May: Speaking truth to power discouraged in public service

2022/05/12 Leave a comment

Good summary of the report. Reminds me of the issues I faced at the DG level during the previous Conservative government (Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism).

The corrosive nature of much of social media makes today’s environment more difficult than even 10 years ago.

But one also has to recognize public servants have their own biases, that are harder to recognize when they align with those of the government, biases that can influence “fearless advice” and which temper how that advice is communicated:

Canada’s public service leaders have a problem telling the truth to their political bosses.

A new report, Top of Mind, says they feel ill-equipped to gather evidence for policy advice, especially in a world where facts are distorted and drowned out by disinformation, polarization and hyperpartisan politics.

To make matters worse, they appear afraid to tell their political masters the hard truths when they do find them.

Getting back to the basics in policy-making and execution are among the top worries that senior bureaucrats raised in the new study into the state of the public service In Canada. It was conducted by two think tanks, the Ottawa-based Institute on Governance (IOG), and the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University.

The study, launched in the middle of the pandemic, was aimed at understanding the challenges these executives face when doing their jobs, which is to provide reliable, well-run services for Canadians as well as policy advice to ministers. It was based on interviews with 42 senior leaders from all levels of government and a survey of 2,355 public servants in the same departments and agencies.

The big worries – which many felt were accelerated by the pandemic – included falling trust in government; the decline in sharing “fearless advice”; a hollowing out of policy capacity; a post-pandemic economic reckoning; conflicts between different levels of government; and the need for public service reform.

The report didn’t dig into the root causes, but the responses raise enough red flags to justify a debate and development of a roadmap for reform, said Stephen Van Dine, IOG’s senior vice-president, public governance.

“We have enough from this report to say we better be looking into this,” he said.

An impartial public service is a cornerstone of Canada’s democracy. Bureaucrats are supposed to speak truth to power. The ethos of “fearless advice and loyal implementation” is its motto, and public servants take an oath to uphold it when hired.

“The participants felt rational thought and evidence-based decision-making are being circumvented by politicization, polarization and disinformation,” said Van Dine.

“Do public servants have access to enough truth to give fearless advice? If all their information is coming from above rather than from networks in and outside government, how much truth is there really? What happened to the role of public education in the policy development process?”

The responses paint a picture of a bureaucracy that’s too isolated from Canadians and not independent enough from politics, said Van Dine.

Over the years, rules restricting travel and hospitality expenses put a damper on public servants’ ability to meet with provincial counterparts, industry representatives and civil society. They aren’t networking, developing contacts outside of government, or educating Canadians about the factors at play in policy-making.

“This has isolated the public service from the outside world and given the outside world the only door into government, which is through the Prime Minister’s Office or a minister’s office,” said Van Dine.

But public servants need new skills and modern technology. They need people who think digital, understand systems, analytics, data and can manage projects. That means attracting people to government and hiring them more quickly than the eight months it takes now.

All of this is having an impact on a long-strained relationship between public servants and ministers. Two-thirds of respondents said that relationship was “an important challenge that requires more effective management.”

Many respondents said the relationship is being eaten away by the “over-politicization of policy-making and choices, and the lack of opportunity to constructively challenge political direction.”

The report concluded that “speaking truth to power…seems less achievable to many participants.” Bureaucrats don’t have “safe spaces” among themselves to have all-out debates about analysis or options that “are unpopular“ or “not in tune with their government’s political position.”

Instead, they are expected to toe the party line and give politicians the advice they want to hear.

It’s unclear why. Is it because the deputy ministers aren’t encouraging dissent? Are bureaucrats holding back for fear of falling out of favour with their bosses or being seen as disrespectful?

“The strong undercurrent is that the public service has lost an element of independence and is now expected to deliver on platform commitments rather than offer objective policy advice on the feasibility of the commitment or alternative ways to achieve the objective of the platform commitment,” said the report.

This is an old problem.

Experts sounded the alarm more than 25 years ago about public servants’ hesitancy to speak to truth to power. It led to the 1996 Tait report, the foundation of the public service’s values and ethics code.

Donald Savoie, a leading public administration expert, has repeatedly warned that the concentration of power in the Prime Minister’s Office is politicizing the public service. He likened it to “court government” where senior officials act like courtiers trying to ingratiate themselves, rather than delivering hard truths.

The Gomery inquiry concluded that a grey zone between bureaucrats and politicians was at the heart of the sponsorship scandal and recommended ways to reset it.

The late auditor general Michael Ferguson famously linked the Phoenix pay system disaster to a risk-averse and “obedient public service.” He concluded that the “ability to convey hard truths has eroded, as has the willingness of senior levels—including ministers—to hear hard truths.”

Despite these warnings, little has been done to fix the problem. The Harper government introduced the Federal Accountability Actin response to the sponsorship scandal, but many experts argue its focus on rules, oversight and compliance made matters worse.

Today’s deputy ministers climbed the ranks over the 20 years since the sponsorship scandal and the Federal Accountability Act is the world they know. Many argue they got to the top because of their skills in dodging risks, following the rules and keeping government out of trouble.

In the new Top of Mind report, it is unclear how a lack of fearless advice is “cascading” down the ranks. Van Dine worries that assistant deputy ministers aren’t speaking up as they should now that Public Service Commission has turned over “talent management” to the deputy ministers who appoint them.

“Now the deputy minister is holding all the cards about promotion and appointment… To what extent are they becoming more deputy servants than public servants?” he asks.

The Harper era is also when public servants found themselves drawn into partisan communications with directives, events, activities and website designs to promote the Conservative Party brand.

Today, some respondents worry that a focus on communications is supplanting policy. The current focus is on how a policy will play out or how its “messaging” will be received by Canadians, rather than getting to the nub of the issues the government wants to address.

“Make stuff less about the announcements and actually make it about the issue,” said one leader, quoted in the report. “Communicate with Canadians on that front—what is the problem you are trying to fix here?… People have the basics wrong, and it leads to bad discord.”

The Top of Mind report makes a series of recommendations that could lead to a top-to-bottom overhaul of the federal public service.

At the top of the list is a proposal for a joint Senate-Commons committee to review the Accountability Act, zeroing in on whether its onerous compliance and reporting requirements stifle innovation and create an obedience culture.

