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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Despite funding boost, Statistics Canada jobs-data upgrade will take time – The Globe and Mail

2014/08/29 Leave a comment

Looks like some long-standing issues between the employer and household surveys. Not surprising that it will take time to build capacity to improve labour market information, but at least there is additional funding and acknowledgment of the need for better information to improve private and public policy:

Officials at Canada’s statistics agency are planning how to spend an additional $14-million a year that the Conservative government announced in June to fund two large new employer surveys.

That announcement followed months of criticism that the government was making policy decisions on everything from training to immigration without reliable job vacancy statistics. Since then, Statscan’s two existing labour market surveys have come under closer scrutiny and criticism.

The agency told The Globe and Mail on Wednesday the new money won’t have any immediate impact on those existing surveys, but Statscan isn’t ruling out changes down the road.

The agency is expected to release a report soon that will explain what led it to make the unprecedented decision this month of pulling its flagship jobs report, a survey of households called the Labour Force Survey, after the discovery of an error in its July numbers.

Despite funding boost, Statistics Canada jobs-data upgrade will take time – The Globe and Mail.

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Sexual exploitation: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil | The Economist

2014/08/29 2 Comments

Institutional and ethnic misogyny reinforcing each other in the UK town of Rotherham:

The investigation by Alexis Jay, a former chief inspector of social work, uncovers a catalogue of offences, mostly by Pakistani men against white girls. Children as young as 11 were plied with drink and drugs, raped, beaten and trafficked to be abused by men in other cities. One was doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight. Another told the investigation that gang rape was a usual part of growing up in her district. The report estimates that some 1,400 children—some from fragile family backgrounds, some in the care of the state—were abused between 1997 and 2013.

All of which is grim enough. But the local council knew at least ten years ago of widespread abuse and yet appears to have downplayed the problem. Nor did the police pay much attention to it. On one occasion, officers attended a derelict house and found an intoxicated girl with several adult men. They arrested the girl for being drunk and disorderly but detained none of the men. Some fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused, only to be arrested themselves.

…. What the report does not spell out, but which is true, is that the horrors in Rotherham fit into a pattern. In other northern towns such as Oldham and Rochdale, as well as in southern cities such as Oxford, gangs of Asian men have been convicted of grooming and abusing young, mostly white girls. This is a specific ethnic issue more than a religious one, says a community worker in a city near Rotherham.

Young Pakistani men are increasingly alienated from their conservative parents, who want them to marry girls from back home often the Mirpur district in Kashmir and also from religious leaders, who often cannot speak English. Discussions of sex are taboo at home and in the mosque, so some learn about it from pornography, about misogyny from rap music and come to view white women as fair game though the report also suggests Pakistani girls were abused, and that this was hushed up.

In Rotherham, this ethnic misogyny then ran up against the institutional misogyny of the police and the mostly white council. Ms Jay writes of one female employee at the council being told that if she wore shorter skirts to meetings “she’d get on better” and other senior male officials making explicit sexual remarks to female workers. Some senior police officers clearly saw the abused girls simply as sexually precocious young women.

Sexual exploitation: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil | The Economist.

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The ideological roots of Stephen Harper’s vendetta against sociology

2014/08/28 Leave a comment

While a bit over-the-top, there is a more than an element of truth to the roots of the Government’s distrust of social science and sociology. Paul Wells captured some of this in The Longer I’m Prime Minister in his discussion of the reasons behind the cancellation of the Census and his explanation of some of the thinkers, like Peter Brimelow, behind his views and ideology.

But sometimes the social scientists assign all responsibility to structural factors, neglecting the individual. Bit more complicated.

But worth reading and reflecting upon:

Harper’s two disparaging comments about sociology, however, also need to be understood alongside his gutting of the long-form census in 2010. It is widely accepted that this action fundamentally undermined Canada’s ability to understand its own demographics, long-term social trends, and inequalities — in short, its sociology.

So what does Harper have against sociology? First, Harper is clearly trumpeting a standard component of neo-liberal ideology: that there are no social phenomena, only individual incidents. This ideology traces back to Margaret Thatcher’s famous claim that “there is no such thing as society.” Neo-liberalism paints all social problems as individual problems. The benefit of this for those who share Harper’s agenda, of course, is that if there are no social problems or solutions, then there is little need for government. Individuals are solely responsible for the problems they face.

This ideology is so seductive not only because it radically simplifies our world, but also because it mirrors the two social institutions neo-liberals actually believe in — the “free” market and law and order. Everything is reduced to either a simplistic market transaction or a criminal case. In the former, you either have the money to buy stuff, or you don’t and it’s up to you to get more. In the latter, a lone individual is personally responsible for a crime and is punished for it. Easy peasy. No sociology needed.

via The ideological roots of Stephen Harper’s vendetta against sociology | Toronto Star.

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Un-muzzle the scientists? Not so fast. – Macleans.ca

2014/08/27 Leave a comment

Andrew Leach in Macleans on government science and un-muzzling, and trying to find the fine balance between a more open approach and respecting the public servant role and policy process.

His arguments are valid in the macro-sense, but that the Government’s overly zealous focus on controlling the message has tipped the scale too much the wrong way. But a thoughtful contribution to the debate:

For me, the key questions are whether government researchers should, themselves, be able to speak out when they feel a government policy does not align with the evidence and, if so, why we would only restrict that to a particular class of government researchers? To speak out publicly against government policy is, by the current definition, fundamentally at odds with the role of a public servant in our democracy. Public servants are expected to provide impartial advice to the policy development process and loyal implementation of government policies once decisions are taken. They are not supposed to critique that policy publicly when it doesn’t align with their interpretation of the evidence or their beliefs with respect to how that evidence should be weighed. Allowing public servants to be openly critical of government decisions – whether based on scientific evidence or any other criteria – turns the relationship between the bureaucracy and their democratically elected masters on its head, undermining the trust essential to an effective working relationship.

Should we have more open government science? Perhaps. I think the better question is to what degree government-supported research should take place in arms-length agencies (the U.S. model for agencies like NASA and the Energy Information Administration come to mind) or outsourced to universities via government granting agencies as opposed to being housed in policy departments. Research housed outside of government departments would allow elected and bureaucratic offices to determine which questions are being asked by researchers or which subject areas are being explored without having influence over the answers or controlling the message. It would also mean that researchers were not privy to the policy discussions of the day and would not necessarily be involved when their research is used to support a decision. There are also options within the public service: perhaps Statistics Canada could broaden its role to collect and publish more environmental statistics such as the sea ice coverage, which was the subject of so much consternation this week, perhaps absorbing some of the functions now performed within Environment Canada. In the same way in which no one would ask a Statistics Canada official what government should do to combat youth unemployment or to raise median incomes when those data are published, no one would ask whether the extent of sea ice coverage should influence our climate change policy choices. When you’re asking officials from the department with jurisdiction over both our domestic climate change policies and our intervention in international climate change negotiations about sea ice coverage, the implications are very different. The questions to the scientist might even be policy-neutral, but I expect most of the resulting articles would not be.

If you want to take the muzzle off government researchers, that’s fine if you want it for the right reasons. I’m all in favour of increasing the quality of information available both to our decision-makers and to the general public. However, we must do it without skewing the policy process. The only way to make sure that’s true if you want open access to researchers is to disconnect those undertaking primary and policy-relevant research from that process and from those departments. Whether that’s best done through arms-length institutions, through universities, or through agencies such as Statistics Canada is a topic for debate. Of course, there are some topics of current government research not suited to open inquiry, for a variety of reasons. Maybe you’re willing to sacrifice some of those topics for access to information? You might also find that some of our government’s best researchers prefer their seat at the policy table to the front pages of the newspaper. Maybe that’s a sacrifice you’re willing to make? Unfortunately, I doubt you’ll be able to rely on anyone in a lab coat to tell you with certainty which is best for the country.

Un-muzzle the scientists? Not so fast. – Macleans.ca.

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