Audit slams feds’ ‘Open Data’ performance

2014/06/06 Leave a comment

Unfortunate, as paper (and pdfs) make an unnecessary complication to analyze data.

CIC publishes many operational stats in electronic format, making it easy to analyse. More formal ATIP requests are either paper or pdfs, inserting a tedious step of conversion.

Have a few new ATIP requests with the provinces (for data) and will see what comes back (have requested electronic format):

Newspapers Canada directly tested federal, provincial and municipal transparency laws with almost 400 formal requests for information last October and November, the 10th annual audit carried out by the organization.

This years version added 172 requests for electronic data sets, requiring the information to be provided in a format that can be digested and manipulated by computer.

Most government bodies fell short, many insisting on providing the data requested on paper, or providing it in the electronic equivalent of a photo — impossible to process in a spreadsheet or database program.

Among the worst performers were some departments of the federal government, which has been promoting its Open Data agenda as evidence of transparency, including the proactive posting of some 200,000 data sets online.

The audit found that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s own department, the Privy Council Office, refused to release any information in electronic format, insisting on paper printouts.

Audit slams feds’ ‘Open Data’ performance | National Newswatch.

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Judith Maxwell: The government built the ‘Ottawa bubble’ it mocks

2014/06/05 Leave a comment

Judith Maxwell, former Chair of the Economic Council of Canada and the former President of Canadian Policy Research Networks, has it about right:

First, interpretation. The federal government is not the only policy actor in Canada. The other 13 governments taken together are larger and likely have more impact than Ottawa does. Then there are the big cities, the community service agencies, employers, big and small, plus researchers in universities, colleges, think tanks, industry associations etc. No policy choice should be made without seeking input from the people who know the subject, what solutions have been tried, and whether or not they worked.

Instead, public servants are blocked from interacting with stakeholders. No roundtables with all viewpoints represented at the table. No participation in meetings where researchers and stakeholders work through the evidence. No right to publish in-house research from federal policy units. No right to comment on the work of others. If consultations are held, only the “friendly voices” are invited. The bubble was built by the government, designed to keep insiders in and outsiders out. Perversely, in this respect, it has been quite successful.

Second, choosing the best option. The way things work now, the Prime Minister’s Office decides on the preferred policy action and then asks the public service to advise on damage control. This turns the policy-making process upside down. First, you find out works, then you decide.

She had her own run in with the Mulroney government when the ECC published a report that downplayed the economic costs of separation (and led the Mulroney government to close the ECC down in 1992)

Judith Maxwell: The government built the ‘Ottawa bubble’ it mocks | Ottawa Citizen.

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U.S. investors begin to imagine a return to Iran – Washington Post

2014/05/30 Leave a comment

Not terribly surprising that US companies, like companies from other countries, are positioning themselves for a post-sanctions environment should the current nuclear talks lead to a deal:

“There will be phenomenal opportunities for American investors. I would definitely consider investing in Iran, and I think that’s the universal answer,” said Dick Simon, chief executive of RSI, a Boston-based real estate development and investment management company, who helped organize a recent trip to Iran composed of mostly U.S. entrepreneurs, as well as several who were Canadian or British.

In the absence of diplomatic relations, such contact can serve to de-escalate tensions between the two governments — which analysts say is a strategic goal for the administrations of President Obama and Rouhani — as negotiations over Iran’s controversial nuclear program are ongoing.“

An increasing number of Americans, both inside and outside government, understand the value of whetting the appetite of business people in Iran,” said Reza Marashi, research director at the National Iranian American Council NIAC.

According to Marashi, NIAC has been inundated this year by calls from Americans who want to travel to Iran. The organization, which favors greater contact between Americans and Iranians, is one of the few non-governmental entities in regular communication with officials in both governments.

As to Canada, still stuck in its standard “huff and puff” rhetoric, with no sign of change (see my earlier piece in the Globe, If Iran opens for business, Canada will need a new approach – and fast).

U.S. investors begin to imagine a return to Iran – The Washington Post.

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Bias-Free Hiring: Interview questions not to ask

2014/05/29 Leave a comment

An interesting but somewhat frustrating checklist of what to ask and what not to ask in interviewing candidates, as bias-free as possible. All too familiar to those of us in government, where the guidelines below are followed religiously and yet are deeply unsatisfying given the over-scripting that occurs. Sometimes it works out fine, sometimes less so:

  • Use the job description to identify the essential skills and abilities needed for the job. Determine which of these skills and abilities are best assessed through a written or practical test, through an interview, and from reference checks. From there, interview questions should be developed and clearly linked to the skills and abilities needed to do the job.
  • Develop the responses which you will look for in the candidates’ responses.
  • Attach a score to each question.
  • Use an interview panel when interviewing. Require each interviewer to write down each candidates’ responses to each question.
  • Ask each candidate the same questions.
  • After each interview, have the interview panel discuss the candidate’s responses and come to an agreed score for each question.

Bias-Free Hiring: Interview questions not to ask.

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Roland Paris: Scripted foreign ministries will disappear from public debate | Embassy

2014/05/29 Leave a comment

Good piece by Roland Paris on digital diplomacy. Nails the big challenge for the Canadian government at the end (broader than just for foreign policy):

“Time will tell. In the Canadian example, Canada was slow to recognize the importance of digital diplomacy. “The Canadian government talks about digital diplomacy and direct diplomacy as two different things. They did get on top of [direct diplomacy] using technology to circumvent constraints [to free speech] on Iranians through the Global Dialogue on the Future of Iran, alongside the [University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs]. For a while Foreign Minister [John] Baird was saying ‘Canada is a leader in digital diplomacy,’ displaying the fact that he didn’t seem to understand that digital diplomacy is so much greater than using electronic tools to allow the dissidents of a country that we have hostile relations with to communicate with each other.

“[John] Baird and the ministry did eventually…announce a new initiative in digital diplomacy, which was essentially to go forth and Tweet, to use these tools. He explicitly said that there has to be a greater tolerance of risk. So is this going to continue, or is this going to be reeled in? We’ll see when the first mistakes are made.

“In the United States, there have been mistakes in digital diplomacy, which did not lead to a retreat at all. The question in Canada is, we have a government that has a particular penchant for message control, compared to most other democratic governments; what will this government do when one of its diplomats follows Minister Baird’s advice, takes risks on Twitter, and puts a foot wrong? That will be the proof, and it will be a test for Minister Baird, and it will also be a test of his ability to deal with message control officials in the Prime Minister’s Office. He’s going to have to show that he meant what he said, when he said there will be greater tolerance of risk, and that might mean facing down message control officials in the Prime Minister’s Office. We’ll see if he can do that.”

Roland Paris: Scripted foreign ministries will disappear from public debate | Embassy – Canadas Foreign Policy Newspaper.

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Ideology, minority rule, distrust shaped Harper government’s relationship with public service | hilltimes.com

2014/05/27 Leave a comment

Good piece by Mark Burgess in the Hill Times that echoes some of the themes in Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism, but at a more senior level:

David Zussman, the author of Off and Running: The Prospects and Pitfalls of Government Transitions in Canada who led former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s transition to power in 1993, said the Conservatives came to power in 2006 with a clear agenda and an inexperienced Cabinet, two factors that defined its approach to the public service.

“The more a government is ideological, the more it knows exactly what it wants to do, typically it’s less willing to hear contrary points of view,” Mr. Zussman, the Jarislowsky Chair on Management in the Public Sector at the University of Ottawa, said in an interview.

“This is partly what I think happened in 2006 with the incoming Harper government, is that they had an agenda and they didn’t think it was necessary that they get counter points of view from the public service.”

Elizabeth Roscoe, a member of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2006 transition team, said the minority mandate was their biggest concern.

“You don’t know how long you’re planning for, and you don’t know what the opposition trigger points might be, and you don’t know the appetite of the electorate, so all of those things have to factor in,” she said in an interview with The Hill Times.

Minority mandates always make governments “twitchy” as they worry about losing power at any time, Mr. Zussman said, which further complicates the relationship with bureaucrats.

The most experienced voices in the new Cabinet at the time—Jim Flaherty, Tony Clement and John Baird—were ministers from Mike Harris’ Ontario government, which had a very rocky relationship with the public service.

“If you feel that the public service is not going to provide you with analysis that is consistent with your overall policy agenda, then you’re probably not going to pay a lot of attention to it,” Mr. Zussman said.

“There was a lot of resistance to overcome in 2006 and I think it’s been a work in progress,” he said.

In the book, the leader of Mr. Harper’s transition team, Derek Burney, said the government’s tightly-controlled approach would loosen after winning a majority government in 2011 and include the public service more in policy making.

“I don’t want to hear any more crap about minority government and politics every day,” Mr. Burney said in the book.

He called on bureaucrats to stand up and express ideas “because this is a government that is going to be a little more receptive to good policy ideas than it was when it was looking over its shoulder” in the minority days.

Mr. Burney, a senior strategic adviser at the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, said the minority mindset wouldn’t change overnight but that it was up to senior bureaucrats to get over the Conservatives’ focus on politics and make the relationship work.