The paper also recommended modernizing the ground rules for relationships between bureaucrats and politicians and examining what’s needed for public servants to create “safe spaces for fearless advice,” so they can provide facts, analysis and policy options that don’t toe the government’s party line.

Source: Speaking truth to power discouraged in public service

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Sarantakis: Taking data seriously: A call to public administrators

2022/05/04 Leave a comment

Important flagging of the importance of data for governments and how governments increasingly lag the private sector in their collection, analysis and use of data and AI to understand citizen needs.

However striking that a senior official would make the case without acknowledging the challenge in doing do for the public sector given that each time the government does so, significant criticism occurs, whether it be for IRCC’s use of the Chinook system, Statistics Canada use of anonymized credit card information to understand consumer spending, or PHAC’s collection of anonymized COVID phone data.

Perhaps a second piece on this harder issue?

It is said that the first step in overcoming a problem is first admitting its existence. So, here goes: Contemporary public administration is data-challenged.

This would have been an implausible statement to utter, historically. After all, public administrators as individuals know how important data is to public policy formulation and program delivery. Public administration has proved its worth over time with the value of record-keeping, and creating and using data — recording, ordering, sorting and tabulating counts of people, forests, geography, geology, tanks, guns and things like the production of butter.

Indeed, the two great and insatiable needs of the early state, formulated by Yale scholar James C. Scott, were taxation and conscription. Without revenues and the capacity to pay to defend sovereignty, states are not durable. In turn, without public administrators recording, ordering, sorting and tabulating data, the state does not endure.

Historically, public administration has been on the cutting edge of data. Entities often went to various state organs and state registries for data. The public service apparatus of the state knew, even in the state formed explicitly to curb government involvement in the daily affairs of its citizens.

But something dramatic has happened. The administrative state – that part of government that continues regardless of whether elections yield majorities or minorities that are red, blue, orange, green, or purple – is no longer on the cutting edge of data. Yes, the state still knows, but often it only now knows after, while private sector entities know now. Even more powerfully, with predictive analytics, sophisticated private entities increasingly know before.

How can we understand this switch? How can we understand public administration losing its historical position of relative data supremacy? To do that, we need to detour from public administration for a moment and veer into the private-sector economy. What we find gives us important clues to our mystery vis-à-vis data and public administration.

The factors of production 

Since Adam Smith, we have understood three core factors of production: land, labour and capital. There are others that have competed to be added to this list. Channeling Peter Drucker, some have argued for “management” – those who directresources. Others have argued for “entrepreneurs” – those who combine resources in new and innovative ways. But Smith’s formulation has proven remarkably durable for more than two centuries.

If Smith were to return and look at some of the most valuable and dynamic corporations of our era – the digital giants Google, Meta (formerly Facebook), Amazon, Apple, Spotify and others – he would likely be mystified. Yes, he would see some land. Yes, he would see some labour. But nowhere near enough to justify the heady heights – and incredible influence and power – of the digital giants. Finally, he would also see some capital. But remarkably, that capital would largely be a by-product of “production,” and not a driver of production.

Seeing the most valuable and powerful entities on earth during his era, Smith would have seen people – lots and lots of labour. He would have seen land. He would have seen capital in the form of constructed ships, and tools, and extracted then refined natural resources. He would have seen stuff – tangible things that he could touch.

But the contemporary Adam Smith would see negligible amounts of people and land in today’s largest companies. Certainly nothing approaching their value, status or their power. These companies, perhaps most surprisingly of all, “consume” relatively little capital.

So if you are generating enormous profits but not drawing heavily on the “factors of production” …. something makes no sense. What is going on?

Brains? Computers? Digital? Algorithms? Cloud computing?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and lots more.

But fundamentally, what is going on now is the fourth factor of production.

Data.

Data as differentiator 

Data has now become the most valuable commodity on earth. Data stocks are more valuable than natural resources. Data is more valuable than manufacturing facilities; more valuable than land; more valuable than labour. Data – the new oil? Oil should be so lucky.

Why?

Data is now the differentiator. Data is now the value-add. As computers, software, micro-processing power, storage, cloud computing and algorithms all become (or all trend toward) commodity status, it is the quantity and quality of data that will transform the mediocre into the successful.

A commodity is an interchangeable and undistinguished part. Where I buy a barrel of oil or a bar of gold or a truck load of gravel or road salt is overwhelmingly just price-contingent. The lowest price wins. To avoid becoming a commodity in data – valued only for how cheaply you can deliver something – you need more and better data than the competition. Increasingly, if you are data-deficient, you will not be competitive or sustainable as an entity.

Put another way, Company A and Company B already compete based on the quantity and the quality of their data. This will also increasingly be true in the coming years for Country A and Country B. Countries have competed forever for oil and gas and timber and nickel. Now they are also adding “quantity and quality of data” to that list of competitions.

Spotify is a data company that deals in music. Netflix is a data company that deals in entertainment. Tesla is a data company on wheels. Google is a data company that deals in information. Amazon is a data company that provides many things – same with Instagram, same with Facebook.

Computing, computation, communication, software, digital distribution – all are, or are rapidly becoming – commodities. Algorithms still have differentiating value, but as advances in artificial intelligence continue, these as well will also invariably trend to commodity status. What really adds value in production increasingly is the quality and quantity of data.

Data and public administration

What does all this have to do with public administration? At first glance, perhaps nothing. But on closer examination, a great deal.

The digital giants became digital giants because they understood – before others – the enormous value of enormous quantities of data. They understood – like the early state understood the power of knowing the quantity and location of trees and people and minerals – that data is power.

As Shoshana Zuboff expertly describes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, data becomes the nexus of power. But the power of data in the contemporary age isn’t about counting trees and people, it is rather about the “instrumentalization of behavior for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetization, and control.”

Contemporary public administration, which traces its very heritage back to data, is far less sophisticated in data today than the digital giants. Data is not utilized for public good applications anywhere near the degree to which data is utilized for commercial gain.

Over time, that will harm us all because the public-good realm will have less access to rich data than the private profit realm. Over time, that will make public administration a dinosaur. We need to better understand the power and application of data.

Public administration and real-time actionable data

States often revert to using blunt policy instruments because public administrations do not have the granularity of data – in real time – that is available to the digital giants. When you don’t have real-time actionable data, you estimate. You ask people to apply. You create programs with criteria instead of directly apply funding to public policy objectives.

