Why policy-makers should care about behavioural science: Supriya Syal

2018/01/24 Leave a comment

As someone who likes ‘nudge’ and related behavioural approaches, liked this article for the examples it cited, both outside and inside Canada:

Classic examples of behavioural interventions for the public sector include measures that help people save more for retirement, consume less electricity, be more likely to pay taxes, sign up for organ donations and get jobs. But the application of behavioural science to policy-making is becoming increasingly diversified around the world. For instance, the Copenhagen Airport in Denmark, in partnership with iNudgeyou (a Denmark-based social purpose company), combatted the problem of people smoking just outside terminal entrances by using stickers that guide them to a designated smoking area a few metres away. Instead of telling people what not to do (no-smoking zones near doors), providing guidance on what behaviour is desirable (smoking zones away from doors) proved more effective. In South Africa, the government of the Western Cape, in partnership with Ideas42 (a US-based nonprofit behavioural design and consulting firm) and the University of Cape Town, used a computer-based “HIV risk game” to educate at-risk youth about HIV. Instead of the typical one-off information brochure, a gamification approach that got youth to make repeated decisions about HIV risk and provided immediate feedback about their choices was a more powerful aid for increasing young people’s understanding of such risks. In Australia, Alfred Health (a hospital), working with Deakin University, Monash University, VicHealth and the Behavioural Insights Team (UK), increased healthier food choices in its cafés by using a traffic-light colour system to classify nutritional value and portion sizes of beverages. Instead of telling people about the health costs of sugary beverages, the team marked drinks as red (most unhealthy), amber or green (most healthy), and “red” drinks were simply removed from the displays and self-service refrigerators and placed under the counters — still available for sale, just less obviously so. The total number of beverages that were sold didn’t change, but the sale of unhealthy sugary beverages went down by 28 to 71 percent in a range of trials.

Meanwhile, in Canada, the Canada Revenue Agency is successfully using behavioural nudges to get people to pay outstanding taxes and to file their taxes online. The Privy Council Office Impact and Innovation Unit (IIU) is using behavioural insights to help Statistics Canada increase its survey response rates, and to help the Department of National Defence recruit more women into the armed forces. The Innovation Lab at Employment and Social Development Canada has used behavioural insights to help people find jobs and has partnered with the IIU to increase uptake of the Canada Learning Bond among low-income families. And the foremost public sector behavioural insights group in Canada, the Ontario Behavioural Insights Unit, has succeeded in increasing organ donation rates and online licence-plate-sticker renewals using behavioural insights.

Despite these initiatives and widespread academic expertise, support and talent, the public sector application of behavioural science in Canada lags behind that of other comparable nations, and the opportunity to create better outcomes for Canadians through behavioural evidence-based policy is immense. Moreover, the bulk of behavioural-insights policy work in Canada amounts to what one might call repair jobs — it is as if we were retrofitting old buildings to make them work in the modern-day context — and behavioural science interventions are used mainly to improve implementation or compliance with a pre-existing policy. Which is important, no doubt, but we could also be building new structures that benefit from modern advancements and would be much better suited to their users’ needs. Indeed, behavioural science provides powerful tools that could help us get it right at the policy design and formation stages. And, in addition to using behavioural science to design better for the public, we could also be using these insights to design better for public servants. But there are few, if any, applications of behavioural science interventions to organizational decision-making within the Canadian government or the bodies that it regulates, so this is a significant area for exploration.

Some of our greatest challenges today are large-scale, complex problems of public policy, public perception and public action: climate change, vaccinations against infectious diseases, diversity and inclusion of historically marginalized groups, humanitarian crises, to name a few. Behavioural science promises empirically validated solutions that are derived from an understanding of the human beings that make up that “public.” And it rests its propositions on evidence in favour of what works to help people themselves make decisions that are better for them, so they can lead better lives. A pretty irresistible call to arms, wouldn’t you say?

via Why policy-makers should care about behavioural science

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Ex-StatsCan chiefs make last-ditch appeal to fix ‘egregious flaw’ in stats agency governance bill

2017/12/07 Leave a comment

Tend to agree with Smith and Fellegi:

A pair of former chief statisticians made a last-ditch plea to Senators last week to fix what one said was an “egregious flaw” that “fundamentally undermines” a government bill’s aim to give Statistics Canada more independence.

In an appearance in front of the Senate’s Social Affairs, Science, and Technology Committee Nov. 30, Wayne Smith and Ivan Fellegi restated the case they made in front of the House of Commons committee that studied Bill C-36: that the changes to the Statistics Act that purport to give the chief statistician more independence, should come with a more-stringent hiring process.

“I’m very conscious of the fact this is the 23rd hour in terms of this legislation,” said Mr. Smith, who served as the chief statistician from 2010 until he resigned in September 2016 in protest over the role Shared Services Canada plays in handling Statistics Canada’s information technology.

Mr. Smith called a lack of specificity in the bill over how the chief statistician is selected the “one egregious flaw in the legislation that fundamentally undermines the achievement of its objective.” The bill would change the chief statistician’s term to a fixed five years served under good behaviour, instead of the current term that lets them stay on as long as the government wants them to.

Both Mr. Smith and Mr. Fellegi—who served as the country’s chief statistician from 1985 to 2008—are calling for the creation of a three-person non-partisan selection committee to create a shortlist of candidates for the governor-in-council appointment (which would ultimately be decided by cabinet), as well as for the bill to clearly define what requirements a chief statistician should have.

“The new proposed bill gives a great deal more authority on professional issues to the chief statistician,” Mr. Fellegi said. “That makes it that much more important that he or she should be properly qualified. And an appropriately composed search committee should have that task.”

But Liberal Senator Jane Cordy (Nova Scotia), a member of the Social Affairs Committee and the bill’s sponsor in the Senate, told The Hill Times she doesn’t think the bill needs changing.

Sen. Cordy, who said she was first approached about sponsoring the bill in the spring by the government’s representative in the Senate Peter Harder (Ottawa, Ont.), pointed to comments made by Independent Senator Tony Dean (Ontario) during the Nov. 30 committee meeting that selection committees don’t eliminate potential bias.

“I’m a fan of search committees,” Sen. Dean told the former chief statisticians, but added he didn’t think the bill necessarily required changing. Instead, the recommendation could be rolled into an observation for the minister to consider.

There is precedent for choosing the chief statistician by committee, according to Mr. Fellegi, who said the appointment of his predecessor, Martin Wilk, was conducted that way. Mr. Wilk’s appointment came after a period in the late 1970s when Statistics Canada didn’t have the stellar reputation it enjoys today, Mr. Fellegi said, and needed a “transformative” leader.

“We found a transformative chief statistician who wouldn’t have applied because he was vice-president of AT&T, being paid probably five times as much, at least, as the offer from the government of Canada,” Mr. Fellegi said, adding that the search committee “basically appealed to his conscience” to have him return to Canada from the United States to take the job from 1980 to 1985.

Conservative Senator Linda Frum (Ontario), the official opposition critic for the bill in the Senate, said during her second-reading speech on Oct. 5 that the chief statistician should also be subject to approval by both houses of Parliament.

“If this government wants to demonstrate its sincere desire for a more arm’s-length relationship between the agency and the government of the day, it should support such an amendment, that parliamentary approval must be required before appointing a new chief statistician,” Sen. Frum said.

On Dec. 1, Sen. Frum’s office told The Hill Times that following the start of the committee’s study of the legislation, she still saw this as a shortcoming, but that there were no proposed amendments yet formalized.

via Ex-StatsCan chiefs make last-ditch appeal to fix ‘egregious flaw’ in stats agency governance bill – The Hill Times – The Hill Times

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Governor in Council Appointments – PCO data

2017/12/06 Leave a comment

Governor in Council Appointments 2016 Baseline

Following the skimpy information provided in both the mandate checker and PCO’s Departmental Performance Report (DPR), I had asked PCO for more details and they were reasonably quick in getting back to me.
The correspondence below indicates that this is very much a work in progress. Hopefully, future reporting will include an annual table of GiC appointments by the four employment equity groups. Hard to the logic, for a government committed to diversity and inclusion, and one that has improved dramatically the diversity of judicial, ambassadorial and senatorial appointments, not to take this next step of more comprehensive reporting:

PCO response:

“…In February 2016, the Prime Minister announced a new approach to Governor in Council—or GIC—appointments that supports open, transparent, and merit-based selection processes for GIC appointments.
 
Significant progress has been made in making appointments.  Since March of this year, the number of appointments made under the new approach has increased approximately 300%.  To date, over 19,000 applications have been received and over 400 appointments made following an open, transparent, and merit-based selection process and approximately 740 appointments made through other selection processes.
 
Of the appointments following an open, transparent, and merit-based selection process, nearly 60% were women.  Most notably, women have been appointed for the first time to a number of leadership positions, including the Chief Science Advisor, the Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Grain Commission, the Chair of Via Rail, and the Chairperson of the Infrastructure Bank.  Over 10% are visible minorities, 10% are Indigenous peoples, and persons with disabilities are well represented.  The total representation of women serving as GIC appointees has increased by over 5% and is now over 40%.”

My reply to PCO:

“I prepared this little summary table for appointments under the new approach:
Women
VisMin
Indigenous peoples
Total
Number
236
40.4
40
400
0.59
0.101
0.1
Obviously, this is approximate but provides a basis for comparison with other EE data.
In terms of the other selection processes, I assume this would include position such as judges, heads of mission and the like and would appreciate confirmation your end. [PCO later advised that it does not include judges.]
Looking at the total number of GiC appointments (1182 in the index as of today, 40 percent women would mean about 473 women or more.
I would hope that in the future PCO would be able to provide annual tables similar to the EE reports for the public service (simplified) that would essentially tell what is a good news story more effectively and consistently. And that future DPRs are more informative.
But nevertheless this information is welcome, represents progress. Thanks for getting back to me.”

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Technology will make today’s government obsolete and that’s good

2017/12/04 Leave a comment

Sunil Johal of the Mowat Centre on the challenges to government with the coming IT/AI/Automation transformation.

With the government’s poor record in recent large scale IT projects (e.g., Shared Services Canada, Phoenix pay system), hard to be optimistic:

A 2016 study by Deloitte and Oxford University found that up to 850,000 jobs in the United Kingdom’s public sector could be lost as a result of automation by 2030, in administrative roles as well as jobs for teachers and police officers.

Merely applying these same projections to the Canadian public sector would mean over 500,000 jobs at risk out of 3.6 million public sector roles. But collective agreements could impede any attempts to pivot away from employees performing routine administrative tasks and towards workers with digital skills.

If the economy at large continues to wring efficiencies out of human labour and substitute technological approaches where possible, it becomes hard to imagine the public sector trundling along as it always has.

Quite simply, the public sector will need to develop a more efficient workforce and adopt more agile structures and strategies in order to maintain relevance in a digital world.

So, what’s the right path forward? While it’s promising to see governments and other public sector organizations move forward with digital service agendas, we can’t expect them to simply overlay digital solutions onto existing processes and reap the real benefits of technology.

Blockchain, AI, virtual government

The public sector, ranging from the core civil service to health care to education, must fundamentally transform how it operates.

Do we need countless contribution agreements, contracts and reimbursements to be physically vetted by clerks in multiple offices when blockchain technology could instantly verify all of those same transactions?

Do policy units need 30 advisers to prepare advice for government ministers, or can much of their work be done automatically with a select few adding high-value insights? Can we employ telepresence to reach students in remote communities with high-quality teachers? Will medical diagnostics be transformed by neural networks that can more accurately detect cancers and other diseases?

Countries like Estonia, widely regarded as the most advanced digital society in the world, demonstrate that it’s possible to rethink government as a digital platform.

Whether and how quickly Canada’s public sector can leverage technological advancements to radically increase the efficiency and effectiveness of programs and services will be perhaps its greatest challenge in the years to come.

Delays and missteps will only continue to put the public service further behind mainstream business and consumer trends, and risk a continued decline in relevance for our public institutions.

via Technology will make today’s government obsolete and that’s good

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Sorry has been the hardest word for governments

2017/11/30 Leave a comment

Good overview by Evan Dyer.

When working on the Canadian Historical Recognition Program and some of the apologies then under consideration, all these issues came up. The article’s comment that lawyers “hate apologies” (given legal risks) brings back memories of many meetings.

And as noted, Conservative governments have been more open to apologies and recognition programs (Japanese wartime internment, Chinese head tax etc, residential school system):

Canada’s next official apology is already in the works.

The country, through its prime minister, is expected to express contrition for the historic cruelty of turning away the St. Louis, a ship carrying Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism in 1939.

The passengers had already been refused entry by Cuban and U.S. authorities. Rejected and dejected, they would return to a Europe on the brink of war. Many would die in Nazi concentration camps.

A statement of regret, 80 years after the fact, will fit firmly into the Canadian government’s record of official apology.

Until Tuesday’s LGBTQ2 apology — and leaving aside apologies to individuals such as Maher Arar — Canada had atoned for three types of wrongs: those related to the Indian Residential School system, wrongs related to immigration, such as the Chinese head tax or the Komagata Maru incident, and wrongs it perpetrated during the two world wars, such as the internment of Japanese-Canadians and the executions of Canadian soldiers during the First World War.

The St. Louis incident checks two of those three boxes.

Some in the Jewish community have fought for years to make the government acknowledge that its decision was heartless and tainted by anti-Semitism.

Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis attempt to communicate with friends and relatives in Cuba, June 3, 1939. The ship’s passengers were later refused entry to Canada and many died in the Holocaust. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/National Archives and Records)

Others are less keen. Sally Zerker, whose Polish-Jewish family members on the St. Louis were turned away, wrote in Canadian Jewish News that an apology now would be “nothing but a shallow, empty, meaningless act.”

“It will not bring back my relatives, or offer me any solace. Instead, it will whitewash a government that did nothing to help the Jews who were fleeing the Nazis and ignored the type of anti-Semitism that was endemic in Canada until the 1970s.”

But Zerker’s reaction is not typical. Though panned by some critics as “virtue-signalling” and gesture politics, apologies often mean a lot to the people to whom they’re directed.

Apologies, left and right

It was Conservative Brian Mulroney who broke the ice in 1988, when he apologized for the internment of Japanese-Canadians (Ronald Reagan the same year signed a similar apology to Japanese-Americans who were interned). Stephen Harper followed suit in 2006 with an apology for the head tax that unfairly penalized Chinese immigrants from 1885 to 1923.

Harper also made what is probably Canada’s biggest apology to date for the residential school system. Justin Trudeau’s apology last week extended that apology to residential school survivors in Newfoundland and Labrador who had been excluded.

Then prime minister Stephen Harper shakes hands with Indigenous leaders on June 11, 2008, the day he formally apologized on behalf of the Canadian government for the residential school system. The exclusion of schools in Newfoundland and Labrador led to another apology by Justin Trudeau last week. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)

Trudeau’s own father was no fan of saying sorry. When Mulroney first proposed an apology for Japanese-Canadians in 1984, Trudeau rebuffed him.

 “I do not think it is the purpose of a government to right the past,” Pierre Trudeau said. “It is our purpose to be just in our time.”

“My father might have a different perspective on it than I do,” Justin Trudeau said Monday, as he prepared to apologize for the persecution of LGBT Canadians.

“He came at it as an academic, as a constitutionalist. I come at it as a teacher, as someone who’s worked a lot in communities.”

Lawyers hate apologies

Trudeau could also have said his father came at it as a lawyer, which he was.

Lawyers routinely tell their clients that apologies can be construed as admissions of guilt or liability — and can carry a price tag.

Concerns about reparations long delayed an official U.S. government apology for slavery.

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton condemned his country’s record on a visit to Senegal in 1998, but added the caveat: “We cannot push time backward through the door of no return. We have lived our history.”

Ten years would pass before the U.S. Congress would pass a resolution apologizing for more than 200 years of slavery and segregation of African-Americans.

