LAC become more than a secrecy shill for the government? At the very least it would help if LAC, who holds the vast majority of government historical records, gets going in declassifying more records for release. That would be a start.

LAC badly needs to change course and become an independent record manager force with integrity, a pro-disclosure champion for the fulsome and quick release of federal information.

Respect and trust would follow.

Ken Rubin is a long-time observer of transparency and secrecy trends in Ottawa. He is reachable via kenrubin.ca

Source: Exposing Library and Archives Canada’s dismal transparency record

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Sears: Convoy inquiry reveals another Canadian intelligence fiasco

2022/10/26 Leave a comment

One of the better commentaries. Paul Wells on substack continues to have a number of must read commentaries:

The developed world grudgingly accepts that its intelligence agencies have a perennially poor performance record. Despite the tens of billions of dollars we spend on them, their list of failures is breathtaking: Iraq, 9/11, prediction that Afghanistans would survive and Ukraine wouldn’t. 

In Canada, we have our own humiliations: Air India and the rendition of Canadian citizens to be tortured in police states. The most recent horror is CSIS’s employ of a human trafficker as its agent, then lying about it to allies.

The guru of intelligence history, Christopher Andrew (“The Secret World”), observes that these disasters are rarely a failure in intelligence collection. More often it is failures in sharing, analysis, and execution. However, as the convoy inquiry (officially, the Special Joint Committee on the Declaration of Emergency) has made glaringly clear, Canadian intelligence and police agencies often fail at collection, as well. 

Bizarrely, CSIS, RCMP and OPP have for years failed to understand and master the power of social media. They monitor the obscure hate sites peripatetically. They fail to see patterns, share findings, or dig into identities and connections. Shopify does a better job at it than Canadian security agencies. Perhaps we should retain them. 

It is the absence of an aggressive outbound social media strategy that is even more astonishing. No agency smacks down misinformation, calls out lies and disinformation, let alone offers a more Canadian view on issues from race to terrorism. The reason may be that they fear to be seen to be “political.” No other NATO country’s spooks are so meek, they use surrogates.

Several police and intelligence agency leaders have shared with me their frustration at their bosses failure to understand the essential role an effective social media strategy has today. It is predictably, generational. Mine doesn’t get it, my son’s generation do.

The OPP’s nose-stretchers are a case in point. Their witnesses claimed on the one hand that the Ottawa Police Service did not digest their intel warnings about the convoy’s potential for violence. Then in the same testimony they concede they did not have any “specific” evidence of such tendencies. Nor can they claim that they raised the alarm with any other agency or police service with the intensity their intel teams were shouting for.

A teen at a screen in their basement could have pointed them to the dozens of cases of inciteful rhetoric and the open calls for violent overthrow of the government, months in advance. The Inquiry has made clear this needs to be addressed urgently: work the social media platforms faster, more deeply, and share your findings. 

The second revelation of the Inquiry: little has changed since Bob Rae revealed the staggering cost in lives of CSIS and the RCMP’s mutual enmity. They treat each other, and their political masters, as interfering and untrustworthy threats. Why was their no high-level forum among three levels of government, and their agencies, weeks before the convoy arrived.

Blaming the dysfunctional state that the Ottawa police had descended to is a useful out for the OPP and RCMP. It is no defence, however, for their failure to do everything they could to ensure public safety. John Morden in his blistering assessment of the G20 Summit disaster made all of these points crystal clear more than a decade ago. No one, apparently, took him seriously.

The politicians hiding under their desks for the first two weeks are the most galling: Premier Ford refusing to even attend a high-level meeting, Justin Trudeau clinging to his “separation of powers” fig leaf until dropping it in favour of the Emergency Declaration, as his inner circle finally realized that this was going to bite them too; and the slippery mayor of Ottawa conspiring behind his own chief’s back to hire a completely unqualified negotiator who reached a deal to move even more trucks to Parliament Hill. Some deal! Political vanity made a bad situation even worse. 

The inquiry has been a blessing already. It has revealed incompetence, infighting, and childish jurisdictional games in texts, emails and testimony. Let us hope some of those tarnished by its revelations now sit down and apply its lessons — before the next armed attack on Ottawa.

Source: Convoy inquiry reveals another Canadian intelligence fiasco

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May: The black hole of public service contract spending

2022/10/20 Leave a comment

Of note:

A parliamentary committee is trying to unpack the $15-billion back hole of spending federal departments spend on contracting.

Not sure how much progress MPs will make with four hearings.

A big question for MPs on the government operations and estimates committee: why is the public service growing in leaps and bounds while outsourcing is exploding right alongside that growth in the bureaucracy? MPs want to know if taxpayers are getting value for money using all these contractors. They have become a “shadow” or ghost public service that can dodge the staffing rules bureaucrats have to follow.

