Fix the link where science and policy meet

2014/06/24 Leave a comment

More on the cumulative impact of Government actions on science and science policy from Homer-Dixon, Douglas and Edwards:

The federal government has severely degraded its internal scientific capacity, including its ability to perform and publicize its own scientific research, track outside scientific research, and monitor and assess policy issues with complex scientific content.

Federal ministries have created rules that require government scientists – especially those working on resource and environmental topics – to get approval from senior bureaucrats before publishing their research. They have also sharply restricted travel to scientific meetings and blocked their scientists from communicating with journalists without prior authorization, and even then often only under supervision. Across the federal government – but especially within the departments of Fisheries and Oceans, Environment, and Natural Resources – large numbers of scientists have been laid off and vital labs and libraries closed. Remaining scientists speak of a climate of fear and self-censorship.

Fix the link where science and policy meet – The Globe and Mail.

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ICYMI: The United States of Metrics – NYTimes.com

2014/06/18 Leave a comment

Nice piece by Bruce Feller on the penchant to measure everything and the quantified self:

Given that everyone faces messiness sooner or later but that everyone also seems to enjoy a bit of data gazing, maybe what’s needed is a fresh way of putting all these numbers in perspective. Curiously, one seems to be at hand, and it’s even got backing from the social scientists: It’s called the law of diminishing returns. Numbers can help, but after a while they become overkill. What we need is a simpler model, something more akin to pass-fail.

“The analogy I would make is diet,” Mr. Watts, of Microsoft Research, said. “If you do a rigorous, exhaustive study of dietary science, I guarantee all you’re going to get is confused. There are thousands of studies out there, and they’re all contradictory. It’s just hopeless. Instead, eat reasonable food, exercise, get a good night’s sleep. After all, you might get hit by a bus tomorrow.”

Mr. Taleb concurs. There are two schools of thought about metrics, he said. You can optimize everything, or you can do what the ancients did and say, “Good enough.”

“Good enough is vastly more rigorous than any metric,” he said, “and it’s more humane, too. Once you reduce a human to a metric, you kill them.”

Or, as the greatest numbers person of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, warned, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

The United States of Metrics – NYTimes.com.

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Public service needs ‘moral contract’ to keep it neutral, study says | Ottawa Citizen

2014/06/13 1 Comment

More on the respective roles of the Government and the public service, this time from Ralph Heintzman and Canada 2020. While much of his observations and criticism is valid, it is no accident that no government has accepted an explicit moral contract or charter to govern the relationship. Ambiguity has its advantages for both sides, and the wish for clarity in the essentially messy business of governing is unrealistic.

None of this condones a number of the actions of the Conservative government but as I argued in my book, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism, the public services was also responsible for some of the breakdown in the relationship:

Canada 2020, a progressive think-tank, plans to release a paper Wednesday that calls for a “charter of public service” or a “moral contract” to set the boundaries for a bureaucracy whose role and responsibilities have become blurred by a powerful Prime Minister’s Office with an iron grip on communications.

Ralph Heintzman, the University of Ottawa research professor who wrote the paper, said the line between public servants and politicians has been blurring for years, but rapidly changing technology, the 24-hour news cycle and government’s obsession with communications and “spin” have made the problem worse.

“I think behaviours in the public service are not what they should be, but not because they are bad-willed but rather because we don’t have the right systems, rules and mechanisms to direct people how to behave properly,” he said in an interview.

Heintzman proposes a new charter that would be legislated and far-reaching. It would enshrine a value and ethics code to guide behaviour. It would include tougher communications rules; give teeth to the accountability of deputy ministers as accounting officers; and revamp the appointment process for deputy ministers by taking it out of the hands of the Clerk of the Privy Council.

… Heintzman argued the three-way relationship – between public servants, MPs and ministers – is critical to the implementation of any government’s agenda regardless of political stripe, but the need for a charter is more critical today for a public service that has been “neglected,” “devalued” and has seen its neutrality “abused” by the Harper government.

The role of the public service has been in the spotlight because of Privy Council Office Clerk Wayne Wouters’s ongoing Blueprint 2020 exercise to retool the future public service. Wouters’s report, like many previous reform exercises over the past 25 years, dodged the deteriorating relationship.

… The grey zone between politicians and bureaucrats was at the heart of everything that went wrong and led to the sponsorship scandal, concluded Justice John Gomery, who headed the sponsorship inquiry. He also recommended a legislated charter. The Tait report made a similar recommendation a decade earlier.

Heintzman argued the Conservatives’ flagship Federal Accountability Act, meant in part to fix the problem, was badly flawed and increased confusion around deputy minister accountability.

Heintzman concludes a big problem is that the Conservatives don’t value the public service as a national institution for Canada’s democracy and see it as an extension of the government to be used as desired; for example it is expected to adhere to a communications strategy to rebrand the “Government of Canada” as the “Harper government.”

“They make no distinction between the Harper ministry and the government of Canada,” he said. They think it is the same thing, so the public service is just there to achieve their own partisan objectives.”

Public service needs ‘moral contract’ to keep it neutral, study says | Ottawa Citizen.

Subsequent article and interview comments are even more critical:

The study, Renewal of the Public Service: Toward a Charter of Public Service, released by the think-tank Canada 2020, says Privy Council Office Clerk Wayne Wouters became the government’s political spokesman for stonewalling Page and refusing the information Parliament needed to do its job – right down to the language of a letter in which he wrote that “in our view” the government’s reductions are credible.

The new study, written by University of Ottawa Prof. Ralph Heintzman, argues that Wouters could have provided an explanation of the government’s reasoning but should never have publicly justified or defended a “contestable political decision” and made it his own.

“Words such as ‘in our view’ – our! – would be quite natural in the mouth of a prime minister. In the mouth of the head of the public service, they are very difficult to explain, or justify. In using them, the clerk left no space whatever between himself and the current ministry,” writes Heintzman.

“A Privy Council Office that could draft such a letter and a clerk who could sign it are at serious risk of abolishing the distinction between a public service and the political administration it serves. No wonder that under the Harper administration, the PCO has become home to a large communications machine serving the partisan needs of the incumbent government and the prime minister.”

When public servants go partisan: new study seeks solutions

The alternate view by  Maryantonett Flumian and Nick Charney, in Canadian Government Executive, is more nuanced, noting how the public service has to adapt to the government of the day:

As the new Clerk, Wouters could have taken the public service in many directions. He chose to rise to the challenge by recognizing the somewhat strained relationships and by doing what he is best at, thoughtfully and persistently building bridges between those who must work as one in the public interest. With the Prime Minister’s public support, he chose a path of reenergizing the public service and channeling its leadership toward transformation and modernization of the institution supported with the necessary infrastructure and tools to serve Canadians and the government. He has not ducked the challenges, nor has he focused on confrontation.

To everything there is a season, and this is the time when both major players seem to have understood that they depend on each other to fashion a modern, resilient and agile public service that supports a modern nation in achieving its place on the global stage. And so, in Wouters’ time at the PCO, his greatest skill as head of the public service may well turn out to be his capacity to get the Prime Minister on side and work with him on issues having to do with the role of the public service, the size of the workforce, and changing the business model of government. This bridge to the future began when he launched the Administrative Services Review. The review looked for government-wide opportunities to consolidate and standardize government operations and led, among other things, to the creation of Shared Services Canada.

Wouters’ ability to work closely with the Prime Minister has manifested itself in other areas than public service renewal, however important that may be. He used his position as Clerk, working with colleagues such as the deputy minister of Finance, to support the government’s economic goals, ensuring the development of five successive budgets that kept Canada out of recession and brought the government back into surplus. His support and advice was critical to the finalization of a number of bilateral trade agreements, including the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the European Union and the Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement. ….

Through Blueprint 2020, Wouters is moving the public service into unchartered waters. Responding to criticism that the public service is too focused on the short term, he is using it to promote a longer term view of policy, program development and service delivery. He is staking the future on the belief that the leadership – at all levels of the largest employer and most diverse workforce in the country, operating in very complex domains – is up to the challenge.

The Prime Minister and the Prime Ministers’ Advisory Committee on the Public Service, until recently chaired by David Emerson, are supportive and aligned to the challenge. The call to arms in the Blueprint 2020 exercise has been launched against a backdrop of cynicism, cost reduction, and a drive to operational efficiency. This renewal starts at a time when the same sort of efforts at transformation are being led by public services around the world. Blueprint 2020 fundamentally recognizes that existing policies, tools and processes no longer fit the needs of today.

The issues of engagement, culture, agility and relevance are at the heart of this renewal. There is a profound recognition, which the cynics missed in the early days, that reforming public service is a team sport where every player must be called upon to be a leader, where every step, big and small, will add up to change. With the public service going through a transformation, the need for broad engagement is fundamental. That is the engagement that Wouters, as head of the public service, has unleashed in Blueprint 2020. Over 100,000 public servants from 85 different departments and agencies have participated in this dialogue.