But the Senate’s beautifully worded apology to African-Americans ends with this rather jarring clause: “Disclaimer: Nothing in this resolution  a) authorizes or supports any claim against the United States; or b) serves as a settlement of any claim against the United States.”

Limited liability

Slavery began in United States during colonial times, but it persisted long after the U.S. Declaration of Independence, as the Congressional apology acknowledged.

Should Canada’s responsibility for historic wrongs extend to pre-Confederation times?

Stephen Harper thought not, which is why he excluded Newfoundland and Labrador from his residential school apology in 2008. Trudeau has decided that the province’s pre-Confederation history (N.L. joined in 1949) was Canada’s history. And it’s a history with its own set of wrongs.

Relations between Newfoundland’s original inhabitants, the Beothuks, and its settlers were so bad that encounters between the two usually left one side dead. The last confirmed member of the Beothuk people died in 1829.

And the same British Crown that pacified Quebec by extending legal tolerance and equality to its Catholic majority showed a much harsher face in its Newfoundland colony. There, it imposed the same code of discrimination and persecution it operated in Ireland: the Penal Laws.

The policies enacted in a forlorn bid to prevent Irish people from settling Newfoundland included banning the Roman Catholic religion, hunting priests and nuns, burning homes and outbuildings and refusing the right of burial.

Official government correspondence of the era typically refers to the island’s Irish people as “idle, disorderly, useless men and women” and “disaffected, disloyal, disorderly, enured to drunkenness, debauchery, vices and felonies of all kinds.”

Irish people lived under absurd restrictions — for example, no two “Papist” men could spend the winter under the same roof unless they were servants of a Protestant master — and any infraction was an excuse for exile.

Sins of the Crown

Acadian family members place flowers at the base of a monument honouring the memory of Acadians who were deported 250 years ago, on the waterfront in Halifax in 2005. (Andrew Vaughan/Canadian Press)

At least one of Canada’s pre-Confederation wrongs has already been addressed in a formal apology — from the Queen.

The expulsion of the Acadians in 1755 from what is now the Maritimes and Quebec was a historic transgression whose consequences are still felt by the exiles’ descendants (some of whom live in Louisiana rather than Nova Scotia, for one thing).

Queen Elizabeth apologized to the Acadians in 2003, signing a royal “Proclamation Designating 28 July of Every Year as A Day of Commemoration of the Great Upheaval.”

But she was careful to add a rider:

“Our present proclamation does not, under any circumstances, constitute a recognition of legal or financial responsibility by the Crown.”

 via Sorry has been the hardest word for governments | CBC News

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Phoenix Pay: Government got conflicting advice before launching ill-fated system

2017/11/30 Leave a comment

Don’t think I would recommend S.i. Systems given their candy coating compared to Gartner.

But Bagnall’s conclusion is right: really hard to put on the brakes on a major initiative at a late stage, given bureaucratic inertia and that people are vested in it going forward:

In the wake of last week’s damning report by auditor general Michael Ferguson — who concluded the pay system is at risk of chewing up $540 million more than its budgeted $310 million by 2019, with no end in sight — it’s worth re-examining some of the independent advice government agencies were getting in early 2016.

Treasury Board, along with Phoenix-sponsor Public Services and Procurement Canada, commissioned at least two reviews that were delivered just days before the February 2016 launch of the new pay system.

One review, by Gartner Inc., offered a number of important warnings, but the second report, by S.i. Systems, was surprisingly upbeat about the Phoenix project’s chances for success.

“The (Phoenix) initiative is very likely to achieve its goals and desired outcomes within the first year or two of full operations,” S.i. Systems noted in its draft final report dated Jan. 18, 2016. “All in-scope work has been completed, a (software) code freeze has been imposed on Phoenix and the Miramichi pay centre is fully operational.”

Ferguson last week gave short shrift to such sentiment, pointing out that roughly one in two federal government employees was experiencing a significant pay issue as of last June — fully 16 months after the launch of Phoenix.

