Feds deny delay as lawyer in multi-billion-dollar Black bureaucrats’ class-action suit calls Crown’s ‘overlap’ arguments ‘insulting’

2022/03/03 Leave a comment

Watching with interest. In terms of the data, clear that the lawyers have cherry-picked the worst departments, and not the overall picture which indicates that Blacks are not unduly under-represented compared to other visible minority groups (see Will the removal of the Canadian citizenship preference in the public service make a difference?):

The leading lawyer in a multi-billion-dollar class-action lawsuit representing current and former Black federal public servants, filed against the federal government and now involving nearly 1,300 individuals, says the government’s lawyers are attempting to delay proceedings by claiming the Black class action overlaps with other ongoing cases—an argument which he calls “insulting.”

“It’s not a secret, we’ve laid it out, we’ve argued it over and over in court. The government has one goal right now: do not let this matter go to court in September,” said Courtney Betty, a former Crown attorney at the federal Justice Department’s Toronto office in the early 1990s, who is leading the class action filed on Dec. 2, 2020.

In March 2021, The Hill Times reported that more than 520 class members had joined a proposed $900-milllion class-action lawsuit alleging decades-long government discrimination, lack of advancement opportunities, and harassment. As of Sept. 21, the number of class members had increased to 1,031, who are now seeking $2.5-billion in damages following an amendment to the claim made on May 13.

The number of class members has increased to 1,293, as of Feb. 28, according to Nicholas Marcus Thompson, who was among the first of the current and former federal employees who filed the class-action lawsuit as a representative plaintiff.

“The Crown’s argument really is that the government is facing a number of class-action lawsuits that raise the issue of systemic levels of discrimination against visible minority groups and racialized groups in government,” said Kofi Achampong, principal lawyer and government relations adviser with Achampong Law.

“Presumably, some of the pleadings in those class actions would cross over or would have some level of consistency with some of the pleadings in the Black class action lawsuit, and therefore it’s difficult for the government to determine who they are responding to in relation to the causes of action for racialized employees,” said Achampong, who is a lawyer and legal strategist for the class-action lawsuit.

“In essence, they are saying there is too much overlap,” he said.

Betty said the government “came up with a very creative argument,” calling it “insulting.”

“What the government says, is that any case in Canada … an Indigenous case, a woman’s case, could be any case—as long as there is racism and discrimination mentioned, then there’s an automatic overlap with the Black class action.”

“That argument carries no weight at all,” said Betty, who noted that this particular case deals with hiring and advancement within the public service.

“Our case is about the hiring and promotion of Black public service workers—there are no other cases that are out there that deals with the hiring and promotion of Black public service workers.”

“The reality is that the basis, the pith and substance of the Black class action, is really the unique experience that Black public servants have undergone across over 100 government departments,” said Achampong, adding that this is “the only legal action, the only class action in the history of Canada, that has ever explicitly sought to address that particular issue.”

Alain Belle-Isle, spokesperson for the Treasury Board Secretariat, said the Government of Canada “has no intention of delaying the certification hearing.”

“The parties in this case continue to discuss the best means of addressing the issue of overlapping claims with the Court, while also preparing for the certification hearing scheduled for September 2022,” wrote Belle-Isle in an emailed response to the The Hill Times. 

He reaffirmed the government’s commitment to creating a “diverse and inclusive public service free of discrimination, harassment and violence,” which was reflected in the most recent mandate letter to the president of the Treasury Board, Mona Fortier (Ottawa-Vanier, Ont).

The mandate letter for Treasury Board President Mona Fortier, pictured during a press conference on Jan. 25, 2021, cites the government’s commitment to a ‘diverse and inclusive public service free of discrimination, harassment and violence.’ 

Black employees ‘last to be hired, first to be fired’: law firm analysis

According to Betty’s legal firm, which has analyzed numbers regarding promotions and demographics within the federal public service, the number of “Black employees” within Natural Resources and the Department of National Defence (civilian staff), was less than two per cent.

In the Department of Justice, less than 20 individuals were appointed on an intermediate basis from 1970 to 2000 who were identified as “Black.”

In Fisheries and Oceans Canada, as of March 31, 2019,  the number of “Black employees” was less than one percent.

And for the 2005 to 2018 period, 35.4 per cent of “Black employees” within the federal public service received zero job promotions.

“What we’ve done is we’ve looked at 30 years of government data, and we’ve demonstrated that on a percentage basis, Black public service workers are the last to be hired, the first to be fired, last to be promoted,” said Betty, pointing to the above data analysis provided to The Hill Times.

“We’ve demonstrated that statistically, so with the harassment of the individual, none of that comes in,” said Betty. “It’s a data analysis case, there’s none of the other cases that are even similar to that.”

Thompson expressed his dismay that there’s “been no appointment in leadership positions” for Black employees in the public service in recent months.

“We’re still in the same position that we were in last year and the year before and the year before,” said Thompson, who added that the government is trying to create a mental health plan, are trying to create developmental opportunities under the mandate of the Treasury Board, “and have acknowledged all of things that we’ve raised as issues that exists for Black workers.”

“But in the courtroom, they are fighting to avoid having to pay for those damages,” said Thompson.

The leadership of the public service continues to remain “almost exclusively white,” said Thompson, as Black workers “continue to be at the bottom of the public service and racialized workers just above.”

“The work of eradicating bias, barriers, and discrimination demands an ongoing, relentless effort, said Belle-Isle. “We are committed to this effort and to using all available levers to improve the experiences of public servants, to ensure that they are able to realize their full potential, and for Canada’s public service to fully reflect the diversity of Canadians.”

Proceed on a ‘case-by-case basis,’ says Justice Gagné

Associate Chief Justice of the Federal Court Jocelyne Gagné said during a Feb. 16 hearing a motion to stay would need ‘substantial overlapping.’ 

The class action will be moving towards certification following a Federal Court justice’s direction for the government and the class action members to file additional documentation.

During the most recent court proceeding on Feb 16, Associate Chief Justice Jocelyne Gagné directed the plaintiffs to serve and file their additional submissions on the issue of overlapping with any other class action brought before the court no later than March 26.

Justice Gagné also directed the Crown to serve and file its record no later than June 29, with the plaintiff’s reply to be file no later than July 14. Certification hearing dates have been set for Sept. 21-23, 2022.