With the release of Destination 2020, the call to action is clear and the momentum continues. Social media, along with the openness of spirit and engagement with which Wouters has launched this dialogue on collaboration, innovation and modernization, is unprecedented in the history of public service reform. The engagement at so many different levels of the organization will ensure that the momentum will not end with the “tabling” of this living, crowd-sourced document.

To come full circle, two unlikely partners – Stephen Harper and Wayne Wouters – picked each other to work together in support of the public interest. Each is working to reshape his own sphere. There is no question that tough conversations occur – as they must – behind closed doors. What will be accomplished is a modern, relevant public service better able to serve Canadians.

I find this to be an overly optimistic take on the government-public service relationship. It avoids the difficult issues of conflicting ideologies, reliance on anecdotes over evidence, and major reductions in core policy and analytical capacity.

However, relationships and trust matter, the Clerk, deputies and other senior managers have to decide the appropriate balance between “fearless advice and loyal implementation,” and where greater cooperation rather than “confrontation” is appropriate. The public service has to adapt to the government more than the other way round.

I worked at Service Canada under Flumian and she was one of the strongest and effective leaders I have encountered. Like Steve Jobs in her ability to inspire and develop a vision, with some of the same human flaws. One of my most rewarding times in government.

To everything there is a season

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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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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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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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How Change.org amplified the act of protest

2014/05/16 Leave a comment

For those interested in social media campaigns, an interesting article on change.org and what makes a successful campaign:

Started in 2007 as an online activism platform by Ben Rattray, a Californian educated at Stanford and the London School of Economics, Change.org transitioned to a petition-only platform in 2011. The site made world headlines when a Change.org petition started by the parents of murdered teen Trayvon Martin helped secure charges against George Zimmerman, his killer. That earned Rattray a spot on Time’s 100 most influential people of 2012. Today, the site has offices in 18 countries—and nearly 70 million users across the globe.

The site is an often-cacophonous clearing house for petitions calling for some sort of action in just about every imaginable domain. In Canada alone, there are petitions to “add women from Canadian history to Canadian bank notes”; to have fluoride removed from tap water; to have fluoride added to tap water; to have a “fully independent investigation” into the Senate scandal; to reverse Canada Post’s decision to end home delivery; to have Prime Minister Stephen Harper stop “using Sir Paul [McCartney’s] beautiful music to humanize his evil robot-man public image.” Some are successes. Most aren’t.

Successful campaigns “have two things,” Rattray says. “It has to be specific, for one, and there needs to be good reason to think that a sufficient amount of public attention around an issue can convince a decision-maker to make the choice to change.” David and Goliath narratives seem to work best, which might explain why Garrett’s petition was so successful. It spiked the contentious issue of animal rights with a dose of celebrity (Barenaked Ladies) and pitted both against a large, faceless corporate entity. Not coincidentally, animal rights is also one of 10 “cause areas”—criminal justice, environment and immigration are among the others—Change.org tends to promote on its site. In Garrett’s case, Change.org staff contacted him to help in the PR push for the petition, and emailed the petition to site users who had signed animal rights petitions in the past.

“We look at things that are most popular, that are trending, that people are interested in, and some things that are already taking off in the media or that have an appeal to a wide audience that the media might want to cover,” says Rattray. “Those are the ones where we’ll reach out to the petition creator and make sure that they’re using the tool most effectively.”

How Change.org amplified the act of protest.

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Justice Canada chops research budget by $1.2-million – The Globe and Mail

2014/05/13 1 Comment

Worrisome. Not the decision itself to cut research funding as much as the reason: not liking the results, and wanting to align research to government policy, rather than understanding of society. While public service research sometimes was less neutral and impartial than it should have been (had my experience in multiculturalism research in this regard), this change abandons any claim to independent and objective research.

Abdication of “fearless advice” role of public service. Hopefully this will provoke more serious reflection among senior ranks of the public service rather than the rather shallow Destination 2020 initiative:

The result is a diminished research capacity, which now must be better controlled from the top to ensure it supports the government policies, says the report.

“The review confirmed that there have been examples of work that was not aligned with government or departmental priorities,” says the October 2013 document, obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

Some past projects have “at times left the impression that research is undermining government decisions.”

The report did not cite specific studies, but a department report last year on public confidence in the justice system appeared to be at odds with the Conservative government’s agenda.

Researcher Charlotte Fraser found many Canadians lacked confidence in the courts and prison system, but suggested it was the result of misunderstanding rather than any failures in the system, and that education could rectify the problem.

Justice Canada chops research budget by $1.2-million – The Globe and Mail.

Le budget de la recherche en droit fond de 1,2 million (La Presse)

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