Non-profits benefiting from data access – Post-Census

2014/05/16 Leave a comment

Good piece in the Globe on the use of data at the neighbourhood level and how the private sector has partially filled the gap caused by the cancellation of the Census and its replacement by the weaker National Household Survey (which does not offer the same level of granularity – the Census went down to the 250 household level):

“We’re not saying we didn’t need the mandatory census or that these data would be as good as if Statistics Canada had done a mandatory long-form census, but businesses absolutely rely on income and ethnicity data for small areas and Statscan didn’t release them,” said Jan Kestle, president of Environics Analytics.

“It’s easier to do when you’re only five years out from a [mandatory long-form] census. In five years time, we’re going to either need more mandatory questions or we’re going to need better access to good quality administrative data.”

Most people use the company’s data in conjunction with a mapping tool and segmentation analysis, which sorts the population into lifestyle categories such as “Middleburg Managers” and “Young Digerati,” to better understand their habits and tastes. A library, for example, found that despite having a large population of senior citizens, programs advertised to “seniors” were a bust. Having looked more closely at their income and lifestyle data, they targeted the same group as “mature adults” and had much more success.

“Often, the real power is in the melding of the data. They know things about their users, but not their neighbourhood, then they marry them,” said Doug Norris, chief demographer at Environics Analytics.

Non-profits benefiting from data access – The Globe and Mail.

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Culture shift: New report touts public service makeover

2014/05/14 Leave a comment

Destination 2020 priorities:

Innovative practices and networking: Along with an “innovation hub” and “change labs,” public servants will use social media and “Dragon’s Den”-style pitches to shape and promote new ideas.

Process and empowerment: A red-tape “tiger team” will be created to examine the snare of rules and processes that slow down operations, approvals and decision-making. Deputy ministers and their employees will connect better, for example using job-shadowing programs, reverse mentoring and Tweet Jams, moderated Twitter discussions.

Technology: An improved directory of federal public servants will include employee profiles and search functions.

People management: Job descriptions will be simplified, and new “learning tools” will help public servants keep their second-language skills up.

Fundamentals  of public service: This emphasizes the role of the public service as laid out in the code of values and ethics. New employees will get orientation training in these values.

Culture shift: New report touts public service makeover.

And some of the initial commentary:

Donald Savoie, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Public Administration and Governance at the University of Moncton, has sounded the alarm to reform the public service for a decade, particularly its fundamental role as policy adviser to government and clarifying its muddy relationship with ministers and Parliament.

“Until you deal with the role of ministers, the role of Parliament and their relationship with public servants … the vision will be only sentences in a report,” he said.

“Forgive me if I am being skeptical but I have been down this reform road too many times before and so have public servants … The report won’t go there. It would be groundbreaking if it does but I would be terribly surprised. And it’s not the clerk’s prerogative to do this, it’s the prime minister’s, and no prime minister has been prepared to do that. This is unchartered territory.”

….

“The clerk is trying to ensure the relevance of the public service at a time when many are questioning it,” said David Mitchell, president of the Public Policy Forum. ”He wants to strategically re-position it as the vital part of governance it traditionally played while recognizing social media, generational change and technology created a huge shift in the skills and competencies needed.”

Mitchell also believes the role of the public service has to be “refreshed” but to reflect the values of today rather than “turning back the clock to idealized version of the public service’s golden age.”

I tend to be somewhat cynical about these efforts, given the mixed results of previous efforts (and to my knowledge, no systematic evaluation has been done of the outcomes and results of previous initiatives, which in itself says a lot). And what will be the performance management framework and outcomes, and how will they be measured this time?

New plan for the PS of the future

 

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Tackle workplace depression, federal executives plead

2014/05/10 Leave a comment

Not too surprising, in the current context of continued Government distrust of public servants, high-profile attacks (e.g., SCC Chief Justice, Chief Electoral Officer etc.), reduced role for policy advice and cutbacks:

APEX’s most recent study of the health of the government’s 6,560 executives clearly showed the workplace was making some of them sick.

The study found the organizational commitment of executives was on decline – from 64 per cent to 52 per cent. About 32 per cent are disengaged, feeling disconnected from their work and unable to deal with the jobs’ demands.

The survey found that the government’s executives are more stressed than 75 per cent of Canadians. They feel they have little control over their work, receive little support from colleagues and supervisors and get scant recognition for their efforts. They complained about incivility in the workplace and harassing bosses. About one-quarter reported symptoms of burnout, ranging from emotional exhaustion to cynicism and a declining sense of accomplishment and usefulness.

Tackle workplace depression, federal executives plead.

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Job-vacancy rate plunges as Tories drop Kijiji data – Evidence vs Anecdote

2014/05/06 1 Comment

A reminder that bad and incomplete data can lead to bad policy decisions and arguments, as exemplified by the over-stating of labour shortages and justification for programs like Temporary Foreign Workers.

Employment and Social Development Canada recently revised its Employment Insurance, Monitoring and Assessment report to take out weak data from on-line sites like Kijiji (see earlier post How Kijiji’s data threw off Ottawa’s math on skills shortages – The Globe and Mail):

“There’s isn’t really any good data out there. Online postings are online postings. How well can you clean those up?” he [Mostafa Askari] asked, pointing out the need to avoid double counting jobs or counting jobs that have been filled but were not taken offline. He said the solution would be to give Statistics Canada more money to improve its research on job vacancies, which are based on surveys of employers.

“I think Statscan can definitely provide better data if they have the means to,” he said. “I assume they are obviously under budget constraints as well. So they have to put that as a priority but they won’t do it unless there’s pressure on them to provide that kind of information.”

Job-vacancy rate plunges as Tories drop Kijiji data – The Globe and Mail.

Konrad Yakabuski’s take on the problem with big data and lack of rigour in analysis:

Yet, if Mr. Kenney and his advisers are guilty of anything, it is of falling victim to the same social media hype that has led many data enthusiasts to spurn official statistics as oh-so yesterday. Want to know if the flu is headed your way or the housing market is set to take off? Why, go to Google Trends. Forget the official unemployment rate. Just track “lost my job” on Twitter.

The idea that the trillions of bytes of data we generate on social media are equipping policy-makers with vast new predictive powers is all the rage these days. Official statistics, the kind compiled by bureaucrats through scientifically tested surveys and representative samples, seem to bore the geeks. But they get all hot and bothered at the mere mention of the word algorithm….

This is but one example of how big data can lead to misguided policy. Mr. Kenney’s Kijiji snafu is another. You’d think this would make people cautious. But in our insatiable desire to make sense out of an increasingly complex world, we are turning evermore to big data to sort it out.

The latest trend is “data journalism” with The New York Times and several upstart media outlets hiring an army of twentysomething computer geeks to massage the numbers in order to spot trends, predict elections and provide funky, counterintuitive insights in the vein of Freakonomics.

The problem is that much of what they report is probably wrong, or at least tendentious. The Upshot, The Times feature launched April 22, has come under fire for stories that either read too much into the data or leave too much out. “First-rate analysis requires more than pretty graphs based on opaque manipulations of data unsuited to address the central substantive points,” prominent U.S. political scientist Larry Bartels wrote in response to one piece on Southern politics.

The most common sin in data journalism is making spurious correlations. Just because Google searches of the term “mortgage” have closely tracked Canadian housing sales in the past two years means nothing on its own.

Big data’s noise is drowning out the signal

A final irony, the final report of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Committee on the Public Service comes out at the same time as these news reports, affirming the need for outside information and discounting the value of more objective surveys:

New sources of information and data have shaken up the process of providing advice to government, he [David Emerson] said, and the public service is adapting to accept data from outside Statistics Canada or other traditional sources.

“I think we made some real progress in helping public servants to open up and I think political staff now have access to a lot of that same information, so there are checks and balances that I think are a little sharper-edged than they were perhaps in the past,” he said.

While I don’t disagree with opening up, we also need to learn the lessons from Kijiji jobs data, ensure better quality control and analysis, and strengthen the role of official statistics and Statistics Canada.

PS thinking more about the digital revolution: Emerson

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Canada hires rookie groups to lead Ukraine election observers

2014/05/01 Leave a comment

While not clear why the Government chose inexperienced organizations to lead Canada’s team of observers to Ukrainian elections compared to Canadem (public service advice was clear), the size of the delegation reflects diaspora politics. Understandable that governments want more visibility than contributions to international organizations, but still questionable:

Canada’s assignment of such large numbers of bilateral observers — the Liberals did it first in 2004, and the Conservatives have followed suit — has continued despite internal warnings.

One such warning came from Bob Johnston, a regional director general with the former Canadian International Development Agency, in a January 2012 memo.

