Diversity and Inclusion Agenda: Impact on the Public Service, Setting the baseline

2016/03/22 1 Comment

My article in The Hill Times, slightly updated:

The Liberal government included in its mandate letters to all ministers a “commitment to transparent, merit-based appointments, to help ensure gender parity and that Indigenous Canadians and minority groups are better reflected in positions of leadership.”

While the focus is clearly with respect to political appointments, this commitment will likely extend to the senior ranks of the public service in a renewed emphasis on diversity. Deputy minister appointments are made by the Prime Minister upon the recommendation of the Clerk of the Privy Council. While the Foreign Affairs Minister recommends  ambassadorial appointments or equivalent, largely reflecting public service recommendations, the Prime Minister approves. The PM also has the power to select candidates for high-profile positions. ADM appointments in Canada, on the other hand, are by the public service only. All positions at this level are bilingual.

With this in mind, I have established the baseline for the current representation of women and visible minorities that will allow tracking of progress over time.

Overall, the Public Service is reasonably diverse with respect to women (54.1 percent), visible minorities (13.2 percent compared to the 15 percent who are Canadian citizens) and Indigenous Canadians (5.1 percent). For the executive ranks, women are almost at parity (46.1 percent) but visible minorities are under-represented (8.5 percent) as are Indigenous Canadians (3.7 percent). All figures are from the Treasury Board Secretariat report, Employment Equity in the Public Service of Canada 2013–14.

To determine representativeness, the government applies a labour market availability (LMA) benchmark (i.e., “the share of designated group members in the workforce from which the employers could hire”).  For ADMs and other members of the EX category,  the respective LMA is 45 percent for women, 7.5 percent for visible minorities and 4.5 percent for Indigenous Canadians.

Arguably, a more appropriate measure of inclusion is derived from comparison to the overall share of the population (or, in the case of visible minorities, the percentage of those who are also Canadian citizens – 15 percent).

However, these aggregate numbers — both actual and LMA — do not give a detailed sense of diversity within the senior ranks of the public service, defined as deputy and assistant deputy ministers (DM and ADM or equivalent).

Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries are relatively diverse (41 percent women, 21 percent visible minority men or women).  The question is how diverse are those public servants at senior levels, with whom they work.

My information sources are reasonably accurate. For the 85 Deputies, their Associates and equivalents, public sources such as GEDS (the government electronic contact database), the Parliamentary website, cross-checked with PCO Deputy Committee lists, were used for both Deputies and Associate Deputies. This data does not include any of the recent changes announced by the Prime Minister.

For ADMs, Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) provided official statistics for the 282 officials at the EX-4 or 5 rank for the 2013-14 year in the core public administration (77 organizations),  along with estimated labour market availability.

For senior heads of Mission (HoM), Global Affairs Canada provided a list of the 16 missions whose Ambassadorial and High Commissioner positions are currently classified at the EX4-5 level (these are a subset of the overall ADM numbers).

Some of these positions are over-filled by people at the DM level (e.g.,  Jon Fried at the WTO) or former politicians (e.g., Lawrence Cannon in Paris, Gordon Campbell in London, and Gary Doer in Washington). This data predates the announcement of the two Ambassador-designates in Washington and the UN (New York), both men replacing men.

While the data for gender is reliable, data for visible minorities is less so, given that official reports rely on self-reporting and that there are limits to using names and photos to identify visible minority status. However, this methodology is also used with respect to MP diversity.

Election 2015 and Beyond- Implementation Diversity and Inclusion.001What does the data show? As seen in the chart above, representation of women is relatively close to gender parity, save for Ambassadors and their equivalents (Heads of Mission and other ADM-equivalent officials abroad).

However, visible minorities are less than half of the percentage of those that are Canadian citizens (15 percent) or in the House of Commons (14 percent).

The ‘all EX’ category has more junior executive positions (EX1-3) and thus the greater diversity in these feeder groups suggests that over time, diversity  at more senior levels should naturally increase.

The public service may feel compelled to take a more active approach given the Government’s commitment.

Likely early tests of the Government’s commitment to increased diversity will occur as deputy ministers retire and are replaced along with changes to Heads of Mission over the course of the year.