In the Feb. 16 hearing, Gagné said a meeting had taken place amongst the judges who were seized with other class actions, “however all of them, but the two last ones, which quite frankly have nothing to do with the issue before the court on this file—and I can tell you that at this point, it is the general view that these cases should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.”

“In my view, and in the view of many, a carriage motion or a motion to stay, I think you need substantial overlapping, which is absent here in these cases,” said Gagné.

“That said, I understand that the case before me is broader, and although encompasses only one group of people, it encompasses many departments of the government,” she said.

Source: Feds deny delay as lawyer in multi-billion-dollar Black bureaucrats’ class-action suit calls Crown’s ‘overlap’ arguments ‘insulting’

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2021 Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey Highlights Report

2022/03/02 Leave a comment

Overall, positive change from 2018

From the conclusion: 

The Public Service Commission of Canada is responsible for promoting and safeguarding a merit-based, representative and non-partisan public service that serves all Canadians. The 2021 Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey makes available detailed information on the perceptions of public servants regarding staffing, and their awareness of their obligations related to political impartiality.

The survey results reveal that:

  • employees’ views on merit, fairness and transparency have improved since 2018 
  • differences persist in employment equity groups’ perceptions of merit, fairness and transparency
  • employees’ awareness of obligations related to political impartiality remains high 
  • there is a need to raise hiring managers’ awareness of persons with a priority entitlement as a valuable source of qualified candidates
  • despite staffing during a pandemic, managers and staffing advisors expressed a high degree of confidence in their organizations’ ability to recruit needed staff

Federal public service organizations will need to take a hard look at these results, identify gaps and develop measures to address them. More in-depth analysis will help pinpoint how to address key areas that still need improvement.

Appendix A

Methodology 

Survey results are based on the responses of full-time indeterminate or term public service employees, including members of the regular Canadian Armed Forces and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who conduct staffing activities under the Public Service Employment Act. Part-time and seasonal employees, casuals, students, contractors, Governor-in-Council appointees and ministers’ exempt staff are excluded from this analysis. Responses of those who did not agree to share their data with the Public Service Commission of Canada are also excluded. The sample consists of 75 440 public service employees, including: 

  • 51 889 non-manager/supervisor employees (69% of respondents)
  • 23 444 managers/supervisors (31% of respondents) 
  • 633 staffing advisors (1% of respondents)

The 2021 survey response rate is 34.2% and the results are considered representative of the 234 757 federal public servants that are included in this broad definition. The data collection took place over a period of 9 weeks, between March 16, 2021, and May 14, 2021. For questions about their past experience, respondents were asked to refer to the previous 12 months, from March 16, 2020, to March 15, 2021 (for example, regarding the COVID-19 pandemic). 

As in the previous cycle of the survey, the 2021 survey frequently uses response categories that ask respondents the extent to which they agree with the question based on a 4-point scale: 

  • “Not at all”
  • “To a minimal extent”
  • “To a moderate extent”
  • “To a great extent”

In the rare exception where a question is posed negatively, the most positive response would be for those who say “not at all” or “to a minimal extent” and this is the result included. For simplicity, this report groups these results into 2 categories to highlight the share of respondents responding most affirmatively to a “moderate” or “great extent.” 

When drawing comparisons, it is important to note that in 2018, a 5-point scale was used for response categories for some questions mostly concentrated in the section on merit, fairness and transparency. For simplicity, the results for the unadjusted positive scores are reported for 2018 since more complex adjustments do not substantially alter the findings.

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May: Federal paymasters struggle to rise from Phoenix

2022/02/25 1 Comment

Ongoing so many years lager:

Thousands of workers are still owed money when they leave or retire from Canada’s public service, and some are still waiting years to get paid. Thousands more move to jobs in other departments and wait months, if not years, for their paperwork to catch up with them.

It’s been six years – and more than $1.4 billion in fixes – since the disastrous Phoenix launch. The government wanted the pay system to be stabilized this year, meaning the backlog of erroneous pay cases would be eliminated permanently. It’s not there yet.

The spotlight on the Phoenix fiasco all but disappeared when the pandemic took the national stage and the number of pay hardship cases fell. The errors that remain aren’t as egregious as they were in the early days when people were getting underpaid or overpaid massively, or not paid at all. However, despite improvements, a backlog of trouble remains.

The Office of the Auditor General found an overall error rate of 47 per cent in the pay of employees it sampled in 2020-21. That’s slightly lower than the 51 per cent error rate the prior year. It also flagged that 41 per cent still had pay errors waiting to be fixed at the end of the year – compared to 31 per cent the year before.

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With $910 million in funding in 2020, Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) put together a three-year plan to get rid of the backlog by December 2022.

The backlog-reduction strategy was built around using technology, boosting the productivity of pay advisers and reducing the volume of cases coming in. The idea is to help pay advisers plow through the flow of transactions every pay cycle and also have enough time to work on the backlog.

The size of the backlog steadily decreased for more than two years, from the peak in January 2018 of 384,000 transactions, to a low of 98,000 in April 2021. The number of people affected dropped. The pay centre also improved its wait times, meeting the service standard of dealing with most pay requests within 20 days at least 80 per cent of the time.

But then it started to backslide.

Phoenix’s processing started to hiccup and sputter for a couple of months before it inched back up throughout the summer and fall of 2021. The active backlog of transactions settled at 141,000 cases by late January 2022.

“When it comes to Phoenix, it is two steps forward, one step back. The backlog of outstanding transactions has reduced since 2016, but whenever a new collective agreement or MOU is signed, it slows down the progress,” said Dany Richard, president of the Association of Canadian Financial Officers.

PSPC officials argued the backslide was nothing more than the normal flux in the volume of work.

They said the number of transactions processed each month varies depending on the complexity of transactions, the pay centre’s capacity, any new collective agreements being implemented, and the normal seasonal spikes in demand, such as hiring summer students.

The size of the public service has also grown 24 per cent since 2015 and there’s been a considerable amount of churn – with people moving in and out of jobs, creating more transactions.

“Although we have made significant progress this past year in reducing the number of transactions in the backlog and queue from 2016-2020, we have seen an increase in new transactions received at the pay centre in 2021, which challenged our ability to reduce the backlog,” said PSPC spokesperson Michèle LaRose in an email.

Some say public servants, many safely working from home, aren’t complaining as loudly about pay errors when so many Canadians lost their jobs during the COVID-19 crisis. Some argue that unions backed off on Phoenix after winning $560 million in damages to compensate workers for pay gaffes. Others say public servants are now so used to pay errors that they have simply become inured to them.

“As the backlog of Phoenix pay issues continues to grow, it seems the government has quietly accepted that Phoenix can’t be fixed, “said Chris Aylward, president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada.”

“We’re nearing the six-year anniversary of the Phoenix fiasco, and thousands of workers are still having pay problems while waiting years for their previous issues to be resolved…Over the past few months, we’re seeing more and more members turn to us for help.”

The auditor general found that 141,100 employees had at least one outstanding “pay action request” last June, down from more than 182,000 in 2018.

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The improvements made to Phoenix came partly through technology, such as automating retroactive payments like backpay for 2018 collective agreements. Processes were streamlined, programs introduced to speed up processing of routine work. This was all aimed at freeing up pay advisers to be deployed on the backlog.

The next focus was the culture change around timeliness and accuracy, which should have happened before Phoenix was launched. Managers, human resource and employees had to learn how to manage pay differently. The old pay system could handle late transactions – largely because pay advisers manually fixed things. But Phoenix runs in real time and can’t digest late or after-the-fact transactions.

That cultural shift from late to on-time transactions is slowly taking hold but problems remain around the timeliness and accuracy of requests for terminations and transfers.

At last count, 30,000 terminations were waiting to be processed, either in the queue or dumped into the backlog after the 45-day service standard is missed. Terminations are issued for anyone who leaves the public service.

About 34 per cent of the cases in backlog are less than a year old, but 12 per cent are more than four years old and the rest are between one and four years old. Employees could be owed vacation pay, overtime, allowances and/or severance pay.

About 10,000 transfers are waiting to catch up with employees in their new departments. Those who move to new jobs with raises or promotions could wait months or years for that extra money to kick in – and then discover they have other pay adjustments such as higher pension premiums.

Overpayments are another headache. Departments are racing to recover salary overpayments to employees in 2016, when Phoenix went live. By law, the government has six years to collect salary overpayments from employees – after which they become unrecoverable and are written off as debt. The government has collected about $2.3 billion so far but has another $552 million to collect.

Sources familiar with Phoenix say the problems dogging the system can be fixed with more pay advisers. PSPC has already quadrupled its pay workforce— to about 2,500 people—since Phoenix was launched.

Source: Federal paymasters struggle to rise from Phoenix

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Regg Cohn: Pipeline protest or convoy blockade — police should apply the same standards to all illegal demonstrations

2022/02/21 Leave a comment

This really becomes a test of being consistent of not, one that applies to both the right and left. And if not, what should be the criteria for when a blockade is acceptable and when it is not (Brian Lee Crowley made similar points We undermine the neutrality of the law at our peril:

The belated liberation of Ottawa from occupation is a lesson.

The breaking of blockades at the borders is a primer.

They are refresher courses in the fragility of democracy and the rigour of the rule of law.

They are reminders that there is a fine line between the consent of the governed, the discontent of anti-government protesters, and the disinformation that fuels it.

How did we get there? Where do we go from here?

A couple of thousand protesters make up a mere 0.01 per cent of the 17.2 million Canadians who voted in the last election. When a tiny minority insists on imposing its will on our elected Parliament, they are dissenters from democracy.

Their written demands were to disband the government and replace it with their own convoy cabinet. Until they got their way, they’d stay — and for nearly a month, they called Canada’s bluff in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Through their determination and defiance, they exposed the emptiness of police threats and the hollowness of deterrence. Outnumbered and outmuscled, local police in Ottawa and Windsor had to call in reinforcements and regroup before they could reclaim lost territory and frontiers.

Declarations of emergency followed — first municipally, next provincially, finally federally. On Friday, as MPs tried to debate the latest measures, Parliament was suspended for the day because of urgent fears for their safety.

That this ragtag band of occupiers sang civil rights hymns, brandished bibles and soaked in hot tubs hardly lessens the gravity of the challenge. They ransomed the economy and entrapped a city while crying for freedom. They wielded captive children as human shields while boasting of their fearlessness.

There is a legitimate debate, in the aftermath, as to whether the disruption and disorder rose to the level of an emergency in strictly legal terms. Critics argue that the authorities had sufficient laws and tools to get the job done without special powers.

In ordinary times, the regular tool box should suffice. But in extraordinary times the tactics of conflict resolution, de-escalation and deterrence are merely theories without practical application — as Ottawa’s former police chief, Peter Sloly, discovered to his dismay after a career devoted to dialogue and community engagement while in Toronto’s force.SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Amid the disorder, the flow of cash (and bitcoin) continued apace and tow truck operators who normally converge on accidents were running for cover. The reality is that the regular playbook was insufficient to restore the rule book.

Critics of the emergency laws point to Toronto as the model of effective enforcement, noting that without special powers our police kept the convoys from becoming blockades at Queen’s Park. Full credit to Mayor John Tory and Toronto’s police chief for learning lessons from the failures in Ottawa and Windsor, mustering a show of force to enforce law and order.

By avoiding the mistake of being outnumbered, Toronto’s cops were not cornered — and therefore had no need of emergency laws to oust any occupiers. But there are glaring contradictions in this comparison.

Many who praise Toronto today for keeping the convoys at bay were harsh critics last year, accusing the city of deploying disproportionate force to remove illegal encampments that had persisted in public parks for more than a year. Most accounts at the time overstated the actual use of force while condemning the mere show of force.

Police were there to safeguard the city workers who did the actual evicting and escorting of the tent occupants — occupiers, if you will — to shelters. Most of the non-violent conflict arose between cops and outside supporters of the encampments (and in some cases photographers — a recurring question of rightful media access).

The argument from many self-styled progressives seems to be that occupying parks for years at a time is no big deal, because it doesn’t directly impede people or commerce. As if the urban planning imperative of public parks and right of access for all Torontonians is optional and dispensable depending on your politics.

Across the country, police have rightly been questioned for apparent hypocrisy — diligently enforcing court orders against earlier Indigenous protests, while turning a blind eye to the latest blockades. If the argument is that police were unacceptably inconsistent, that is incontestably true; but if the point is that two wrongs make a right — that illegality should be ignored equally everywhere — then it simply doesn’t add up.