How big is big? A Carleton University research team has been digging into contracts to get a handle on how many billions are spent and on what. Last year, it estimated the government spent $15 billion, and $4.7 billion was on IT contracts.

A big part is amendments. About 272,075 contracts have been active since 2017-18. About 16 per cent of them have been amended at least once. These amendments added $25.6 billion to the original cost.

On average: Contract duration is about 10 months and is worth $423,000 (for contracts over $10,000).

Longest: 34.8 years (June 2015 to March 2050 for the consortium to replace the Champlain Bridge in Montreal).

Biggest: $5.7 billion to Brookfield Global Integrated Solutions for office building management.

ArriveCAN: The committee’s probe comes at the same time as a head-scratching revelation that the cost of the much-reviled ArriveCAN app is on track to hit $54 million. Stunned, app developers say it could have been done for about $1 million. Even public servants are aghast. There is a shortage of app developers in government. One long-time official, who is not authorized to speak about the subject, argued the app’s development should have been contracted out to the experts. Trying to build inhouse, where there’s a shortage of the right skills, means bringing in an army of consultants.

Some MPs on the committee want to have a separate probe into why developing the ArriveCAN app cost so much.

Here’s a look at some of the $15 billion in contracting costs across the government of Canada, according to a Carleton University research project:

Source: Carleton SPPS Research Project.
Source: Carleton SPPS Research Project.

CONTRACTING 101
Why does it matter? Why do it?

The Professional Institute of Public Service of Canada (PIPSC) has long been consumed by outsourcing – especially for IT – and has done a number of reports. It concludes outsourcing means higher costs and lower quality services for Canadians. It erodes transparency, accountability and the institutional knowledge of the public service.

The fact is departments will always need to outsource for expertise they don’t have, especially for IT and digital talent to modernize government and services for Canadians.

The I-need-it-now pace of the public service picked up during the pandemic. Now a global talent shortage meets the public service’s turtle-slow hiring process. Departments can’t wait. They contract.

Why does it matter?

  • About $15 billion a year is spent on contracts in the core public service. (The Liberals also promised when elected to reduce spending on consultants to 2005-06 levels.)
  • It strikes at the heart of the kind of work the public service should be doing and what should it contract out, says Conservative MP Kelly McCauley. “A lot of lot these (consultant) reports should be done by our ever-expanding public service. So, what does this say…. about size of our public service if we have to source out so many contracts to the Deloittes of the world?”
  • Accountability. It raises questions about influence and who has the government’s ear in making policy and decisions.
  • Then there is question of value for money when both contracting and hiring is increasing but services don’t seem to be getting any better. We saw a summer of delays for passports, immigration applications and at airports. NDP MP Gord Johns has asked: “What steps are being taken to ensure that the quality of the service to the public and to other government departments is the first order of business?”

These questions will become even more important when the inevitable spending reviews and cuts come.

Main reasons departments contract:

  • They need special expertise and have no in-house skills to do the work.
  • Talent shortage, major recruitment and retention issues for the full gamut of IT work.
  • The time to hire staff, often months, is too long to meet the ever-shortening deadlines of the work.
  • Surges in workload.
  • No funding of public servant positions so departments use operating budgets for contracts.

IT contracts will become even more important as all governments push to modernize services. Digital expertise, hiring and contracting them, is central to Canada’s Digital Ambition, to modernize. In a speech, Treasury Board President Mona Fortier outlined her IT priorities: “escaping the trap” of decades-old legacy systems, establishing digital credentials so that Canadians can securely access all government services online, and pursuing a strategy to recruit, keep and develop in-house digital talent.

Where’s Treasury Board? Treasury Board is the employer and rules-maker, but the actual authority for contracting and human resources has been turned over to deputy ministers to manage their departments.

“Does Treasury Board have any role apart from setting a general framework,” asked McCauley. “Does Treasury Board as a guardian of the public purse ever follow up on any of these contracts that are sent out?”

Last week, MPs were all over the map during the first hearing, questioning contracts from big IT projects to cleaning services and everything in between. They grilled bureaucrats to get a handle on what is outsourced and why.

Finally, Conservative MP Kelly McCauley threw up his hands (watch here, at 12:28:30) and asked:

“I just want a quick question to the three departments here. Just a real quick yes or no if you believe taxpayers are getting fair value for the money, the billions being spent on outside or outside contracts. Just a quick yes or no?”

No takers. Crickets.

Source: The black hole of public service contract spending

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Clark: How your right to know is getting stymied by the Denial Machine

2022/10/11 Leave a comment

Good commentary on the broke ATIP system and how this impacts service to the public, particularly with respect to immigration (IRCC does a good job in publishing most of its operational data on the government-wide open data site):

Thirty-nine years ago, after a wave of post-Watergate epiphanies about government secrecy, the Canadian government passed the first federal Access to Information Act. Ever since then it is has been building a denial machine.