13 new Deputies have been named to date by the Prime Minister including 6 women (46 percent, reflecting in part the four women: appointed on International Women’s Day!) and one visible minority (8 percent). Future appointments will indicate whether this portends a trend.

By tracking this on an annual basis, along with changes to ADM ranks, progress can be assessed.

Diversity and inclusion agenda: impact on the public service

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Rudy and McKinney: Making government information more accessible

2016/03/22 Leave a comment

Valid points and practical suggestions made by Bernard Rudny of Powered by Data, a project of Tides Canada, and James McKinney.

My experience is mixed with respect to data requests.

Some departments (CIC/IRCC) have established procedures and protocols to access data, and have been very forthcoming in my requests (apart from the Comms folks who refused to provide polling data in spreadsheet form!).

TBS was similarly forthcoming with respect to diversity among ADMs but PCO was not able (or unwilling) to provide the public information on the more than 1,300 GiC appointments in spreadsheet form (like any database, this should be easily exportable):

ATI is simultaneously an invaluable and cumbersome system. Any record that is requested must be manually reviewed, regardless of how innocuous it may be, which makes the process slow and inefficient.

Consider a common example: you request a spreadsheet from a federal department. Its contents are neither confidential nor controversial. Under the present system, that spreadsheet will be printed, reviewed, scanned, then mailed to you as a PDF file on a CD-ROM. The whole process takes weeks, months or even years. By the time it’s complete, any functionality the spreadsheet had as a digital document — like being able to search for text, or add up the numbers in a column — is gone. Instead, you’re dealing with a low-grade image of something that was once useful data that could be searched and sorted.

This is a 20th-century approach to information. It treats every “record” like a paper document. That’s appropriate in some cases, but in the era of the Internet and databases, it’s out of step with the times. The alternative is to release information pro-actively — not just in response to requests — and to use formats that preserve the value of digital data. True openness is about eliminating barriers to access and going out of your way to publish open data.

To be fair, there has been some good news on that front: the Treasury Board Secretariat has done a laudable job of creating an open data program and the 2014 Directive on Open Government included a commitment to being open by default.

If the federal government is going to become more open, it needs to be transparent about the progress it is making

So where do we go from here? How can the government build trust and make progress on this issue? The first step is to inventory all the information of value the federal government holds. Canada has already committed to creating that inventory under the open government directive, but it’s not required to happen before 2020. Speeding up the process is essential.

As we write this, more than 245,000 datasets are available through the government’s open data portal. That’s an impressive number, but it raises a question: how many are still closed? The number is likely in the millions, but ultimately unknown. Without it, there’s no meaningful way to measure the progress being made.

Moreover, some federal departments have been better about releasing information than others. Of the open datasets mentioned above, about 236,000 come from Natural Resources Canada. Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, meanwhile, has released two datasets, Public Safety has released one. Inventories would help assess which departments need more help to open up their information.

Completing this inventory of information sooner rather than later would provide other benefits. Once the inventory is available, stakeholders — including researchers, communities, non-profit organizations and businesses — can provide informed input on what data to release first. That allows government departments to prioritize the opening of information that will enable positive social and economic impacts.

No one expects “open by default” to be implemented overnight. There are many steps to take — from reforming the ATI system to dealing with Crown copyright — and the road is long. Some information will also need to be kept within government for reasons of privacy and security.

Source: Rudny & McKinney: Making government information more accessible | National Post

Filed under Government Tagged with , , ,

Trudeau appoints seven new senators: Diversity and inclusion in this first batch

2016/03/19 Leave a comment

The first batch of Senate appointments provide initial confirmation of the Government’s intent to diversity and inclusion in appointments. The chart above contrasts appointments by previous Prime Ministers with those made Friday (former PM Martin made no appointments during his short tenure).

Prime Minister Harper made many visible minority Senate appointments, partially as part of its engagement strategy with new Canadian voters and to address representation gaps elsewhere.

In addition to the large share of women appointed, the presence of one visible minority, one Indigenous person, and one person with disability (although given her accomplishments, hard to consider Chantal Petitclerc as such), the regional balance of these initial appointments include three from Ontario and two each from Quebec and Manitoba.