Johnston recommended Canada channel its election observation efforts through the internationally recognized leader in the field, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, or OSCE.

However, Johnston noted the government may want to send in short-term bilateral observers “to demonstrate Canada’s commitment to Ukraine’s democratic development” — a message that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his cabinet have repeatedly emphasized.

“If this option is selected, Canadem would again be the only possible partner,” Johnston wrote.

Johnston’s boss, then CIDA president, Margaret Biggs, agreed.

“Canadem, a Canadian NGO with a long track record of recruiting, training, and deploying election observers, is the proposed implementing organization,” Biggs wrote in a July 2012 memo. CIDA has since been merged into Foreign Affairs….

Veteran Canadian election observers, who have served on numerous international missions, criticized the government for sending such large numbers of bilateral observers when no other country does so. They agreed to speak on the condition they not be identified because all are independent contractors who rely on international work for their livelihoods.

They say the government is sending large numbers of observers to win votes at home because there are an estimated 1.2 million people of Ukrainian descent in Canada.

“You’ve got the gold standard with the OSCE, and we’re sending the maximum contribution we can send anyway. On top of that, for domestic political reasons we’re sending another however-many-Canadians for no reason at all,” said one observer.

Canada hires rookie groups to lead Ukraine election observers.

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Canadian Public Service Commission studies on Employment Equity designated groups

2014/04/29 Leave a comment

Courtesy of the Community of Federal Visible Minorities (CFVM), summary of the findings of recent studies on employment equity hiring. Main findings:

  • Men who are members of visible minorities have greater chances of promotion than their comparison group, and women who are members of visible minorities have fewer chances of promotion than their comparison group;
  • Men and women with disabilities have fewer chances of promotion than their respective comparison groups;
  • Aboriginal men and women have similar chances of promotion than their respective comparison groups; and
  • Women who do not belong to another EE group have similar chances of promotion to men who do not belong to other EE groups.

As to perceptions of fairness:

  • Men with disabilities and men who are members of visible minorities have less favourable perceptions than their respective comparison groups;
  • Aboriginal men have similar perceptions to their comparison group;
  • Women who are members of visible minorities have less favourable perceptions than their comparison group;
  • Aboriginal women and women with disabilities have similar perceptions to their respective comparison groups; and
  • Men who do not belong to an EE group have less favourable perceptions than women who do not belong to another EE group

For the complete reports:

Statistical Study – Members of EE Groups: Perceptions of Merit and Fairness in Staffing Activities

Statistical Study – Members of EE Groups: Chances of Promotion

Appointments to the Public Service by Employment Equity Designated Group for 2012-2013 – Statistical Update

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1812: The War No One Wants to Commemorate (US View)

2014/04/26 Leave a comment

Funny to see how the war of 1812 is viewed by the American media, given the high profile by the Canadian Government ($28 million in funding). A war between the USA and Britain (no mention of Canada) and, in the US narrative, the US won:

So why the relative lack of enthusiasm about 1812? Maybe because the U.S. is now best friends with the aggressor, Great Britain. But that didn’t seem to generate any awkwardness during the Revolutionary War bicentennial, when Queen Elizabeth was happy to visit to join in the celebrations. More likely, say some historians, it’s simply a lack of awareness.

“This is an area of history that is so not well known by the broader American public,” says Karen Daly, executive director of Dumbarton House, an historic Washington property that is now a museum. “I find when people visit Dumbarton House, an incredible number of Americans don’t even know this event even happened. They tend to jump from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War. This area of history is glossed over in our schooling. And yet, this is what gave us our national anthem and it is very much the event that cemented the union and the democracy. It’s an incredible piece of our history.”

So come on America, have some pride for the 1812 War! We actually won this one.

I assume someone in the Conservative government will write a letter to Time!

1812: The War No One Wants to Commemorate | TIME.com.

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The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest

2014/04/24 Leave a comment

Understandably, the Government has claimed credit for Canada now having a higher middle class income than the US (any government would do the same, even though this is a 30-year trend involving many governments).

I recall during the 1990s the then Mulroney government had a “prosperity initiative” that included studies by Michael Porter who was then a major figure on theories and factors involved in growth (and has broadened his focus since then: see We’re Not No. 1! We’re Not No. 1! – Porter’s Social Competitiveness Report). At the time, one of the talking points was that Canada was a Honda Civic nation, the US was a Honda Accord. Times have changed.

