Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias one year later: What I heard

2014/09/16 4 Comments

My reflections on my book one year later, and what I heard from others:

In promoting my book, I spoke with a variety of groups, including former deputies, policy analysts, students, academics and journalists.

The limited feedback I received from the political level indicated that I had achieved my goal of balancing government and public servant perspectives.

From these discussions, particularly with more senior officials, it was clear that there was a relationship issue, for which both sides shared responsibility. But it was striking that the theme of mutual distrust and suspicion permeated most levels with direct experience in working with the political level.

Equally striking to some was that the relationship, and the overall approach did not change once the government obtained a majority in 2011.

Some pointed out that I over-simplified the ideological divide, as public servants in economic departments have more conservative views than those in social departments. Others questioned whether it was values, rather than ideology, but did not disagree on the divide.

Others acknowledged that the public service had not adequately prepared for the transition by not understanding the ideological and values roots of the government.

Some expressed frustration at providing advice that was routinely discounted or viewed as disloyal, and questioned how it was possible to provide advice when the government’s world view was so at odds with their best, professional advice, even acknowledging their implicit biases.

Most were pessimistic that a change of government would necessarily change things for the better, as the success of the Harper government in implementing its agenda and controlling the message was not lost on the other parties.

Those with longer memories warned against nostalgia for “the good old days,” noting that they were not as good as portrayed.

It was unclear the degree of which the relationship issue was being discussed within and among departments, or whether the Destination 2020 initiative, a more comfortable process discussion, overshadowed a more fundamental re-examination.

Policy arrogance and innocent bias | hilltimes.com. (pay wall)

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Among the Harper governments list of secrets: Soldiers on Viagra

2014/09/16 Leave a comment

Not exactly in keeping with the spirit of the Accountability Act:

There were 61 complaints last year to Suzanne Legault, the country’s information commissioner, about the cabinet confidence clause, almost twice the number in 2012. Figures from the commissioner’s office show it used the exclusion 2,117 times in 2012-13, a 20 per cent increase over the year before.

More recent data won’t be available until end of 2014, Legault told The Canadian Press in an interview.

She is concerned, however, about how wide-ranging the definition of a cabinet secret has become, especially since once the exclusion is declared, not even she can see the documents in question.

“When you look at the scope of the exclusion, it is extremely broad,” Legault said.

“It’s very, very broad. It basically catches anything that mentions a record that’s a cabinet confidence. In my view, the actual scope of this does not respect fundamental tenets of freedom of information.”

Media outlets aren’t the only ones for whom the flow of information in Ottawa has slowed to a trickle. Watchdog agencies like the auditor general, the military ombudsman and the parliamentary budget officer are also complaining.

Auditor general Michael Ferguson said last spring that his attempts to audit the long-term health of public pension plans had been stymied by bureaucrats at Finance and Treasury Board.

Ferguson said he was “surprised” at the scope of information officials refused to disclose.

Kevin Page, who took the Harper government to federal court when he was parliamentary budget officer, said the law needs a major overhaul.

“Under my time as the budget officer we were told on numerous occasions — from crime bills to elements of the government’s economic forecast to departmental spending restraint plans post budget 2012 — that Parliament and the PBO could not get access to information because it was a cabinet confidence,” Page said.

“The stakes were high. The government was asking Parliament to vote on bills without relevant financial information and were hiding behind the veil of cabinet confidence. This undermined accountability for Parliament and the accountability of the public service.”

Among the Harper governments list of secrets: Soldiers on Viagra.

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Jason Kenney and a guy at the Fraser Institute trade blows in Twitter cat fight | Press Progress

2014/09/15 Leave a comment

A great example of how to use Twitter to debate, and another demonstration of why Jason Kenney is such a strong minister (his series of tweets with Bob Rae is another example Jason Kenney Blasts Bob Rae’s ‘Obscene’ Temporary Foreign Workers Tweet).

Kenney  engages equally with those on the right as with those on the centre and left:

Jason Kenney and a guy at the Fraser Institute trade blows in Twitter cat fight | Press Progress.

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Blatchford: Kim-like takeover bid a terrifying twist in the Rob Ford drama

2014/09/15 Leave a comment

Best piece on the Ford family reality show I have read:

Rob Ford, hospitalized with a tumour this week and facing what he admits “could be a battle of my lifetime,” was withdrawing from the mayor’s race. He’s sick and scared, you see; he didn’t say that directly, but that’s what his decision to drop out meant, and fair enough.

But as it turns out, neither he nor anyone else in the family is so sick or so scared that they didn’t didn’t also set in motion the old bait-and-switch, with Rob simultaneously announcing his candidacy for councillor in Ward 2, his home ward, and that he’d asked brother Doug to “finish what we started together,” and that Doug would now carry on in the mayoral race.

Oh, and as well, even as Doug was being registered at the clerk’s office downtown, so was their nephew, Michael Ford, withdrawing as a candidate for the Ward 2 seat to make room for the mayor, and instead throwing his hat into the ring for school trustee in neighbouring Ward 1.

It was as though it was inconceivable that Toronto, like Pyongyang, should manage without a Ford for every citizen. As Kim Jong-un took over as Supreme Leader upon the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, the Eternal General, in 2011, who himself took over the reins of power from his old man, Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader, when he died in 1994, so were the Fords digging deep into their gene pool.

On the tube, no kidding, reporters were soon referring to the press conference Doug Ford would be holding that evening at “Mamma Ford’s house.” They might as well have called Diane Ford “Dear Mother,” you know?

To use a PM Harper word, it would be good for Toronto and the country if this “trifecta” of Fords would be given a time-out by the electorate, although Rob will likely win back his counsellor seat.

Blatchford: Kim-like takeover bid a terrifying twist in the Rob Ford drama.

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Clement wants to cut public servants’ sick days to five | Ottawa Citizen

2014/09/13 Leave a comment

Nice euphemism “most transformative:”

Bureaucrats offered Clement various options on how to overhaul the plan and the proposal he selected was considered the “most transformative.” It also shows how willing the government is to wage a major battle with unions in the run-up to the 2015 election.

The creation of a short-term disability plan is not part of negotiations as such. But the number of sick days and ability to roll over unused days is enshrined in contracts and must be re-negotiated.

The fate of banked sick leave was a big question hanging over this round of bargaining. Public servants can’t cash in their unused sick leave when they retire and many leave with weeks or months in their banks.

The government had commissioned an actuarial valuation of the $5.2 billion in banked leave, which determined bureaucrats would only use about $1.4 billion worth of the unused leave. That $1.4 billion, recorded as a liability on the government’s books, will disappear if banked sick leave is abolished.

Many hoped Clement would allow some, if not all, to be carried over so employees could dip into their credits for extra leave if they needed more than the new five-day threshold. Canada Post did this when it revamped its sick leave.

Banked sick leave provides flexibility in case of longer illness or catastrophic illness such as cancer (which helped me tremendously).

While there was abuse, and thus some need to tighten up, it does seem Canada Post found a way to do so while preserving some flexibility.

Clement wants to cut public servants’ sick days to five | Ottawa Citizen.

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Hospitals to query patients on race, sexual orientation

2014/09/10 Leave a comment

Balancing the need for better information to inform care decisions and concerns about people being asked to provide information is always a challenge.

But my bias is towards better information, and the few times that it has come up with my doctors, their line is “nothing is more costly than ignorance.”

More specialized information and linkages than from the Census and NHS:

Marylin Kanee, director of human rights and health equity at Mount Sinai, said properly training staff is key to ensuring patients feel comfortable with the survey and understand the information will be used to improve medical care. Researchers will not be given names of patients. Responses will be aggregated and analyzed to detect differences in health outcomes connected to variables such as race, language and poverty.

“This is information that will help us to tailor the care that we provide to our patients,” Ms. Kanee said. “It will give us information about who are patients are and it will help us to really understand where the inequities are.”

At St. Michael’s Hospital, Fok-Han Leung has experienced the benefits of having greater demographic information at his fingertips. Data collection was tested at the hospital’s family medicine outpatient clinic, with responses gathered on tablets. The information was then instantly linked to a patient’s file.

Seeing a patient’s income, for example, helped inform Dr. Leung’s prescription decisions. In some cases, a shorter medication supply and monitoring the drug’s effectiveness was more prudent than a costly 90-day prescription.

“It can sometimes help with diagnosis, but it very much helps with [care] management,” Dr. Leung said.

Patient participation in Toronto Central’s questionnaire has been strong so far: 85 per cent. At St. Joseph’s, Mike Heenan, vice-president responsible for quality and patient experience, said he’s heard from a few staff opposed to the hospital participating in the project. But he notes 95 per cent of 14,954 presurgery patients have answered the questionnaire, while only eight have registered concerns.

Hospitals to query patients on race, sexual orientation – The Globe and Mail.

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Ex-Tory MPs book offers a glimpse into the tightly controlled caucus – The Globe and Mail

2014/09/09 2 Comments

Two contrasting views of the Harper government approach, starting with Brent Rathgaber, the former Tory backbencher who became an independent MP over the degree of control exercised by the PM and PMO:

The book raises questions of backbench independence that have simmered over the past year and comes as one Conservative MP, Michael Chong, pushes through a bill that would rein in the power of party leaders. Mr. Rathgeber supports the bill but, in the book, predicts it won’t pass.

The book makes specific recommendations for improving the function of the House of Commons, including disallowing backbench softballs; breaking up omnibus bills; bringing in MP recall rights, allowing voters to turf a representative between elections; and giving the Speaker, not government, say over when to limit debate on a bill.

The final straw for Mr. Rathgeber was the gutting of his own private member’s bill last spring – one that would have required government to disclose the salaries of senior bureaucrats. In the book, he said the PMO saw too many “landmines” in the notion, and eventually derailed the bill. Mr. Rathgeber quit caucus that day.

He expects the book to have few fans within government. Opposition MPs may like it, he said. “But if and when they become the government they will summarily dismiss all those concepts,” he said in an interview, saying there’s no silver-bullet for reversing the long, steady decline of Canada’s democratic institutions. “This is about the long game. This is about contributing to the debate to try to fix things.”

Ex-Tory MPs book offers a glimpse into the tightly controlled caucus – The Globe and Mail.

Michael den Tandt on why the PM’s tight control will not change in the context of his relationship with the media:

Harper personally, meantime, is simply not comfortable in informal engagements with reporters, both because he’s afraid of having an idle remark blow up in his face and because casual banter is not his forte. His recent Arctic tour was  a case in point; the informal portion of the agenda was restricted to five minutes on the aft deck of a Canadian navy ship, on one day. Had Harper felt able to do more, without risk, one has to believe he would have.

With respect to the environment, as I wrote during the tour, the Harper Tories are  behaving in the Arctic as a government would if it believed carbon emissions were warming the planet. But they may not be in a position politically to say so out of deference to their donor base, which is sharply right-of-centre and, probably, climate-skeptical. By the same token, every seemingly pointless battle between Conservatives and the media, or academics, or democratic institutions, is fodder for a fundraising mail-out. Populist politics, or more precisely populist, small-sum, broad-based fundraising such as we now have in Canada, feeds on partisan brush wars.

The upshot? Observers, including pundits, editorial boards and former Conservative prime ministers, can say all they like that Harper should change his ways. Did Mulroney change, in year nine? Did Jean Chretien, or Pierre Trudeau? There are reasons why they don’t. The most important may be that they can’t.

Den Tandt: Harper’s relationship with the media won’t change

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Fixing the public service: Groom stronger, specialized managers, says Hugh Segal | Ottawa Citizen

2014/09/04 Leave a comment

Always worth listening to Hugh Segal, given his long and distinguished career and of course his current role as co-chair of the PM’s blue-chip advisory committee on the public service.

His thoughts help address some of the systemic issues:

Segal said the committee will have to grapple with these changes but he broadly supports getting rid of management layers, scrapping more rules and reorganizing work to give public servants more flexibility and authority to do their jobs. It will demand stronger managers and more training for them.

He said the existing snare of rules, structures and processes limit managers’ power and “discretion” in influencing or making change. He said they need more discretion to open up and speed up decision-making. Also, he said the managers’ talents will vary by department with, for example, Canada Border Services Agency needing very different skills than Canadian Heritage.

Segal isn’t wed to the longstanding notion that managers are generic and can be moved from department to department.

He argued the second-in-command in the navy wouldn’t have got there without specific training, credentials and expertise, but the same isn’t expected of civilian public servants as they climb the ranks of the bureaucracy. The government needs to offer employees specific career paths with opportunities to get specialized certifications or designations.

Segal said the government must get a better handle on the work of some 7,000 executives and whether they are really doing executive work.

At the same time, he said deputy ministers should be skilled and knowledgeable about their portfolios when appointed to the job. He argued deputy ministers should stay put in their jobs for four or five years before being rotated into the next senior post.

Fixing the public service: Groom stronger, specialized managers, says Hugh Segal | Ottawa Citizen.

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Statistics Canada rewrote our story on Statistics Canada – Macleans.ca

2014/09/04 1 Comment

This is quite funny, but not for the lack of judgement it showed in trying to “correct” the spin of a story. Worth reading as most points are editorial rather than substantive in nature.

A short letter to the editor focussing on substance would have been more effective:

Problems like these are pretty common in big organizations, where it’s not unheard of for IT departments to start updating computer systems without telling anyone for updates to systems to be made without a full understanding of their impact and for senior managers to have no idea how their computer systems work, causing mass panic and confusion.

Statistics Canada rewrote our story on Statistics Canada – Macleans.ca.

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StatsCan considering ‘virtual census’ to replace head count | Ottawa Citizen

2014/09/02 Leave a comment

Makes sense, in terms of efficiency and potentially accuracy (i.e., income data from tax forms may be more reliable than self-reporting).

Ironically, given that it is essentially a “big data” approach, it could be more intrusive than the former mandatory census that the Government abolished citing its intrusiveness (and not mentioning less than a handful of complaints).

Information sharing and privacy will be the harder policy issues.

But good that this is being considered:

A virtual census relies heavily on administrative data: giant caches of information collected by government in the regular course of business.

Statistics Canada already uses 500 databases drawn from federal, provincial and municipal governments, and the private sector. Among many other things, those data files provide information on individual incomes taxes, corporate taxes, payroll deductions, employment insurance, building permits, births and deaths, even telephone bills.

A handful of European countries — Finland, Holland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany — have scrapped their survey-based censuses in favour of population counts that rely heavily on an amalgam of administrative data. Sometimes, that data is combined with information from sample surveys.

“If you look around the world, particularly in Europe, you’ll see many countries have moved away from going out with a survey the way we do,” Smith told the Citizen.

“They’ve said there are data files available that we can use to effectively count the population: we don’t need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and bother every household in the country to count the population.”

StatsCan considering ‘virtual census’ to replace head count | Ottawa Citizen.

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