The real challenge for the Government will be less with respect to these high profile announcements but the more mundane Governor-in-Council appointments that will be made over coming years (about 1,500 positions, currently just over 1,300 filled) and the range of judicial appointments that will emerge in coming years:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is appointing the head of his transition team and six other Canadians to the Senate in the first injection of fresh blood to the scandal-plagued institution in three years, sources said.

Mr. Trudeau is set to announce on Friday that he is calling on Peter Harder, a retired senior bureaucrat and high-level corporate adviser, to be the Liberal government’s leader in the Senate. In addition to Mr. Harder, the six new senators will be:

  • Raymonde Gagné, former president of Manitoba’s Université de Saint-Boniface;
  • Frances Lankin, a minister in the former Ontario NDP government and a national security expert;
  • Ratna Omidvar, an expert on migration and diversity, and executive director at Ryerson University’s Global Diversity Exchange;
  • Chantal Petitclerc, a champion Paralympic wheelchair racer and Team Canada chef de mission at the Rio Paralympic Games;
  • André Pratte, an award-winning editorial writer and federalist thinker from Quebec;
  • Murray Sinclair, a retired Manitoba judge and former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into residential schools.

Mr. Harder will face the tough task of moving government legislation through a fractious Senate in which the Liberal Party has no control over any other members. Still stinging from a recent spending scandal, the institution is also set to release on Monday a final report on the expenses claims of 14 senators who challenged the Auditor-General’s call for reimbursements.

Mr. Trudeau’s six other appointees will be expected to act as independent-minded legislators, as the Prime Minister aims to eliminate partisanship in the upper chamber and improve its reputation.

The Senate is currently composed of 42 Conservative senators, 26 Liberal senators (who are not part of the Liberal caucus of MPs) and 13 non-aligned senators.

Source: Trudeau set to appoint seven new senators – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Women to outnumber men on Ottawa’s influential council of economic advisers

2016/03/19 Leave a comment

Another sign of the Government’s commitment to diversity and inclusion:

Women will outnumber men on what could turn out to be the most influential group of people around Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau.

The Canadian Press has learned that Morneau will unveil the federal government’s new advisory council Friday – a team that will help draw up a plan designed to get Canada’s economy out of a rut.

In total, the lineup of business and academic leaders will include eight women and six men.

The advisers, who will be paid a salary of $1, are responsible for helping the government prepare a long-term growth strategy that will be released by the end of the year.

The council members’ names are being made public just days before the release of the Liberal government’s first budget.

The budget, to be tabled next Tuesday, is expected to spell out much of Ottawa’s plans to spend billions of dollars on measures – such as infrastructure – aimed at boosting the country’s productivity and economic growth.

Last month, Morneau announced that the advisory council would be chaired by Dominic Barton, the global managing director of consulting giant McKinsey & Company.

At the time, Morneau said council members would meet with him regularly and provide advice “on concrete policy actions to help create the long-term conditions for economic growth focused on the middle class.”

The council will also include prominent business figures such as Canada Pension Plan Investment Board president and CEO Mark Wiseman and Michael Sabia, CEO of the Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec, the province’s largest pension fund manager.

Other council members:

  • Elyse Allen, president and CEO, General Electric Canada
  • Katherine Barr, general partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures
  • Jennifer Blanke, chief economist, World Economic Forum
  • Kenneth Courtis, chairman, Starfort Investment Holdings
  • Brian Ferguson, president and CEO, Cenovus Energy Inc.
  • Suzanne Fortier, principal and vice-chancellor, McGill University
  • Carol Anne Hilton, CEO, Transformation
  • Carol Lee, CEO and co-founder, Linacare Cosmotherapy Inc.
  • Christopher Ragan, associate professor of economics at McGill University and chair of the Ecofiscal Commission
  • Angela Strange, partner, Andreessen Horowitz
  • Ilse Treurnicht, CEO, MaRS Discovery District

“I look forward to working with the council members, whose diverse backgrounds and impressive expertise will inform our work as we develop and implement a strategy that will build on the foundation we will lay with budget 2016,” Morneau said in a statement.

One visible minority by my count.

Source: Women to outnumber men on Ottawa’s influential council of economic advisers – The Globe and Mail

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Non-partisan to partisan: Federal politicians pluck their staff from the civil service

2016/03/17 Leave a comment

Growth in political staffers 2000-15.001Some useful Treasury Board stats subject of the article below by David Akin, captured in the chart above, showing a correlation in the earlier years of the Conservative government between growth in staffers and growth in the public service (see my earlier article Diversity in political backrooms still lacking):

To fill as many as 500 partisan political jobs on Parliament Hill, the Justin Trudeau government has been dipping into the non-partisan civil service — just like the Stephen Harper government before it and the Paul Martin and Jean Chretien governments before that.

Though Harper did make a rule change about this revolving door, the system continues to be set up in a way that helps those who jump to partisan jobs go back to the civil service if the government of the day changes.

Those scooping up jobs as chiefs of staff, press secretaries, or policy advisors in ministers’ office can request an unpaid leave-of-absence, a request that is usually granted. It may not guarantee their old job if they leave politics, but it usually guarantees an equivalent job.

It also counts just as much towards a pension as the non-partisan service.

Plus the new jobs in politics usually come with a big raise.

A minister’s chief of staff can earn up to $180,000 a year. A press secretary can earn up to about $108,000.

There were 559 of these partisan staff in the last year of the Harper government.

While Conservatives are just as likely to use this revolving door as Liberals, Harper said in the 2006 election campaign that a “Liberal” civil service would act as a check on any Conservative government if only because Liberals have, since the Second World War, been in office more than the Tories.

The civil service, naturally, objects to that observation.

“It is an overarching and utmost priority of the Government of Canada to manage the public service with integrity and in accordance with existing polices and collective agreements,” said Kelly James, a spokesperson for the Treasury Board, the federal department that manages human resources policies.

The last time the Liberals were in charge, Liberal political staff had an inside track on non-partisan civil servant jobs. So long as they met the basic requirements for an open civil service position, they got the job — along with the employment security and pension opportunities.

Harper changed that, eliminating the preferential treatment.

There’s no data tracking the partisan/non-partisan revolving door, though long-time Parliament Hill watchers have seen at least a handful of Martin/Chretien era partisan staffers back in that role after spending the Harper decade in a civil servant jobs.

Source: Non-partisan to partisan: Federal politicians pluck their staff from the civil service

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

How the parties collect your personal info — and why Trudeau doesn’t seem to mind: Delacourt

2016/03/17 Leave a comment

Great piece by Delacourt:

Numbers are definitely in fashion in the new Liberal government at the moment — and not just because the budget is landing next week.

A first-ever session on “behavioural economics” for public servants was filled to capacity last week, according to a Hill Times report. “Combining economics with behavioural psychology,” said PCO spokesperson Raymond Rivet, “this new tool can help governments make services more client-focused, increase uptake of programs, and improve regulatory compliance.

Better government through behavioural economics — the idea was popularized by the 2009 book Nudge and almost immediately adopted through the establishment of a “nudge unit” by the British government in 2010. Justin Trudeau’s government is already borrowing the concept of “deliverology” from the Brits, so the ‘nudge’ was never going to be far behind. President Barack Obama, Trudeau’s new best friend, also has taken steps to introduce nudge theory to the U.S. government in recent years.

But the real motivation for data-based governance in the Trudeau government may have come from a source much closer to home — the recent election, specifically the Liberals’ extensive use of big data to win 184 seats last fall. Make no mistake: Trudeau’s Liberals may have won the election by promising intangibles like ‘hope’ and ‘change’, but they sealed the deal with a sophisticated data campaign and ground war.

So now that the Liberals have seen how mastery of the numbers can help win elections, we probably shouldn’t be too surprised that they see those same skills as useful for governing as well. Big-data politics is here to stay.

What’s missing from that equation, however — at least on the political side — is privacy protection. Late last week, while everyone’s attention was fixated on Washington, federal Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien reminded a Commons committee that all the political parties are amassing data on voters without any laws to guard citizens’ privacy.

“While the Privacy Act is probably not the best instrument to do this, Parliament should also consider regulating the collection, use and disclosure of personal information by political parties,” Therrien told the Commons committee on access to information and privacy.
A little more than a year ago, it seemed that a new Liberal government could be expected to agree with the privacy commissioner.
Recall last year’s conference on “digital governance” in Ottawa; on stage for one panel discussion were key strategists for the three main parties — Tim Powers for the Conservatives, Brad Lavigne for the New Democrats and Gerald Butts for the Liberals. Mr. Butts is, of course, now Trudeau’s principal secretary.

Fielding questions from the audience, the three were asked whether political databases should be subject to Canadian privacy laws. Powers and Lavigne demurred; only Butts seemed to be saying ‘yes’.

Here’s his lengthy quote, which appeared a few weeks later in an iPolitics column by Chris Waddell:

“Let’s not kid ourselves, political parties are public institutions of a sort. They are granted within national or sub-national legislation special status on a whole variety of fronts, whether they be the charitable deduction, the exemption from access to information — all those sorts of things,” Butts told the conference.

“We have created a whole body of law … or maybe we haven’t. Maybe we have just created a hole in our two bodies of law that allow political parties to exist out there in the ether. I think that is increasingly a problem and it is difficult for me to envision a future where it exists for much longer.”

That was a year ago. And unless I missed it, there’s nothing in any of Trudeau’s mandate letters to ministers about new privacy laws for political parties. And without giving away too much about the new chapters of my soon-to-be-re-released book on political marketing, I didn’t get the impression during our recent interview that Prime Minister Trudeau was greatly troubled by the collision between privacy protection and political databases.

It seems odd to me that citizens can get (often appropriately) worked up about “intrusive” government measures, whether it’s the census or the C-51 anti-terrorism law, and yet be mostly indifferent to what the chief electoral officer has called the “Wild West” of political data collection.

Even Conservatives who resented the gun registry didn’t seem to mind that their own party was keeping track of gun owners in its database, so that it could send them specially targeted fundraising messages from time to time. That’s just behavioural economics, applied to the political arena.

So far, British Columbia is the only province to take steps to put political databases in line with privacy protection. The provincial chief of elections in B.C., Keith Archer, notified political parties that they would not get access to the voters’ list — the raw material of any political database — if they failed to comply with privacy laws.

That step could — and should — be implemented in Ottawa, too. We’re in the era of big-data politics and behavioural-insight governance, and Canadians are entitled to some accountability about the data the governing party is collecting and using on them.

Not so long ago, one of Trudeau’s most senior advisers agreed with that idea. Maybe all it takes is a little nudge.

Source: How the parties collect your personal info — and why Trudeau doesn’t seem to mind – iPolitics

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Charities push back against Liberals on political audits

2016/03/16 Leave a comment

Interesting given that the mandate letter of National Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier includes the following commitment:

Allow charities to do their work on behalf of Canadians free from political harassment, and modernize the rules governing the charitable and not-for-profit sectors, working with the Minister of Finance.  This will include clarifying the rules governing “political activity,” with an understanding that charities make an important contribution to public debate and public policy.  A new legislative framework to strengthen the sector will emerge from this process. –

Apparently, this will only be on a go-forward basis:

Some Canadian charities are reviving a campaign to get tax auditors off their backs after the Liberal government delivered what the charities say is a half-measure in ending “political harassment,” a promise from the 2015 election campaign.

At least 14 charities, including the Sierra Club Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund, launched a letter-writing campaign and petition this week calling on the Liberal government to stop all political-activity audits started by the Harper Conservatives in 2012.

“Charities under audit for political activities from the previous government are still under audit,” says a statement on a website, created by a charities coalition last year.

“These audits need to end immediately. Reform of the rules that allowed these audits must begin.”

Some 54 charities were caught by CRA’s political-activities audits, and five were given notice they would lose their charitable registrations, meaning they could not offer tax receipts to donors.

Critics have said the rules restricting political activities are unclear, and that the audits effectively gagged some groups, a phenomenon dubbed “advocacy chill.”

Optimism dampened

The charities sector had been heartened by the Liberals’ platform, which promised to “allow charities to do their work on behalf of Canadians free from political harassment.”

But the optimism was soon dampened. On Jan. 20, National Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier said 24 political-activity audits currently underway will continue their course, and the five groups under notice of deregistration will not be spared, though they can appeal.

The only change was that auditors would be stood down in six cases of charities scheduled for political-activity audits that had not yet begun, and the $13.4-million program would eventually be wound up.

Tim Gray, executive director of Environmental Defence, which is facing deregistration, said in an interview: “Let’s recognize what actually happened with the previous government and put an end to this.

“We are trying to escalate the importance of action on this issue. So we’re going to relaunch and encourage people to contact the minister and the prime minister to get them to act on their commitments.”

Source: Charities push back against Liberals on political audits – Politics – CBC News

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Public servants flock to PCO’s first-ever behavioural economics briefing

2016/03/15 Leave a comment

I am a fan of nudges and Kirkman captures the reality that current politics already incorporate nudges, and so the question is more what kind of nudge is more effective as part of policy and program design, rather than more existential questioning.

As readers already know, I am also a fan of behavioural economics, and found the insights in Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow particularly relevant to policy makers who may not be as aware of their thinking processes as needed:

Elspeth Kirkman, North American head of the Behavioural Insights Team’s head of North American operations, was asked during a presentation how she responds to criticism that she’s involved in “social engineering.” She said governments cannot get away from the fact they have to encourage certain kinds of behaviour from people, so it might as well be done effectively.

“Departments and governments are already nudging people in terms of how they present information to them, how they ask them to do things, how they structure their defaults, and all we’re doing really is being mindful about that,” she said. “We’re saying, actually, let’s just understand what the implication in the way that we’re structuring that choice is.”

Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University, told the audience that sometimes more than a “nudge” is needed when it comes to public policy.

“I’m a big fan of nudges … but nudges are a very modest attempt to interfere minimally, often at a very low cost, when you’re politically somewhat helpless, in ways that that help people,” he said.

“But there’s a lot more than that. And if you think about what policy does throughout, whether it’s the design of emergency rooms or what it takes to make a nation healthy and happy, there are profound psychological questions that lie at the core of what we do.”

When asked to elaborate in what qualifies as a nudge and what’s seen as more, Mr. Shafir noted how buildings are often designed—in terms of where stairs, elevators, and parking lots are placed—to promote physical activity, and he feels buildings that are constructed in ways to encourage certain behaviours represent the kind of policy that goes beyond nudges.

Ms. Kirkman talked about an EAST model—which stands for easy, attractive, social, and timely—for creating conditions for public compliance with government policies.

She talked about using plain language and less “legalese” to make it easier for people to understand government communications. She used an example of a U.S. city that had an unfortunate practice of sending out very technically worded letters to homeowners whose properties did not meet municipal standards.

“The letter actually starts with: ‘According to Chapter 156 and/or Chapter 155 and/or Chapter 37 in the [municipal] ordinances process, we have found your property to be in violation of inspection.’ And it kind of just goes on and on and on like this, and it doesn’t actually say, ‘Hey, you need to fix your property and here’s what’s wrong with it.’ ”

In terms of making things attractive, Ms. Kirkman used an example how different styles of texting unemployed people from a job centre in the Britain to inform them about a new supermarket that was holding a job fair. She said 10 per cent of the people notified would typically attend such a non-mandatory event. However, when people’s individual names were used in the message, that increased to 15 per cent. When the message appeared to come from the unemployed people’s employment advisers, it increased to 17 per cent. Finally, that rate increased to 26 per cent when the individuals were told their advisers had booked them a time-slot at this event.

The social aspect of encouraging certain actions is shown by Mr. Treusch’s example of publicizing how most people pay their taxes, Ms. Kirkman said.

Another factor is who conveys the message, she said. She recalled how the British government once sent letters signed by the chief medical officer that advised certain physicians to prescribe antibiotics less often, and the campaign was a success. She said the message would have been less effective with this particular audience if it came from the health minister. These physicians were also told how the majority of their peers were prescribing fewer antibiotics, she added.

An example of timeliness focused on a police force Britain that was found to be much less ethnically diverse than the community it serves. Research ultimately uncovered that most applicants of minority ethnicities were failing an online test in which they were asked how they would react, as a police officer, to certain situations.

Ms. Kirkman said it’s believed the effect of “stereotype threat” was at work, where people who are part of groups that have negative stereotypes tend to perform worse in certain instances if reminded of those stereotypes just before the task.

She said when the wording of the email asking applicants to take this test was changed to be “warmer” and contain a preamble asking them to think about what it would mean to their community if they became a police officer, the gap in success in the test between white applicants and others was closed.