S.i. Systems couched some of its conclusions with caveats, noting that the system was not yet fully automated, with the result some pay transactions were being dealt with manually. However, the consultants viewed this as a “temporary” issue during the transition from dozens of older pay systems to the consolidated Phoenix system.

S.i. Systems nevertheless was clear that Public Services and Procurement Canada — the department in charge of the project — should move ahead with Phoenix. Such a move “will be challenging,” the S.i. Systems report noted, “but it is likely that the problems and difficulties will be manageable.”

The consultants concluded “The (Phoenix) project team is to be commended for bringing this complex initiative to its current stage.”

The Gartner report, dated Feb. 11, 2016, offered a much different view. Not only did Gartner identify a dozen significant risks facing the impending rollout of Phoenix, it offered strategies for minimizing them. Many of the risks proved all too real, while the tips for reducing them were ignored.

Consider this item, offered in a discussion of potential problems associated with testing the new pay system: “End to end testing has not been performed by any department that Gartner has interviewed,” Gartner noted, “Best practice would dictate multiple end-to-end cycles be tested prior to go-live (in February 2016).”

The Gartner document added that its consultants were never provided with “a clearly documented testing strategy and plan.”

Gartner was hired on Dec. 21, 2015, leaving it just enough time to interview eight federal departments. Nevertheless, the sample included some of the largest ones (Health Canada, Employment and Social Development Canada and Public Services).

Other key risks identified by Gartner included training, support and transition.

For instance, Gartner notes that federal departments hadn’t yet implemented their training programs. This meant that if any gaps in training emerged it would be impossible to address these through revised or remedial courses before Phoenix went live. Gartner concluded the training shortfall could result in “unanticipated consequences such as an incorrect pay calculation.”

Gartner also brought attention to what has proved one of Phoenix’s most intractable problems — technical support for government employees using the system, a problem exacerbated by the reduction in the number of pay administrators starting in 2014.

Gartner correctly predicted there would be a very large number of queries facing pay administrators at the central location in Miramichi, N.B. — not least because employees across government had little opportunity beforehand to become familiar with Phoenix’s many quirks.

The consultants offered a number of suggestions for reducing the risks of the Phoenix rollout, including trying a more piecemeal approach. Divide the two main waves of employees into multiple waves, for instance, and start with the least difficult departments — those with relatively few seasonal employees, shift workers and other complicating features when it comes to pay.

Critically, Gartner also suggested running Phoenix in tandem with the older pay system as a contingency in case the new system didn’t perform as advertised.

These and other recommendations were ignored, with the result now all too plain to see. Nearly 350,000 pay transactions are today choking a system designed to accommodate 80,000.

To be fair, S.i. Systems also took note of the potential risks involved in abandoning the old pay system before making sure Phoenix actually worked. “(We) did not see evidence of a fallback or test strategy to mitigate this potentially risky event,” the S.i. Systems report noted in an Annex.

But the consultants downplayed the risk in its summary assessment that declared the Phoenix project was using an “excellent testing strategy” and that “when problems were encountered, appropriate and timely action was taken.”

But no matter the consultants’ advice, the final call about moving ahead with a project this big belonged to government. After nearly a decade in development, Phoenix suffered the flaw of unstoppable bureaucratic momentum. The directors of the project seemed not inclined to pay much attention to last-minute advice unless it happened to line up with where they were going anyway.

via Phoenix Pay: Government got conflicting advice before launching ill-fated system | Ottawa Citizen

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Bagnall: Phoenix — a disaster so bad, it just might spark real change

2017/11/23 Leave a comment

Good analysis by Bagnall:

While software experts sort through the technical problems, the government has gone on a hiring binge so Public Services and other federal departments can begin to make a dent in pay requests that require manual processing. The irony, of course, is that the Conservatives, starting in 2014, had reduced the number of compensation advisers across government from 2,000 to 1,350 in anticipation of a more efficient system.

The government today now employs more compensation advisers and support staff than it did prior to the launch of Phoenix — counting the employees within departments who have recently been reassigned — temporarily, one hopes — to handle pay issues.

Such is the “all-hands-on-deck” sentiment throughout government that even the public service unions are contemplating agreeing to simpler language in dozens of collective agreements.

They have a number of incentives to make changes in contract language, even if it potentially eliminates certain types of overtime pay or complex provisions relating to paid leave. Labour leaders have been inundated with demands from members to help get Phoenix fixed. Few blame the unions for the broken system but blame is no longer the point.

Phoenix has been in crisis so long that government employees are now making career decisions stemming from their fear of payroll consequences. If they transfer to another department, retire, go on paternity leave or accept a raise, will they be able to weather a temporary loss of pay?

There are other knock-on effects of Phoenix, most notably in other departments that are also managing complex information technology projects. Earlier this year, the Department of National Defence cancelled a procurement that would have linked part of its pay system to Phoenix. Departments are also evaluating whether they should manage IT projects in a different manner altogether.

The federal government has a long history of top-down management — intricate, massive designs that try to anticipate every contingency. But by the time all aspects are locked in, the world of technology has moved on.

In the case of Phoenix, project managers seemed to understand the risks and potential complications of the system they were proposing — but at a theoretical level. The auditor general made it clear that very little was ready when the system was launched at a practical level — not the software, the processes or the oversight. When the system early on began sounding warning sirens, those managing Phoenix didn’t know how to ask the right questions to establish a fix.

This knowledge gap existed because Public Services and Procurement Canada tried to do everything itself.

Ferguson concluded his report by urging Public Services and Treasury Board — the federal government’s main employer — to develop a sustainable repair for Phoenix based on a fuller understanding of the system’s underlying flaws.

Ideally such a fix would address the culture that produces such IT disasters. There’s too little direct experience in IT, too much fear of making errors that embarrass cabinet members and top brass in the department, too little feedback from the rest of government.

Getting all this right might mean we’d never have to read another report as damning as the one Ferguson delivered Tuesday.

via Bagnall: Phoenix — a disaster so bad, it just might spark real change | Ottawa Citizen

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Diversity among Canadian Heads of Mission: Two Years In | Canadian International Council

2017/11/10 Leave a comment

My latest:

Of the 74 appointments to date, close to half have been women compared to an end-2015 baseline of less than one-third. When considered proportionately to the 15 percent of Canada’s population who are both visible minorities and Canadian citizens, visible minorities remain slightly under-represented at 11% of appointments. Significantly, there are no identified Indigenous peoples heads of mission.

via Diversity among Canadian Heads of Mission: Two Years In | Canadian International Council

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Losing a war criminal in Canada’s access to information system

2017/11/07 Leave a comment

Telling account of ATIP failure by Michael Friscolanti – ATIP took longer to respond than locating a fugitive:

Nearly four years ago, Maclean’s tracked down a fugitive: Dragan Djuric, a suspected Serbian war criminal. At the time, his mug shot was one of dozens featured on an FBI-style “Wanted” list launched by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA)—a Stephen Harper-era initiative aimed at flushing out illegal immigrants who vanished before they could be deported.

A failed refugee claimant who supposedly disappeared in the early 2000s, Djuric’s trail had gone cold after the border agency said it exhausted every last lead in his file. Maclean’s managed to find him in a matter of a few weeks, thanks to some obvious clues left behind in his Federal Court records. Living in Slovenia—not somewhere in Canada, as Ottawa believed—Djuric was actually quite happy to talk to a reporter, anxious to prove he wasn’t hiding at all.

After the article was published, Maclean’s went looking for something else via the Access to Information Act: internal CBSA records discussing Djuric’s case. Only now, two and a half years after filing that ATIP request, has the agency handed over the documents.

Although the records contain some newsworthy revelations—including the fact that the Harper Conservatives quietly removed 15 other names from the Wanted list after the article appeared—the disclosure says a lot more about the dysfunctional state of Canada’s access to information system than it does about missing war criminals. Simply put, Maclean’s had a much easier time locating a fugitive than it did obtaining government documents about said fugitive.

“The access system is clearly broken,” says Fred Vallance-Jones, a journalism professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax, and project leader of an annual freedom-of-information audit. “If you don’t have the ability to get information reasonably promptly, then all we know about our government is what the government is willing to tell us in press releases and news conferences. And we all know that the government doesn’t always give the full picture.”

via Losing a war criminal in Canada’s access to information system – Macleans.ca

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John Ivison: Concerns raised as Liberals consider tougher French requirements for public servants

2017/10/19 Leave a comment

Good discussion by Ivison of some of the issues involved:

Canada is blessed with a bilingual public service – a bureaucracy mildewed with caution and capable of stifling innovation in both official languages.

We are, in fact, better at stopping things happening than anyone – Canada is number one in the International Civil Service Effectiveness Index.

Yet, nearly five decades after the passage of the Official Languages Act, the public service is not bilingual enough, it seems.

A new report by two senior bureaucrats, commissioned by the Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick, has found many public servants working in bilingual regions do not feel comfortable using their language of choice at work.

The solution, according to Patrick Borbey, president of the Public Service Commission of Canada, and senior bureaucrat, Matthew Mendelsohn, is to raise the linguistic requirements for those in supervisory roles.

This sounds fair enough at first blush – people should be able to work in the language in which they can express themselves most easily. The complaint is that even when French is used, it is symbolic – typically introduced at the beginning or end of a discussion but not sustained.

However, the backdrop to this is a public service that is already over-represented in executive positions by French speakers. Twenty three per cent of Canadians identify French as their first language but 26 per cent of Canada’s 250,000 federal public servants are French speakers and fully 31 per cent of those in executive positions primarily speak French.

Raising the linguistic bar is likely to exacerbate the dominance of French speakers in the upper echelons of the public service – sparking more resentment inside the bureaucracy, where many view the existing requirements as an insurmountable hurdle to promotion.

The proposal is to raise the requirement for French oral expression and comprehension from level B to level C – a test which only 35-45 per cent of employees currently pass.

The Liberals point out that the move toward superior proficiency levels is just one of 14 recommendations made by Borbey and Mendelsohn – and none are likely to be adopted in isolation.

The hope is that by increasing training levels across the public service, proficiency would improve at all levels.

“We’re committed to ensuring English and French speaking Canadians have equal opportunities of employment and advancement in federal institutions, including through better and more accessible language training necessary to achieve higher language standards,” said Jean-Luc Ferland, press secretary to Scott Brison, president of the Treasury Board.

He blamed the Conservative government for cutting training budgets and said any proposed changes would be made in consultation with public sector unions.

That goes without saying since the report recommends the government fund increased training by “re-purposing” the $800 bilingualism bonus paid to public servants who meet the language requirements for their position. That goes without saying since the report recommends the government fund increased training by “re-purposing” the $800 bilingualism bonus paid to public servants who meet the language requirements for their position. (Full disclosure: my spouse qualifies for the bonus.)

Killing the bonus could prove counter-productive – many bureaucrats maintain their skills with the express purpose of passing their five-yearly language test and qualifying for the $800 bonus.

One wonders if Justin Trudeau would be mobbed by joyful civil servants in the future, as he was at the Global Affairs building two years ago, if he claws back the bilingualism bonus?

André Picotte, acting president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees, said his union has not been consulted on what would constitute a hefty pay-cut for his members.

“There are several ways we can foster bilingualism in the work place. But not by axing benefits in place since the 1970s,” he said.

He called on the government to increase the training budget so that it is accessible to junior bureaucrats, who find it difficult to cultivate the language skills necessary for jobs requiring bilingualism.

It’s a long-standing criticism that language training is offered too late in the career of public servants, and is often allocated through performance management processes, with the result some staff never have access to in-person language training.

The report’s recommendations may mitigate some of those shortcomings – for example, the requirement for each institution or department to create a “personal language training account” to enable all employees to receive a certain number of hours of language training.

But outside of Quebec and New Brunswick, just eight per cent of Canadians are bilingual – for the vast majority, ordering quiche lorraine taxes their linguistic ability.

If the Liberals adopt a policy that makes the federal public service even less representative of the Canadian public than it is already, they will stoke the impression that the West, in particular, is being frozen out.

Source: National Post

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