Krugman: Does :ChatGPT Mean Robots Are Coming For the Skilled Jobs?

2022/12/08 Leave a comment

Of interest. Much of government work is potentially vulnerable to these technologies. Hope IRCC is exploring this and comparable chat systems to address some of the service pressures:

Will robots take away our jobs?

People have been asking that question for an astonishingly long time. The Regency-era British economist David Ricardo added to the third edition of his classic “Principles of Political Economy,” published in 1821, a chapter titled “On Machinery,” in which he tried to show how the technologies of the early Industrial Revolution could, at least initially, hurt workers. Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel “Player Piano” envisaged a near-future America in which automation has eliminated most employment.

At the level of the economy as a whole, the verdict is clear: So far, machines haven’t done away with the need for workers. U.S. workers are almost five times as productive as they were in the early postwar years, but there has been no long-term upward trend in unemployment:

Higher productivity hasn’t hurt overall employment.
Higher productivity hasn’t hurt overall employment.Credit…FRED

That said, technology can eliminate particular kinds of jobs. In 1948 half a million Americans were employed mining coal; the great bulk of those jobs had disappeared by the early 21st century not because we stopped mining coal — the big decline in coal production, in favor first of natural gas and then of renewable energy, started only around 15 years ago — but because strip mining and mountaintop removal made it possible to extract an increasing amount of coal with many fewer workers:

Some jobs have largely disappeared.
Some jobs have largely disappeared.Credit…FRED

It’s true that the jobs that disappear in the face of technological progress have generally been replaced by other jobs. But that doesn’t mean that the process has been painless. Individual workers may not find it easy to change jobs, especially if the new jobs are in different places. They may find their skills devalued; in some cases, as with coal, technological change can uproot communities and their way of life.

This kind of dislocation has, as I said, been a feature of modern societies for at least two centuries. But something new may be happening now.

In the past, the jobs replaced by technology tended to involve manual labor. Machines replaced muscles. On the one hand, industrial robots replaced routine assembly-line work. On the other hand, there has been ever-growing demand for knowledge workers, a term coined by the management consultant Peter Drucker in 1959 for people engaged in nonrepetitive problem solving. Many people, myself included, have said that we’re increasingly becoming a knowledge economy.

But what if machines can take over a large chunk of what we have historically thought of as knowledge work?

Last week the research company OpenAI released — to enormous buzz from tech circles — a program called ChatGPT, which can carry out what look like natural-language conversations. You can ask questions or make requests and get responses that are startlingly clear and even seem well-informed. You can also do fun things — one colleague recently asked for and received an analysis of secular stagnation in sonnet form — but let’s stick with things that might be economically useful.

ChatGPT is only the latest example of technology that seems to be able to carry out tasks that not long ago seemed to require the services not just of human beings but of humans with substantial formal education.

For example, machine translation from one language to another used to be a joke; some readers may have heard the apocryphal tale of the Russian-English translation program that took “the spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak” and ended up with “the vodka was good, but the meat was spoiled.” These days, translation programs may not produce great literature, but they’re adequate for many purposes. And the same is true in many fields.

You can argue that what we often call artificial intelligence isn’t really intelligence. Indeed, it may be a long time before machines can be truly creative or offer deep insight. But then, how much of what human beings do is truly creative or deeply insightful? (Indeed, how much of what gets published in academic journals — a field of endeavor I know pretty well — meets those criteria?)

So quite a few knowledge jobs may be eminently replaceable.

What will this mean for the economy?

It is difficult to predict exactly how A.I. will impact the demand for knowledge workers, as it will likely vary, depending on the industry and specific job tasks. However, it is possible that in some cases, A.I. and automation may be able to perform certain knowledge-based tasks more efficiently than humans, potentially reducing the need for some knowledge workers. This could include tasks such as data analysis, research and report writing. However, it is also worth noting that A.I. and automation may also create new job opportunities for knowledge workers, particularly in fields related to A.I. development and implementation.

OK, I didn’t write the paragraph you just read; ChatGPT did, in response to the question “How will A.I. affect the demand for knowledge workers?” The giveaway, to me at least, is that I still refuse to use “impact” as a verb. And it didn’t explicitly lay out exactly why we should, overall, expect no impact on aggregate employment. But it was arguably better than what many humans, including some people who imagine themselves smart, would have written.