Source: Public servants flock to PCO’s first-ever behavioural economics briefing |

Filed under Government, Other Tagged with , , ,

Brand Command: Canadian Politics and Democracy in the Age of Message Control

2016/03/12 Leave a comment

Alex Marland’s book on branding and message control under the Harper government is now out (Marland also edited the wonderful Canadian Election Analysis 2015 – Ubcpress.ca, issued just a few weeks after the election).

Now that the ‘brand’ has changed, interesting to reflect on the Liberal government’s equally – if not stronger – branding, evident at both the PM, Ministerial and other levels:

A brand-centric approach to power involves the strategic unification of words and visuals. At the most basic level, a branding philosophy holds that communicating disjointed messages in a haphazard style is less likely to resonate with intended audiences. Conversely, core information repeatedly communicated in an uncomplicated, consistent, and efficient way to targeted subgroups is more likely to secure support for the sender’s agenda. Branding strategy positions the sender as unique, reassures audiences, and communicates aspirational, value-based, and credible messages. Repetitiveness and symmetry are crafted to pierce the clamour. A “less is more” approach to communication reinforces information and messages and does so in a resource-efficient manner that accentuates visual imagery.

Branding balances the information demands of the impassioned and the uninterested. It communicates cues and signals to distracted audiences while stoking emotional connections with those who are most loyal. It involves marketers maximizing their communications investments by promoting messages designed to differentiate the brand and to resonate on an emotional level with target audiences. It understates or ignores the brand’s flaws. It turns a humdrum interaction into a memorable experience. The resulting brand loyalty felt by the most ardent supporters is such that they can be impervious to missteps and to courting by competitors. An organization requires tenacious leadership to assert branding objectives over the demands and criticisms of other actors. The more fractured that media become, the more that party strategists and senior public servants seek to standardize and centralize their messages. The more that message cohesion, discipline, and centralization are practised, the more that society makes political choices based on images of politicians rather than on policy details. In politics, the brand unites everything.Th e rest of us need to look at political leaders, party politics, the media, and public administration through a branding lens to understand this.

…This book … is concerned with establishing that changes in communications technology are enabling the centre to enforce communications control and to implement branding strategy. This examination will provide both believers and disbelievers of the Savoie thesis with a basis for further assessment of whether the centre has too much power – and in particular a better understanding of the institutional conditions and processes related to political communications and elite behaviour. Brand Command argues that the causes of centralization are systemic, not individualistic. In this light, Trudeau’s pledge to empower cabinet and buck the forces of centralization seems idealistic. Branding strategy seeks to influence public impressions and to set and advance agendas. It is accompanied by an organizational willingness to exploit opportunities to penetrate a communications cyclone and a motivation to achieve resource efficiencies. In interviews conducted for this book, many respondents pontificated, unaided, along the following lines: “Disseminating a message in the clutter or bombardment of information that you get today is a huge challenge … One of the solutions to that is consistency of messaging, which probably explains to a large degree the centralized approach that government has taken to its communications.”

Brand Command UBC Press

Filed under Government Tagged with , , ,

Canadian woman will be on next series of bank notes, Trudeau announces

2016/03/10 Leave a comment

One has to admire the choreography of this announcement on International Women’s Day with other related elements: the PM’s op-ed in the Globe ( Gender equality is an opportunity, not a threat) and the announcement of DM changes, which included four women (one of whom is visible minority) and one man – because its 2016?:

The image of an iconic Canadian woman will appear on the next issue of bank notes, Prime Minister Trudeau announced today.

“A Canadian woman will be featured on the very first of the next series of bills expected in 2018,” Trudeau said.

“Today, on International Women’s Day, the Bank of Canada is taking the first step by launching public consultations to select an iconic Canadian woman to be featured on this new bill.”

The government and the Bank of Canada did not indicate which denomination would showcase the iconic female Canadian.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau, who stood alongside the prime minister with other members of the Liberal caucus and former Mississauga, Ont., mayor Hazel McCallion during the announcement, noted that it is “high time to change.”

“One of the very first things I had the honour of doing as the new finance minister was asking the governor of the Bank of Canada, Stephen Poloz, and his colleagues at the bank whether it’s in fact possible to put a woman on the bank note,” said Morneau.

The finance minister said he was told the central bank had been looking into the possibility for some time and was keen to support the initiative.

Source: Canadian woman will be on next series of bank notes, Trudeau announces – Politics – CBC News

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →