Article of interest recap

2024/03/25 Leave a comment

For the 1st time, Canada will set targets for temporary residents After trimming growth in Permanent Residents, imposing caps on international students, Minister Miller reverses course again and reduces the number of temporary foreign workers. Taken together, marks a significant repudiation of previous decisions and ministers, ironically making it easier for a possible future conservative government to impose further limits should it choose to do so. And including temporary foreign workers and international students in the annual levels plan is long overdue.

The Coalition for a Better Future’s report Fragile Growth: An Urgent Need to Get the Basics Right reiterated productivity and related economic challenges.

Scotia Bank’s Raising the Bar, Not Just Lowering the Number: Canada’s Immigration Policy Confronts Critical Choices makes the case for a charter focus on economic immigration and increasing productivity.

Parissa Mahboubi’s Canada’s immigration system isn’t living up to its potential. Here’s how to fix it provides a familiar list of recommendations, along with the puzzling one for more business immigrants given that government is notoriously bad is assessing entrepreneurship as previous programs have indicated.Life in Canada is ‘more expensive’ than most immigrants expected, new poll finds. Not surprising findings from Leger, highlighting a declining value proposition for immigrants.

Daniel Bertrand of the ICC argues Stop undervaluing the contributions that international students make to Canada, noting the need for “a much more strategic approach, modelled after the economic immigration process, with a points system that prioritizes these more valuable areas of study.”

No surprise that Trudeau rules out Quebec’s request for full control over immigration (Trudeau dit non à confier les pleins pouvoirs en immigration au Québec) with Michel David noting the Les limites du bluff. More detailed explanations of the reason behind the refusal in Marc Miller émet de fortes réserves sur les demandes de Québec en immigration, my favourite being, with respect to family class, « C’est très difficile de légiférer l’amour, [et de] demander à quelqu’un d’épouser quelqu’un qui parle uniquement français ».

Citizenship

Using coercion, Russia has successfully imposed its citizenship in Ukraine’s occupied territories, horrific example of citizenship as an instrument of war and denial of identity.

India’s new citizenship law for religious minorities leaves Muslims out, confirms the Modi governments overall approach of Hindu nationalism.

Omar Khan, in Ramadan heralds a political awakening for Canadian Muslims, notes the need for political responsibly among Muslim and other Canadians “it’s a responsibility to recognize that proper understanding between communities comes through dialogue, not ultimatums. There should be no litmus tests for elected officials wishing to address Muslim congregations. Those with divergent opinions should be engaged, not frozen out.”

David Akin assesses A closer look at the growing diversity of Conservatives under Poilievre, highlighting the party’s recruiting efforts (and quoting me).

Other

John McWhorter continues his contrarian streak in No, the SAT Isn’t Racist, making convincing arguments in favour of standardized testing.

Marsha Lederman highlights the increased censorship in the Exodus from literary magazine Guernica reveals the censorship the Israel-Hamas war has wrought in terms of free and honest artistic expression.

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The Privy Council Office needs some new computers — and they want to buy Apple, not Windows

2017/02/06 Leave a comment

Fun piece by David Akin on PCO’s purchase of Apple. As a long-time Mac user, was frustrated by the corporate IT folks who were overly slavish with respect to Windows and Blackberry.

But Macs have generally always had a place in the Comms shop for videos and other creative work:

Between federal government civilian employees and the RCMP and Canadian Forces uniformed members, there must be close to 500,000 people.  Almost all of those folks would need a desktop computer. Many would need a laptop computer. And many would need a government-issued smartphone.

All those devices — not to mention the servers that store government data and software — present one heckuva a challenge from an information technology management point-of-view. The federal government’s I.T. chief has to worry about security, about cost, interoperability, and ease of administration when it comes to training and software updates. For those reasons, the government has for years standardized on computers that run Microsoft’s Windows operating system which means, almost by default, a standard deployment of Microsoft’s Office suite — Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access.

The standard smartphone deployed to government employees has, for years, been a BlackBerry.