It would be easy to pin the blame on secretive politicians trying to obstruct the public’s ability to know what is going on inside government, because they have done that. Prime ministers including Justin Trudeau and his predecessor, Stephen Harper, have broken promises to open government.

But it’s not just that. There is bureaucratic aversion to openness, and a default assumption that making the public’s business public would be tricky. Complicated. Impractical.

And there is another problem: The government’s failure to provide information about simple things is gumming up the system.

Take a look at the recent The Globe and Mail story in which Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard is quoted telling a House of Commons committee that every department in government is failing to keep up with Access to Information requests. Should there be reforms? Ms. Maynard told the committee, in a phrase that should leave us all gobsmacked, that “respecting the law as it currently exists would represent an important first step.”

The government’s Access to Information system, which cost $90-milion in 2021, is garnering 10,000 complaints a year, the story noted. And it included a statistic that offers a clue to one big chunk of the problem: Access to Information requests to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada have increased so much they now outnumber requests to all other departments.

Why? Because IRCC is so bad at providing basic routine info that people are resorting to freedom-of-information requests.

The Access to Information law is supposed to allow people to pay a small fee to request federal government records or, at least, records that aren’t covered by the extensive legal exceptions.

The system for implementing the Act – the $90-million machine – is based on finding the requested documents, but heavily focused on applying exceptions and blacking stuff out. Ask for a copy of a government contract and often the prices of items will be redacted, even though the Federal Court of Canada has ruled such information should be released. One huge problem is delays, sometimes of years. With information, access delayed is often access denied.

That’s why the volume of requests to the Immigration department is instructive. Many come from people asking for info on their applications, said Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland. He publishes an immigration-policy newsletter, Lexbase, which is based heavily on access-to-information releases.

IRCC has for decades been unable or unwilling to provide updates to applicants, so Members of Parliament are often deluged with requests for help. Increasingly, their offices file access requests.

If you’re a regular internet shopper, you might recognize those requests as the immigration version of a common customer-service question: “Where’s my stuff?” Companies such as Amazon have online tracking systems that give customers simple answers: whether the order has been received, or shipped, and so on. If they didn’t, they’d be deluged with inquiries. But IRCC doesn’t do that.

Now the government’s failure to provide basic information is gumming up the system that is supposed to allow Canadians to pierce the veil of secrecy.

More broadly, Ottawa’s failure to make openness routine – even though doing so is easy in the digital age – makes getting access to out-of-the-ordinary information slower, and harder.

Requesters sometimes ask for copies of agreements for “grants and contributions” that set out government funding for organizations and groups. These should be automatically published on a website. So should all contracts except in rare exceptions. And so on.

But politicians don’t much care for that sort of transparency. Why let more people see things that might raise embarrassing questions? When the system is clogged up, as it is now, they don’t have to care. There’s no real penalty for failing to respect the Access to Information law.

If the government spent twice the money on a functioning Access to Information system, it would be well worth it. Instead, over decades, Ottawa has built – by design and by accident – a system that is effectively a machine to deny and delay.

Source: How your right to know is getting stymied by the Denial Machine

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Nudging the way to better public policy

2022/10/11 Leave a comment

More on nudging but too much on process and number of units rather than concrete examples, both successes and failures:

In 2013, Rotman School of Management professor Dilip Soman argued governments should use a behavioural approach to design public policy. Building on the concept of “nudging” introduced by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Soman suggested this approach could lead to real policy change. Nine years later, we can see how this approach appears to be working in the design and implementation of public policies across Canada. This is why policymakers should consider using it more frequently.

The idea behind nudging is simple. By creating a “choice architecture” – simple, beneficial options that people can opt in or out of – policymakers can improve access to public services and help people achieve their goals in life. Nudging makes it easier for people to get what they need from government without taxing their time and energy.

Key to this approach is finding small tweaks with big impact, backed by scientific methods like randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Nudging helps policymakers learn what works and what doesn’t.

It’s an easy idea to get behind. Too often, citizens find that interacting with government challenges their patience and sucks up their time. Renewing a driver’s licence should take a few clicks on a website ­– not hours in line at an administrative office staring at walls painted “greige.”

Many Canadians might wonder if service delivery could be improved. It can – and nudging is a mechanism that can lead to improvement. In recent years, governments have shown their ability to improve the service experience, reduce burden on citizens and increase uptake of important programs.

Consider organ donation. Survey data shows that 90 per cent of Canadians support organ donation. Yet uptake is dismally low for this critical, life-saving act – just 32 per cent of Canadians are registered donors. In Ontario, a complicated enrollment process meant that many residents didn’t know how to sign up, or simply forgot to do it. In 2016, Ontario’s “nudge unit” worked with Service Ontario to insert a prompt in the health card renewal process. The nudge considerably enhanced uptake.

The benefits are clear, but the politics aren’t always so simple. At its best, nudging can help citizens access public services. This is especially important for those who have been marginalized or excluded by government.

But concerns about the ethics of nudging are well documented, with particular attention to the idea that well-intentioned interventions could give way to outright manipulation. Further, some of the issues that nudging touches can be viewed as political such as organ donation, vaccine uptake and recruitment for the Canadian Armed Forces.

In recent years, nudging has given way to a more structured approach: the application of behavioural insights (BI). BI relies on expertise in public policy and behavioural science and recognizes that data-driven experimentation isn’t always the first-best option. If nudging improves policy implementation, BI goes that extra step to include policy design – doing the work in advance to ensure citizens can access services without wasting their time and energy.

One strength of BI is its transparency. It makes clear assumptions, and its proponents are committed to testing those assumptions through rigorous evaluation. Earlier this year, BI practitioners collaborated with researchers from Berkeley. Together, they published the results of 126 studies covering 23-million individuals. In a world of scientific uncertainty and mixed results, they found strong evidence that behaviorally informed public policy can work. Overall, nudge interventions improved target behaviours by eight per cent.

In real terms, this results in social and economic benefits. When it succeeds, BI can help citizens avoid feeling regret from making under-informed or myopic decisions based on intuition and emotion, rather than deliberation and reasoned analysis. When it fails, it provides quality evidence for policymakers to find alternatives – and quickly.

What does BI in Canada look like now? Since Soman’s piece was published in Policy Options in 2013, the federal government has introduced the Impact and Innovation Unit (IIU) in the Privy Council Office. The interdisciplinary team consists of policy experts with a variety of educational backgrounds ranging from education to neuroscience. The stated goal of is to reduce barriers to innovation within government and to “leverage the benefits of impact measurement to support evidence-based decision-making.”

While the IIU works in tandem with other departments on a contract basis to pilot and implement RCTs around discrete policy problems, small BI enclaves have also emerged in other departments such as Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and Canada Revenue Agency. The IIU also supports a broader agenda around policy innovation and responsiveness with projects such as the Impact Canada Initiative and COVID-19 snapshot monitoring (COSMO).

At the provincial level, the governments of British Columbia and Ontario have also established BI units – the former within the B.C. Public Service Agency and the latter in the Treasury Board Secretariat. Similar work (though not a standalone unit) was found in Alberta’s CoLab (though the unit was dismantled in 2020).

Together, provincial and federal ministries have reported 59 BI trials (see Figure 1) with many more in the works. The majority (39 out of 59) of the trials fall into one of three policy areas: government operations, health, or social welfare.

Cities have also taken up the challenge with projects like City Studio (Vancouver) or Civic Innovation (Toronto) that focus on improvements to service delivery and increasing citizen participation.

Governments aren’t the only actors in the BI game either. The Canadian Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), established in 2014, emerged from the original “Nudge Unit” in the British government, which was founded in the Cabinet Office in 2010. It uses a consultancy model to support government and the not-for-profit sector to support BI policy interventions.

BIT is a major player. It has offered advice and conducted hundreds of RCTs in policy domains ranging from health and social policy to natural resources and government operations. In 2019, BIT opened its first Canadian office, headquartered in Toronto. Since then, BIT Canada has helped lead pathbreaking work on tax benefit claims, employment services and other pressing issues.

One of the interesting features of BI in Canada is the collaborative approach embedded in BI units. Not only is the work indicative of the many cross-cutting relationships across government, but it highlights the ability of government and academia to form meaningful partnerships. They bring together a variety of financial and human resources to drive evidence-based policy change

Chief among them is the relationships BI units have formed with academics. They include the Behavioural Economics in Action at Rotman and the Decision Insights for Business and Societyteams.

Looking at the context of nudging in present-day policymaking, it appears we may have arrived at a new equilibrium. Some were skeptical about nudging. There are concerns that it’s threatened to overtake policymaking with novel, experimental methods or that it would be used unethically to trick people or undermine their self-interest. There are also concerns that it would somehow cheapen or gamify policy development.

However, BI now occupies a useful, if modest, place among policymakers’ tools. We consider this success not just in the number of BI units, but in its incremental application across policy areas where the tool is well positioned to improve policy design and implementation.

As Soman noted, the behavioural approach to public policy is reflective of a set of guiding principles for policymakers even if a “grand unified theory” is not yet on the books. But perhaps one is not necessary. Nudging has grown – perhaps not prolifically – but it now appears to be an accepted tool to promote policy compliance and enhance policy uptake.

Source: Nudging the way to better public policy

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