The Gatekeepers: Where ATIP offices fell short during the pandemic

2021/08/10 Leave a comment

Of note. Would be a lot easier in some ways for the default to post more publicly on open Canada but changing government culture is difficult (which I remember all too well from my time within government and then my time outside filing ATIPs).

Some of the Information Commissioner’s recommendations are practical and should be doable:

Four months into the pandemic, anyone exercising their right to query the federal government would have received the following message from one of its largest departments, Public Services and Procurement Canada:

Due to the current and evolving COVID-19 pandemic, PSPC’s network is limited to essential and critical services such as pay, pension and procurement. While we are committed to respecting your right of access and are actively looking for solutions to maintain operations, we have little to no capacity at this time. Consequently, the Access to Information and Privacy Office has decided to put all access and privacy requests on hold until the situation returns to normal.

PSPC was hardly unique. When the federal government sent the vast majority of its 300,000 employees to work from home 17 months ago, the decrepit state of its electronic backbone was suddenly exposed, leaving more than 1,000 ATIP specialists in particular to grapple with some unsettling realities.

Most were unable to link securely from home to their offices. Even if the links had been in place, it often wouldn’t have mattered. In nine of the largest departments and agencies, more than one-quarter of the requests completed the previous year were in paper format. At the RCMP, the ratio was more than half.

Laying hands on those documents demands a physical presence. And the offices were mostly empty.

“The right of access, a quasi-constitutional right, cannot be suspended because of the pandemic,” Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard declared earlier this year.

As Maynard elaborated in an interview with this newspaper, she was not implying that ATIP workers should have been forced back to the office to do their duties. Her point was that the government had failed to provide the necessary tools. “Sadly, the pandemic opened our eyes to the issues,” she said. “We have a system that’s still archaic.”

Maynard also noted a disturbing tendency within government generally to give access requests lower priority — not necessarily within the ATIP units, but among employees elsewhere in government who locate and forward the necessary documents.

“It is very difficult to find people who want to work in access to information,” Maynard said before a House of Commons committee.

“You’re dealing with requesters who are eager to get the information, but you’re also dealing with a department that doesn’t want to respond, doesn’t have time to respond or has other more important things to do. It’s not an easy job.”

Eventually departments resumed ATIP operations last year, at least fitfully. But the end result for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2021, wasn’t pretty.

A Postmedia survey of 13 of the largest departments and agencies revealed 23 per cent fewer requests were closed during fiscal 2021 compared to the previous year, ranging from a drop of nearly 60 per cent for Global Affairs to just five per cent for Employment.

The number of requests also slipped, albeit a comparatively modest seven per cent overall. The range was even wider, however: from a decline of 48 per cent at Global Affairs to an increase of 62 per cent at the department of Innovation. There was also increased activity at PSPC and the Privy Council Office, two organizations that, like Innovation, were heavily involved in the government’s COVID-19 response. Year over year declines were slight at Employment and Canada Revenue Agency for the same reason.

(This discussion excludes the outsized influence of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, which on its own accounted for three-quarters of access requests last year across government and belongs in a separate category. The vast majority of its access activity involves requests for updates on the progress of immigration or refugee applications. The department received nearly 108,000 access requests last year, down eight per cent, and completed nearly 105,000, down six per cent.)

With a few exceptions, the net result of the access activity within the other large government organizations was an increase in backlogs — dramatically so in the case of Innovation, the Privy Council Office, Public Services & Procurement Canada and Library & Archives. Collectively, the group of 13 received 26,400 access requests in fiscal 2021 and processed just 21,100. As a result, the backlog jumped 40 per cent.

Hypothetically, it would take the group of 12 more than seven months to clear their backlog, assuming processing took place at the pre-pandemic pace and no further requests come in.

Which is to say there is a big problem here.

Global Affairs blamed its egregious performance in matters of access on a classified server that can be used only by employees in the office. The department is developing an “IT infrastructure that will allow remote work on non-classified documents.”

Some departments — the RCMP, Defence and Immigration — have already been investigated by Maynard following complaints about lengthy delays and a lack of disclosure.

The RCMP acknowledges ongoing difficulties related to “insufficient resources” and “antiquated software systems” — compounded by the pandemic.

The number of access requests received by the RCMP in fiscal 2021 surged 18 per cent to 5,300-plus, while the police agency closed just 3,430 — nearly one-third fewer than the year before. This left the RCMP with a backlog representing a year’s worth of pre-pandemic activity.

“The RCMP recognizes that it must modernize its ATIP program,” the agency said in response to queries by this newspaper, “and has developed an ambitious plan and strategy to achieve this.”

Even agencies that have invested heavily in information technology over the years are re-visiting their methods.

Canada Revenue Agency, one of three government organizations (along with Employment and CSIS) that managed to trim the number of outstanding access requests during fiscal 2021, was prompted into action by its early experience during the pandemic.

While much of the agency’s work is already done electronically, its massive computer network wasn’t set up to handle having a majority of its 45,000 employees work from home. Indeed, during the spring of 2020, the only employees allowed to sign on to the network were those performing “critical services” for Canadians, such as the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit.

Processing access requests was not among those services considered essential, even though many of the requests were related to CERB and other COVID-19 response programs developed by the agency.

When CRA resumed answering access requests last summer, it committed to “a full-scale business transformation” aimed at expediting matters. The agency was vague on the details, but said this would involve changes to the CRA’s “processes, organizational structure and the use of technology.”

Translated into plain language, the agency is figuring out how to create and store documents so they are easier to retrieve. The question of exactly what should be disclosed is a more complicated one, but Maynard has some views on that as well.

