Clarkson: Under Trump, the rules of the game have completely changed

2025/02/05 Leave a comment

Another one in. a series of articles and commentary on the challenges posed by Trump:

…The second term of Donald Trump means that we in Canada have to be even more watchful, careful and clever in our reactions to his actions. We have to overcome our disbelief and suspend our feelings. It has really happened.

Recently visiting the University of Tübingen in Germany, I learned that in 1931 they fired their only Jewish professor – two years before Hitler came to power. A combination of disbelief and passivity make a dangerous cocktail in the face of unscrupulous domination. We must beware of what Timothy Snyder warns of in his book On Tyranny. It is called “anticipatory obedience” or “vorauseilender Gehorsam” in German. Hitler and the Nazis benefited from it. It is a resonant and depressing fact that most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given in times like these, in moments of historical apprehension.

So, what are we to do as Canadians in our professions and our personal lives? The most important factor is that we are all Canadians and we have to behave like Canadians. We all have to brush up on our history and realize that we live in one of the oldest continuous democracies. John Ralston Saul, who wrote the biography of Robert Baldwin and the reformers of 1848 in Upper Canada, has been saying this for a long time, but it is necessary to keep emphasizing it. Because it is true. We have had in our history no civil war, no rewriting of the Constitution. We have had a continuous democracy since 1848. We must treasure that. We must protect it.

What we have to do is to continue to believe in the project that is Canada, and which has despite so many difficulties and challenges remained the Canada that we know: bilingual, based on the Magna Carta, and parliamentary democracy. A Canada that has a Charter of Rights and Freedoms and a Canada that is bilingual in French and English. These are things that do not need to be changed; these are things that are valuable; these are things that make us Canadian.

We are going to be constantly challenged and threatened. We must continue doing things for others. We must continue to be a welcoming nation. We must continue our path of reconciliation with Indigenous people. We must continue these things because we know that’s the right thing to do. We must continue to do them because it makes us more human to do them. Canadians can only try to mitigate whatever evils there are in the world, even if they come from our closest neighbour with whom we share an unguarded border.

We must always remember the words of the great reformer Joseph Howe who, in 1835, posed the most important Canadian questions: “What is right? What is just? What is for the public good?”

Source: Under Trump, the rules of the game have completely changed

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Brooks: The Six Principles of Stupidity

2025/02/01 Leave a comment

Good list:

Principle 1: Ideology produces disagreement, but stupidity produces befuddlement. This week, people in institutions across America spent a couple of days trying to figure out what the hell was going on. This is what happens when a government freezes roughly $3 trillion in spending with a two-page memo that reads like it was written by an intern. When stupidity is in control, the literature professor Patrick Moreau argues, words become unscrewed “from their relation to reality.”

Principle 2: Stupidity often inheres in organizations, not individuals. When you create an organization in which one man has all the power and everybody else has to flatter his preconceptions, then stupidity will surely result. As the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: “This is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”

Principle 3: People who behave stupidly are more dangerous than people who behave maliciously. Evil people at least have some accurate sense of their own self-interest, which might restrain them. Stupidity dares greatly! Stupidity already has all the answers!

Principle 4: People who behave stupidly are unaware of the stupidity of their actions. You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is that incompetent people don’t have the skills to recognize their own incompetence. Let’s introduce the Hegseth-Gabbard corollary: The Trump administration is attempting to remove civil servants who may or may not be progressive but who have tremendous knowledge in their field of expertise and hire MAGA loyalists who often lack domain knowledge or expertise. The results may not be what the MAGA folks hoped for.