But things are changing.

Example: Last night, the government posted a tender for a supplier to fix up bureaucrats who work in the Privy Council Office with 52 computers — from Apple!

Now, maybe the PCO was working on Macs before this tender offer went out. I’ve asked the department if that’s the case and we will update here. I am told, in fact, by a PCO spokesperson that it is not unusual for departments to have a small number of Apple computer in use “for specialized requirements.”

 

…The PCO is the federal government department that supports the work of the prime minister. It is the civil service mirror/partner, if you will, of the PMO — the Prime Minister’s Office. Officials in both the PMO and PCO work closely together. In my personal experience, I have seen many PMO officials using Apple products. And I know via some documents I dug up using an access to information request that the prime minister himself had some Apple products purchased for his use at his home office at Rideau cottage. He bought (if memory serves) an iPad Pro, among other devices and information technology.

But Trudeau is not the only prime minister to have picked Apple. That’s right: Stephen Harper was an Apple guy. The one and only time I ever saw Harper use any piece of information technology, it was his own personal Apple MacBook, which he brought into the House of Commons one night during a long “take-note” debate. Interestingly, the Apple logo that is on the front of any MacBook had been covered on Harper’s device with a family photo.

And it was another Conservative politician — Stockwell Day — who was the first MP I ever saw to bring a tablet into the House of Commons and, you bet, that tablet was an iPad. Nowadays, if you look down upon the House of Commons, you will see a sea of iPads.

But I can tell you House of Commons I.T. had to be dragged kicking and screaming to agree to have iPads on the House network or to agree to support iPads.

And so it may be with the broader government-wide I.T. community, already dealing right now with a very rough transition to some common platforms and computing environments via Shared Services Canada. (And we won’t even talk about the fiasco that is the computerized Phoenix payroll system.)

But at the Privy Council Office — the command-and-control centre for the entire civil service — 50 Apple computers are on the way.

Why are they going Mac and getting off of Windows? Unknown at this point. Again: Questions are in to PCO and we’ll see what they say. But there might be a few reasons.

First, speaking as a guy who used the original Apple McIntosh to paginate my university paper back in the 80s, who used to be a technology reporter and who still has a working Apple G4 Cube at home, Macs are just, well, machines for the rest of us. (See that famous Apple ad, below, which introduced the world to the McIntosh).

But there is also some evidence that, even though a comparable Apple desktop is more expensive versus a comparable Windows box, the total cost of ownership — TCO in I.T.-speak — is actually lower once you factor in how much it costs to provide tech support to users of device and other issues.  Heck, even IBM now buys Macs and encourages its clients to do so because of lower costs. (IBM, incidentally, was widely believed to have been the firm that was mocked in that original 1984 Apple ad.)

Source: The Privy Council Office needs some new computers — and they want to buy Apple, not Windows | National Post

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Non-partisan to partisan: Federal politicians pluck their staff from the civil service

2016/03/17 Leave a comment

Growth in political staffers 2000-15.001Some useful Treasury Board stats subject of the article below by David Akin, captured in the chart above, showing a correlation in the earlier years of the Conservative government between growth in staffers and growth in the public service (see my earlier article Diversity in political backrooms still lacking):

To fill as many as 500 partisan political jobs on Parliament Hill, the Justin Trudeau government has been dipping into the non-partisan civil service — just like the Stephen Harper government before it and the Paul Martin and Jean Chretien governments before that.

Though Harper did make a rule change about this revolving door, the system continues to be set up in a way that helps those who jump to partisan jobs go back to the civil service if the government of the day changes.

Those scooping up jobs as chiefs of staff, press secretaries, or policy advisors in ministers’ office can request an unpaid leave-of-absence, a request that is usually granted. It may not guarantee their old job if they leave politics, but it usually guarantees an equivalent job.

It also counts just as much towards a pension as the non-partisan service.

Plus the new jobs in politics usually come with a big raise.

A minister’s chief of staff can earn up to $180,000 a year. A press secretary can earn up to about $108,000.

There were 559 of these partisan staff in the last year of the Harper government.

While Conservatives are just as likely to use this revolving door as Liberals, Harper said in the 2006 election campaign that a “Liberal” civil service would act as a check on any Conservative government if only because Liberals have, since the Second World War, been in office more than the Tories.

The civil service, naturally, objects to that observation.

“It is an overarching and utmost priority of the Government of Canada to manage the public service with integrity and in accordance with existing polices and collective agreements,” said Kelly James, a spokesperson for the Treasury Board, the federal department that manages human resources policies.

The last time the Liberals were in charge, Liberal political staff had an inside track on non-partisan civil servant jobs. So long as they met the basic requirements for an open civil service position, they got the job — along with the employment security and pension opportunities.

Harper changed that, eliminating the preferential treatment.

There’s no data tracking the partisan/non-partisan revolving door, though long-time Parliament Hill watchers have seen at least a handful of Martin/Chretien era partisan staffers back in that role after spending the Harper decade in a civil servant jobs.

Source: Non-partisan to partisan: Federal politicians pluck their staff from the civil service

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Conservative judges, bureaucracy, Senate a likely constraint on future government: Atkin

2015/06/02 Leave a comment

David Akin on the possible constraints facing an incoming new non-Conservative government, using PM Harper’s 2006 language regarding Liberal constraints on an incoming Conservative government:

“The reality is that we will have, for some time to come, a Liberal Senate, a Liberal civil service, at least at the senior levels where they’ve been appointed by the Liberals, and courts that have been appointed by the Liberals,” Harper said. ”These are obviously checks on the power of a Conservative government. That’s why I say … there is certainly no absolute power for a Conservative government and no real, true majority.”

Though all those checks and balances might seem obvious, the Martin Liberals used this comment by Harper as an attack point, to suggest that, absent all those Liberal judges and bureaucrats, Harper would impose a Conservative revolution on the otherwise peaceable kingdom that was Canada in 2006.

The Liberal attacks were successful to a point: They helped keep Harper’s win to a minority.

But now, more than eight years later, as we look at the polls and consider the possibility of another ideologically driven party, the New Democrats, potentially forming government, it’s useful to consider the wisdom of what Harper said at the end of that 2006 campaign.

Right now, we have a Conservative Senate. There is not a single New Democrat senator. That’s a virtue now for NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, but it could be a liability if he becomes prime minister and needs a Senate full of Conservatives and Liberals to pass his government’s legislation.

If course, the NDP has vowed to get rid of the Senate altogether. Good luck doing that without your own senators, New Democrats!

What about the civil service? Public sector union bosses might prefer a New Democrat government but an entire generation of leaders and managers in the civil service is now in place that were hand-picked by the Harper Conservatives. The Clerk of the Privy Council — the top bureaucrat among the 257,000 federal bureaucrats — is Janice Charette. She cut her political teeth as a former chief of staff to former Progressive Conservative leader Jean Charest and other PC ministers before going into the ‘non-partisan’ public service.

And then there are those judges. When Harper looked at the Supreme Court in 2006, all he saw was Liberals. But now, if Thomas Mulcair becomes PM and looks at the court, he will see 7 of 9 justices appointed by Harper, one — the Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin — appointed by Brian Mulroney and just one appointed by a Liberal PM.

By Harper’s own logic of 2006, between the Senate, the bureaucracy and the judiciary, there would be much to constrain an NDP government should that happen this fall.

Harper made that point in 2006, was attacked for making it, and won a minority government. Will Mulcair make the same point in this election season with the same effect?

Comments on senior officials is of interest. Suspect some may be vulnerable that have appeared to stray the line (but doubt that Charette would be considered among them).

And of course, as others have argued (and I in my book, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism), the Harper government distrust of the public service never was fully overcome.

Conservative judges, bureaucracy, Senate a likely constraint on future governmen.

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