Police should absolutely be consistent. They should break up occupations in Ottawa and blockades at the border, just as they should also end blockades of rail lines or pipelines that hold the economy hostage in similar ways.

That doesn’t mean police cannot use common sense and exercise discretion, for each demonstration is different in its own way. But all protesters share an unshakable belief that they are in the right and have been wronged.

If politicians pick and choose their favourite causes — as Conservative MPs did by meeting and greeting the Ottawa occupiers — we will privilege some protesters over others and be caught in the contradictions.

The quintessentially Canadian phrase, “Peace, order and good government,” is written into our Constitution and etched into our ethos. Those five words go hand in hand, until they don’t — and people take the law into their own hands.

Source: Pipeline protest or convoy blockade — police should apply the same standards to all illegal demonstrations

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Gurney: All these truckers, and no one at the wheel

2022/02/12 1 Comment

One of the better commentaries on the failure of political and bureaucratic foresight and leadership (although Friday federal and Ontario government showed some):

At time of writing — and, gosh, things have been moving fast today — Ottawa remains the site of a major protest, in several locations. The Ambassador Bridge, linking Windsor and Detroit, has been blockaded. Two other U.S-Canada border crossings have also been shut. The federal public-safety minister has said that the RCMP is sending reinforcements to the closed border crossings. We’ll see what we run out of first: Mounties or blockades. Or, given the threat to our supply lines, critical supplies.

I think the most important thing to understand about the convoy-protest crises now unfolding in this country is that many of our leaders are overwhelmed and confused by a situation that they were not prepared for. It has echoes of the beginning of the pandemic, right? In early 2020, we had weeks or even months of notice that something was happening in China, and then in the Middle East, and then in Europe, and then in North America, and then here. And right up until the moment we dropped the hammer for the first lockdown, the official position remained that the risk to Canada was low.

The protests now rocking Canada aren’t a virus. But it’s the same leaders — in many cases, literally the exact same people in the same roles in the same institutions — who yet again had early warning that something was brewing, had a pretty good idea of what was planned, and then were still stunned to find it happening in Ottawa. In conversations all this week with sources at both the provincial and federal level, I got the overwhelming sense that, while a full understanding that we are in a crisis is now taking firm root across our governments, there’s still a lot of confusion and denial among senior bureaucrats and elected officials. The information is there. They just can’t accept it yet. And, until they do, there’s no chance of action. 

Canada has been a blessed country for generations. There haven’t been major consequences, on a societal level, for a degree of unseriousness among our political leaders. As a country, we are rich, well-fed, militarily secure, and well-tended to by a health-care system that, at least pre-COVID-19, could have been a lot better but wasn’t terrible, overall. It was solidly decent. 

The problem with a degree of unseriousness is that the world can be a pretty serious place. Future historians will probably marvel at the complacency and mediocrity we tolerated and eventually grew to expect and accept as normal amid our political class and in the functions of government. But whatever conclusions they draw after all this, we’re stuck in it now. This is where we are, these are the problems we have, and you’ve all met the leaders we’re living with. So what do we do?

We have to accept their limitations. Most of our politicians today never imagined they’d be living through times like this. They wanted a bit of power and status in a happy, stable, wealthy peacetime country. Now they’re being asked to lead that country during an emergency. Not only is this not what they signed up for, but it’s also something they probably never even thought about before putting their name on a ballot. They probably aren’t the right people for this moment. Those who may have it within them are going to have to learn on the job and won’t have much help doing it. I don’t think most of our bureaucracy or political staffers are more up to speed on these compounding challenges than most of the elected leaders.

So all I can ask of them, all I can advise (beg?) them to do, is to try to remember that the public is looking to them to make the best decisions they can in the public interest. The public doesn’t care about partisanship right now — well, okay, fine, some of them do, because they want to make sure the blame lands on the other guy. But most of us just want to see our governments working together. Most of us don’t care about the mistakes that brought us here (or are at least willing to postpone the blame game and focus on solutions). And we really don’t want to see people buck-passing or hiding from hard decisions behind jurisdictional fig leaves. 

On Thursday, reports emerged that the Ontario government wasn’t sitting down with federal and municipal counterparts regarding the Ottawa situation, because the meetings “don’t accomplish anything.” Then show up, dammit, and pound the table and throw your shoes around the room and toss chairs through the window until something is accomplished. If the feds and Ottawa are too stunned to make a call, someone from Queen’s Park needs to take the wheel.

Or from Ottawa! Or from the federal government! Who cares?! Lock them in a room until someone discovers a spine and starts leading the effort. This is literally the least they could do — and the least they owe the people.

We need leaders now, not politicians content to avoid any action and let someone else take the blame. I’m not sure we have any. And it looks as if the so-called leaders at Queen’s Park won’t even show up. History is watching. Hell, the present is watching. You are all failing this latest challenge. Avoiding the meetings and shunting your calls right to voicemail isn’t politically savvy, guys. It’s just gutless. 

Source: All these truckers, and no one at the wheel

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The federal public service desperately needs renewal

2022/02/02 Leave a comment

Under-reported:

The 28th Annual Report to the Prime Minister on the Public Service of Canada was released on Dec. 13, two weeks after the throne speech, one day before the economic update, and three days before the prime minister’s mandate letters to his cabinet.

The thread that connects each of these major transition milestone documents is the impact of the pandemic, the response to it, and its long-term economic and health implications for Canada. This report addresses the same theme with a focus on the professional public service.

Admittedly, the annual report to the prime minister generates few headlines in the mainstream media. Nevertheless, the report is one of the few public communications between the clerk of the Privy Council and the prime minister in his role as head of the public service. It’s one of his three roles, including deputy minister to the prime minister and secretary to cabinet. The latter two seldom lend themselves to regular or even annual public disclosure.

In broad terms, the report acknowledges the relationship or “partnership” that exists between the elected government and the professional non-partisan public service. While governments may change, the permanent public service supports peaceful transitions from one political party to the next, as well as continuity of services to Canadians, and, indirectly, a measure of predictability that financial markets crave.

The role of the public service is an important one and seldom discussed in any great depth. The annual report on the “state of the public service” provides a measure of transparency to the public, parliamentarians, and civil society. The report usually touches on the dominant issues, challenges, and opportunities that faced the country the previous year, and how the public service responded. While the clerk often highlights significant achievements, such as accepting 50,000 Syrian refugees in 2016, it also acknowledges failures, such as the Phoenix pay system.

