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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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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