And the most interesting part is the explanation, which has public policy implications:

Three broad factors appear to be driving much of the weak income performance in the United States. First, educational attainment in the United States has risen far more slowly than in much of the industrialized world over the last three decades, making it harder for the American economy to maintain its share of highly skilled, well-paying jobs.

Americans between the ages of 55 and 65 have literacy, numeracy and technology skills that are above average relative to 55- to 65-year-olds in rest of the industrialized world, according to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international group. Younger Americans, though, are not keeping pace: Those between 16 and 24 rank near the bottom among rich countries, well behind their counterparts in Canada, Australia, Japan and Scandinavia and close to those in Italy and Spain.

A second factor is that companies in the United States economy distribute a smaller share of their bounty to the middle class and poor than similar companies elsewhere. Top executives make substantially more money in the United States than in other wealthy countries. The minimum wage is lower. Labor unions are weaker.

And because the total bounty produced by the American economy has not been growing substantially faster here in recent decades than in Canada or Western Europe, most American workers are left receiving meager raises.

American Incomes Are Losing Their Edge, Except at the TopInflation-adjusted, after-tax income over time

Finally, governments in Canada and Western Europe take more aggressive steps to raise the take-home pay of low- and middle-income households by redistributing income.

The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest – NYTimes.com.

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Why is Canada botching the Great War centenary? – Granatstein

2014/04/22 1 Comment

Funny to see how the academics who support the overall thrust of the Government’s change of emphasis on Canada’s historical narrative, particularly the increased emphasis on the military, have started to realize the limitations of the Government’s commitment. Jack Granatstein’s commentary on the commemoration of WW1 and Canada’s role is valid and telling (for his critique of the Government’s cuts to Library and Archives Canada see Who will preserve the past for future generations?:

But the Great War years also changed the homeland. Women relatives of Canadian soldiers got the vote in 1917, and thousands of women left farms and hearths to work in munitions factories that produced a quarter of the artillery shells for British and Dominion forces by 1917. Prohibition cut off alcohol sales; millions were raised in Victory Loan campaigns; income tax came into effect (as a “temporary” wartime measure); and farmers and workers began to organize politically as inflation hit everyone. Above all, conscription in 1917 split the nation, pitting farmers against city dwellers, labour against bosses, French against English. That year’s election, won by the pro-conscription Unionist government of Sir Robert Borden, was the most racist in our history.

We certainly don’t want to celebrate all of these wartime events and changes, but we need to talk about them and learn from them. We need TV documentaries on the war and its battles and on the events, positive and negative, on the home front. We need books, conferences, lectures and displays in our national and local museums. We need to remember.

This requires some modest new funding. There will be a surplus by 2015, and there will be money available – if the government wishes to use it. There will also be the money to ensure that veterans get the help they require. It’s not a zero-sum game.

We really must remember the Great War properly. It was when Canada stood proudly on the world stage for the first time, and it would be a disgrace for the government to shortchange it.

Why is Canada botching the Great War centenary? – The Globe and Mail.

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Moderate Islam meets Auschwitz | +972 Magazine

2014/04/19 Leave a comment

Interesting piece on Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, a Palestinian academic who came under considerable controversy for his taking a group of Palestinian students to Auschwitz and whose partnership with Ben Gurion University includes exposing Israeli students to the nakba or catastrophe.

His thoughts on the narratives and identity are pertinent and interesting:

Among Palestinians, his advocacy of Holocaust education for Palestinians is deeply fraught. It is pointless to dismiss this as stalwart Arab anti-Semitism. Jews and Jewish Israelis, too, are almost totally incapable of considering the Palestinian Nakba, because they fear it is primarily a justification for right of return. Similarly, Palestinians encounter the Holocaust first and foremost as the justification for their modern-day oppression – and only secondarily as a matter of history and human suffering….

Indeed, between the evolving bear-hug of Israel-conservative circles and the anger he is causing among many Palestinians, his influence is unpredictable. Dajani’s language has a naivete that is out of fashion in the post-second Intifada, post nth negotiation-breakdown environment: he talks of building bridges instead of walls, and praises the Oslo accords as a psychological breakthrough. He blithely supports two states, because both societies need national and identity realization, he says, as if realities on the ground have not changed over the last 20 years.

Moderate Islam meets Auschwitz | +972 Magazine.

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