This year’s report (April 2020 to March 2021) covered the standard “boilerplate” information contained in annexes, including the composition of the public service, key demographics, and the public service’s more notable achievements and successes that both the prime minister and the public should know about.

The report also looks forward. It recommends doing more to improve diversity and inclusion in the public service, as well as harnessing the “lessons from the pandemic.”

“Like an elastic band, we stretched to support the government’s response to the pandemic,” reads the report. “As the pressure eases, and, in time, it will, the natural inclination will be to ‘snap back’ to our previous state. That should not happen.”

Such strident language by the head of the public service reveals that the pre-pandemic situation wasn’t working particularly well, and the “suspension” of certain rules and procedures was necessary to respond to the public-health crisis at hand.

Yet, it would be a mistake to believe this was a call for the “swashbuckling” days of an older era in Canada that likely never existed in the first place. The clerk notes the need to ensure that probity, risk assessment, transparency, and accountability not be set aside, but perhaps applied in new, less cumbersome ways.

It also recommends exploring the benefits of going fully digital and increasing remote workforces. Each area interconnects with collective agreements, real property, official-language requirements, and possibly employment equity. The Accountability Act, which passed in 2006, would likely need updating.

Taken together, questions posed by the clerk in his report to the prime minister amount to a robust agenda for public-service renewal. Yet no such ambition was referred to in the throne speech, the ministerial mandate letters, or the economic update.

It’s interesting to note that the last reference to public-service renewal in a speech from the throne was under prime minister Stephen Harper in 2013. Admittedly, he didn’t have a global pandemic to contend with, but he did have his fair share of global problems, including the economic crisis of 2008, deficit reduction, and international events requiring the deployment of the Canadian military. Harper nevertheless made space on his policy agenda for altering the public service.

If public-service renewal isn’t in Budget 2022, it probably won’t be on the 44th Parliament’s agenda. It will be interesting to see what next year’s Annual Report to the Prime Minister on the Public Service of Canada says about the issues raised in this one.

Stephen Van Dine is senior vice-president of public governance at the Institute on Governance.

Source: The federal public service desperately needs renewal

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Canadians’ health data are in a shambles

2021/12/10 2 Comments

Unfortunately, all too true, with too few exceptions, based upon my admittedly anecdotal experience in Ottawa:

Canadians see new and increasingly powerful computerization in almost every facet of their day-to-day lives – everywhere, that is, except for something as fundamental as our health care, where systems are too often stuck in the past.

When we go to the doctor, we get prescriptions printed on paper; lab results are sent via fax; and typically, medical offices have no direct links to any patient hospitalization data. And while the pandemic sparked a mad scramble to set up many new data systems – to track who was infected, where there were ventilators, who has been vaccinated and with which vaccine – this has happened in a largely unco-ordinated way, with Ottawa and provincial governments each developing systems separately.

As a result, even these newest computer systems are duplicative, and they do not communicate across provincial boundaries, or even within some provinces – not even, for example, to connect vaccinations, infections, the genotype of the virus, hospitalizations, other diseases and deaths so they are centrally accessible. And so Canada’s recent health-data efforts have wasted millions of dollars while failing to provide the evidence base needed for real-time effective responses to the fluctuating waves of COVID-19 infections..

This kind of failure is not new. Even before the pandemic, key kinds of data have long been imprisoned by data custodians who are excessively fearful of privacy breaches, even though the data are generally collected and stored in secure computer databases. A broad range of critical health care data remains unavailable – not only for patients’ direct clinical care, research and quality control, but also for tracking adverse drug reactions, showing unnecessary diagnostic imaging and drug over-prescribing. The result is that major inefficiencies in the systems remain hidden – and may actually cause health problems, and even deaths by medical misadventure.

There are many directions one could point the finger of blame, but as a new report from the Expert Advisory Committee to the Public Health Agency of Canada found, the root cause is a failure of governance. Federal and provincial governments have failed to agree on strong enforcement of common data standards and interoperability, though this is not only a problem of federalism. Health-data governance problems are also evident within provinces where one health agency’s data system is not connected to others within the same province.

What Canada and the provinces have now is essentially provider-centric health-data systems – not just one but many kinds for hospitals, others for primary care, and yet others still for public health. What Canadians want and need is patient- or person-centric health data. That way, no matter where you are in the country, your allergies, chronic diseases and prescriptions can be known instantly by care providers.

Private vendor-centric health-data software also pose a threat, as do data collected by powerful tech companies from new wearable technologies that offer to collect your health data for you. If Canada does not act swiftly and decisively to establish the needed governance, competing vendor software and individual data will continue the rapidly growing cacophony of proprietary standards. This trend is raising new concerns about privacy, along with untracked increases in health care costs.

The fundamental importance of standardized, interoperable, securely protected health data has been known for decades. There have been repeated efforts to achieve a modern effective health-data system for Canada. But federal cajoling and even financial incentives have failed. Much stronger governance mechanisms are required, and urgently, as the global pandemic has revealed.

The federal government has the constitutional authority to play a much stronger role, given its powers in spending, public health, statistics, as well as “peace, order and good government.” It also has readily available regulatory powers under the Canada Health Act.

Of course, high-quality data collection and data software have costs. But given the tens of billions of health care dollars the federal government is providing to the provinces through fiscal transfers, it is long past time they leveraged this clout – using both carrots and sticks – so Canadians can finally have informed, accessible health data when and where they need it most.

Michael Wolfson is a former assistant chief statistician at Statistics Canada, and a current member of the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics. Bartha Maria Knoppers is a professor, the Canada Research Chair in Law and Medicine, and director of the Centre of Genomics and Policy at McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine. They are both members of the Expert Advisory Group for the Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canadians-health-data-are-in-a-shambles/

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Ottawa, provinces must create agency to reform how health data is collected and used, report says

2021/12/01 Leave a comment

East to agree, hard to implement given provincial agreement needed. Even integration within a province is far from being implemented in a comprehensive manner:

The federal and provincial governments must create a national agency to set standards for the collection and sharing of health data to respond more quickly to threats such as pandemics and to improve patient care, a new report says.

The report, from a federal advisory group to be released on Tuesday, says governments across the country also need to change privacy laws to allow health records and data to be more easily shared – with patients, medical providers and public-health officials. That would require a significant culture shift away from a system that focuses solely on keeping data secure and private, and toward one that ensures health records and data can be used and shared safely.

The report says the systems across the country that aren’t standardized and can’t talk to each other have limited Canada’s ability to respond to COVID-19, including managing vaccines and tracking variants. More broadly, that reality is also hurting patient care, and could hamper the response to other health crises, the report says.

“We haven’t had this concept that people holding this data should be promoting its appropriate use, its timely use for the benefit of the individuals or for the entire population of Canada,” Vivek Goel, a public-health expert who chaired the review and is also president of the University of Waterloo, said in an interview.

The report is the second of three from the Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy Expert Advisory Group, which the federal government launched last year to examine data problems exposed by COVID-19. While the group’s work was spurred by the pandemic, its recommendations are far broader, and call for dramatic changes to how Canadians’ health data are stored and managed.

The report says the systems for managing health records, and the privacy laws that oversee them, were designed and created for paper records and haven’t sufficiently been updated for a primarily digital system.

Most people can’t access their own health records, which also aren’t readily available to health care providers as patients move through the system, the report says. The document calls for a “person-centric approach” that would give patients control of their records and allow all of their health care providers to access them easily and securely.

“An integrated, person-centric health data structure ensures that all health data follows an individual through the course of their life-long care,” the report says.

It adds that creating a national system would require governments to agree on standards to ensure those records can be accessed regardless of where a patient is or which doctor they see.

While the report does not make detailed recommendations about managing such a system, Dr. Goel said it should be overseen by a body controlled by Ottawa, the provinces and the territories that would recognize – and address – the reality that health care falls under provincial and territorial jurisdiction.

“We need an entity that is co-owned, co-managed, co-supervised by the federal, provincial and territorial governments together in setting those standards,” he said.

It would also require changes to privacy laws. The report says current privacy laws turn health care providers into “custodians” of data, which, in turn, creates a “privacy chill” that prompts them to restrict access even if not required. Instead, the report proposes a model of “data stewardship” that “champions data sharing, access, use and protection.”

Dr. Goel said a system that standardizes health data and facilitates sharing with officials and experts in other jurisdictions would help governments identify and track public-health threats such as infectious diseases including COVID-19. He said the pandemic revealed how ill-equipped federal, provincial and local health agencies were to gather and share data.

For example, he said as new variants of COVID-19 emerge, such as the Omicron variant that is dominating headlines, it is crucial to track who is getting sick and how transmission and patient outcomes are affected.

To do that effectively, health officials need access to information not just from their own provincial or local health unit, but the entire country. That doesn’t require the same system for everyone, just systems designed to communicate.

He compared it to the Interac network, which allows transactions to be tracked between banks even if they are all using different systems. “There are models that we can learn from the private sector.”

Dr. Goel said governments would need the public’s buy-in to increase data sharing in this way, but he thinks they can be persuaded. He says patients may actually be surprised to learn how little information is shared for wider public-health surveillance, such as the details they provide to COVID-19 contact tracers.

Ewan Affleck, a doctor and an expert in health informatics who sits on the advisory group, said he routinely runs into problems accessing his patients’ records from other providers or jurisdictions.

He treats patients in the Northwest Territories, which sends many people to Alberta for surgery and other procedures, but he often can’t access their information easily – or at all.

“I have no means of getting it because of jurisdictional legislation laws, privacy concerns, and this impairs my capacity to provide care,” Dr. Affleck said in an interview.

“So we make mistakes, and those mistakes damage Canadians. This is happening all the time.”

Dr. Affleck said the same issues hamper Canada’s ability to track and respond to population-level health issues such as pandemics.

“Whether it is guiding our response to COVID or whether we’re treating a patient for a urinary tract infection, this is all based on our adjudication of information,” he said.

“Digital health in Canada is legislated to fail. We have to change that model, because it’s an antiquated model from the age of paper-based information, which worked well then, but it works terribly now. And it is actually damaging Canadians.”

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ottawa-provinces-must-create-agency-to-reform-how-health-data-is/

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May: What are we losing with the elimination of our digital government minister?

2021/11/08 Leave a comment

Good discussion of some of the deeper issues and considerations, none of which are easy to address or resolve:

The Trudeau government’s decision to drop a digital government minister from the cabinet lineup comes when many argue just about everything on its agenda requires some kind of digital transformation to fix or implement.

Digital technology is central to tackling any policy issue whether it’s fighting the rest of the pandemic and rebuilding a shaken economy, climate change, child care, housing and Indigenous services. Digital tools are used to gather and mine data to develop policies, implement them and deliver services Canadians can use.

In fact, FWD50, an Ottawa conference of the world’s leading digital experts is virtually meeting this week to discuss using technology “to make society better for all.” They argue technology is policy. Can’t have one without the other.

The pandemic that forced thousands of bureaucrats to work remotely created a level of basic digital literacy so quickly that the Treasury Board is now rethinking policies around the future of work and modernizing technology.

So why is the government separating them with two ministers, one responsible for policy and the other in charge of technology?

Joyce Murray, Canada’s fourth digital government minister, was shuffled to Fisheries and Oceans with no one appointed to replace her. Her job appears to have been carved up between Treasury Board President Mona Fortier and Public Services and Procurement Minister Filomena Tassi.

The loss of digital cabinet clout is being criticized as a significant setback. It takes away much-needed political leadership, a single voice at the cabinet table and a focus to navigate a responsibility that is already fractured among too many players.

“We’re now living in a world where every policy issue is a digital issue,” said Ryan Androsoff, director of digital leadership programs at the Institute in Governance.

“Government can have the greatest policy ideas in the world, but if they can’t execute on them, it gets them nowhere,” he said. “Today, good delivery and execution inevitably means digital. It’s tough to imagine any area of government activity that won’t have some kind of technological underpinning to how policy is delivered and implemented.”

The decision came out of the blue for the technology industry, setting off concerns that the government is backing off from its digital strategy as progress toward a co-ordinated approach was being made. The government spends more than $7 billion a year on technology.

“A digital minister at least brought it to the forefront,” said Michele Lajeunesse, senior vice-president of government relations and policy at industry association TECHNATION.

“It showed government recognized a need to focus on its digital transformation… and I would say it progressed somewhat. The fear is this is taking a potentially major step back, and if the decision is to split it between TBS and PSPC (Public Services and Procurement Canada) will we be better off? We don’t think so.”

It also comes when the world is scrambling for tech talent in the face of a global shortage.

Countries like the U.S. and U.K. are bolstering the role of tech to better manage remote work, attract more tech workers and make sure citizens have easy online access to government services.

The head of the U.S. General Services Administration recently summed up the shift: “It’s super clear that bad delivery sinks good policy. To be able to deliver anything, we have to have the tech talent in the room at the beginning of the discussion, not bolted on at the end.”

Digital experts boil digital transformation down to technology, data, process and organizational change – and people with the skills in each are the lynchpins to make it work.

Murray, who was also the first standalone digital minister, launched a digital strategy with four overarching goals that the government isn’t close to achieving:

  • Modernize the way government replaces, builds and manages IT systems;
  • Provide services to people when and where they need them;
  • Co-ordinate the approach to digital operations;
  • Transform the way public servants work.

From the start, however, many argued the kind of big, transformational change that digital can bring requires a fundamental rethinking of the government’s rules and policies underpinning how public servants work – from human resources, staffing and hiring to budgeting and procurement.

Former treasury board president Scott Brison was the first to throw the spotlight on digital in the aftermath of the disastrous Phoenix pay system, which brought urgency to changing the way government does business and provides service to Canadians.

He successfully pressed to have digital minister included in his title, pitching a digital strategy as a way to improve the lives of Canadians and restore the trust and confidence they have lost in all governments.

But the success of the digital minister has been much debated.

Amanda Clarke, a digital and public management expert and associate professor at Carleton University, said the job had little clout, no effective carrot-and-stick to force change. The minister didn’t control contracting decisions on major modernization projects. And most of the powers to push needed reforms rest with Treasury Board.

“I don’t actually think it’s a strategic loss for the bigger movement,” said Clarke.

As digital minister, Murray had some key pieces of the government machinery. The biggest was Shared Services Canada, the giant IT agency that operates with a $2-billion budget and more than 7,000 employees.

The long-troubled agency redeemed itself with an almost overnight rollout of equipment, network access and digital tools so public servants could work remotely during the pandemic. It is being folded into PSPC, which some worry could shift its focus to procurement and compliance rather advancing the digital strategy.

She oversaw the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), which provides direction to departments on information management and technology. She also had the Canadian Digital Services, the U.S.-inspired swat team of tech geeks to tackle IT problems and harness digital to help departments design and build better services.

But there is a constellation of all the other departments and agencies, each of which had their own CIOs who report to their deputy ministers. Several executives from technology firms admit they didn’t even bother with the digital minister and went directly to departments where decisions are made on what to systems to upgrade or buy.

The government has yet to explain the rationale for dropping the cabinet post and the fate of digital strategy is expected to be answered in the ministers’ mandate letters. In a statement, Shared Services Canada said its mandate to accelerate digital transformation and build a more open, people-centric and resilient digital government will continue under PSPC.

Digital transformation requires leadership

Androsoff argues it’s political leadership, not bureaucrats, that has to drive changes in governance and accountability to make such sweeping changes happen.

“I think there has to be a recognition that… the governance structure we have for digital right now is not set up to deliver on results,” he said. “If the government is serious about trying to really change how government works for the digital era, it has to do some real thinking around how to put in place the type of authorities and decision-making structures that’s going to actually let change happen.”

But that takes time, and Clarke argues the talent crisis is the most urgent problem, and some changes could be made during the typical two-year governing window of a minority government.

Some of these reforms could dovetail with the Treasury Board’s planning for the future of work as pandemic restrictions are lifted and public servants can return to in-office work.

The government is widely expected to move to a hybrid workforce – a mix of employees working in office and remotely – to attract and retain talent, which could force a rethink of the hiring and classification policies.

That resonates with former privy council clerk Michael Wernick, who as Canada’s top bureaucrat pushed for a top-to-bottom structural reform – delayering, fewer levels of executives and a massive overhaul of its human resources regime, including reducing the 670 occupational groups and 80,000 rules that affect public servants’ pay.

The limits of the killer app

Wernick argues the government has made improvements to public-facing online services but can’t go much further without a deeper overhaul of back-end systems and how government works.

“The fork-in-the-road question is: are you going to continue to look for cool apps and outward-facing things we can do? Or are you going to deal with some of the deep structural issues in the public service?” he said.

Under the hood of some of those online services and apps are old mainframes and technology, some on the verge of collapse. And under that are the lumbering operational processes and procedures created by outdated rules and policies.

Right off the bat, Clarke argues the government needs new job titles and descriptions so departments can hire and develop the kind of in-house skills needed and wean off the IT consultants it spends billions of dollars on.

Job classifications for IT workers were written before the internet, and jobs like product managers and user-experience specialists didn’t exist. Job listings that describe positions designed for another era – which also scream a dated organization – hold no attraction for tech job seekers. They won’t apply.

“A lot of the problems we see with technology today in government are a people problem. When you don’t have people on staff who know how to design modern services, projects will fail,” said Clarke. “They also have to know how to be smart shoppers when it comes time to select partners and to procure new solutions.”

A multi-disciplinary team working on a new policy, for example, used to be not able to bring in IT workers to help figure out how to deliver the program to users because of an old rule that required IT workers to report only to CIOs. This also forced the team to recruit consultants from outside to advise them. That rule was changed, but the practice is still deeply rooted in departments.

And then there’s the months it takes to fill a job, which sends managers to the private sector, which can fill openings with consultants within days.

“This is how the rigidity of the classification becomes antithetical to good policy work,” said Clarke. “One of the best practices in modern digital government is bringing in experts around technology and implementation early in the policy design process so that you kind of set up the project for success.”

But Clarke said the government also has to get a handle on its over-reliance on outsourcing, which has hollowed out the skills of in-house IT staff. The government should track who gets contracts, how competitive they are and potential conflicts of interest. She said it’s shocking how many companies that worked on bungled or failed projects are then hired back to fix them.

The unions have fought IT contracting as too expensive, locking in the government to specific vendors and atrophying skills among in-house technical workers. A 2020 report found spending on IT consulting more than doubled between 2011 and 2018, when it hit $1.3 billion.

“Big projects are still business as usual. They’re still massive and they still involve these classic players who have their fingers all over every digital failure and yet keep getting hired by government to lead digital projects,” said Clarke. “It’s absolutely baffling.”

Source: https://irpp.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f538f283d07ef7057a628bed8&id=1261e9c10f&e=86cabdc518

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Canada’s Public Service Employee Survey: using advanced data analytics to focus workplace culture change

2021/11/05 2 Comments

Good to have more people like Philip Lillies looking at the Survey and probing the meaning of the findings, whether by organization or group, along with combining findings with the Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey (SNPS). More complex analysis than I can do!:

Since 2005, summaries of overall Public Service Employee Survey (PSES) results have been posted on the Government of Canada open portal. The summaries of overall results have facilitated the analysis of shortcomings in the culture of the workplace by human resource personnel, internal auditors, and researchers. Notably, two researchers, Andrew Griffith and Jake Cole have recently published in The Hill Times analyses that have complemented the summaries of overall results posted on the Government of Canada portal.

However, summaries of overall results have a glaring deficiency: they may indicate that corrective action is necessary, but they provide insufficient guidance as to what action might be most effective or which employee groups are most in need of this action. Comparison of variations across departments and across employee groups can make up for this insufficiency. These comparisons can be used to derive associations between responses; these associations often indicate the potential causes and consequences of the variations across groups. And causes and consequences are an important guide to action.

In 2020, I retired from my position as a senior internal auditor in the public service. During my first year of retirement, I have endeavoured to make up for shortcomings in the usual analysis tools by writing a Python program that had the capacity to use response variations to find associations between responses. It then attributed these associations to causes and consequences for particular departments and employee groups. In what follows, I build on the work of Griffith and Cole by presenting some examples of what I have found using my Python program.

Measuring and improving happiness

Cole states that the pandemic has been good for public service employees. According to him, “Whatever the reason, they are a happier bunch.” There are no questions about happiness in the PSES, but many experts, including Cole suggest that employee engagement is a good indicator of happiness. Under the theme of “engagement,” the PSES has seven questions. Across the entire public service, there are, nonetheless, variations in the level of engagement. By focusing corrective action on those groups that show the lowest scores to engagement questions and to associated questions, we can improve the efficiency of the corrective action.

So, from among these seven engagement-themed questions, here are the four that show the most variation across the public service:

  • Q11: Feeling valued at work.
  • Q50: Recommendation that my department is a great place to work.
  • Q51: Satisfied with my department or agency.
  • Q52: Prefer my workplace over others in the federal public service.

But to take focused corrective action we need to know which employees in which departments are suffering from lack of engagement. It turns out that there are eight departments that show below average scores in responses to these four questions. Questions associated with these four questions will be the questions from which we can derive causes and consequences and those groups with below average responses to these four questions will be the groups to which corrective action needs to be applied.

To take a concrete example, it turns out that border services employees are one of the most disengaged groups within the Canadian Border Services Agency and the potential causes of their disengagement can be found in the below-average scores of their responses to career-related questions, such as:

  • Q41: my department or agency does a good job of supporting employee career development.

Corrective action can be applied accordingly.

Combining results from two surveys

Another important government survey is the Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey (SNPS), which is also directed at employees, and publishes its results on the government’s open portal in a separate cycle to the PSES. Using Python to combine results from the two surveys is both trivial and insightful.

Table 1 lists the ethical questions that show a high variation in response scores when the SNPS is combined with the PSES. Associated with all of these questions from the PSES, except one, are two questions from the SNPS:

QALL_05D: The process of selecting a person for a position is done fairly.
QALL_05B: I believe that we hire people who can do the job.

Not only does the association of these questions with so many of the PSES ethical questions highlight the importance of the work of the Public Service Commission, which is responsible for staffing practices, but one would also be inclined to draw the conclusion that these SNPS questions are two important ethical questions that should be included in the PSES rather than the SNPS.

Table 1: Questions from the PSES with High Variation when SNPS is combined with PSES

Ethical workplace
Q19: Satisfactory resolution of interpersonal issues.
Q38: Know where to go for help on ethical issues.
Q39: Promotion of values and ethics.
Q40: No fear of reprisal.
Leadership: senior management
Q31: Leadership by ethical example.
Q32: Confidence in senior management.
Q33: Effectiveness and timeliness of decisions.
Q34: Effectiveness of essential information flows.
Harassment
Q60: Satisfactory harassment resolution.
Q61: Satisfactory harassment prevention program.
Discrimination
Q63-B: Discrimination from individuals with authority over me.
Q67: Satisfactory discrimination resolution.
Q68: Satisfactory discrimination prevention program.

Empowerment of Black employees

Griffith, in his November 2019 article, reaches the conclusion that Black employees are among the least empowered. His conclusion is based on the overall scores of Black employee responses to organizational culture indicators in the PSES 2019 survey. Interestingly, my Python program indicates that there are nine departments that show not only below average scores in responses to these empowerment questions, but also below average scores in their responses to questions associated with these questions. What is surprising is that among these nine departments are the Public Service Commission of Canada, the Military Police Complaints Commission of Canada, the Courts Administration Service, Canadian Human Rights Commission, the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. These are ethically oriented regulatory and research bodies that should be the first to understand the mechanisms and implications of discrimination; hence, should already be taking the necessary corrective actions. Perhaps, these results indicate that understanding is only a first step in overcoming discrimination, in which case discovering what corrective actions are required to go beyond understanding points to the need for further investigation.

Conclusion

I can only agree with Cole that the PSES provides a rich source of information that, if properly assessed and acted on, could result in positive changes for the employees and subsequently for the Canadians they are there to serve. However, assessment cannot be limited to discussion and comparison of overall results. As I hope the examples provided show, this rich source of information can only be fully exploited by making use of computerized data analytics techniques that highlight associations between responses and pinpoint employee groups where follow-up is needed. Nonetheless, associations should not be confused with definitive results; rather they should be taken as guidance for further assessment and investigation. Speaking from my own professional experience, I would say that the need for this informed cultural analysis provides an exciting opportunity for the next generation of internal auditors if they can rise to the challenge.

Source: Canada’s Public Service Employee Survey: using advanced data analytics to focus workplace culture change

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