May: Is the public service ready for a big Trump policy shift?

2025/02/17 Leave a comment

Well worth reading. The how is the hard part, given takes time and needs strong political support across two governments:

…Alex Benay supports the concept of Musk’s AI-first strategy but not the human costs of his tactics.  

“We should be striving for a zero-bureaucracy government in Canada by putting our national AI capabilities to the test in our public sectors first,” he said last week in a post he specified was a personal view, not an official position.  

Benay is a former CIO once dubbed Canada’s “disruptor-in-chief.”   

The government is quietly studying public-service productivity through a working group that will examine technology and AI. But that’s not enough, Lee argues.  

He thinks what’s needed is a “super-charged Glasco Commission” – the 1960s royal commission on government organization. A small, fast-moving blue-ribbon panel of public- and private-sector experts — including a disruptor — needs to draft a plan to overhaul the public service and be ready for the next government’s first mandate 

“People will be screaming bloody murder. But we’re in this crisis now, having to respond to Trump, the demands he’s making, as well as AI changing everything in government. Nothing can stop that train. They need money for border and defense spending, and there’s going to be a huge downsizing coming.” 

So far, none of the Liberal leadership contenders or Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has talked about a strategic review or public-service reforms to ready the federal workforce for a new world order.   

Poilievre has said he will cut the public service by attrition – not replacing those who retire, leave or quit – and through the “powerful mathematics of attrition, we will reduce the morbidly obese back-office bureaucracy.” 

But that math doesn’t work, says Wernick. The savings are too small. Productivity takes a hit. And managers have no control over selecting talent or ensuring the right people are in the right jobs. 

“You cannot solve your fiscal problem by cutting the public service. The arithmetic doesn’t work. So, where the politicians are not being honest with people is: we need more revenue,” he says. 

Governments, however, want to move fast. Strategic reviews take time.

“If you want a serious overhaul or renovation, you need two years, two budgets, and a lot of help to figure out what the federal government should look like by the end of your first mandate in 2029.”  

Source: Is the public service ready for a big Trump policy shift?

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Ottawa using AI to tackle Phoenix backlog as it tests replacement pay system

2025/01/24 Leave a comment

Needed. But again, a major part of the challenge is the multiple HR classifications, complex rules among other aspects, with major simplification and streamlining unlikely to be pursued as messy, time consuming and of little interest to the political level:

…Benay says AI is automating repetitive tasks, speeding up decision making and providing insights into human resources and pay data.

He says the government is testing the use of its AI assistant tool for three types of transactions – acting appointments, leave without pay and executive acting appointments – and is planning to launch automated “bulk processing” in these areas in April.

The government plans to expand AI-use to more transaction types over the course of next year, according to Benay, and could eventually use it to help with all types of cases, like departmental transfers and retirements.

There will always be an aspect of human verification, Benay says, as the tool was developed to keep humans in the loop.

“One thing we will not do is just turn it over to the AI machine,” says Benay.

The Government of Canada website says the backlog of transactions stood at 383,000 as of Dec. 31, 2024, with 52 per cent of those over a year old.

The government has said that it doesn’t want any backlog older than a year being transferred into a new system.

“A human only learns so fast, and the intake is continuing to come in,” Benay says. “The reason the AI work that we’re doing is so crucial is we have to increase (the) pace.”

Benay says the government has launched two boards that will oversee the use of AI and is looking at a third-party review of the AI virtual assistant tool over the course of the winter, with results to be published once it’s completed….

Source: Ottawa using AI to tackle Phoenix backlog as it tests replacement pay system

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