The Information Commissioner reckons one of the best ways to cull large backlogs is for departments and agencies to automatically disclose information that is the focus of multiple requests. Training employees in the art of creating documents and records that are more easily searched is another way.

Nevertheless, Maynard recognizes that people seeking information from their government are also butting heads against an entrenched, longstanding culture of secrecy. That is why she is lobbying for changes to the access legislation that would remove some of the enormous discretion now exercised by those in control of the information.

“Where people have a discretionary exclusionary power, they will rarely decide to disclose the information,” she told MPs.

“Rather, they will attempt to redact the information for fear that it may be misinterpreted or cause embarrassment.”

That’s a longer-term war. In the meantime, fixing the ATIP regime’s technical shortcomings in the wake of COVID-19 will be challenge enough.

Source: The Gatekeepers: Where ATIP offices fell short during the pandemic

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Restaurants and stores say government aid is to blame for a labour shortage — but the hard data tells a different story

2021/08/09 Leave a comment

Of note, given current discussions on whether our immigration system needs to be rebalanced towards the lower skilled and paid:

Relaxed health rules are allowing thousands of restaurants and stores to reopen. But employers are already complaining they can’t find enough workers, especially in hospitality and retail. Some are offering signing bonuses, redistributing tips and making other special efforts to attract staff.

Employers like to point the finger at government income supports that helped people through the pandemic, like emergency recovery benefits (now extended to October) and expanded eligibility for EI payments. Employers complain these programs reduce the incentive to accept low-wage, irregular work in restaurants and shops. Many also want Ottawa to expand the Temporary Foreign Worker program, so they can access low-cost labour from other countries.

To be sure, it is an operational headache for restaurants and stores to reconnect with former employees after months of closure, and they’re all trying to do this at the same time. But the hard data does not support the claim of a generalized labour shortage.

After all, unemployment remains elevated: the latest Statistics Canada reportpegged the official rate at 7.5 per cent. And other pools of hidden unemployment (including people working very short hours, and people who left the labour force during the pandemic) push the true unemployment rate towards 15 per cent.

Wages in stores and restaurants remain very low, and are not rising, which should happen if labour was genuinely scarce. In hospitality, for example, the median wage is $15 per hour (barely matching the legal minimum in many provinces), and average weekly earnings are just $500 per week (reflecting inadequate hours of work as well as low wages).

There is no sign wages are improving, despite anecdotes in the media. To the contrary, wages have grown more slowly in retail and hospitality than the overall economy since the pandemic. Thus the wage penalty for workers in these sectors is getting worse, not better.

When your industry offers less than half the going wage, you shouldn’t be surprised you have trouble attracting workers. That’s like me offering $100,000 for a Lamborghini (less than half the list price), and then crying shortage when no-one will sell me one.

It’s no mystery how to recruit and retain a more stable workforce: offer better pay, stable shifts, decent benefits, and improved training and safety. Inadequate and irregular hours are actually a bigger disincentive than low hourly wages (almost half of hospitality staff work part time). Reorganizing schedules to allow predictable shifts and more full-time roles would support genuine career opportunities in these industries, rather than a culture of lousy precarious work.

Other countries have shown that service sector work can offer stable middle-class career paths. Canada could do the same, but only if we prevent employers from taking the easy out — namely, providing them with still more desperate workers willing to work for any wage. If governments respond to complaints about a labour shortage by cutting income supports or importing migrant labour, that will only short-circuit the improvements in job quality these sectors ultimately need.

Only once did Canada’s economy truly run out of workers. That was during the Second World War, when a massive, government-funded war effort ended the Depression and put every able worker into a productive job. We aren’t anywhere near that situation today, but we could be, if we wanted to. We could launch an ambitious post-COVID national reconstruction plan, featuring massive and ongoing investments in green energy, affordable housing, and human and caring services. That would create hundreds of thousands of jobs, end mass unemployment and improve living standards in the process.

But creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs is actually the last thing low-wage employers want. That would only make it all the harder for them to recruit cheap, desperate labour.

In sum, there’s no “labour shortage” in Canada today, nor is one on the horizon. Governments should ignore these phoney complaints, and instead encourage employers to respond to staffing problems like any other hard-to-find commodity. When something is truly scarce, smart businesses find ways to use less of it (in this case through automation and efficiency measures). They emphasize quality over quantity. And, at the end of the day, they pay more.

In the long run, this will drive productivity growth, innovation and better jobs. And that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work in Vancouver, is a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @jimbostanford

Source: Restaurants and stores say government aid is to blame for a labour shortage — but the hard data tells a different story

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ICYMI: Now more than ever, political platforms should be built on the foundation of a long-term policy framework

2021/08/09 Leave a comment

Irrespective of one’s political leanings or whether one agrees with the specific recommendations, it would be nice if elections and politics provided space for more serious policy discussions with respect to longer-term issues, not just the productivity and investment issues highlighted here.

Ironically, their focus on productivity and GDP per capita raises questions regarding the increased immigration levels of the government.

The challenge, however, is how to do so given political party positioning, social media soundbites and the difficulty of doing so:

When presenting their policy platforms in the federal election we’re all expecting soon, political parties may be tempted to focus on capturing headlines. Resisting short-termism is not easy in the current era of growing populism and focus-group-driven politics, but the stakes for our country’s economic future are high.

We’re coming out of an unprecedented (and unsustainable) period of fiscal expansion to alleviate the economic ravages of a global pandemic. In addition, we face long-standing challenges including rapid technological transformation, climate change, aging demographics, changing geopolitical dynamics and more than a decade of secular stagnation. Now more than ever, political platforms should be built on the foundation of a long-term policy framework.

Progress is a choice. It doesn’t happen on its own. From 1945 to 1975, Canadians saw their average real weekly earnings grow at a rate that more than doubled every 28 years. This amazing level of economic growth came in large part as a result of policy choices we made as a country. There was intentionality on what we were trying to achieve together. We need a renewed commitment to our long-term economic future.

Political platforms should be formed based on long-term economic objectives with platform commitments reflecting their potential impact on those objectives. Critically, a strong accountability mechanism, such as a review of outcomes relative to commitments by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, would hold the ruling party accountable to its promises.

Which economic objectives should take priority? Here are two that could have a significant impact:

Real median per-capita income should rise by at least 5 per cent over every five-year period. This may not seem particularly ambitious, but in the five years leading up to 2019 (the most recent data available) median per-capita income only rose 3.4 per cent. Since 2009, there have only been three years in which the rolling five-year window has seen growth of 5 per cent or more. Focusing on median per-capita income ensures that the gains from growth are shared broadly across the population rather than benefiting only a few. To achieve this, policies would need to demonstrate how they plan to sustainably raise growth and improve labour-market outcomes for all segments of the population. We need a shift from consumption spending to greater focus on productive investments: applied public R&D in fast-growing sectors, child care, reskilling workers for the digital economy and helping our resource sector transition to a low-carbon future. Evaluating performance over a five-year window would allow for inevitable cyclical variations that can lead to large annual swings.

Commit to halving the investment gap with OECD countries. There is a well-known and well-documented lack of business investment in machinery, equipment and intellectual property in Canada. There are of course many firms that invest a lot, but by and large economy-wide data consistently show that Canada ranks near the bottom of the pack among members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. In relation to GDP, business investment of this type is barely more than half what it is in the United States, and just under two-thirds of what it is in the average OECD country. Moreover, as the C.D. Howe Institute notes, Canadian business investment per available worker also badly lags that in the U.S. and other OECD countries. This underperformance in business investment directly contributes to our poor productivity performance, and loss of competitiveness. It is no coincidence that Canada’s export competitiveness weakened in recent years as its share of the U.S. market declined. Over the past two decades, Canadian exports have risen at just half the pace of the overall economy.

In addition, while the United States and the United Kingdom are making ambitious moves on advanced industries and increasing their R&D investments, Canada’s approach is still tentative. In an economy increasingly dependent on intangible assets such as data and digital services, innovation will be a key driver of growth. Building Canada’s sectoral capabilities in advanced (or innovation) industries is becoming paramount. These industries encompass technology at its broadest and most consequential. High productivity ensures that the average worker employed in an advanced industry earns a yearly wage nearly 50 per cent higher than the average Canadian worker.

If pursued, these objectives would represent bold and firm commitments to sustainably raising our standard of living. Parties may of course disagree on the means to achieve them, but they can hardly ignore them. The policy choices that we make in the next few years will shape the Canada of 2050, and our country’s standing in the global economy.

Jean-François Perrault is Scotiabank’s chief economist and a former assistant deputy minister at the Department of Finance. Robert Asselin is senior vice-president of policy at the Business Council of Canada and former policy adviser to two prime ministers.

Source: Now more than ever, political platforms should be built on the foundation of a long-term policy framework

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Globe editorial: Why did Ottawa kill GPHIN? Because politicians get no credit for averting a disaster that hasn’t happened yet

2021/07/14 Leave a comment

Of note, the overall challenge facing governments with respect to longer-term planning and preparation.

Silent on some of the internal decision-making processes that led to the weakening of GPHIN as it is still not clear whether the decision to shutter GPHIN was bureaucratically or politically-driven. Suspect the former given the small resources involved.

Somewhat normal to have tensions between scientific/medical experts and public service generalists but more serious in this case.

Notable recommendation that touches on this: 2.8 There should be sufficient public health expertise in GPHIN’s management to fully understand event-based surveillance.

A new independent review of the mismanagement of Canada’s pandemic early warning system, which was effectively shuttered by the Trudeau government in the months before COVID-19 made itself known in Wuhan, China, says all the right things.

Released Monday, the report urges Ottawa to better fund the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), and to make better use of the invaluable intelligence on disease outbreaks around the world that it gathers by scanning medical reports, media and other markers on a constant basis.

That, of course, is very good advice. It’s a given that, in the future, there will be more outbreaks in our connected world; it’s not a question of if, but when. Maintaining a well-funded early warning system, and creating a risk assessment group inside Canada’s Public Health Agency to analyze its finding and directly advise decision-makers, is a no-brainer.

But here’s the thing: Coming up with good advice on how to prepare for the next pandemic, and getting politicians to act on it, isn’t hard when a disease that has killed more than four million people worldwide, including more than 26,000 in Canada, is still spreading.

As the report itself says, “The best time to discuss pandemic preparedness is when it is most present in the minds of Canadians and of the governments who serve them.” 

Okay. But what happens in five or 10 years, if there’s been no outbreak in the interim, and those same governments start to lose interest in life-saving measures that don’t make headlines but which, if successful, prevent them?

The fate of GPHIN is just one of several glaring examples of what happens when Canadian governments decide that, since a disaster hasn’t happened recently, now must be a good time to cancel the insurance policy.

Created in the early 1990s, and eventually folded into the Public Health Agency of Canada, GPHIN was a world-leading scientific body that tracked outbreaks such as SARS, H1N1, MERS and Ebola, and shared its findings with the World Health Organization.

The Harper government indirectly weakened GPHIN in 2014, when it stripped PHAC of some of its independence. But the Trudeau government delivered the coup de grace in May of 2019, when it told GPHIN to stop its international monitoring and focus on domestic outbreaks.

It’s impossible to say for sure that turning off Canada’s early warning system contributed to Ottawa’s sluggish and confused response to the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020. It certainly didn’t help.

What may be more important, though, is how the evisceration of GPHIN fits a pattern in Canadian politics.

For instance, after the scare of the SARS epidemic in Toronto in 2003, Ontario’s Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care prepared for a future outbreak by spending $45-million on 26,000 pallets of masks, face shields, needles, disinfectant wipes, disposable thermometers and other vital medical equipment.

But in 2017, the province’s Auditor-General found that more than 80 per cent of the supplies were no longer usable. The stuff had been left to rot, because the government never allocated money to manage and replenish the stocks.

In another example, this one from before the SARS crisis, the Ontario government in 2001 laid off a group of PhD-level scientists hired to watch for emerging diseases. “Do we want five people sitting around waiting for work to arrive?” a Health department spokesman asked at the time.

Yes. Yes we do.

This is going to be the real test of Canada’s postpandemic response: Can measures urgently agreed to while COVID-19 is still an omnipresent threat survive subsequent governments that start to chafe at the independence that GPHIN and PHAC need in order to do their jobs, or become annoyed at money being spent on what may at times look like just a bunch of scientists sitting around waiting for a crisis to arrive?

The GPHIN report is wrong: The best time to discuss pandemic preparedness is not when it is top of mind, but when it has receded to the background and there is no political gain to be had by talking about it.

That’s the critical moment. Canadians won’t automatically be at risk the next time a virus threatens to become a pandemic somewhere on the planet. The danger will come before that, when governments decide to cut back on the vital but unheralded work that could have kept them safe.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-why-did-ottawa-kill-gphin-because-politicians-get-no-credit-for/

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Coyne: Shared ideals are a sturdier material to build a nation than mere ethnic or cultural difference

2021/07/12 7 Comments

Valid concerns regarding making reality reflect the aspirational values in the Charter:

I still see people quoting that line from Justin Trudeau’s interview with The New York Times in 2015 – the one about there being “no core identity, no mainstream” in Canada – as if it were some sort of darkly revealing gaffe, in which he incautiously lets slip his globalist agenda, or his woke radicalism, or his hatred of Canada.

In fact, as the next line in the interview makes clear, he was merely repeating a commonplace, almost a truism. What ties Canada together, he said, are “shared values,” among which he listed “openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice.”

This does not make Canada, as the Prime Minister claimed, “the first post-national state.” It is simply a different kind of national state. As it is defined in the literature, ours is a civic, rather than ethnocultural, nation: one rooted not in blood or language, but in common beliefs and aspirations.

Contrary to what both Mr. Trudeau and his critics seem to believe, this is neither a new nor a radical idea. It has been the basis of American nationhood, for example, for more than two centuries. And it was very much the idea of our own founding fathers, who spoke often and movingly of the “political nation” they hoped to create.

But what if there are no common values or ideals that tie us together? What if we cannot agree on what we stand for – or even that we should exist? What if, in short, we are neither an ethnocultural nor a civic nation? What then?

What distinguishes civic nationhood is the element of choice, or at least the consciousness of it. (The ethnic or cultural idea of nation is just as much a choice, even if it seems more “natural” to its proponents.) In Ernest Renan’s celebrated definition, a nation is a permanent daily referendum of its citizens.

For Canadians, that choice is particularly acute: the pull of the American nation to our south, or the smaller, ethnocultural nations within, is ever-present. If the Canadian national idea is to succeed, then it must make an especially compelling appeal to those shared values, common beliefs and collective ambitions (Renan, again: “having done great things together” in the past, a nation is defined by the wish “to do them again” in future). And yet that is not what we have done.

Far from soaring ideals or rousing ambitions, postwar Canadian nationalists obsessed over the rather more mundane project of cultivating a distinctive Canadian cultural identity – an identity that, so far as it was not wholly ersatz, looked remarkably like their own: white, English-speaking, southern Ontarian, social democratic.

Hence the stereotype of the polite, diffident Canadian, so naturally inclined to statism, and (above all) so different from the Americans. And hence the reflexive recourse to the state, as both the emblem of our national difference and the vehicle for its preservation.

For a time they were able to ignore or shout down those who dissented from nationalist orthodoxy – who preferred, say, free trade to protectionism, or markets to public enterprise. But having invested so heavily in the idea of difference as the fount of nationhood, they found they had nothing to say when their compatriots – Indigenous people, Quebeckers, Western Canadians – replied, in effect: hang on, we’re different from you.

And the more that our political leaders have tried to paper over those differences, essentially by denying that Canada means anything or has any foundational principles – or none that it would insist on in the face of sectional opposition – the less argument they can offer for its continuing existence as a nation-state.

The Charter of Rights was an attempt to put this right: to define the nation in terms of its commitment to a short list of universal ideals, rights to which every Canadian citizen was equally entitled. But the proposal was doomed from the start. Rights are an American idea, said some. For others the problem was not rights, as such, but the idea that they should be guaranteed equally.

At any rate, the critics have won the day: With the notwithstanding clause now almost routinely invoked, the Charter is fast becoming a dead letter. It joins a long list of other national institutions and symbols – Parliament, the Crown, the flag, the anthem – that, by a combination of disuse and abuse, have been rendered more or less inert. Or maybe it is simply that there is no longer any nation left to symbolize.

The consequence is not disintegration, but paralysis. The moral basis of nationalism – the vindication of it, in spite of its manifest failings – lies in its capacity to expand the bounds of empathy beyond the merely familiar. It is what makes us willing to make sacrifices for one another in a way we would not do for those not of the same nation. It is what makes democratic government possible, beyond the local level – for without it, we will never accept to be on the losing side of any vote.

Which brings us to our present condition, in which the discovery that Canada has, like other nations, its own list of past crimes and present failures, has led to a kind of collective emotional breakdown, wherein the very existence of the country or the idea that it is, on balance, a good thing, is called into the question: as if the world would be a better place had Canada never been born.

If this means an end to our peculiarly Canadian sense of superior virtue – the Canadian identity, again – all well and good. But to say that we have fallen short of certain ideals does not mean it is hypocritical even to aspire to them. We should understand “Canadian values” for what they are – not as qualities of character with which we are exceptionally endowed, but as moral duties to which we we are called.

The Americans, for all their faults, get this. The nation has never lived up to the ringing phrases of its Declaration of Independence; it falls far short of them even today. Yet it remains a defining statement of Americanism – like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, a beacon to which it is perpetually drawn. That way is still open to us, if we choose to follow it.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-shared-ideals-are-a-sturdier-material-to-build-a-nation-than-mere/

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Canada has an access-to-information system in name only

2021/07/07 Leave a comment

Have encountered some of the same frustrations:

The Treasury Board is quietly conducting a long-promised review of the Access to Information Act, which governs how Canadians can obtain records held by the government. Unfortunately, these consultations appear to be more of a public relations exercise than a serious effort to improve Canadians’ right to access.

The original act dates to 1983 and has barely changed since then. It has not kept up with the advent of the internet, nor have fundamental weaknesses been fixed. Changes made by the Trudeau government in recent years have failed to fully open promised classes of records and have not advanced pro-active publication as far as needed.

Today, we have an access-to-information system in name only. A lack of firm timelines means requests regularly stretch on for months, if not years. Broad exemptions mean crucial information is withheld from the public. A culture of secrecy in many departments undermines the act almost entirely. The Office of the Information Commissioner is underresourced to handle the deluge of complaints.

The current review process is not going to fix all that. Unlike in past consultations, the Treasury Board is not releasing any kind of green paper or other consultative document to chart a course for the reforms, nor has the government sought independent expert advice.

A green paper is essential to capturing and conveying the essence of the innumerable public reports on problems with the system, which go back decades. Drawing on outside experts is equally important for any real reform agenda, especially one that might return the Canadian government to an equal footing with many allied jurisdictions. Canada was an early entrant into the arena of freedom of information; now we are a disappointing laggard.

Reform and revitalization of the Access to Information regime must include significant legislative changes, but must also consider the ecosystem in which it operates.

As it stands, the act allows for the government to exempt and withhold information “obtained in confidence,” information deemed “injurious to the conduct of international affairs,” virtually any information relating to defence and security, and nearly every record that could be described as providing “advice” to the government. These exemptions, as currently worded, simply reinforce practices of hoarding records and a culture of entrenched secrecy. We propose strict limitations on these exemptions, and a test that would require the government to prove the harm of releasing such information.

Some records are completely excluded at present, such as Cabinet confidences. These should be brought under the act, with appropriate restrictions so disputes over access to them can be adjudicated by the Information Commissioner. In addition, information practices are changing in government with ever greater reliance on text messaging, verbal briefings and other transitory material. The act should oblige all government agencies to properly document their decision-making processes and retain these records.

Equally important, a real public-interest override clause must be added, with an oversight role for the Information Commissioner.

There needs to be a declassification regime for all government records. Other governments declassify documents after 30 years or less: Canadians are lucky if these files are ever released. Library and Archives Canada, in particular, should play a role in receiving such records and educating Canadians on their importance.

Once processed and released to an individual requester, the information in question should be made publicly available on a consolidated and searchable government database, including both the metadata about the record and the record itself. We should do away with the wasteful cycle of returning records back into the hands of departmental gatekeepers after every request is fulfilled.

These measures need to be accompanied by a major change in culture within government, including a lowering of the walls of secrecy and an alignment between the Access to Information Act and the principles that underscored the National Security Transparency Commitment promised by the Liberal government in 2017.

A broken access system wastes government resources, does not serve Canadians and does not illuminate our governance history and practice. But it is not yet beyond salvation. The Treasury Board review needs to embrace a bold vision for the future and make a deep change to the legislation and administration of the act.

Dean Beeby is an Ottawa-based independent journalist, author and a specialist on freedom of information. Justin Ling is a freelance investigative journalist. James L. Turk is the director of the Centre for Free Expression at Ryerson University. Wesley Wark is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-has-an-access-to-information-system-in-name-only/

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Fadden: Canada needs a national inquiry into its handling of COVID-19

2021/06/26 Leave a comment

Fully agree this is needed. And hopefully, the results and recommendations will lead to action, in the short and medium term, unlike the forgetfulness following the SARS enquiries:

As COVID-19 case counts continue to decline and Canada looks optimistically ahead to our future after pandemic restrictions are lifted, it may be time to also start looking back – specifically, at how this country handled the pandemic and how we should organize ourselves to deal with the next major disruptive event. The only way this can be done comprehensively and objectively is through the establishment of a public inquiry with national scope and freedom from political interference.

Two points can be made in favour of such an inquiry. The first is that it is indisputable that the pandemic could have been better handled. We were not properly prepared and many of the decisions taken from the very beginning were the wrong ones, or were at least not explained nearly as clearly as they might have been. The expiry of much of our national stockpile of personal protective equipment and the confusing initial advice on the wearing of masks are just two examples. A careful examination of the reasons for these types of mistakes could help us avoid repeating them in the future.