Principle 5: Stupidity is nearly impossible to oppose. Bonhoeffer notes, “Against stupidity we are defenseless.” Because stupid actions do not make sense, they invariably come as a surprise. Reasonable arguments fall on deaf ears. Counter-evidence is brushed aside. Facts are deemed irrelevant. Bonhoeffer continues, “In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”

Principle 6: The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence, it’s rationality. The psychologist Keith Stanovich defines rationality as the capacity to make decisions that help people achieve their objectives. People in the grip of the populist mind-set tend to be contemptuous of experience, prudence and expertise, helpful components of rationality. It turns out that this can make some populists willing to believe anything — conspiracy theories, folk tales and internet legends; that vaccines are harmful to children. They don’t live within a structured body of thought but within a rave party chaos of prejudices.

As time has gone by, I’ve developed more and more sympathy for the goals the populists are trying to achieve. America’s leadership class has spent the last few generations excluding, ignoring, rejecting and insulting a large swath of this country. It’s terrible to be assaulted in this way. It’s worse when you finally seize power and start assaulting yourself — and everyone around you. In fact, it’s stupid.

Source: The Six Principles of Stupidity

Filed under Government, Politics Tagged with ,

Eng: Will artificial intelligence really fix Ottawa’s troubled Phoenix pay?

2025/02/01 Leave a comment

Nails it. Without simplification, extremely hard to achieve, AI and automation unlikely to be successful:

…Why did Phoenix fail? There are many reasons, but to name a few: an overwhelming number of rules and processes, including 72 job classifications and 80,000 pay rules, requiring more than 300 customizations built into the payroll system; a lack of proper testing with users before a major rollout; and dated procurement processes that favour large vendors and waterfall methodologies….

Source: Will artificial intelligence really fix Ottawa’s troubled Phoenix pay?

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Aydintasbas: Trump will overplay his hand. Be ready for when he does. 

2025/01/27 Leave a comment

As a friend noted, also litigate, litigate, litigate, as is being done with birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment:

American democracy is about to undergo a serious stress test. I know how it feels, in part because I lived through the slow and steady march of state capture as a journalist working in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.

Over a decade as a high-profile journalist, I covered Turkey’s descent into illiberalism, having to engage in the daily push and pull with the government. I know how self-censorship starts in small ways but then creeps into operations on a daily basis. I am familiar with the rhythms of the battle to reshape the media, state institutions and the judiciary.

Having lived through it, and having gathered some lessons in hindsight, I believe that there are strategies that can help Democrats and Trump critics not only survive the coming four years, but come out stronger. Here are six of them.

  • Don’t Panic — Autocracy Takes Time
  • Don’t Disengage — Stay Connected
  • Don’t Fear the Infighting
  • Charismatic Leadership Is a Non-Negotiable
  • Skip the Protests and Identity Politics
  • Have Hope

Source: Trump will overplay his hand. Be ready for when he does.

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Ottawa using AI to tackle Phoenix backlog as it tests replacement pay system

2025/01/24 Leave a comment

Needed. But again, a major part of the challenge is the multiple HR classifications, complex rules among other aspects, with major simplification and streamlining unlikely to be pursued as messy, time consuming and of little interest to the political level:

…Benay says AI is automating repetitive tasks, speeding up decision making and providing insights into human resources and pay data.

He says the government is testing the use of its AI assistant tool for three types of transactions – acting appointments, leave without pay and executive acting appointments – and is planning to launch automated “bulk processing” in these areas in April.

The government plans to expand AI-use to more transaction types over the course of next year, according to Benay, and could eventually use it to help with all types of cases, like departmental transfers and retirements.

There will always be an aspect of human verification, Benay says, as the tool was developed to keep humans in the loop.

“One thing we will not do is just turn it over to the AI machine,” says Benay.

The Government of Canada website says the backlog of transactions stood at 383,000 as of Dec. 31, 2024, with 52 per cent of those over a year old.

The government has said that it doesn’t want any backlog older than a year being transferred into a new system.

“A human only learns so fast, and the intake is continuing to come in,” Benay says. “The reason the AI work that we’re doing is so crucial is we have to increase (the) pace.”

Benay says the government has launched two boards that will oversee the use of AI and is looking at a third-party review of the AI virtual assistant tool over the course of the winter, with results to be published once it’s completed….

Source: Ottawa using AI to tackle Phoenix backlog as it tests replacement pay system

Filed under Government Tagged with , , ,

Trump rescinds Biden’s census order, clearing a path for reshaping election maps

2025/01/22 Leave a comment

Sigh…

Among the dozens of Biden-era executive orders that President Trump revoked on Monday was one that had reversed the first Trump administration’s unprecedented policy of altering a key set of census results.

Since the first U.S. census in 1790, no resident has ever been omitted from those numbers because of immigration status. And after the Civil War, the14th Amendment has called for the population counts that determine each state’s share of U.S. House seats and Electoral College votes to include the “whole number of persons in each state.”

Biden’s now-revoked 2021 order affirmed the longstanding practice of including the total number of persons residing in each state in those census results. It was issued in response to Trump’s attempt during the national tally in 2020 to exclude millions of U.S. residents without legal status.

Biden’s order also effectively ended a Trump administration-initiated project at the Census Bureau to produce neighborhood block-level citizenship data using government records. That data, a GOP redistricting strategist once concluded, could be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” when voting districts are redrawn.

It’s not clear yet if the second Trump administration would revive these census-related efforts. In his new order, Trump said revoking Biden’s order “will be the first of many steps the United States Federal Government will take to repair our institutions and our economy.”

Conservative groups behind the “Project 2025” plan have included adding a citizenship question among their priorities for a conservative administration. And a growing number of Republican members of Congress, including Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina, have introduced bills that call for using the next head count to tally non-U.S. citizens living in the country and then subtract some or all of those residents from what are known as the congressional apportionment counts.

Trump’s second term is set to end before final decisions have to be made on what questions the 2030 census will ask and who ends up getting included in the apportionment counts.

Source: Trump rescinds Biden’s census order, clearing a path for reshaping election maps

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Former top bureaucrat calls for major overhaul of the federal government

2025/01/21 Leave a comment

Wernick is likely the clerk with the most active public role in contributing to debate and discussion regarding government and the need for serious public sector reform. But getting political backing for such reform, given lengthy and contentious discussions with no political benefits within a normal mandate, is virtually impossible.

Those of us who remember the Universal Classification System (UCS) in the 90s will remember the extensive job description rewrites and related efforts, and its abandonment given its unworkability and likely political questioning.

This excerpt focusses on the large number of executives and related levels (of note, the percentage of EX of total public servants has not increased as dramatically as stated in the article: from 2.6 percent in 2008 to 3.0 percent in 2023, and largely flat under the Liberal government):

…Another issue is the expanding number of executives, which has outpaced the growth of the unionized workforce over the last 15 years. There are now over 9,000 executives across five levels, with about 80 deputy ministers above them, ranked by four levels. 

Over time, the executive layer has become thicker with the proliferation of new “half-step” positions, such as senior and associate assistant deputy ministers—a pattern seen across other executive levels, as well. 

This thickening of the executive ranks raises significant questions. Are these appointments narrowing the scope and responsibility of executive roles, or are they necessary due to the increased pace and volume of work? 

Some argue that the proliferation of these positions contributes to high turnover, with many not staying in jobs long enough to learn the ropes, or be accountable for decisions under their watch.  

Additionally, some of the movement stems from using promotions to offer higher pay to keep or attract talent. 

As clerk, Wernick pushed to restructure the executive ranks and overhaul their compensation, but never gained political backing after the Phoenix fiasco. He suggests reducing the five executive levels to three: senior, middle, and junior. This would require a review of the need and scope of each position, potentially taking three years and offering buyouts to those displaced. 

Previously, the most discussed option was collapsing the five levels into three: merging EX-4 and EX-5, as well as EX-1 and EX-2, while keeping EX-3 intact.  

The executive ranks tend to be dominated by policy experts, and Wernick argues more weight should be given to those with skills and experience in operations and service.  