In the long run, productivity gains in knowledge industries, like past gains in traditional industries, will make society richer and improve our lives in general (unless Skynet kills us all). But in the long run, we are all dead, and even before that, some of us may find ourselves either unemployed or earning far less than we expected, given our expensive educations.

Source: Does ChatGPT Mean Robots Are Coming For the Skilled Jobs?

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May/Savoie: Canada needs a royal commission to fix problems with the federal public service

2022/12/08 Leave a comment

There are so many issues where a royal commission would be useful and provide deeper insights and solutions to some of the weaknesses of Canadian government policies and programs:

Canada’s public service needs to be fixed. It’s growing like gangbusters, faces relentless attack, is losing the confidence of politicians, and struggles to keep up in a changing world because it is using decades-old policies and processes, says a leading expert.

Donald Savoie, Canada’s pre-eminent scholar and expert on public administration, is calling for a royal commission into the role of the public service, the first in more than 45 years, to fix its deteriorating relationship with ministers, Parliament and Canadians.

Savoie has written exhaustively about what’s wrong with the public service. But he now believes the non-partisan institution has so irreparably come off its moorings that only an independent royal commission can fix it.

“I reluctantly came around to a royal commission because I see no better option. I’m not a big fan of them. They’re costly and once launched can go off on tangents… But what else can we do?”

He says the time is right because the public service is under “sustained criticism with bureaucrat bashing taking hold everywhere.”

The work and expectations of the public service has changed dramatically over the past 45 years while the rules under which they operate stayed the same. Ministers of all political stripes have hired large staffs for policy advice, whereas they used to rely on getting that from public servants.

All of that is taking its toll on the morale of the public service, frustrating those who work there and discouraging those who may be interested in working in government.

The most worrisome problem is the lack of trust.

Forty years ago, a minister ‘s office had three or four assistants and the main policy adviser was the department’s deputy minister. Today, ministers have several dozen staff headed by chiefs of staff ­— equivalent to assistant deputy ministers — and have their own policy advisers.

“Why is it that 40 years ago there was no such thing as a policy adviser to a minister? It used to be a deputy minister, but now every minister’s office has four or five,” says Savoie. “That tells me ministers are saying: ‘we don’t accept the policy advice that comes from our deputy minister.’ That’s a pretty fundamental question.”

Public servants basked in accolades in the early days of the pandemic for responding quickly and getting benefits out to Canadians. That all turned as the pandemic eased and public servants were lambasted for moving too fast and making mistakes.

Service debacles such as passport and immigration delays fed Canadians’ growing discontent with government, while populist leaders such as Pierre Poilievre and anti-institution protest groups are tapping into that mistrust.

Savoie says it’s now increasingly popular to deride the public service as too big, overpaid, underworked and pampered with pensions and benefits few Canadians enjoy.

“I hear it, I understand it,” he says. “But where does all that bashing take you? We better have a sober second thought. This is a vitally important institution and all we’re doing is belittling it.”

Then, the rapid growth in the size of the public service, which went into overdrive during the pandemic, grabbed the spotlight.

The public service is growing faster than the private sector as the economy recovers from the pandemic. It’s bigger than ever and the Parliamentary Budget Office expects it will hit 409,000 employees within five years – and maybe more.

On top of that, outsourcing work to contractors – the so-called shadow public service – is also soaring. But all that growth isn’t paying off with better services.

Savoie laments that fixing the situation isn’t on anyone’s radar. The public service can’t do it. The prime minister, ministers and even the clerk of the Privy Council, the head of the public service, already have too much on their plate. On top of that, he argues, “nobody knows what to do about it. “

“The public service is an institution that’s been buffeted about for so long…but it can’t speak out,” says Savoie. “They can’t voice what they think is wrong.

“So how do we get to the bottom of these issues? I think we can only do that with a detached body, that’s neither reporting to the public service nor politicians, and can look coldly at how it has evolved and what needs to be done to fix it.”

Reforming the public service has been an enduring challenge for more than 50 years. There’s been debate over the years about who’s best to lead the way on reform – public servants, the government or Parliament.

A royal commission is an independent investigation into matters of national importance. It comes with broad powers to hold public hearings, call witnesses under oath and compel evidence. They make recommendations to the government on what should change.

There have been at least four such royal commissions into the public service over the years. The last ones are the Glassco Commission in the 1960s and the Lambert Commission in the 1970s.

The Glassco commission focused on government organization. Its recommendations can be summed up as “let the managers manage.” The Lambert Commission delved into financial management and accountability. Its work can be summed up as “make the managers manage.”

But Savoie says both commissions, led by businessmen, never considered how management reforms related to Parliament or ministers.

They were followed by a series of reform initiatives led by the public service – Public Service 2000; the 1990s Chretien government Program Review; La Relève of 1998; the Task Force on the Human Resources Services Modernization Initiative of 2015-16, through to Blueprint 2020, which has been updated with Beyond 2020.

Savoie holds the Canada Research Chair in Public Administration and Governance at the Université de Moncton. His research and achievements are prodigious, and have influenced policy and public management. He has won too many awards to count ­— including being named a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2022 — and has published 52 books and is always working on another.

Savoie has warned about eroding trust, the concentration of power and “politicization” of the public service in articles and books ever since he wrote the 1999 book, Governing from the Centre, a must-read in Ottawa circles that made him persona non-grata with then-prime minister Jean Chrétien.

Back in 2003, Savoie wrote Breaking the Bargain, about the unravelling of the traditional bargain underpinning the relationship between politicians and public servants.

Public servants are still nominally bound by that bargain. They are still expected to be anonymous and non-partisan and when meeting with parliamentarians, “have no distinct personality from their ministers” – like bureaucrats 45 years ago, says Savoie.

A recent report, Top of Mind, by two think tanks – the Ottawa-based Institute on Governance and the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University – also threw the spotlight on the increasingly troubled relationship after probing public service executives at all levels of government about their biggest challenges.

Stephen Van Dine, who led the project, argues reform is overdue and supports the idea of independent review by a royal commission.

“Recent events have shown a fundamental decline in understanding between the roles of elected and unelected public officials resulting in poor decisions, absence of foresight and planning to anticipate policy needs,” he says. “It means policy options to address climate change, health care reform, and cost of living are likely less robust.”

The Top-of-Mind report found that today’s executives worry about falling public trust in government; the decline in senior bureaucrats giving “fearless advice” to ministers; a hollowing-out of policy capacity; a post-pandemic economic reckoning; conflicts among levels of government; and the need for public service reform.

There is a growing appetite to reform the public service. Politicians, public servants and Canadians don’t feel it is working like it should, but it’s not a groundswell and won’t be a vote-winner for the campaign trail.

The Trudeau government was elected in 2015 as saviours of the public service, with promises of a new “golden age,” but some argue an all-powerful PMO and mistrust has made things worse.

The big worry for those like Savoie who believe the “strength of Canada depends on the strength of the public service” is that with the rise of populism and its push for smaller and less intrusive government it will be fixed by sweeping cuts, downsizing and privatization.

“There has to be a rational way to do this,” said Savoie.

Source: Canada needs a royal commission to fix problems with the federal public service

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Canada’s Growing Problem with Trust in Government

2022/12/02 Leave a comment

Almost a rant, but legitimately so (passports backlogs have largely been addressed, with Service Canada issuing more passports than applications September-November):

The strength of liberal democracies like Canada’s is often measured in terms of social cohesion. It’s the glue that holds society together — the common values and goals shared by citizens that inspire trust in each other and in our country’s institutions.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) defines a society as cohesive if “it works towards the well-being of all its members, fights exclusion and marginalization, creates a sense of belonging, promotes trust, and offers its members the opportunity of upward social mobility.”

Social cohesion is much more than “campfires and kumbaya.” Cohesive countries are politically stable, their citizens respect laws and they have robust institutions that reflect competence and trusted governance. As Donald Savoie, the Canadian public services guru, wrote in the Globe and Mail last summer, “The rule of law, sustained economic development, the ability to pursue the national interest, and the need to deal with society’s wicked problems require these institutions to function well.”

Governments are judged by what they do, but it’s useful to distinguish between the normal back and forth of politics, and the specific actions of governments that truly build or diminish social cohesion. Political partisanship is largely irrelevant to trust in government and is regularly discounted by citizens; it’s the policies and programs and how they are implemented that are more likely to impact how we feel about the quality of public governance. In addition, the loud political disagreements of the day often obscure the ultimate impacts of public policy issues on social cohesion.

In the mid-1960s, successive minority governments and the bitter partisan battles between Liberal Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson and Opposition Leader John Diefenbaker dominated the political headlines. But despite the day-to-day rancour, those P parliaments also put in the place the basic architecture of this country’s modern welfare state – medicare, the Québec and Canada Pension Plans, the Canada Assistance Plan and national student loans – vital public services that over time became highly prized by citizens. It was only with the perspective of history that Canadians saw how they performed and realized their value.

Canada has traditionally been a “peaceable kingdom,” enjoying traditionally high levels of social cohesion on many fronts. Our political institutions are stable and accessible. Public and charitable programs to help the disadvantaged are relatively strong. We value our health care system as a right of citizenship. Collectively we are a welcoming people and understand that our low birth rate means that we need immigrants if we are to keep economic growth and prosperity rolling.

But only six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, polls began to chart the erosion of social cohesion in Canada and around the world. In October 2020, IPSOS found that “more Canadians have “weak” (30 percent) than “solid” (26 percent) social cohesion.” By March of this year, IPSOS reported that Canadians’ “trust in government to do what is right” had dropped from 58% in late 2020 to 43%. Equally troubling, the survey found that “In Canada, only 33 percent  of citizens believe that most people can be trusted, against 67 percent who believe that you can’t be too careful dealing with people.” Similarly troubling are reports from news organizations that their own research shows a decline in trust in the work that they do.

More recently, there is evidence of additional damage to social cohesion resulting from perceptions of how our federal system works. The Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) published a “Resentment Index,” indicating that “Canadians in every province are resentful about their province’s place in the federation.” While feelings of resentment are strongest in Saskatchewan, Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador:

  • “On average residents of all provinces think the region where they live contributes more than its fair share.”
  • In the Prairie provinces, “the sense that they contribute more than their fair share is combined with the view that Quebec contributes less.”
  • The practice of asymmetrical federalism (the practice by which national arrangements apply differently to Québec) is seen in the rest of the country as a special benefit for that province.

The authors conclude that alienation is rooted in zero-sum perceptions about how the country works: resentment of Québec is the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed.

There’s no doubt the pandemic stressed Canadians as no other recent event has done. To lead the fight against COVID-19, governments intervened  in people’s personal lives as never before with lockdowns, vaccine mandates and school closures, and for some, this stirred feelings of fear and anger. The resulting bonfire of grievances let loose some nasty demons that are likely to be with us for a long time: many politicians and public officials at all levels still experience personal insults and public threats just for doing their jobs. And the pandemic also highlighted failures in state capacity at all levels and a startling lack of competence that is diminishing trust in government on several fronts.

Nowhere are these failures as stark as in health care. COVID-19 placed intolerable strains on the system, and it is still struggling to address huge surgery backlogs and deliver basic services. Nationally, the pediatric care system is overwhelmed, with some children’s hospitals operating at 180 percent of capacity. Provinces have major problems keeping and finding doctors and nurses, but Canada is the only developed country without a national health care human resources strategy. More than six million Canadians do not have a family doctor. My wife and I have personal knowledge of this problem – we are among that number.

These challenges are a wake-up call for those of us who thought Canada was on the right track on health care. In 2020, Canada spent 12.2 percent of its GDP on health, more than any other countries in the OECD except the US, Germany and the Netherlands. But what do we get for all that money? Not nearly enough. In 2021, a multi-nation study by the Commonwealth Fund found that Canada placed 10th among 11 high income countries in terms of access to health care and its quality, the administrative efficiency of the system, equity and health care outcomes. Only the US fared worse in the performance rankings.

While Canadian health care is on the verge of collapse and crying out for reform and innovation, the federal and provincial governments are locked in a squabble over transfer payments and control over an increasingly failing system. The provinces want money for health care with no strings attached while the federal government wants assurances that its additional dollars will buy much-needed reforms.

While the stand-off continues, due to higher energy prices, a more buoyant economy and inflation, the federal government and most provinces are awash in cash, and several are eying budgetary surpluses in the near term. While a few provinces are investing to fix health care, others have spent billions in taxpayer kickbacks such as cancelled taxes on gasoline, abolition of auto licence fees, or simply to create a rosy glow among voters before their next election. It’s both sad and ironic that health care, which has done so much to build social cohesion, is now diminishing trust in governments’ capacity to deliver the country’s most treasured public program.

What’s happening in health care is closely matched by what’s been revealed at the recent public hearings of the Public Order Emergency Commission on the invoking of the Emergencies Act. It’s been a master class in provincial/municipal dysfunction in crisis management and policing. The disclosure that members of the Ottawa police, the OPP and the RCMP were leaking policing plans to the demonstrators, and to the far right-group Diagolon, is particularly chilling. If the police lack the leadership, capacity and will to uphold the rule of law, it’s no wonder that public trust in institutions is plummeting.

Meanwhile, Canadians continue to face other reminders of diminished institutional capacity and performance. Waiting for passports is still an eight-to nine-month challenge, long after the federal government promised it was on the way to be fixed. This fall, thousands of international students coming to Canadian universities and colleges met weeks of delays in receiving their study permits, as Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) struggled with a backlog of 1.5 million applications for study permits and other temporary resident visas, further diminishing Canada’s reputation for simple competence in providing necessary services.

For immigration generally, as of October 31, IRCC had roughly 2.2 million applications in its inventory, with around 1.2 million in backlog, meaning that they exceed the department’s service standards. As the Globe and Mail recently reported, these processing delays have caused a surge in mandamus applications, a legal procedure aimed at achieving a court order that tells the department to do its job. Eight hundred such applications were filed in federal court last year and another 709 so far this year; and 333 came from people in the economic streams of immigration, the very people Canada needs most. These delays are just another example of high-sounding policy promises made by government being sandbagged by a failure to deliver. It seems the government’s earlier focus on “deliverology” has been forgotten.

Another spectacular policy and implementation failure is the federal protection program for air travellers seeking compensation for travel delays. The Airline Passenger Protection Regulations spell out the conditions under which air carriers must compensate passengers who have experienced cancellations or delays, including arranging alternate flights, providing refunds or paying compensation.

The large airline carriers have been playing fast and loose with these requirements for as long as they have existed. They regularly deny compensation by claiming that crew shortages caused the delay or cancellation, but the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTC), the complaints adjudication body for the regulations, says “Crew shortages are within the airline’s control, unless the airline could not have prevented the flight disruption despite proper planning.”

In the 2021-22 fiscal year, the CTC received 28,673 complaints, up from 26,742 a year earlier. By the end of this November, the agency had received another 19,000 complaints since April. The backlog of complaints now totals a stunning 30,000, meaning the CTC is yet another federal agency overwhelmed in doing its job. It’s difficult to imagine a government that doesn’t recognize that with over 47,000 citizen complaints over two years a system is not working and take steps to fix it. Insult is added to injury when the complaints systems for failing programs are themselves swamped by public demand and do not perform with speed and efficiency.

The ubiquity and reach of social media have raised the stakes for governments at all levels to deliver public programs on which millions of people depend competently and effectively. When public-facing services fail or triumph, the performance of governments is available for all to see. With faults and failures instantly apparent, the resulting anger of citizens is amplified by social media and seen by millions in the global commons. The result is a destructive cycle of disappointment, leading to grievance and anger, and further distrust of government institutions. The message that “everything seems broken in Canada” is gaining in resonance.

Governments at all levels face peril if they ignore their responsibility for delivering necessary services smartly, effectively and on time. Canada’s social cohesion, along with the public’s trust in our institutions of governance, are at stake.

Contributing Writer Geoff Norquay was Senior Adviser on Social Policy to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and later served as Director of Communications in the Opposition Leader’s Office under Stephen Harper.  He is a Principal of Earnscliffe Strategies in Ottawa.

Source: Canada’s Growing Problem with Trust in Government

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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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