The second point underlying the need for an inquiry is the worldwide consensus that serious disruptive events will continue to occur and are likely to grow in intensity and variety. Other pandemics, flooding, fires or migration are the most obvious and likely. To fail to better prepare for such events will border on criminal, and proper planning requires a clear understanding of how the management of past events can be improved upon.

There are a number of ways to review our management of the current pandemic, but nothing short of a nationally oriented public inquiry established by – but not beholden to – the federal government will do. Internal reviews by the public service would be too narrow and they would be undertaken by the very institutions whose activities and advice need to be reviewed. Review by Parliament would fall prey to the excessive partisanship that seems to govern relations within our various legislatures. Auditors general will have a contribution to make to our understanding of what happened, but they are limited to their respective jurisdictions and have little if any ability to consider activity in the private sector and in civil society.

The COVID-19 crisis is unquestionably a national and international challenge that paid little attention to borders, and as such the inquiry must be structured to allow for a review of all aspects of how Canada fared. Three issues should be of particular focus.

The first is the need to consider to what extent Canada should ensure that certain essential goods be available, no matter what. This is not a matter for governments alone; it requires the participation of the business sector and the provinces.

The second issue is one of personal freedoms. We live in a country of rights and responsibilities, and that balance always needs to be carefully calibrated. The question of whether an individual’s right to refuse public health advice supersedes government efforts to ensure the greater good needs at least some measure of resolution.

The third issue involves the roles and responsibilities of the numerous levels of government within Canada, as well as the roles of other countries and of international institutions. The management of interprovincial and international borders is perhaps the most obvious example of something in this area that needs to be probed. The broad distribution of responsibility and action to deal with COVID-19 may or may not have been essentially correct. Either way, it needs an objective review to determine if any adjustments are necessary for the future.

A process like this could also help us recognize and fortify our strong points. The objective of an inquiry is not to assume bad faith or assign blame, but rather to look into what was done and how, with a view to proposing corrective action. Any inquiry must recognize what went well. In this respect, the relatively positive response of the public to instructions and the general level of co-operation between the federal and provincial governments (as evidenced by many First Minister virtual meetings) need mention.

Given the number of deaths Canada has seen throughout this pandemic, the enormous social and economic adjustments Canadians have made, and the unprecedented cost to taxpayers, this country needs a credible, practical and comprehensive look at how we can be better prepared for the next pandemic. A public inquiry established by the federal government, but independent of it, is the only practical vehicle to accomplish this. It needs to be set up before the next election to prevent its work from becoming a matter of partisan debate. Now is not too soon to get started.

Richard Fadden is a former national security adviser to the prime minister. He was director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service from 2009 to 2013 and served as deputy minister of national defence from 2013 to 2015.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-needs-a-national-inquiry-into-its-handling-of-covid-19/

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Selley: Justin Trudeau’s symbolic agenda collides with itself at the Supreme Court

2021/06/22 Leave a comment

Can’t satisfy all groups on a nine-member court (more latitude with respect to all judicial appointments where government, as per the contrast between the 2016 baseline and subsequent appointments highlights. And while symbolism is important, the harder work lies with reducing inequalities and long-standing issues:

A few headlines from the past week: “Justice Mahmud Jamal is first person of colour nominated to the Supreme Court of Canada” (CBC, the Toronto Star, and The Guardian). “ ‘Taunted and harassed’ as a youth, judge Mahmud Jamal receives historic Supreme Court nomination” (CTV and the National Post, quoting Jamal’s application statement). “Judge Mahmud Jamal, who finished high school in Edmonton, nominated to Supreme Court of Canada” (the Edmonton Journal, scoring the all-important local angle).

The first sentence in The Globe and Mail’s story mentions that Jamal is a “frequently cited author on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” We learn later on about his copious qualifications and impressive record as a jurist. But the second sentence explains a conflict: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was “under pressure from minority and Indigenous organizations to make the Supreme Court more diverse.” And so “the Indigenous Bar Association is disappointed.”

The Supreme Court has some pretty spicy meatballs on its plate, not least the future of certain religious practices in certain parts of Quebec’s public service, and will have more spicy meatballs in the future. The retiring Rosalie Abella is no ordinary Supreme Court justice, but rather the standard-bearer for a very activist and flexible brand of judge. We might hear more about Jamal’s approach when he meets with parliamentary committees. But surely it’s odd how much more we seem to care about who he is than about how he thinks or how he might rule.

Justin Trudeau isn’t the first prime minister to be concerned with the symbolism of his appointments, and nor have the Canadian media only recently acquired an interest. Globe and Mail headline writers greeted Bertha Wilson’s appointment in 1982 with “First woman is appointed to Canada’s top court” (March 5). (This was followed by “Woman judge still avoiding press” (March 9) and finally “Woman justice to take oath” (March 26).) Abella’s and Louise Charron’s appointments in 2004 were hailed for approaching near-gender-parity on the top bench.

This is all for the good, to a large extent. In a jury trial, we are ostensibly judged by our peers. We shouldn’t want judges to be members of an exalted class. Ideally, the jurisprudence they create would reflect the full scope of Canadian experiences — of class, race, ethnicity, faith and so on.

But it’s not a stretch to say that Trudeau — Mr. “Because it’s 2015″ — is more obsessed with symbolism than is typical. And sometimes it makes his life far more difficult than it needs to be. On the Supreme Court, his wish to appoint an Indigenous justice runs smack into his pledge never to appoint a justice who can’t manage a hearing in both official languages — which is to say, his wish to placate Quebec nationalists at every possible turn.

“A fully bilingual Indigenous candidate who also meets regional requirements and conventions” is a very tough order to fill, as many articles in the press have explained. Fewer articles have noted how far offside this requirement is with Trudeau’s reconciliation agenda. Trudeau’s new rule for judges doesn’t just discount Indigenous languages entirely; it also demands Indigenous lawyers learn not just one settler tongue fluently, but both! In a recent interview with APTN, Harry LaForme, Canada’s first Indigenous appellate court judge, likened the policy to the assimilation of children at residential schools. It would be very awkward, if only more people noticed.

You see a somewhat different problem when it comes to the unfilled vacancy at Rideau Hall, which is seeing similar demands for a minority or Indigenous appointment. Either would be fine, obviously, just so long as they’re not on a mission to do anything other than be the Queen’s representative on Canadian soil. You can just imagine Trudeau and his advisers struggling with the concept, even after Julie Payette’s flameout and Paul Martin’s near-miss with obvious-separatist Michaëlle Jean. This is a chance to make a splash, to send a message!

But the returns diminish. Real people who need real improvements in their lives cannot be impressed by symbolism. And weakness for symbolism makes us overlook things. It’s a distraction. Many of Trudeau’s detractors, especially to his left, would suggest it has distracted him from actually making significant progress on issues central to his brand, and to which these symbolic appointments are meant to nod.

A pledge to eliminate boil-water advisories on reserves is worthless without eliminating boil-water advisories. Adopting or not adopting the UN declaration on Indigenous rights is worthless without implementing what’s in it. At some point after accepting the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which had a whole section on unmarked and forgotten children’s gravesites, someone was going to have to pony up the money to look for those gravesites. It took until now.

I often argue there are maddeningly few fundamental differences between Liberal governance and Conservative governance in Canada — certainly not nearly enough to justify the intensity of the battles between them. Privileging action and disdaining empty symbolism is one principle Canadian conservatives should guard jealously, even if they don’t always apply it consistently themselves. It’s the only way to help real people with real problems.

Source: https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/chris-selley-justin-trudeaus-symbolic-agenda-collides-with-itself-at-the-supreme-court/wcm/cad4b3f1-d2c4-48a2-93f0-976678296276

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Canada’s data gaps hampered pandemic response, hurting vaccination tracking: report

2021/06/18 Leave a comment

An area that governments need to address:

The pandemic has exposed significant problems with how Canada gathers and processes data on everything from case numbers to vaccinations, which has hurt the country’s response to COVID-19, a new report conducted for the federal government says.

Canada could not track the spread of the virus as effectively as it needed to last year, according to a report prepared by the Pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy Expert Advisory Group that will be made public Thursday. The country is now struggling to keep tabs on vaccine effectiveness because of flaws in the system, including how different jurisdictions record and share information.

These data gaps, created by a patchwork of health systems that don’t always work together and often code data in different ways, need to be addressed with a national approach, the report warns.

“There is no doubt that our response to the pandemic has been severely limited as a result,” says an advance copy of the report, which was reviewed by The Globe and Mail.

The report was ordered by Ottawa last year to examine data problems exposed by COVID-19. The group will put together a list of recommendations to the Public Health Agency of Canada and other departments on how to fix these weaknesses, said Vivek Goel, who chaired the review.

When the COVID-19 outbreak hit, problems in reporting new cases, symptoms and other crucial data became apparent in Canada’s patchwork system. Since provincial and territorial jurisdictions don’t necessarily use the same standards for collecting or codifying information, pooling crucial data on a national level became difficult.

“Early on it was challenging to get a full national picture, even of basic case counts,” Dr. Goel said, noting that crucial information such as the sites of the outbreaks, or the occupations of those who became ill, weren’t always collected, codified, or shared between health jurisdictions. This prevented policy makers from knowing where and how hot spots were developing, and where the next crisis might be lurking.

“That [information] is something that is collected on the front lines of public health as people do their interviews, or it is collected at the time someone goes for testing. But if it’s not collected in a consistent way in every place and then coded and loaded into the system, we don’t wind up with a good picture,” Dr. Goel said.

“I would say if we had some of that information in a more timely manner, we might have had some decisions [by the government] being made sooner,” Dr. Goel said.

The country got better at processing information as the pandemic progressed, but “Canada had had some pretty significant challenges early on in even getting some of that basic data shared and uploaded,” he said.

These data gaps have become magnified as the country tries to mount a rapid immunization campaign across those same varied jurisdictions. Lacking the ability to quickly and effectively pool data from around the country, Canada is struggling to track, in real time, how effectively the vaccines are working in the broader population.

“Probably the most important question around vaccination in Canada is around the effectiveness of the vaccines in the real world with the dosing schedules and approaches that we’ve taken in Canada, because we’re the country that’s taken the longest dose interval,” Dr. Goel said.

“We’ve got reports that have started to come out, but they’re coming out at the provincial level,” he said. “We don’t have a national report, and every province’s systems are slightly different. So we wind up with slightly different estimates. They’re not going to be comparable.”

More detailed data on vaccine uptake is also difficult to compile, he said. “We need to have data coming together around how many people have been immunized by age group, occupation codes, all sorts of information. For example, people want to know how many teachers have had [the vaccine]. But we don’t have systems that really allow us to easily bring that kind of data together,” Dr. Goel said.

Questions specific to Canada, such as the effectiveness of mixing vaccines, are also hard to answer without properly collecting and analyzing data from across the country, he said. “We’ve got more of this mixing and matching coming up, so we need to be generating real-world evidence on how well it’s working,” Dr. Goel said.

The findings echo a report by the Auditor-General of Canada in March that said the government lacked proper data procedures to accurately track the spread of the virus. Dr. Goel said the issues are due to a number of causes, from lack of investment and concerns over privacy breaches to provinces simply wanting to oversee their own systems.

He also noted that various reports and governments have tried to address these issues in the past, but the problems were never fixed. After the 2003 SARS outbreak, Ottawa oversaw the creation of a database system known as Panorama, intended to improve infectious-disease surveillance and immunization tracking on a national level. However, the project struggled to gain support, ran into numerous roadblocks and was never effective.

“Despite all these good intentions, we don’t seem to make the progress we’d like to see,” said Dr. Goel, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health who is leaving to become president of the University of Waterloo next month.

The report calls for Ottawa to work with provinces and territories, as well as First Nations, Inuit and Métis organizations, to build a system where health data, including information on outbreaks and immunization, can be pooled effectively, and governments can act faster. Overcoming privacy concerns is a key challenge, and any such initiative must ensure that personalized information is protected, the report says.

“We need to tackle the root causes of the problems that have plagued our ability to make progress toward a common aim for all Canadians,” the report says. “Put simply, our systems, processes and policies are geared towards an analog world, while we live in a digital age.”

Dr. Goel said there are several examples of countries that collect, share and process data better than Canada, while still protecting privacy and respecting regional autonomy. Several Scandinavian countries have systems Canada should seek to emulate, he said, while the British, despite having data challenges of their own, have a more effective surveillance system implemented across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

“There are models for how we could approach that in Canada, but until we get to the point where we work together on these things, we wind up with these siloed sorts of approaches across the country,” Dr. Goel said.

“These issues have been underscored through Canada’s response to COVID-19,” the report says. The challenges include “timely collection and use of testing, case and vaccination data; assessing impacts of the pandemic in specific populations; sharing genomic data for management of variants; and the persistent challenges of long-term care.”

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadas-data-gaps-hampered-pandemic-response-hurting-vaccination/

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Government’s failure to keep stock of PPE reserves hurt us when we needed it most

2021/05/29 Leave a comment

Good commentary on the long history of government data management and use issues, brought to prominence during COVID-19, along with systemic accountability issues.

And yes, the default option for government data would be public (and to be fair, the open government initiative has resulted in more availability of data):

Seventeen years ago, there was a cabinet minister named Reg Alcock, the President of the Treasury Board, who invited people to his office for lectures about data.

The late Mr. Alcock was a hefty, 6-foot-8 mountain of a man with two main interests: Liberal Party organizing in Manitoba and dragging the government into the digital age. Part of the lecture he gave in 2004 was a question: Why is it that corporate executives have computers that can tell them, for example, how many trucks their company owns, but a prime minister would need a year to get the same answer from government?

On Wednesday, Auditor-General Karen Hogan issued a report on the government’s handling of stockpiles of PPE that let it be known that Mr. Alcock’s question is still hanging in the air, nearly two decades later.

Ms. Hogan’s team reported that the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) had a stockpile of personal protective equipment and medical devices, but it didn’t have a policy about what should be in it, or what was in it, or whether the equipment had expired.

When the biggest public-health crisis of modern times hit and provinces needed N95 masks and ventilators from the National Emergency Strategic Stockpile, well, there wasn’t enough useful stuff there. The data were so unreliable the auditors couldn’t tell how badly it fell short.

The haphazard management of the stockpile wasn’t a new thing. Internal audits in 2010 and 2013 raised those issues.

Citizens might think a decade of disregarded warnings is a scandal that will shake the halls of power in Ottawa. But for a politician, it is cause for relief. The best kind of failure is one that was going on long before you took office. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s advisers will be happy enough that the Auditor-General credited the government for responding after the crisis hit.

But note that PHAC did draft a proposal to develop a better inventory management system in January, 2020 – just as COVID-19 was spreading – but agency officials told auditors “it was put on hold because of budget constraints.”

Mr. Alcock, back in the day, didn’t just want government to get computer systems – they have a lot – but to manage data, to make more information available and usable, so that government knows better what is happening within government.

But politicians in charge aren’t good at driving change in long-term, systemic issues that voters don’t even see. Mr. Alcock, for example, was preaching for IT in a Paul Martin government busy with Liberal scandals and non-confidence votes in Parliament.

Two PMs later, and governments still have a hard time seeing what government is doing. The National Emergency Strategic Stockpile wasn’t much use in a crisis because it didn’t do the kind of information management that that happens at a grocery store: figuring out what you will need, buying it, tracking what goes in and out and what is going bad.

By now we know that bad data management, not knowing what you don’t know, raises risk in a crisis. And there’s something else: Most of that data can and should be made public.

Why not let the public see the running tally of N95 masks in inventory, or ventilators on the web? Most people won’t look at it, but perhaps a few experts in universities and elsewhere will analyze the policies, crunch the data and, we can hope, point out when they’re messed up. Or just missing. That applies to other kinds of data, too.

In Britain, this week’s remarkable testimony of Dominic Cummings, a former aide to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, about the chaotic initial response to the pandemic made it pretty clear that it’s no longer necessary, or wise, to leave the data inside government.

Mr. Cummings testified to a parliamentary committee that false assumptions, bad analysis, and groupthink inside government led Mr. Johnson’s government to a disastrous notion that it should try to reach herd immunity rather than slowing the spread of COVID-19. Scientists outside government, notably a mathematician, helped convince him that was “catastrophically wrong,” he said. He and the government’s top science adviser later agreed data should have been released earlier, to get input.

That’s not the same thing as PHAC’s failure to keep track of a stockpile. But then, if we want to encourage the government to keep tabs on the data, one good way is to demand to see it.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-governments-failure-to-keep-stock-of-ppe-reserves-hurt-us-when-we/

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