That worked for a world when real-time actionable data either did not exist or was enormously expensive to actualize. But that is not today’s world. The percentage of the economy migrating online is growing every day, and the online economy has grown much faster than the analog economy in recent years. But something else is happening, too. With the internet of things(IoT), our toasters and our refrigerators and our lightbulbs and our ventilation systems and our water treatment plants and our garage doors and our pacemakers are all migrating online. The enormous oceans of data we have today will, in a few very short years, look like little trickles of water when the IoT begins to take hold in full flight.

Public administration is already behind. Imagine what happens when the volume of data being generated every moment of every day by billions of connected things across the globe increases at an even faster rate.

Does public administration understand the power of data? Do we understand how to use it to serve public policy goals? Do we understand how to regulate it for the public good? Do we have the systems in place to capture data? Do we have the systems in place to safeguard data? Do we have the systems in place to safeguard its use by non-state actors?

These are the many questions facing public administration today. The faster we get the answers, the better public administrators will be able to serve their political decision-makers and their state populations.

Time is not our friend on these questions.

Source: Taking data seriously: A call to public administrators

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Sears: Canada faces great challenges. We needs more independent, creative policy thinkers to address them

2022/04/06 Leave a comment

Not quite as bleak as presented but does flag some real weaknesses including policy diversity:

Canada faces policy challenges today that are broader and more complex than perhaps ever in our history. Several are well-known: climate, health care and the next contagion, sliding productivity and widening inequality. Each will be expensive to tackle, and all will require great creativity to address.

In the U.S., the U.K. and Europe much of that thinking is done by an array of policy think tanks. We have a few, and some of those we have are far too predictable. One need not do more than read the headline on a C.D. Howe Institute economic report to know what the next 5,000 words of analysis and recommendations will be. The Fraser Institute’s views on private health care, climate change and lower taxes have been repeated hundreds of times with changes only to the names and dates.

Two of Canada’s political parties have policy think tanks that are aligned philosophically, but independent in their prescriptions. The Manning Centre (now the Canada Strong and Free Network) was an important ginger group of new conservative thinking in the Harper years, though it appears to have lost a great deal of energy since the departure of its founder Preston Manning.

Canadian conservatives desperately need a bold centre for testing policy if they are to return to being a party of government. It has long failed to elaborate a credible conservative agenda for action on any of the tough issues. Ken Boessenkool’s Conservatives for Clean Growth may be a valuable new player on climate, perhaps one that will inspire new groups on other priorities.

Curiously, the Liberal party has several times failed in its efforts to create a similar centre to feed its need for creative new centrist thinking. The gap is evident in areas such as security policy, wealth inequality and growth through innovation. The obstacle maybe the number of Liberal thinkers who are parked in the academy or in non-partisan centres such as the Institute for Research on Public Policy, who don’t fancy a new competitor.

The least likely of the three national parties, in terms of resources, has three policy centres. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives was created by New Democrats and labour more than 40 years ago, and regularly serves up new progressive policy proposals. The Douglas Coldwell Layton Foundation, recently revived under former Jack Layton staffers Karl Belanger and Josh Bizjak, is plunging into new policy research. But it is the youngest of the three that shows the greatest strength and communications skill.

The Broadbent Institute is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. It staged its Progress Summit this week, returning to its regular cycle of policy conferences, training sessions and research. Alone among any of the big institutes, it also runs its own media business, Press Progress. Key to its success has been finding the right balance between being a forum for new and often dissenting progressive voices, and for party loyalty. New executive director Jen Hassum brings a formidable reputation as an organizer and communications strategist.

All governments need external nudges (and occasionally shoves) to keep them out of policy ruts, or from repeating the same mistakes. Our governments today need broader and richer sources of policy innovation than ever before. The academy is curiously weak in experts who bring creative thinking combined with an understanding of tough political realities. Too many of the civil society organizations who do sponsor research promote only their own agenda. Many of the health charities are especially guilty of this.

This week, the government released its “new” climate agenda. Apart from the fact much of it was announced many times before, it was short of implementation details. Fortunately, on this file we are well served by an array of independent climate policy experts. But it’s been over two decades since we last had a serious discussion on national security; Ukraine has revealed the cost of that failure. And health care is desperately in need of bold action, not just new funding.

We need more creative thinkers and new think tanks to make all that happen.

Source: Canada faces great challenges. We needs more independent, creative policy thinkers to address them

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Immigration Canada acts to end racism, cultural bias among employees

2022/04/04 Leave a comment

Of note:

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is conducting a study to explore potential cultural bias shown by its employees when it comes to processing visa applications at the country’s points of entry, according to a department spokesperson.

The study comes in response to a survey examining workplace racism at IRCC released last year that revealed multiple reports of racist “microagressions” by employees and supervisors.

Participants interviewed said that some of the overt and subtle racism they have witnessed by both employees and decision makers at IRCC “can and probably must impact case processing.”

The department has also made it mandatory for employees and executives to take unconscious bias training, and instituted a requirement for senior staff to take a specific course on inclusive hiring practices as a prerequisite for obtaining their delegated authority to sign financial and staffing decisions.

In addition, said spokesperson Jeffrey MacDonald, IRCC is appointing anti-racism representatives in each sector of the department to support the work of a newly-established Anti-Racism Task Force and has created a Black Employee Network to ensure Black voices are heard in driving change.

“We must actively fight racism and continue to work tirelessly to foster a culture of inclusion, diversity, and respect…but actions speak louder than words,” MacDonald told New Canadian Media through email.

MacDonald said IRCC will be hiring an independent firm to do an Employment System Review (ESR). The ESR will identify new solutions in core areas such as people management practices and accountability.

IRCC also plans to release its Anti-Racism Strategy and action plan later this year.

IRCC’s steps to combat racism and cultural bias come in the wake of critics arguing that that’s precisely what is contributing to a growing backlog of visa applications while exacerbating issues of racial discrimination and harassment in the workplace.

Jasraj Singh Hallan, a Calgary-area MP who serves as the Conservative Party’s shadow minister on immigration, told NCM the IRCC isn’t only plagued with racism and cultural bias when dealing with visa applications, but it is also struggling to stamp out racist workplace behaviour.

“I have been asking IRCC for several months now to reveal the number of disciplinary actions and investigations it has taken against employees, but have been unable to get answers,” he told NCM.