Mr. Zussman said he also would have predicted the Conservatives would open up to the public service and adjust to majority rule after 2011 but that the shift never occurred.

“I think what’s happened, frankly, is after five years, the government has a particular way of operating and they’re just continuing to operate the same way,” he said. “They would argue that it’s working well for them, I suppose.”

Mr. Burney couldn’t be reached for this article. Ms. Roscoe said it took public servants some time to understand the Conservatives’ philosophy and approach.

“Once they did, then they understood better how to align priorities, how to align the agenda, and how to help both bring forward ideas and to implement them,” she said.

Ideology, minority rule, distrust shaped Harper government’s relationship with public service | hilltimes.com. (pay wall)

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Wayne Wouters: Public service reform means fixing sick leave too

2014/05/27 Leave a comment

More on Destination 2020 and the Clerk’s messaging on workplace stress and changes to sick leave:

Privy Council Clerk Wayne Wouters told the Citizen his Destination 2020 reforms, meant to bring the public service into the digital age, go hand-in-hand with Treasury Board President Tony Clement’s promise to replace an outdated sick-leave regime created more than 40 years ago for a very different workforce.

Wouters said he supports Clement’s plan to replace the existing accumulated sick-leave regime with a new short-term disability plan aimed at getting ill and injured workers better and back to work faster.

“Our system is not conducive to a modern workforce,” said Wouters. “People go on sick leave and they go on long-term disability and it’s out of sight, out of mind. We never think how to bring these people back, incorporate them and what kind of wellness program they need.”

A large part of stress is fundamental to the different roles of the political and official levels. When a government works well with the public service (without being captive to their advice), stress goes down. When a government is more antagonistic to the public service and often dismissive of their advice, stress goes up. Hopes that the Conservative government would evolve more into the former, given their time in office and having a majority since 2011, have not panned out as any number of recent incidents attest.

As to the replacement of sick leave and disability insurance, I have had experience on both sides of the issue: as a manager, with employees who abused the system, and as someone with an aggressive cancer which forced me to be absent for an extended period of time.

As a manager, there were few tools and support to deal with abuse in a time-efficient manner. Some employees used accumulated sick leave as “pre-retirement” time, which annoyed me to no end. But given that employees can always get a doctor to certify absence and the Health Canada verification process, while helpful, is somewhat cumbersome, there was not much that one can do. The sick leave reforms will address, at least in part, some of this abuse.

But as someone with cancer, who had banked considerable sick leave over my career, having this accumulated sick leave made a difference during my extended absence. I used it when I needed it. I also benefited from extremely supportive managers and HR. In the end, given a relapse, I ran out of sick leave and went on long-term disability.

One can argue, based upon comparability, that these changes may make sense. But as usual, when we focus on abuse, as we have to do, we penalize those who play by the rules, and who may find themselves in a catastrophic health situation where banking and flexibility can make a big difference.

Wayne Wouters: Public service reform means fixing sick leave too | Ottawa Citizen.

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Public servants risk becoming policy dinosaurs, David Emerson warns

2014/05/24 1 Comment

More on David Emerson’s comments on the need for a more open, responsive public service in an era of more and more data and sources of information and policy advice:

Former cabinet minister David Emerson, the outgoing chair of the prime minister’s advisory committee on the public service, said technology and big data are turning the world of policy-making on its ear.

“Government is a little information economy with lots of barriers to the free flow and use of information, so a big challenge for the public service will be how to adapt when the world is now able to access all kinds of quantitative and qualitative information is a split second on hand-held devices,” Emerson told the Citizen.

“And if they can’t do that quickly, government becomes less and less relevant because, by the time decisions are made, it will be too late.”

Emerson said the public service can no longer rely on traditional sources of “structured” and “cleansed” data produced by the likes of a downsized Statistics Canada to advise ministers in a world flooded with massive amounts of unfiltered information and less reliable data.

Emerson said his committee never took a position on the elimination of the agency’s mandatory long-form census but instead argued globalization and huge volumes of data now available have changed the “breadth and scope” of advice governments need in order to deal with complicated issues.

He said this “tectonic shift” will force public servants to change the way they work and think about their advice to cabinet, which was “traditionally seen as utterings of the priesthood.”

Public servants have to get out of the “Ottawa bubble,” re-think how to analyze and manipulate data and speed up internal approval processes to get advice to ministers faster.

“If all you are doing is relying on StatsCan and other institutional sources of data … then you are missing out on massive amounts of new data now available,” Emerson said. “The other sources of information will crowd you out and compete for the ear of politicians who are trying to anticipate what is actually happening out in the world to satisfy voters who have access to the same massive amounts of information. It is a whole new ball game.”

True enough. But the risks of “uncleansed” data became apparent with labour market information that overstated job vacancies (Job-vacancy rate plunges as Tories drop Kijiji data – Evidence vs Anecdote).

The plethora of data and outside sources of information needs “curation” in order to be more useful for policy and decision makers. The public service has to be more engaged and open (and be allowed to consult and engage Canadians more widely than at present). In doing so, it also needs to guard against bias in its choice of outside evidence and advice.

Data and information without synthesis and analysis is largely noise, and not helpful to policy choices.

Public servants risk becoming policy dinosaurs, David Emerson warns | Ottawa Citizen.

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No ‘trust gap’ for average bureaucrat, Wayne Wouters says | Ottawa Citizen

2014/05/21 Leave a comment

There is some validity to his comments, given that it is true that most public servants have relatively little contact with the political level. But there are issues at senior levels, and after 8 years of a Conservative government, public servants have adjusted and many of those viewed as “enemies” have moved on. Destination 2020 was also carefully – and understandably – managed to focus more on the ways of working rather than addressing the fundamental relationship issues. Public servants tend to be cautious in voicing criticism while within the public service; those of us who are retired have more flexibility. And as Head of the Public Service, he has to encourage rather than discourage:

…. Privy Council Clerk Wayne Wouters says he barely heard any complaints about public servants’ relationship with Conservative ministers and their offices from the 110,000 bureaucrats across the country who took part in his Blueprint 2020 discussions on how to re-shape the workforce.

“The only time … I hear about a trust gap (is) from those who don’t necessarily work in government,” he told the Citizen.

“What I was amazed by on all this was the degree of commitment and passion people had … I don’t think we heard this whole trust thing that others seem to be talking about.”

His remarks were a striking contrast to what the association representing senior managers and executives running departments has said. The trust gap was one of APEX’s chief concerns during the Blueprint 2020 review and it suggested steps to restore respect and confidence between public servants and their political masters.

The Public Policy Forum also conducted a major study among public and private sector leaders on leadership skills for the future public service and said the trust gap emerged as a top issue.

Wouters acknowledged some senior executives may have concerns, but average public servants are far removed from that political interaction and their big worries are getting the tools to do their jobs, he said.

While I had provided the Clerk with a courtesy copy of my book, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism, I did not necessarily expect substantive comment but was surprised that at the lack of acknowledgement by his office. Same thing with CIC’s Deputy. However, the President of the Canada School of Public Service did acknowledge and circulate the book to her senior management team.

From my discussions with current and former public servants, largely at the executive level, things are not quite so rosy as portrayed.

No ‘trust gap’ for average bureaucrat, Wayne Wouters says | Ottawa Citizen.

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Au Musée de l’histoire, une majorité d’événements célébreront la guerre

2014/05/17 Leave a comment

Have not seen anything recent in English media on the Museum of Canadian History programming. Liberals have raised over-emphasis on military ((26 out of 30 events), Conservatives have claimed, with straight face, that this was Museum’s decision:

«On est un pays qui a fait de grandes choses», juge le député Stéphane Dion, citant le Canada comme un «pionnier de la démocratie et des droits de la personne». «Il y a plein de choses que l’on peut célébrer et tout est orienté vers le militaire», déplore-t-il.

Il est d’accord que le «passé militaire glorieux» du Canada – l’armée n’étant intervenue à l’étranger que pour assurer la paix et la justice, selon lui – mérite d’être souligné, mais il estime avec cette vision réductrice des célébrations, les conservateurs «appauvrissent la richesse de notre histoire».

Selon lui, tout n’a pas été que conflits armés au Canada. Le député libéral de Saint-Laurent-Cartierville aurait aimé voir dans la liste des festivités une célébration de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés et du centenaire du droit de vote des femmes, entre autres exemples.

Questionnée en Chambre à ce sujet, jeudi, la ministre du Patrimoine canadien, Shelly Glover, a répliqué que le Musée canadien de l’histoire prend ses propres décisions en matière de programmation.

«Les musées font leur propres décisions opérationnelles», a-t-elle répondu, écartant toute forme d’ingérence de son gouvernement.

«Ce sera un succès partout au pays grâce aux consultations que nous avons faites auprès des Canadiens et Canadiennes, et des consultations se poursuivent», a-t-elle ajouté au sujet des célébrations du 150e.

Au Musée de l’histoire, une majorité d’événements célébreront la guerre | Stéphanie Marin | National.

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