One possible solution is to create a separate track that would allow specialists in fields like IT or data to be promoted for those skills without having to move into management. This would likely mean raising salaries for the lowest tier of executives to make these jobs more appealing to executives while also rewarding specialists for their expertise.  

Source: Former top bureaucrat calls for major overhaul of the federal government

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Salgo: Trudeau missed his chance to reshape the public service

2025/01/14 Leave a comment

Most governments do not want to invest valuable political capital in public service reform given the complexity of the public service, relative lack of public interest, pushback from pressure groups, and long timelines:

…The real failures of the Trudeau government vis-à-vis the public service have been ones of omission.

Public servants face a host of problems — outdated structures and hierarchies; too much accountability for process and too little for outcomes; and a failure to keep pace with modern skill sets and digital service capabilities — that don’t seem to have interested the prime minister much. Nor did he ever revisit the more questionable elements of Harper’s Accountability Act.

In fairness, the government’s early focus on the systematic delivery of identified priorities (so-called deliverology) initially held out some promise that public servants could focus more on outcomes. But the initiative seems to have fizzled out under a heavy paper burden, an indiscriminate sea of “priorities” and an underdeveloped sense of irony.

Of course, the failure to modernize during these years must also be laid at the doorstep of the public service leadership. Still, the government of the day plays an important role in shaping that leadership, its goals and the management policies under which it operates.

The Trudeau government’s most conspicuous legacy to the public service was to expand it massively during COVID. Was this good or bad? As Ho Chi Minh said of the French Revolution, it’s too early to tell, but a looming retrenchment suggests that the hiring went at least a little overboard.

And in addition to being hugely expensive, the expansion was strikingly non-strategic, arguably even haphazard. The Treasury Board’s equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives did reflect a kind of vision for the public service, but it had more to do with the government’s broader social agenda than a rethinking of what the bureaucracy does.

The government missed yet another opportunity to forge a new kind of public service in the post-COVID period. While in formal terms it left issues like return-to-office to the bureaucracy itself, the senior public service was as mindful of optics as the government could have wished. Public servants have no inherent right to work remotely, but it would have been nice to have data on functional matters such as productivity before decisions were taken.

And while public servants got respectable raises under Trudeau, the government didn’t exactly roll over when public sector unions went on strike in the wake of inflation and a return-to-office mandate. While it worked out a deal with PSAC in 2023, it has since proved willing to put the collective bargaining process to one side, undoubtedly in keeping with the sentiments of most Canadians.

All things considered, the Trudeau years amount to rather thin gruel for anyone who hoped for public service transformation. But these may yet look like halcyon days if a new and cost-conscious government arrives with a limited store of patience and a willingness to put a few agenda-friendly officials in place.

Source: Salgo: Trudeau missed his chance to reshape the public service

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

MacDougall: Memo to the public service — From here on in, all change, all the time

2025/01/02 Leave a comment

Not cheery but realistic:

To the esteemed members of the public service,

As the calendar prepares for its switch to 2025, it is time to take stock of 2024 and what it portends for the new year.

First, the obvious: There is likely to be a change in the political control of the government. To put things bluntly, it would take a miracle (Christmas or otherwise) for Pierre Poilievre to not become prime minister in the first quarter of the new year, now that NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has indicated his intention of moving a vote of no confidence in the Liberal government.

What’s more, the current Conservative advantage in the polls translates into a size and strength of government that will be unlike anything we have seen in the modern age. Forget the first minority Harper government in 2006. Forget even the 2011 Harper majority. It is likely to be a record majority. As a result, Canadians are going to expect significant change and they will be expecting the public service to deliver that change.

And the public service is likely going to have to do so as a smaller team. Its numbers have grown — and grown enormously — under the current Liberal government. In 2015, the number was under 258,000. As of today, it is just under 368,000, which represents an expansion of some 43 per cent. Expect the headcount to come down, in some places significantly. There is no point bemoaning this fact.