“The impact of racism and cultural bias in IRCC is contributing to massive backlogs in visa applications, refugee processing times and increased cost to the taxpayer.” The latest IRCC numbers show there are 1.84 million people waiting on decisions in its inventory as of mid-March.

Even as Canada struggles to address the processing delays, the country’s 2022–2024 Immigration Levels Plan aims to continue welcoming immigrants at a rate of about one per cent of Canada’s population. This includes 431,645 permanent residents in 2022 (an increase of about 21,000 people from its original plan), 447,055 in 2023, and 451,000 in 2024.

Respondents to the survey released last year pointed to the differences in visa refusal rates by country as an indicator that some form of bias must be at play.

The study also showed there’s growing concern that increased automation of visa processing will embed racially discriminatory practices in a way that will be harder to see over time.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) has filed a policy grievance against IRCC on behalf of the Canada Employment and Immigration Union (CEIU) based on the disproportionate and adverse treatment of racialized members.

The grievance was filed on March 15, ahead of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

“In this case, IRCC has shown they are incapable or unwilling to proactively address issues of racial discrimination and harassment when they arise, such as excluding racialized employees from hiring and promotional opportunities,” said the PSAC.

PSAC and CEIU are seeking several corrective and concrete measures to eliminate discrimination in the workplace and prevent discriminatory practices in the future. The unions are also calling for all affected members to receive compensation for damages.

PSAC is also supporting a Black Class Action Lawsuit brought by 12 federal public service workers, who identify as Black, Caribbean or of African descent.

The lawsuit reaches back 50 years, arguing the federal government perpetuated Black employee exclusion: the systemic practice of limiting skilled Black workers from career advancement opportunities.

The lawsuit has now grown to represent 1,300 plaintiffs, including past and present IRCC employees, who are seeking over $2.5 billion in damages.

Meanwhile, an internal IRCC memo, obtained by Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, shows that taxpayers are doling out between $9,915 and $33,738 depending on the determination of the eligibility of an asylum claim.

“The lower cost is incurred in cases where the asylum claim is accepted at the first hearing, while the higher cost relates to claims which are initially denied, and the claimant exhausts all appeal options and is ultimately removed from Canada,” the memo stated.

“You can expect the processing costs to go up given the increasing backlog,” Kurland told NCM.

“When the government doesn’t put in the necessary resources to process applications properly and in a timely fashion, Canadians end up paying for it anyway,” Kwan told NCM.

Kwan noted that in 2021, 23 per cent of appeals of Refugee Protection Division (RPD) decisions were overturned by the Refugee Appeals Division (RAD), with an additional 8.5 per cent sent back to the RPD to reassess their decision.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​The Refugee Appeal Division decides appeals of decisions of the Refugee Protection Division to allow or reject claims for refugee protection. A person whose claim is rejected by the RPD can ask the RAD to review this decision to assess whether the RPD was wrong.

“That’s a very high error rate and this doesn’t include federal reviews which will uncover even more judgement errors,” said Kwan.

Source: Immigration Canada acts to end racism, cultural bias among employees

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Cuts in Britain Could Cause a Covid Data Drought

2022/04/04 Leave a comment

Unfortunately, many governments are short sighted.

Canada did the same when it disbanded the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) the year before the pandemic, many provinces are no longer carrying out regular testing and reducing the frequency of reporting etc.

Interesting example of South Africa and how it is able to maintain monitoring at a reasonable cost:

The British government on Friday shut down or scaled back a number of its Covid surveillance programs, curtailing the collection of data that the United States and many other countries had come to rely on to understand the threat posed by emerging variants and the effectiveness of vaccines. Denmark, too, renowned for insights from its comprehensive tests, has drastically cut back on its virus tracking efforts in recent months.

As more countries loosen their policies toward living with Covid rather than snuffing it out, health experts worry that monitoring systems will become weaker, making it more difficult to predict new surges and to make sense of emerging variants.

“Things are going to get harder now,” Samuel Scarpino, a managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, said. “And right as things get hard, we’re dialing back the data systems.”

Since the Alpha variant emerged in the fall of 2020, Britain has served as a bellwether, tracking that variant as well as Delta and Omicron before they arrived in the United States. After a slow start, American genomic surveillance efforts have steadily improved with a modest increase in funding.

“This might actually put the U.S. in more of a leadership position,” said Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

At the start of the pandemic, Britain was especially well prepared to set up a world-class virus tracking program. The country was already home to many experts on virus evolution, it had large labs ready to sequence viral genes, and it could link that sequencing to electronic records from its National Health Service.

In March 2020, British researchers created a consortium to sequence as many viral genomes as they could lay hands on. Some samples came from tests that people took when they felt ill, others came from hospitals, and still others came from national surveys.

That last category was especially important, experts said. By testing hundreds of thousands of people at random each month, the researchers could detect new variants and outbreaks among people who didn’t even know they were sick, rather than waiting for tests to come from clinics or hospitals.

“The community testing has been the most rapid indicator of changes to the epidemic, and it’s also been the most rapid indicator of the appearance of new variants,” said Christophe Fraser, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford. “It’s really the key tool.”

By late 2020, Britain was performing genomic sequencing on thousands of virus samples a week from surveys and tests, supplying online databases with more than half of the world’s coronavirus genomes. That December, this data allowed researchers to identify Alpha, the first coronavirus variant, in an outbreak in southeastern England.

A few other countries stood out for their efforts to track the virus’s evolution. Denmark set up an ambitious system for sequencing most of its positive coronavirus tests. Israel combined viral tracking with aggressive vaccination, quickly producing evidence last summer that the vaccines were becoming less effective — data that other countries leaned on in their decision to approve boosters.

But Britain remained the exemplar in not only sequencing viral genomes, but combining that information with medical records and epidemiology to make sense of the variants.

“The U.K. really set itself up to give information to the whole world,” said Jeffrey Barrett, the former director of the Covid-19 Genomics Initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Britain.

Even in the past few weeks, Britain’s surveillance systems were giving the world crucial information about the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron. British researchers established that the variant does not pose a greater risk of hospitalization than other forms of Omicron but is more transmissible.

On Friday, two of the country’s routine virus surveys were shut down and a third was scaled back, baffling Dr. Fraser and many other researchers, particularly when those surveys now show that Britain’s Covid infection rates are estimated to have reached a record high: one in 13 people. The government also stopped paying for free tests, and either canceled or paused contact-tracing apps and sewage sampling programs.

“I don’t understand what the strategy is, to put together these very large instruments and then dismantle them,” Dr. Fraser said.

The cuts have come as Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called for Britain to “learn to live with this virus.” When the government released its plans in February, it pointed to the success of the country’s vaccination program and the high costs of various virus programs. Although it would be scaling back surveillance, it said, “the government will continue to monitor cases, in hospital settings in particular, including using genomic sequencing, which will allow some insights into the evolution of the virus.”

It’s true that life with Covid is different now than it was back in the spring of 2020. Vaccines drastically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death — at least in countries that have vaccinated enough people. Antiviral pills and other treatments can further blunt Covid’s devastation, although they’re still in short supply in much of the world.

Supplying free tests and running large-scale surveys is expensive, Dr. Barrett acknowledged, and after two years, it made sense that countries would look for ways to curb spending. “I do understand it’s a tricky position for governments,” he said.

But he expressed worry that cutting back too far on genomic surveillance would leave Britain unprepared for a new variant. “You don’t want to be blind on that,” he said

With a reduction in testing, Steven Paterson, a geneticist at the University of Liverpool, pointed out that Britain will have fewer viruses to sequence. He estimated the sequencing output could drop by 80 percent.

“Whichever way you look at it, it’s going to lead very much to a degradation of the insight that we can have, either into the numbers of infections, or our ability to spot new variants as they come through,” Dr. Paterson said.

Experts warned that it will be difficult to restart surveillance programs of the coronavirus, known formally as SARS-CoV-2, when a new variant emerges.

“If there’s one thing we know about SARS-CoV-2, it’s that it always surprises us,” said Paul Elliott, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London and a lead investigator on one of the community surveys being cut. “Things can change really, really quickly.”

Other countries are also applying a live-with-Covid philosophy to their surveillance. Denmark’s testing rate has dropped nearly 90 percent from its January peak. The Danish government announced on March 10 that tests would be required only for certain medical reasons, such as pregnancy.

Astrid Iversen, an Oxford virologist who has consulted for the Danish government, expressed worry that the country was trying to convince itself the pandemic was over. “The virus hasn’t gotten the email,” she said.

With the drop in testing, she said, the daily case count in Denmark doesn’t reflect the true state of the pandemic as well as before. But the country is ramping up widespread testing of wastewater, which might work well enough to monitor new variants. If the wastewater revealed an alarming spike, the country could start its testing again.

“I feel confident that Denmark will be able to scale up,” she said.

Israel has also seen a drastic drop in testing, but Ran Balicer, the director of the Clalit Research Institute, said the country’s health care systems will continue to track variants and monitor the effectiveness of vaccines. “For us, living with Covid does not mean ignoring Covid,” he said.

While Britain and Denmark have been cutting back on surveillance, one country offers a model of robust-yet-affordable virus monitoring: South Africa.

South Africa rose to prominence in November, when researchers there first discovered Omicron. The feat was all the more impressive given that the country sequences only a few hundred virus genomes a week.

Tulio de Oliveira, the director of South Africa’s Centre for Epidemic Response & Innovation, credited the design of the survey for its success. He and his colleagues randomly pick out test results from every province across the country to sequence. That method ensures that a bias in their survey doesn’t lead them to miss something important.

It also means that they run much leaner operations than those of richer countries. Since its start in early 2020, the survey has cost just $2.1 million. “It’s much more sustainable,” Dr. de Oliveira said.

In contrast, many countries in Africa and Asia have yet to start any substantial sequencing. “We are blind to many parts of the world,” said Elodie Ghedin, a viral genomics expert at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The United States has traveled a course of its own. In early 2021, when the Alpha variant swept across the country, American researchers were sequencing only a tiny fraction of positive Covid tests. “We were far behind Britain,” Dr. Ghedin said.

Since then, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has helped state and local public health departments start doing their own sequencing of virus genomes. While countries like Britain and Denmark pull back on surveillance, the United States is still ramping up its efforts. Last month, the C.D.C. announced a $185 million initiative to support sequencing centers at universities.

Still, budget fights in Washington are bringing uncertainty to the country’s long-term surveillance. And the United States faces obstacles that other wealthy countries don’t.

Without a national health care system, the country cannot link each virus sample with a person’s medical records. And the United States has not set up a regularly updated national survey of the sort that has served the United Kingdom and South Africa so well.

“All scientists would love it if we had something like that,” Dr. Ghedin said. “But we have to work with the confines of our system.”

Source: Cuts in Britain Could Cause a Covid Data Drought

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Should it stay or go? Ottawa weighs the vaccine mandate for the public service

2022/03/29 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see what government decides and whether it is applied consistently across departments and organizations:

The timing and pace of return-to-office plans for Canada’s public servants will hinge on what the federal government decides to do with its vaccine mandate for employees.

The federal Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer is leading a review into the six-month-old mandate, seeking input from unions and other stakeholders, but a decision will be based on the advice of public-health officials. The results of the review will be given to Treasury Board President Mona Fortier.

While the review had to start by the six-month anniversary on April 6, it is not a deadline for a decision.

Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, said public-health officials are at a “very important juncture” in reviewing COVID-19 policies such as mandates, which are shifting from “an emphasis on requirements to recommendations.”

But Opposition MPs repeatedly pressed Tam and Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos at the Commons health committee this week on when mandates for travellers and public servants will be lifted. Tam said the situation is unstable because of surges caused by the latest Omicron variant. She said Canada is taking a phased approach with the lifting of mandates that must be closely watched.

“I think this is just waiting to see what happens with that situation, ensuring the provinces are still able to cope as they release measures. They are just doing that at the moment and (with) that observation, the federal government makes a decision,” Tam told the committee.

Dany Richard, co-chair of the National Joint Council, a joint union and management committee, said the review is a political “hot potato” for the government. The factors to consider are many, including the risk of lifting the mandate too soon or appearing to be capitulating to the pressure of the February convoy protests.

“They might play it by ear, extend for three months, but if they remove it, we’ll have people saying ‘Hey, I don’t feel comfortable returning to work’ knowing they’ll be working with someone who is not vaccinated,” said Richard.

Last October, the government introduced a vaccination policy requiring all public servants and RCMP employees to prove they’re fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or face unpaid leave. Today, more than 98 per cent of public servants are fully vaccinated. Vaccine mandates are also imposed on employees of federally regulated industries.

Benjamin Piper, an employment lawyer at Goldblatt Partners, said keeping the mandate has become more difficult as provinces drop COVID-19 restrictions with recent declines in serious illness and death.

“There’s no doubt that the law would say that at some point, if the situation has improved sufficiently, this will no longer be justifiable. The question is when you reach that point,” Piper said.

Health officials say the two-dose vaccine mandates that initially proved effective in increasing vaccine uptake and limiting spread aren’t offering much protection in reducing transmission of Omicron.

“We know is that, with the Omicron variant, having two doses – the protection against infection and further transmission goes really low,” Tam said during a recent news conference. “You really need a third dose to provide augmentation against transmission. All that should be taken into account as the federal government looks at the policies going forward.”

But Tam suggested expanding the mandates to three doses isn’t in the cards now. It would difficult because eligibility for a booster varies by age. Also, people who have Omicron infection are asked to wait up to three months before getting the third dose.

The mandate review also comes as the more contagious COVID Omicron variant called BA.2 is on the rise and expected to create another surge in cases. The BA.2 sub-variant is on its way to becoming dominant in Ontario and across Canada. Although more transmissible than the original Omicron, it does not appear to be as severe.

All these factors are converging as the government tries to ease the workforce it sent home to work during the pandemic back to the workplace after two years.

The government is moving to a hybrid workforce, a mix of working at home and remotely. Departments are returning at their own pace and the progress is slow. Many don’t expect a major return until the fall but a new variant could change all that.

Many argue scrapping the vaccine mandate could derail imminent return-to-office plans. Many public servants want to continue working from home. Employees could resist returning to the workplace without a vaccination policy or assurance the employee next them is vaccinated.

Richard said unions would press for workers to work from home if safety fears rise. They are particularly concerned about departments that issued blanket orders for all employees to return to the office two or three days a week.

It is an open question whether the government can justify imposing the mandate and proof of vaccination on remote workers who don’t come to the office. Since the pandemic started, the government has hired hundreds of remote workers who don’t have an office to go to.

Meredith Thatcher, co-founder and workplace strategist at Agile Work Evolutions, argues keeping the mandate for now, along with social distancing and other precautions will help get people back to the office sooner.

“I think having a mandate in place will make people feel more comfortable. If I am told I have to return to the office three days a week and there’s no vaccine mandate, I may say, ‘I’m sorry; I have an immunocompromised person in my house. I’m not coming.’”

Lifting the mandate could also fuel a wave of internal churn as employees pick up and move to departments that will allow them to work remotely.

“I’m telling you there’s going to be a kind of Darwinian natural selection. My members have mobility. They can go work where they want and if telework is a big deal for them, they’ll go and work somewhere else,” said Richard.

Whether the mandate stays or goes, unions argue it’s time to stop punishing the unvaccinated and let them go back to work.

Greg Phillips, president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees (CAPE), argued the 702 unvaccinated employees should be provided with accommodations such as remote work or daily testing and personal protective equipment if they have to go to the workplace.

“We feel that those that remain unvaccinated should be allowed to start working again and start earning a living again, and that if people are going into the office, they should probably be vaccinated,” Phillips said.

Phillips said the mandate was introduced as a temporary measure and the 98-per-cent vaccination rate shows it was a success. If extended, CAPE wants a plan that explains the rationale and outlines milestones.

“We want to know the game plan for when they see an end to the policy,” said Phillips. “Every sporting event has a time limit or a score limit. You always know when the game is going to be over.”

Source: Should it stay or go? Ottawa weighs the vaccine mandate for the public service

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May: Never tweet. Social media is complicating the age-old neutrality of the public service

2022/03/18 Leave a comment

Easier in my time when the major worry was appearing in the press regarding a leaked document. Safer to never tweet on public policy issues and debates while in government, as tweets can give the perception that the public service is not neutral and impartial by the political level.

Public service did give the impression of not being impartial at times during the Harper government:

Social media is a part of life that is increasingly treacherous for Canada’s public servants, who may need better guidance to navigate their public and private lives online.

The blurring of that line was on display during the so-called freedom convoy protest that paralyzed downtown Ottawa. Some public servants took to social media to oppose or support the protest, sometimes with funds. Other public servants criticized colleagues who backed the protest as well as government mishandling of the nearly month-long blockade.

The storm of often anonymous allegations of misbehaviour on social media underlined an absence of transparency in the government agencies responsible for the ethical behaviour of bureaucrats. Neither the Treasury Board Secretariat nor the Office of Public Sector Integrity Commission were willing or able to say if any investigation or other action has been taken against any public servant.

On Reddit, members of public servant forums questioned the loyalty of federal workers who donated money to a convoy with an underlying mission to overthrow the government. Public servants on Twitter chided anyone who may have used government email to send a donation; accused them of ethical breaches. One suggested any of them with secret security clearances or higher should face a loyalty interview from CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Some demanded they be investigated or have security clearances revoked. Others called for dismissal. One senior bureaucrat told Policy Options public servants should be dismissed if they funded anything to do with removing the elected government to which they pledged loyalty.

Meanwhile, eyebrows were raised when Artur Wilczynski, an assistant deputy minister for diversity and inclusion at the Communications Security Establishment, tweeted a stinging criticism of Ottawa police’s handling of the protest. As a rule, senior bureaucrats, especially from such a top-secret department, keep such opinions to themselves. The CSE called Wilczynski’s criticism a personal opinion, noting it would be inappropriate for the CSE to comment on matters that don’t fall within its mandate.

It’s unclear whether any public servants are being investigated or disciplined for an ethical breach – or an illegal act.

Public servants typically have a lot of latitude to engage in political activities before risking an ethical breach. That changed when the Emergencies Act was invoked, making a peaceful protest an illegal occupation.

The Treasury Board Secretariat, the public service’s employer, knows some public servants supported the protesters, a spokesperson said. But it is unaware of whether any were warned or disciplined by their departments for any public support online or offline.

“We do not collect information about complaints or disciplinary actions against employees,” the Treasury Board said in an email.

Social media users suggested at least a dozen public servantswent to the Office of Public Sector Integrity Commission to report the possibility that a handful of bureaucrats were on a leaked list of convoy donors that was exposed when a hackers took down the crowdsourcing website GiveSendGo. The commission investigates wrongdoings that could pose serious threats to the integrity of the public service.

Commissioner Joe Friday refused to say whether he has received or is investigating any complaints. His office sees a spike in inquiries and disclosures when hot-button public issues dominate the news, he said.

Social media is here to stay. But how public servants use social media to balance their duty of loyalty to government with their right to free speech and engage in political activity seems to be an open question.

Public servants have rules for behavior at work and during off-hours, though the line between on and off the clock has increasingly blurred after two years of working at home. The rules come from the Public Service Employment Act, the Values and Ethics Code and the codes of conduct for each department.

But some argue there’s a grey zone now that partisan politics and political activities have moved online.

Jared Wesley, an associate professor of political science at the University of Alberta, said governments have not done a good job updating their ethics protocols, standards of practice and codes of conduct to manage social media. They amount to deputy ministers offering a rule-of-thumb “if your boss wouldn’t like, don’t post it,” he said.

Carleton University’s Amanda Clarke and employment lawyer Benjamin Piper examined the gap in guidance in a paper, A Legal Framework to Govern Online Political Expression by Public Servants. Clarke, a digital and public management expert and associate professor, said this uncertainty about the rules cuts two ways.

“What we can learn from this incident is that there is already a grey area and it’s dangerous for public servants who are not equipped with sufficient guidance,” said Clarke.

“There are two outcomes. One: they over-censor and unnecessarily give up their rights to political participation …. The second is they go to the other extreme and abandon their obligation to be neutral, which can put them into dangerous positions, personally and professionally and, at the larger democratic level, undermine the public service’s credibility.”

In fact, public servants believe impartiality is important, a recent survey shows, and 97 per cent steer clear of political activities beyond voting. Eighty-nine per cent believe expressing views on social media can affect their impartiality or the perception of their impartiality. But it found only about 70 per cent of managers felt capable of providing guidance to workers on engaging in such activities.

Clarke argues the modernization of public service must address how public servants reconcile their online lives with their professional duties.

“You can’t expect public servants not to have online political lives. This is where politics unfolds today. So, anybody who is trying to say that is the solution is missing the reality of how we how we engage in politics today.”

More than 40 years ago, the Supreme Court’s landmark Fraser ruling confirmed public servants’ political rights – with some restrictions. They depend on factors such as one’s rank or level of influence in the public service; the visibility of the political activity; the relationship between the subject matter and the public servant’s work and whether they can be identified as public servants.

David Zussman, who long held the Jarislowsky Chair in Public Management at the University of Ottawa, said the rules should be the same whether a public servant pens an op-ed, a letter to the editor or a tweet.

“Public servants should be able to make personal decisions about who they support, but the overriding consideration is keeping the public service neutral and apolitical.”

Shortcomings of existing rules, however, were revealed in the 2015 election, when an environment scientist, Tony Turner, was suspended for writing and performing a protest song called “Harperman” that went viral on YouTube.

His union, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, argued he had violated no restrictions: he wasn’t an executive, his job was tracking migratory birds, he wrote the song on his own time, used no government resources and there was nothing in the video or on his website to indicate he was a public servant. He hadn’t produced the video or posted it to YouTube.

About the same time, a Justice Department memo surfaced, warning: “you are a public servant 24/7,” anything posted is public and there is no privacy on the Internet. Unions feared public servants could be prevented from using social media, a basic part of life.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube have complicated the rules for public servants posting an opinion, signing an online petition or making a crowdsourced donation, Clarke and Piper argue.

Social media can amplify opinions in public debate and indiscriminate liking, sharing, or re-posting can ramp up visibility more than expected.  Assessments of whether a public servant crossed the line have to consider whether they used privacy settings, pseudonyms or identified as public servants.

Clarke and Piper question whether public servants who never mention their jobs should be punished if they are outed as government employees in a data breach – like those who donated to the convoy protest. What about a friend taking a screenshot of a private email you sent criticizing government, sending it others or posting it online?

The Internet makes it easy to identify people, Piper said. Public servants who avoid disclosing their employer on their personal social media accounts can be identified using Google, LinkedIn or the government’s own employee directory.

So back to the convoy protest. Before the emergency order, would public servants have unwittingly crossed the line by supporting the protest or donating money to it?

The protest opposed vaccines and pandemic restrictions, though the blockade also became home to a mix of grievances. Many supporters signed a memorandum of understanding by one of the organizing groups calling for the Governor-General and Senate to form a new government with the protestors.

“It’s hard for me to see how a private donation by someone who has a job that has nothing to do with vaccine mandates or the trucker protest could attract discipline. That would be a really aggressive application of discipline by the government,” said Piper.

But Wesley argues that the convoy was known from the start as a seditionist organization and anyone who gave money to the original GoFundMe account should have seen the attached MOU. It was later withdrawn.

“Most public servants sign an oath to the Queen and should have recognized that signing or donating money to that movement was an abrogation of your oath,” he said. “I think a re-examination of who they are, who they work for and implications of donating to a cause that would have upended Canada’s system of constitutional monarchy is definitely worth a conversation with that individual.”

Perhaps part of the problem is the traditional bargain of loyalty and impartiality between politicians and public servants is coming unglued.

The duty of loyalty is shifting. The stability and job security that once attracted new recruits for lifelong careers in government aren’t important for many young workers, who like remote work and expect to work for many employers.

A recent study found half of the politicians surveyed don’t really want an impartial public service. Brendan Boyd, assistant professor at MacEwan University, suggests they prefer a bureaucracy that enthusiastically defends its policies rather than simply implements and explains them. However, 85 per cent of the politicians say that outside of work hours, public servants should be impartial.

“There will be further test cases, and how we define a duty of loyalty is going to either be confirmed or adapted or changed,” said Friday.

“But public servants are still allowed to communicate, hold or express views as a means of expression. And the pace at which the views, thoughts and opinions are expressed is so phenomenal that I think it fundamentally changes the playing field.”

Source: Never tweet. Social media is complicating the age-old neutrality of the public service

Filed under Government, Social Media Tagged with ,

Ottawa and unions agree to simplify pay rules for public servants

2022/03/09 Leave a comment

Ottawa and unions agree to simplify pay rules for public servants

Government has far too long expected technology as a solution for the harder work of simplification and streamlining of payrolls, processes, and definitions. Harder work to do (remember the Universal Classification Standard fiasco of the 90s and how much time was spent to no avail).

And as to the union demand that the most beneficial provision be the basis, using the median would likely be more reasonable .

But needs to be done, otherwise IT solutions will never work well:

For the first time, the federal government and its 17 public service unions have agreed to discuss simplifying the thousands of pay rules and processes that derailed the troubled Phoenix pay system from the start.

This simplifying, which could take years to unfold, is a key piece of the government’s pilot project to build a new system – the Next Generation Human Resources and Pay (NextGen) – to replace Phoenix.

A joint union and management committee for NextGen has been examining issues around the new pay system for several years. The upcoming round of collective bargaining will be the first to take a stab at simplifying the rules and processes that have gummed up Phoenix since its launch in 2015.

However, there are many potential problems.

“They (the government) can’t let technology drive their business processes. They have to fix business processes before implementing new technology. In the case of Phoenix, the opposite occurred. Not having fixed those processes and collective agreements dooms NextGen,” said a source familiar with the project who is not authorized to speak publicly.

Some say this willingness to simplify a myriad of contracts could be a watershed moment in federal labour history, which has been rocky since the Lester B. Pearson Liberal government introduced collective bargaining in the 1960s. Public service reformers have pressed for decades to modernize compensation and a human resources regime built for another era.

They are also heading into these talks at a time when COVID-19 has upended work. As provinces lift pandemic restrictions, departments are gearing up for a partial return to the office with a hybrid workforce, part of which will continue to work from home. The federal government is also studying the future of work in a world where technology, automation and AI are changing jobs and the skills needed in the public service.

Despite the pressure to modernize, it remains to be seen how far the two sides are willing to go. Unions say no proposals have been put on the table.

Phoenix was built on PeopleSoft 9.1, an off-the-shelf software. IBM built the system, which was heavily customized to handle the complicated public service regime with 80,000 pay rules and 105 collective agreements for 300,000 employees.

Technology experts long argued the complexities of the pay rules were a root cause of Phoenix’s problem. They say rules and processes should have been reduced before the government started work on Phoenix, and they argue that these remain a significant challenge for any new system. On top of that, the government has a mishmash of 37 human resource systems that feed into Phoenix, each with its own processes.

Canada’s auditor general has issued the same warning over the years and said in this year’s audit of Phoenix’s continuing pay errors that it would be closely monitoring the NextGen project.

“We continue to be concerned that the new HR to pay system could repeat weaknesses we found in the HR to pay process and could pay some employees inaccurately,” said the report.

This time, however, the government wants a new combined pay and human resource system that can be configured to handle the pay regime without rewriting code to customize the software. That makes paring down the myriad of rules all the more critical.

Shared Services Canada (SSC), a federal agency responsible for technology across all federal departments, is leading the NextGen project. In an email, SSC said Toronto-based Ceridian, which bills itself as a global “human capital management” company, is configuring Dayforce, its flagship software, for a test run with the Department of Canadian Heritage to see if it can “support the government’s human resources and pay activities.”

However, concerns remain.

“What we don’t want here is for the employer to think: ‘Well, the reason why NextGen is having issues implementing is because the collective agreements are too complicated.’ Fine, let’s simplify them. We’re not against that,” said Dany Richard, president of the Association of Canadian Financial Officers, who co-chairs the joint management-union committee for NextGen.

As much as both sides are on board for the sake of getting a pay system that works, the pinch point will be cost. Unions don’t want their members to take a hit on their pay or benefits

The Public Service Alliance of Canada, the largest union, is having preliminary discussions with Treasury Board about the pay system and harmonizing the language of its contracts.

“We’re going in curious and with an open mind to see what’s being proposed, and what they want to talk about, and seeing what we can come to agreements on,” said Greg Phillips, president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees, the third-largest public service union.

“But at the end of the day, it’s the employer’s responsibility to pay employees and they need to have the system in order to do that. And for modernizing HR, that’s their decision. It shouldn’t be done on the backs of employees.”

Unions have previously argued that if the government wants to reduce rules, the fastest way is to pick the most beneficial provision and make it the standard for everyone. Take, for example, the nearly 40 different rules for overtime. The unions want the government to pick the most generous of the overtime rules and apply it to everyone.

Unions argue that bringing employees up to the most generous provision may cost more in the short term, but it would be considerably cheaper than continuing to sink millions of dollars into fixing and maintaining Phoenix, which has already cost $1.4 billion in fixes.

“Let’s just put it to the common denominator, whatever it is, and write it off. It may sound like public servants gain and will get more benefits. But having clear collective agreements that are consistent will help simplify the pay system,” said Richard.

The government already spends about $53 billion a year on salaries and benefits for employees, which is 60 per cent of its total operating costs. After the spending spree to combat COVID-19, there is little appetite to pay public servants more.

Another complicating factor is that the unions have negotiated rules for pay and benefits over 60 years that are specific to each of more than 80 occupational groups in the public service.

On top of basic salary — and any raises or promotions — public servants are entitled to various allowances, such as for education, living in remote areas, acting in a higher job classification, bilingual bonuses and shift premiums. The pay for part-time or hourly employees is even more complex. Layered on top of that are rules within rules — with arcane language that often has conflicting interpretations.

One solution is harmonizing language so that all definitions are the same, such as for “family” which is key to various types of leave. Or acting pay, which kicks in for some employees after one day of filling in for someone in a higher job classification but which in another contract requires three days of doing that.

For vacation pay, some employees are entitled to four weeks after eight years of service and others get it after five years. With overtime, some employees get double time on Sunday whether they work Saturday or not, while others get double time on Sunday only after working Saturday at time and a half. In short, the rules are many and are all over the map.

The government has a pile of allowances, which employees receive on top of salaries that could, for example, be rolled into base salaries. They include retention allowances, extra pay for employees whose skills are in short supply, and allowances for meals, vehicles, travel, and clothing, such as uniforms, safety boots, and glasses.

SSC officials were unavailable to expand upon the project or its possible scale and scope beyond a brief message.

SSC said in an email that NexGen has now moved into the design and experimentation stage “which will continue to inform and define the way forward.”

“NextGen HR and Pay initiative will produce options and recommendations for a human resources and pay system that meets the complex needs of the (government),” it added.

Source: Ottawa and unions agree to simplify pay rules for public servants

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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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