President Obama explains the difference between Silicon Valley and the real world – Recode

2016/10/19 Leave a comment

To be noted:

The final thing I’ll say is that government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.

So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences — setting aside my Syria and Yemen portfolio — then I think those suggestions are terrific. (Laughter and applause.) That’s not, by the way, to say that there aren’t huge efficiencies and improvements that have to be made.

But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked. No, it’s not inherently wrecked; it’s just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That’s not on your balance sheet, that’s on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that’s hard and it’s messy, and we’re building up legacy systems that we can’t just blow up.

Source: President Obama explains the difference between Silicon Valley and the real world – Recode

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‘There seems to be a paralysis’: Trudeau government has backlog of more than 300 appointments

2016/10/18 Leave a comment

Almost a year in, one would expect more vacancies to have been filled, given the overall policy – greater diversity – is clear. But I can also see the wish to ensure that the details of the policy and its implementation are addressed first.

One of the key things to look for is the degree of transparency in political appointments, with comparable employment equity reporting to the public service and federally-regulated sectors (telecoms, banking, transport). Currently for judges, only gender is tracked. For other GiC appointments, while gender has been tracked comprehensively for 25 years (as has official languages), there has been little systemic tracking of the other groups (visible minorities, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities).

And in some cases, there has been backsliding: the GiC appointment index (top view) has less information than previously, requiring more looking at the individual organizations than before.

For my baseline study, see my short ebook, “Because it’s 2015 …” Implementing Diversity and Inclusion, available either in an iPad/Mac version (iBooks) or Windows (pdf) Version.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet have accumulated a backlog of more than 300 appointments that are due to be filled, a CBC News investigation has found.

Almost 20 per cent of governor in council (GIC) appointments, which include roles with Crown corporations, port authorities, agencies and tribunals, are currently vacant or occupied by a Conservative appointee whose term is past its expiry date.

Overall, 170 GIC positions are listed as vacant. Another 116 are past their appointment’s expiry date but the incumbent has been allowed to remain in the role until he or she is either replaced or renewed.

Currently, 61 federally appointed judge positions are vacant, including one seat on the Supreme Court of Canada.

In the Senate, 20 per cent of the 105 seats are empty. The government has pledged to fill the 21 spots “by the end of the year.” Three more senators are due to retire in January.

Taking a toll

In some cases, incumbents have been temporarily renewed only a day or two before their appointments were set to expire because the government had not yet launched the process to find a replacement.

For example, Graham Fraser’s appointment as commissioner of official languages, which was set to expire Sunday, was extended Thursday for two months. The government has yet to issue a job posting to find his successor.

The backlog has taken a toll on the operations of some boards and government bodies.

The CRTC hasn’t been able to hold a planned hearing on French music since November because it doesn’t have the necessary three French-speaking commissioners.

The parole board, where 21 per cent of positions are currently vacant, says it’s being stretched, with its remaining part-time board members putting in additional hours to ensure the work is done.

Alberta judges warned a Senate committee in late September that the 61 vacant judge positions could affect court proceedings, saying the province’s justice system is so backlogged they are now setting trial dates for 2018. Last week, an Edmonton judge stayed a murder charge against Lance Matthew Regan, citing delays in bringing the case to trial caused in part by the backlog in Alberta’s justice system.

‘Overwhelmed’

Liberal government insiders privately point to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office as the source of the problem, saying “the centre” has been “overwhelmed.”

The government is confident the problem will be resolved soon. It says the backlog was caused in part by the decision to overhaul the appointments process and bring in a more open, balanced, merit-based system. The new system is now up and running and vacancies are being filled, officials say.

Source: ‘There seems to be a paralysis’: Trudeau government has backlog of more than 300 appointments – Politics – CBC News

Sean Fine of the Globe focusses on the impact on the court system:

While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is considering his first appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada – a vacancy became available on Sept. 1 – the shortage of lower-court judges may make it difficult for some jurisdictions to meet constitutional guarantees of timely criminal trials.

In July, the Supreme Court of Canada set a deadline of 30 months in superior courts (such as the Court of Queen’s Bench) from the time a charge is laid until the trial is completed. In Calgary, the wait is now just short of 15 months – 63 weeks – to schedule a trial of five days or more. (It can take months from the time a charge is laid until a trial is scheduled.) The situation is about the same in Nova Scotia, where the Supreme Court is now booking criminal trials of five days or more for next fall.

Civil trials, too, face long delays, which Chief Justice Wittmann said is especially hard on families seeking resolutions to legal problems. The lead time to schedule a civil or family trial of five days or more in the Court of Queen’s Bench in Calgary is now 138 weeks – bookings are being accepted for April, 2019. The Court of Queen’s Bench is Alberta’s top trial court, and it has seven vacancies and 59 full-time judges in office, according to the Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs. The province’s Court of Appeal has two vacancies and 12 full-time judges in office.

In Nova Scotia, the Supreme Court (the top trial court) has five vacancies and 31 full-time judges in office. The Court of Appeal has one vacancy and seven judges in office.

“On rare occasions in the past we’ve had to cancel matters. However, this is the first time we’ve had to send out multiple letters the month before suggesting that trial dates be rescheduled due to the shortage of judges,” Jennifer Stairs, the communications director for the Nova Scotia judiciary, told The Globe in an e-mail.

“That’s very difficult on the lawyers and on the litigants who are anxious to have their matters heard.”

B.C. has eight vacancies and 82 judges in office on its Supreme Court, and three open spots and 12 judges in office on its appeal court. Five-day criminal trials are available in January, 2017, while five-day civil trials, other than motor-vehicle actions, can be booked from August, 2017, onward. Dates for five-day motor-vehicle action trials are fully booked for the next 18 months, according to Superior Courts communications officer Bruce Cohen.

The Canadian Bar Association, representing the country’s legal profession, is also upset at the delays in appointing judges.

“We are very concerned. Ongoing judicial vacancies have created significant delays in the court system. These delays have a serious impact on separating families and their children, on criminal justice, on business in Canada,” CBA president René Basque said in an e-mail.

Canadian courts languish as vacancies on bench remain unfilled

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Glass ceiling still in place for British Columbia public sector employees

2016/10/18 Leave a comment

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on the perspective), there is no equivalent federal ‘sunshine list’ on all public sector salaries.

british-columbia-public-service-2011

However, we do have data on federal Deputy and Assistant Deputy Ministers (for women, 2016 baseline 37.6 percent women and 4.7 percent visible minorities for deputies, 40.8 and 7.2 percent for ADMs). DM appointments by the current government are close to gender parity at 46.9 percent women.

My analysis of GiC appointments showed less representation of women and visible minorities, and a similar gap to British Columbia between senior and junior appointments for crown corporations and administrative tribunals:

GiC Baseline 2016.014

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may have introduced a gender-balanced cabinet “because it’s 2015,” but that equality does not extend to public servants in B.C., where the vast majority of the highest-paid employees are men.

An analysis of The Sun’s exclusive public sector salary database reveals that of the 200 highest-paid public employees in B.C., during 2014 or the 2014-15 fiscal year, 70 per cent were men and 30 per cent were women. That increases to 77 per cent male when the field is narrowed to the top 100 (By contrast, 94 of the 100 highest-paid corporate executives in 2015 were men, according to Business in Vancouver.)

“There’s an old saying: the higher, the fewer, with respect to women,” said Barbara Arneil, head of the University of B.C.’s political science department. “We have what I think are structural, systemic reasons why women are not reaching the top of their profession, whether that is in the university, whether that’s in government, whether that’s in the private sector. And we’re wasting very good resources.”

Search The Sun’s exclusive public sector salary database.

The Sun analyzed the top 200 public-sector earners in this year’s database, which contains salary information for nearly 77,000 employees, and the top 50 earners in six of the seven sectors: B.C. government, Crown corporations, health authorities, local government, school districts, and colleges and universities. The Sun did not include municipal police in this analysis because forces generally withhold many names to protect undercover officers. The Sun relied on first names for this gender analysis, checking Internet profiles in cases where only a first initial was provided or the name was ambiguous.

The gender divide is most pronounced at colleges and universities, where men represented 41 of the top 50 earners, or 82 per cent, in the 2014-15 fiscal year. But because the University of B.C. accounts for 45 of the top 50 highest-paid employees in the sector in the province, these findings really only reflect that institution. At the University of Victoria, for example, five of the 10 highest-paid employees are women.

Pay equity is an issue UBC takes seriously, university spokeswoman Susan Danard said in an emailed statement.

“Compensation is affected by several factors, including the depth of experience and accomplishment that a faculty or staff member brings with them when they are first hired, and the length of employment with UBC, with people paid more as they progress in their careers,” she said. Faculty and area of specialization are also factors that affect pay equity, she said, noting specialists and top doctors in the faculty of medicine are often the highest paid given the demands and complexity of their jobs.

Source: Glass ceiling still in place for public sector employees | Vancouver Sun

Daphne Bramham picks up on issue:

Canada’s failure is in providing women the opportunities to fully participate in the economy. Not only does Canada lag the Nordic countries, it trails countries like the United States, Namibia, Mongolia, Belarus, Thailand and Burundi.

It’s because women don’t have equal opportunities, Canada’s overall gender ranking dropped to 30th in 2015, down 11 places from 2014.

Among the more troubling findings in the Sun’s gender analysis of B.C. public-sector wages is that the 25 universities and colleges have the fewest women in top-paid positions — only nine among the top 50. Of those, five work at the University of British Columbia.

The excuses/reasons are the usual ones. Prime career-building years coincide with the prime reproductive years and Canadian mothers continue to bear the largest share of the caregiving for both children and aging parents.

Even though 58 per cent of these institutions’ graduates are women, missing are the supports for those young women to succeed in academe. It’s all the more disappointing because post-secondary institutions are supposed to be places of innovation and change, not laggards.

What’s not surprising is that the health services authorities account for the most women on the top-earners’ list with 59; 35 of whom are at the Provincial Health Services Authority.

For more than a decade, the majority of medical school graduates have been women. Among the professionals in the B.C. government, women account for nearly 90 per cent of the nurses and nutritionists and three-quarters of the social workers and counsellors.

But that may be change for the worse because catching up wage-wise isn’t as simple as more women working in traditionally male jobs. When women do that, the pay scale drops. That’s what sociologist Paula England at New York University concluded after analyzing U.S. census data from 1950 to 2000.

When biologists went from being predominately men to women, England found that wages fell 18 percentage points (even accounting for changed value of the dollar over time). When workers in parks and camps went from mostly men to mostly women, the median hourly wages dropped 57 percentage points.

It’s because when women do the work, England told the New York Times, “It just doesn’t look like it’s as important to the bottom line or requires as much skill.”

Daphne Bramham: Few women in B.C. public sector’s top ranks, …

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Brampton council says no to electoral reform despite ethnic mismatch with residents | Toronto Star

2016/10/18 Leave a comment

The gap between representation at the municipal level and other levels of government has been an issue for some time (all federal MPs and provincial MPPs from Brampton are Indo Canadians, over reflecting their share of the population and the first-past-the-post system).

Ranked balloting may be part of the solution but there are likely other factors involved, including the lack of political parties at the municipal level:

On Wednesday — as a federal debate on the issue draws near and with new Ontario legislation that gives cities the option of ranked balloting — Brampton council voted 11-0 against the idea. Meanwhile, Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral method is being used by fewer and fewer democratic nations around the world because it’s recognized as a system that too often puts people in power despite their having little voter support.

“Each city councillor in Brampton has the support, on average, of less than 4 per cent of the city’s voters, yet they’re making decisions that affect the entire city,” says Pat McGrail, chair of Fair Vote Peel, who made a presentation to council Wednesday, advocating for a ranked ballot system whereby candidates would need the support of a majority to get elected.

Brampton councillors who responded to the Star said they voted against ranked balloting because voters might find the system too confusing. It works by allowing voters to rank at least three top candidates (cities can opt to allow more candidates to be ranked on each ballot). The candidate who receives the least first place votes is eliminated in each round and their votes are redistributed until one candidate has a majority.

But critics point to research that shows the current first-past-the-post system often leads to municipal councils that do not accurately reflect the ethnic diversity of cities. In Brampton close to 70 per cent of the city’s residents are visible minorities. Only one out of eleven members of city council is a visible minority.

“That’s not just a Brampton problem,” says Dave Meslin, an expert on the subject who is authoring a book on electoral reform and has helped with the federal government’s current public consultations on the issue being conducted in every riding across Canada. He says Canada is now alone in its use of first-past-the-post for every level of government. “The lack of diverse representation on municipal councils is a glaring problem across Ontario.”

He points to U.S. research that shows ranked balloting in cities has significantly improved representation that more accurately reflects the electorate. Vote splitting, where an incumbent can rely on a concentrated base of supporters, while a number of other candidates fight for the remaining voters — often the vast majority — is something that can’t happen with ranked balloting, Meslin says.

In the 2014 municipal election, of all winners, Brampton Coun. Martin Medeiros received the least number of votes — 4,188, or 22 per cent of the votes cast in his ward. He beat Shan Gill by 100 votes. There were 15 candidates in total who ran for the council seat Medeiros now occupies. With a city-wide turnout of 36 per cent of eligible voters, applying the same rate, Medeiros received the support of about 7 per cent of eligible voters in his ward.

He did not respond when asked to comment on his decision not to support ranked balloting.

The provincial government was asked if its new legislation under Bill 181, which gives cities the option of using ranked balloting for elections, falls short because it leaves the ultimate decision to the very politicians who might get defeated by the new system.

“We feel that municipalities are responsible levels of government and are in the best position to make decisions in the best interest of their communities,” said Ministry of Municipal Affairs spokesperson Conrad Spezowka.

McGrail says low voter turnout is another problem with first-past-the-post. “The central problem of first-past-the-post is divide and conquer while appealing to your base. People become so disenfranchised they don’t even bother to vote.”

Sukhjot Naroo, a Brampton resident and co-founder of the social network Brampton Beats, which has almost 4,000 members who focus on municipal issues, says he doubts Brampton council will accurately reflect the city’s population as long as vote splitting continues. He lists an increasing number of issues accompanying Brampton’s rapid demographic shift, from zoning for places of worship to funding for a variety of culturally specific activities, that don’t get proper representation on council.

“Everyone on council will benefit from vote-splitting. The incumbents don’t want change. They’re just trying to protect the status quo. Out of eleven votes, not one even considered ranked balloting. Not even Gurpreet Dhillon, the only South Asian member of council, because he now has his base of supporters and can grow that through his growing political connections.”

Dhillon did not respond to questions emailed to him.

Toronto’s Katherine Skene says she’s dismayed, but not surprised by Brampton’s 11-0 vote. “I would hope that councils, before voting on the issue, there would be broad public consultation to find out what the voters actually want.”

Skene is co-chair of the Ranked Ballot Initiative of Toronto, where councillors last year voted 25-18 against a provincial option to allow for ranked balloting, a reversal of that council’s earlier position to bring ranked ballots about. Mayor John Tory supported the idea during his election campaign and maintained his support in last year’s vote.

Source: Brampton council says no to electoral reform despite ethnic mismatch with residents | Toronto Star

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Nova Scotia’s towns and cities elect more diverse candidates

2016/10/18 Leave a comment

Nova Scotia is the most diverse province of Atlantic Canada (9 percent visible minorities, the largest group being Black Canadians):

Lindell Smith set out to start a conversation about diversity at Halifax city hall this summer, and it seems people listened: the 26-year-old has now become the first African Nova Scotian elected to city council in 16 years.

“People from all communities went out and voted. The numbers show … something different is needed,” Smith said after Halifax’s municipal elections wrapped up over the weekend. “When someone comes in and starts asking questions, people realize, ‘We don’t know why we still do it that way.’”

Towns and cities across Nova Scotia made modest gains in diversity with the results of municipal elections on Saturday, but Smith and others note the province still has a long way to go.

Smith decisively won a seven-way race for the city’s north-end district with about 52 per cent of the vote.

 The 26-year-old will be the first black city councillor elected since 2000—when Graham Downey, the only other visible minority member to serve in Halifax regional council since its inception in 1996, lost the seat Smith now occupies.

“For the black community, it’s like we have somebody who’s at the leadership table,” Smith says. “It’s almost this sigh of relief like, ‘Wow, it took this long.’ ”

Smith’s predecessor, outgoing councillor Jennifer Watts, did not seek re-election in the north-end district. She expressed hope this election would change the composition of the then all-white, three-quarters male and “predominately older” council to better reflect the city it serves.

Despite having a more diverse roster of candidates this year—including seven visible minorities and the city’s first openly transgender candidate—Smith was the only member of a previously unrepresented group to get elected. Meanwhile, the number of female councillors in City Hall shrunk from four to two.

“It’s great that we have someone who’s not of European descent and is not over fifty, but we need to have all different voices,” Smith says.

In Kentville, about an hour’s drive west of Halifax, political newcomer Sandra Snow defeated outgoing mayor Dave Corkum with 70 per cent of the vote. The retired military aviation contractor looks forward to leading a council with four of its seven seats occupied by women.

“Women tend to lead from the heart,” Snow says. “I think when we’re discussing issues, there will be a lot more collaboration around the table.”

It’s a sight that would make former Kentville mayor Gladys Porter proud, Snow says. Porter became the first woman in the Martimes to be elected mayor 70 years ago, and after 11 years in office, went on to serve as the first female member of Nova Scotia legislature.

“We still have a long while to go,” Snow says. “A woman has a very busy life … and often we don’t prioritize ourselves first and we don’t prioritize the fact that maybe we do have political ambitions.”

Wolfville saw the gender balance in its Town Hall shift dramatically with women clinching five out of six council seats.

Source: Nova Scotia’s towns and cities elect more diverse candidates – Macleans.ca

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Canadian Studies profs hold conference on how to stay critical without Harper around

2016/10/03 Leave a comment

While Twitter commentary has been biting, my take is that it is refreshing to have a group acknowledge its implicit (and sometimes explicit) biases.

A similar reflection others (e.g., public servants, the media) might also be warranted, although my sense is the media is becoming more critical as the government’s time in office becomes longer, with the related decisions (or non-decisions):

Canadian Studies professors slammed Stephen Harper’s Conservative government so much that they’re literally holding a conference in Ottawa to discuss how to keep their critical edge now that he’s gone.

“The loss of the Harper government for Canadian academics is not unlike the loss of George W. Bush for American comedians,” the description of the conference’s theme says.

“The question in this moment of optimism (which may well have passed by the time this conference comes around) is…What do we do now?”

Called “After the Deluge: Reframing/Sustaining Critique in Post-Harper Canada,” the conference will take place at Carleton University on Oct. 28 and 29.

The conference’s theme notes Canadian Studies professors have “long prided themselves on a robust critique of the Canadian State,” and outlines how the Conservative government under Harper antagonized scholars.

 It singles out the elimination of the long form census and budget cuts to Library and Archives Canada as examples of “attacks” on research infrastructure.

“The Harper government also hit the world of Canadian Studies at its doorstep by cancelling the Understanding Canada program in 2012,” it says.

The theme also questions whether Canadian Studies in general has become too “premised on oppositional critique of the state,” and whether that’s really the best approach for their research.

“Are generative, collaborative, appreciative, and assets-based approaches to Canadian Studies a failure of critical vigilance, or a long-overdue paradigm shift?” the conference’s theme ponders.

Peter Thompson, an associate professor at Carleton who’s helping organize the conference, said the event will be less blunt than the theme implies.

“The idea is not just bashing the Harper era,” he said. “It’s about to what extent is there a change, and looking at that with clear eyes. We’re not assuming that there’s a change in government so things are automatically better.”

Thompson — who was very careful to keep the discussion apolitical — did acknowledge that with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau overturning some of the Conservative government’s most controversial policies, there is the potential for contemporary research to become too soft.

“I don’t want to assume what people are going to say at the conference,” he said. “But yeah … it’s about making sure that critique, and that the sharpness of the critique, is still there even though things have changed.”

Papers presented at the conference will touch on areas such as national security, national symbols, and cultural policy, Thompson said.

The conference is organized as part of the Canadian Studies Network, and will also host the network’s annual general meeting.

Source: Canadian Studies profs hold conference on how to stay critical without Harper around | National Post

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Shared Services likely to become ‘money pit,’ says Canada’s former chief statistician who quit two weeks ago

2016/09/27 Leave a comment

In his words:

Canada’s former chief statistician, who publicly quit his job two weeks ago on principle to the cheers of hundreds of Statistics Canada employees, says Shared Services Canada is doomed to fail.

“There’s a really good chance Shared Services Canada will turn into a money pit,” Mr. Smith told The Hill Times after he resigned publicly as Canada’s chief statistician on Sept. 16.

Mr. Smith stepped down after fighting unsuccessfully to free Statistics Canada from Shared Services’ government IT department, which Mr. Smith said jeopardizes the number-crunching agency’s independence and integrity. As well, he said the model the government created for the government-wide IT management is doomed to fail.

…As a result of his departure, he told The Hill Times that he’s been iced-out of the deputy minister community, one he said he had never really been “in,” and, so far, said his claims have been dismissed by the government.

Mr. Smith said he thinks it’s a wrong-headed move to transfer Statistics Canada’s informatics infrastructure to Shared Services, but believes it’s the senior ranks of the bureaucracy that is pushing “extremely strongly,” in favour of the Shared Services model.

“This idea came out of the bureaucracy, the most senior bureaucracy is very committed to it, they don’t want to walk away from it. [The] Privy Council Office, Treasury Board Secretariat, and more people in the most senior ranks are strongly committed to this,” said Mr. Smith, adding that they were the ones to sell it to the current government as worth continuing.

“I think the government wants to believe it,” he said.

The $2-billion department, Shared Services, was created in 2011 by the previous Conservative government to consolidate and modernize the Government of Canada’s IT networks and personnel by 2020, a deadline it’s now uncertain about meeting, given extensive delays and potential greater costs than initially thought. Its three key tasks are to amalgamate all government email systems, merge data centres, and consolidate IT networks.

….Mr. Smith said, in principle, the job of the national statistics office is centered around information and technology, and “everything we do, from drawing samples, to collecting via the internet, to processing survey data and disseminating survey data, it absolutely requires informatics to run efficiently, and well and properly. … When the government created Shared Services Canada it took our away our authority to acquire informatics infrastructure, hardware, the servers, and the file servers we needed to do our job, and they gave that authority to SSC.”

Mr. Smith said even though he had the budget to purchase the informatics systems he wanted, the decision-making power had been taken away from him.

“Therefore they can stop me from disseminating data, from producing data, simply by withholding or failing to provide the informatics infrastructure—the computing power—to do it. And it doesn’t really matter, at the end of the day, if they do it out of malicious intent or whether they do it out of incompetence; the result is the same,” said Mr. Smith.

He said there was an “unacceptable level of risk” in its data centre infrastructure, which the two departments disagreed on where the actual drives would be located and who would have access. He said there was an inability for Shared Services to deliver the additional capacity required to move ahead with Statistics Canada’s plans to enhance its website to be more user-friendly. And he said there was, at the time he left, a “lineup” of policy departments at Statistics Canada’s door asking for new data as a result of the Liberal government’s emphasis in evidence-based decision-making.

“More money got spent, the results aren’t there, and this is simply because the decisions are outside the control of Statistics Canada now,” said Mr. Smith.

He added that although this was the state of affairs when he resigned, he’s optimistic that because of his outspoken critiques, “every effort will be made to make sure my predictions don’t come true.”

In response to the allegations last week, senior officials from Shared Services and the Treasury Board Secretariat held a technical briefing where Shared Services Canada chief Ron Parker dismissed Mr. Smith’s concerns.

Mr. Parker said that he and Mr. Smith last met at an April meeting and there were “no technical or operational issues” raised. Mr. Smith said this is utterly false.

“I was appalled … for him to contend that there was no issues is absolutely absurd,” Mr. Smith said, adding that he recalls at that meeting raising a “litany of concerns.”

Mr. Smith said he thinks the government shouldn’t go further down the enterprise-wide IT path until a business plan and accountability model have been established between Shared Services and all partner departments. He said the government should be skeptical about its ability to deliver on such a massive transformation, pointing to the Phoenix pay system debacle that’s disrupted or affected the pay for 82,000 public servants. The Phoenix pay system has cost the government more than $50-million to fix, and the $398-million Email Transformation Initiative to move all government email addresses to one your.email@canada.ca system is on hold and 18 months past when it was supposed to be fully implemented.

The complaints from Statistics Canada are not the first from a department who is unsatisfied with Shared Services work. A number of departments are unhappy about the service they’ve received and some other departments that deal with sensitive data have explored ways to opt out of the system. So far, Mr. Parker says the plans do not include any departments opting out of the agreement.

Despite this, Mr. Parker declared the benefits of the enterprise approach remain clear, and “the partners are part of that model and therefore there’s nothing, nothing in the plan that envisions opting-out.”

….The decision to resign came after months of trying to bring attention to his concerns, said Mr. Smith, who has been raising issues since before the current government was elected and after, in meetings with the minister responsible for Statistics Canada, Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains (Mississauga-Malton, Ont.), and Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick.

He thought the government’s promise to enhance his agency’s independence would bring sea change to fix his problems with Shared Services. When it didn’t and the issues with Shared Services Canada began to dominate conversations with employees who were saying it affected their ability to do their job, he decided he needed to make it clear he was prepared to resign. After that didn’t move the needle, he submitted his resignation letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.) on Aug. 3, enough time he thought for them to implement an independent appointment process for his successor. That didn’t happen and instead the government appointed Anil Arora, who was working as an assistant deputy minister at Health Canada.

“When I penned that letter I thought that the odds were overwhelmingly against it having any impact other than me winding up resigned, and my interpretation of the situation was correct,” said Mr. Smith, who didn’t hear anything from anyone in government from the point of submitting his resignation until Sept. 15, when letters came from both Mr. Wernick and Mr. Trudeau, accepting his resignation.

After the way government has handled his resignation, he thinks Canadians should be skeptical about their commitments to Statistics Canada.

While he doesn’t see himself as a whistleblower, since resigning he said he’s received a lot of encouragement from employees at the agency, who have sent him emails supporting his move and thanking him for standing up. He’s received support from the national statistics council, from provincial and territorial counterparts, and international support.

“Everybody sees the issue, and they’re all living the consequences,” Mr. Smith said.

Source: Shared Services likely to become ‘money pit,’ says Canada’s former chief statistician who quit two weeks ago – The Hill Times – The Hill Times

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Statistics Canada eyes the end of the short-form census

2016/09/27 Leave a comment

Other countries do this and makes sense, both from cost and accuracy perspectives. But complex transition:

The mandatory long-form census returned this year, a decade after it was last seen.

If things go as planned, a decade from now the short-form census won’t be seen again.

Statistics Canada is working on a plan for the 2026 census that would eliminate the mandatory short-form census that goes to every household and instead use existing government databases to conduct a virtual count of the population.

The plan would save taxpayers millions of dollars and provide the same information used by governments to plan roads, hospitals, schools and other public services.

Documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act paint a detailed picture of what officials hope to have in place by 2026: a digital register of every Canadian that could be updated every five years, if not annually, and a smaller long-form questionnaire.

“This approach to replace the short-form questionnaire will require a complete redesign of the long-form questionnaire,” reads the April report provided to former chief statistician Wayne Smith.

The agency said in a statement that it hasn’t yet determined its approach for the 2021 census, but made no direct reference to the 2026 count. The statement said the agency “conducts ongoing research activities to determine the most efficient way of collecting census information.”

Source: Statistics Canada eyes the end of the short-form census – Macleans.ca

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Liberal replacement for Conservatives’ Office of Religious Freedoms costs four times as much | National Post

2016/09/22 Leave a comment

Irresponsible headline: the proper comparison would be with respect to the budget for the previous human rights division plus the Office of Religious Freedoms, which I suspect would show little to no change.

Comparing a basket of apples with one apple:

The overall budget for the Office of Human Rights, Freedoms and Inclusion, which replaces the Conservative-era Office of Religious Freedoms, could exceed $18 million, according to foreign minister Stéphane Dion.

The office budget was stated at “up to $15 million” in a June press release from Global Affairs Canada. But that’s just the programming budget, according to the response — there’s anther $3.04 million allotted annually to operations and salaries.

That compares to $4.25 million and $720,386, respectively, under the Office of Religious Freedoms.

Since its creation four months ago, the office has been “working to identify programming opportunities,” Dion said in response to a Conservative question on the order paper.

The office is engaging with organizations that already received funding under the previous administration, Dion confirmed, but also “new stakeholders” looking at a broader range of issues including “peaceful pluralism, inclusion, diversity and democracy.”

 Those themes are divided into three divisions, with 36 full-time employees in total: human rights and indigenous affairs; inclusion and religious freedom; and democracy.

Only five people worked for the Office of Religious Freedoms, Dion said.

To focus on indigenous rights abroad could force the government to walk a tightrope, since some Canadian mining operations have been opposed by local populations in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Still, Dion told Postmedia in May he thought “the overwhelming majority of the mining industry of Canada will welcome this focus … they will be willing to work with this office, I’m sure.”

The buck doesn’t stop there for human rights promotion, with Dion explaining that heads of Canada’s diplomatic missions are now “empowered” to speak out about issues in their day-to-day responsibilities, and to media.

“Human rights promotion, including freedom of religious or belief, is now entrenched in our heads of missions’ core objectives and priorities and will be included in their annual performance commitments,” he said.

Source: Liberal replacement for Conservatives’ Office of Religious Freedoms costs four times as much | National Post

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No excuse for Ottawa’s bungled technology: Barrie McKenna

2016/09/20 Leave a comment

One of the rare commentaries that connects the dots between Shared Services Canada, the Phoenix pay system, and the inability of government to manage complex IT projects (admittedly, some of the most complex around).

It does beg the question, as posed by Donald Savoie in his book, What Is Government Good At?: A Canadian Answer.

One also has to ask the question, in all the decks, analyses, MCs and TB submissions, were the risks clearly stated and assessed? Did the public servants provide ‘fearless advice’ or not?

Maybe you don’t think it’s a big deal that tens of thousands of federal government workers are going unpaid because of the botched roll out of a new pay system.

Most civil servants are overpaid and underworked anyway, right?

Many Canadians may feel similarly untroubled that government data centres are frequently crashing, downing websites and leaving key agencies, such as Statistics Canada, unable to get timely economic information to financial markets.

But it does matter. Canada isn’t some tin-pot country that can’t pay its workers, run a computer or produce timely data. It’s a G7 country, a modern, advanced economy that should be a model of good governance.

There is a disturbing back story to these embarrassing headlines.

Turn back the clock to 2010. Stephen Harper’s Conservative government was eager to demonstrate it could wring billions of dollars in savings out of a fat government bureaucracy it neither liked nor trusted.

Two of the signature initiatives that emerged from this effort was the centralized Phoenix pay system and the birth of Shared Services Canada, a $1.9-billion super agency that would consolidate all of the government technology systems.

And for years afterward it would point to these efforts to bolster its reputation as a sound manager of the machinery of government.

Both have been unmitigated disasters.

The fallout from these moves continues to reverberate through the government. Not only have the promised savings never materialized, but Ottawa is now spending tens of millions more to fix the problems.

On Friday, Statscan’s chief statistician, Wayne Smith, abruptly resigned, complaining that the agency’s independence has been compromised by “disruptive, ineffective, slow and unaffordable” technology supplied by Shared Services Canada.

Mr. Smith’s frustrations boiled over July 8 when the agency’s main website was down for nearly eight hours due to a power switch failure, snarling the release of June’s jobs numbers, one of the country’s most important economic indicators. Statscan staff resorted to snapping the document on a smartphone and faxing pages to data users at financial institutions and media outlets.

Statscan’s website routinely goes down on busy data-release days.

The problems at Shared Services, which consolidated the information technology of 43 departments, go way beyond Statscan. The federal Auditor-General concluded in a report this year that Shared Services’ operations are so dogged by hidden costs, delays, security problems and poor accounting that potential savings remain “largely unknown.”

The Liberals quietly boosted Shared Services’ budget by $384-million over two years in its March budget, in part to keep creaky old computer systems from crashing. Critics worry that much more will be needed to fully modernize systems.

In late July, smoke inside a federal data centre in Ottawa forced the temporary shutdown of government e-mail and some websites.

Meanwhile, Ottawa says the estimated bill to fix IBM’s Phoenix pay system has reached $45-million to $50-million, and could climb higher. The government has promised to cover any out-of-pocket expenses of workers who couldn’t pay bills or were forced to borrow money when they weren’t paid.

Just like Shared Services, Phoenix was supposed to save the government money – $70-million a year – by consolidating a myriad of pay systems spanning 300,000 workers in more than 100 departments. Most of the first-year savings have now been wiped out.

A big part of the problem can be traced to a decision by the Conservatives to create a new payroll-processing centre in Miramichi, N.B. Roughly 500 – mostly inexperienced – new hires, would replace more than 2,000 payroll staff from across the country.

Ottawa has since been forced to add pay specialists in Gatineau, Que., and at temporary offices in Winnipeg, Montreal, Toronto and Sherbrooke, Que. – all to help fix the problem of workers getting paid too much, not enough or not at all.

Efficiency was never the main reason for choosing Miramichi. Putting the payroll centre in the city was political compensation for the closing of the long-gun registry, which had been located there.

The Conservatives fed the country a narrative about making government leaner and more efficient.

They delivered something quite different.

Source: No excuse for Ottawa’s bungled technology – The Globe and Mail

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