It doesn’t matter what your politics are. Yes, you are here to advise the government of the day. But in the end, and after providing that fearless advice, you are also here to deliver the mandate of the government elected by the Canadian people. So public servants would do well to pay particular attention to the policy priorities of the modern Conservative Party of Canada. The carbon tax will go. Housebuilding will become (even more of) a priority. Budgets will be reduced. And criminal justice policy will once again become more aggressive.

Government workers will, of course, be busy elsewhere too. Canada’s foreign policy, for one, will take on a new posture. And those of you working in immigration are already toiling hard to reshape our core programs. We can expect this work to continue at pace. We have lost the pan-Canadian acceptance of our historically high immigration levels and we will have to work hard to re-establish control over the numbers, especially if the incoming American administration does what it says it will do with respect to a crackdown on illegal immigrants.

Indeed, the incoming Trump administration will provide a number of challenges to our country’s government. Many of you are already seized with tariff policy and border security measures. Many more of you will be seized by Canada’s reactions to the other whims of the former and soon-to-be president. An already increasingly unpredictable world is going to throw up even more wild cards.

It is perhaps trite to observe at this point that we are now a long way from the heady days of 2015, which is the last time this vast team of bureaucrats faced a change of administration. Ten years ago, public servants felt that their efforts were about to be more fully appreciated. Ten years on, many are sitting down with their families in apprehension this holiday period.

What I propose is to make this challenge an opportunity. For there is an advantage to be had. What the current prime minister has described as a “post-national state,” i.e. Canada, is once again about to feel acutely aware of its Canadianness in the face of Donald Trump. There is work everyone can do to make Canada (even) great(er) again.

As Marcus Aurelius once said: “The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.” As Friedrich Nietzsche put it: “Amor fati”, i.e. love your fate. And if that’s too high-brow for you, you can try this: “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

Source: MacDougall: Memo to the public service — From here on in, all change, all the time

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

A new generation of judges is redefining what Canada’s top courts look like 

2025/01/02 Leave a comment

Really good and thorough analysis of judicial appointments under the Liberal government. My 2016 analysis of the Harper government appointments referenced. Legacy achievement of the Liberals and their first minister of justice, Wilson-Raybould. The next needed analysis would be to assess their impact on jurisprudence and decisions, a much harder task.

Likely that there will be a contrary shift under the likely Poilievre government in terms of process, appointments and transparency (i.e. FCJAC reports):

…A decade ago, and forever before that, a clear majority of judges on Canada’s most important courts were white men. That began to change after the federal government’s 2016 reshaping of the judicial hiring process, which in part focused on increasing diversity.

Now, among 1,180 federally appointed judges, 47 per cent are women, 6 per cent are racialized and 2 per cent are Indigenous, according to data compiled by the Office of the Commissioner of Federal Judicial Affairs in 2024. It is the first time the agency has compiled statistics on the varied backgrounds of all judges who decide the biggest cases.

Underrepresentation remains an issue, especially among Indigenous and racialized people, but recent gains are significant. In unofficial data from 2016, compiled by a former senior federal civil servant [me!] in Policy Options magazine, 30 per cent of judges at the time on federally appointed benches were women, 2 per cent were racialized and 1 per cent were Indigenous…

Up until 2016, the top judicial ranks were dominated by white men, chosen by Liberal and Conservative governments alike. From 2007 through 2015, when Stephen Harper was prime minister, two-thirds of 701 appointments were men, according to earlier data on gender from Federal Judicial Affairs. For several years, almost all new judges appointed by Mr. Harper’s government were white, a 2012 Globe story reported.

The federal Conservative Party did not respond to requests for comment.

In the new data compiled by Federal Judicial Affairs, with numbers as of February, 2024, the shift under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is distinct….

Source: A new generation of judges is redefining what Canada’s top courts look like 


Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →