Government rejects call to measure productivity across public service

2025/12/18 2 Comments

Sigh… While some areas intrinsically hard to measure such as policy processes and communications, operational areas are more straightforward such as application and benefit processing, HR, finance and accommodation. Good quotes from Wernick:

The federal government is rejecting a call from a working group to measure productivity across Canada’s public sector, arguing that doing so would not “readily align” with its priorities.

A working group tasked with measuring productivity in the federal public service recommends in a recent report that Statistics Canada explore, test and report publicly on the development of a productivity measurement program for the public sector.

The group says accurate and transparent measurement of public service productivity is “essential to improving outcomes” and that without reliable data, it’s “difficult to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of government services or identify areas for improvement.”

…Former clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick says he’s disappointed the government rejected the call to put more effort into measurement, noting it could be included in departments’ annual results reports. 

“It would have been a relatively easy give for them to say they’ll keep working and try to do better,” Wernick said. “It surprised me.”

He said government transformation and efficiency is one of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government’s “signature themes.”

“They should be receptive to it,” Wernick said.

He said there’s “nothing surprising” in the recommendations but questioned whether anything more concrete will be decided in the months to come.

“There’s a lot of specifics missing,” he said.

Source: Government rejects call to measure productivity across public service

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May: Leadership Signals – Take it as permission to simplify

2025/11/12 Leave a comment

Her weekly posts are required reading. This week’s except that I liked:

…Small things can be transformative, says Allen Sutherland, president of the Institute on Governance. Such as: the steady signals Carney and Sabia send about not letting process or the “web of rules” get in the way. Streamline. Simplify.

“If there is some transformation in the public service day to day — where public servants act with more commitment to implementation and less focus on simply being rule followers — then I’d say that’s very transformative.”

In short, leadership signals can drive change and behaviour across the public service.

For Michael Wernick, who once sat in Sabia’s chair as clerk, the budget falls short on real transformation. It has aspirational reforms, but none of the legislative fixes, structural pruning, or deep investment in public-service capacity needed.

For Sahir Khan, the budget is like a solid mid-term grade. But “the final mark will depend entirely on execution — and that burden falls squarely on the public service,” says Khan, vice president at OttawaU’s Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy.

One senior bureaucrat summed it up: Carney’s approach isn’t about transforming the institution or rethinking its principles. It’s pragmatic: the public service is being reshaped by being told to deliver on priorities.

“That’s the Carney transformation. You don’t waste time on a grand plan. You set aspirational goals and tell them to get it done.”

Another added: “The government isn’t focused on institutional theory but on practical, delivery-focused fixes. Carney isn’t interested in changing the public service to be different — he’s interested in it changing to deliver something he wants done differently. The focus is on results.”

This approach of skipping grand plans is concentrating attention and decision-making in the PMO and PCO on departments tied to top priorities. Some bureaucrats worry that political staff will jump in to fill gaps if public servants can’t move fast enough. That would blur accountability. It also raises questions about whether departments not directly tied to top priorities are getting enough attention.

Source: May: Leadership Signals – Take it as permission to simplify

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Carney’s plan to cut tens of billions in spending is tough but doable, experts say

2025/07/16 Leave a comment

Always interesting to listen to the assessments of previous clerks on some of the lessons learned:

….Mel Cappe, who served as clerk of the Privy Council from 1999 to 2002, a position that includes heading up the public service, said meeting those targets will be tough but doable.

“There’s somebody in the public who’s going to be outraged by the cuts,” he said. “This is going to require all ministers holding hands, saying prayers together.”

…But previous clerks of the Privy Council say it will be difficult for the government to avoid cutting staff because wages, benefits and pensions are such a large part of the operating budget.Leaning on attrition

In 2023-24, excluding one-time payments like back pay made after a new collective agreement was signed, the federal government spent $65.3 billion on salaries, pensions and benefits. That was a 10 per cent increase over the previous year.

“In 1995, the wage bill was so high that it was necessary to invest some money to facilitate people to leave by giving them cashouts,” Cappe said.

“If you are going to do that on a massive scale, you have to be prepared to see those costs up front. Because it will save you a lot of money in the long run.”

Michael Wernick — the clerk of the Privy Council from 2016 to 2019 — told CBC News that relying on attrition “doesn’t make any sense as a management strategy.”

“What happens if your absolute key cybersecurity expert retires next week? You’re not going to replace her?” he said. “If your aspiration is a serious compression of the numbers, then you have to be more mindful about it and you have to do layoffs and buyouts.”

Where you cut — rather than how much

One of the ways the prime minister has said his government will cut operating expenses is by looking for ways to employ artificial intelligence and automation.

Wernick says that approach will require investment in training and technology and that, like buyouts for public servants, comes with an upfront cost.

But both former clerks say the Liberal government can hit its targets and they have a suggestion for how it can be done.

“Stop doing some things, rather than an across-the-board cut,” Cappe said.

By going this route, staff no longer carrying out a given function can be moved to work on other government priorities. Wernick says cutting entire lines of business also prevents spending from creeping back up.

“If you don’t kill the program entirely, the pressure to restore it will come in almost immediately from the clients, from the mayors, from the caucus,” Wernick said.

Donald Savoie, an expert in public administration and governance at the Université de Moncton, said the government can be downsized without hurting service delivery.

“Let’s look at programs that we don’t need anymore, let’s look at organizations that we don’t need anymore,” Savoie said.

He said there is also room to cut the use of consultants and outside contractors, but Wernick warned doing so would cut off access to expertise. That can be mitigated, he said, by training public servants — but that comes with an upfront cost.

Trying to emulate Chrétien and Martin’s fiscal success

Savoie said Carney has two things in common with Chrétien that bode well for his cost-cutting ambitions.

The first is that unlike Brian Mulroney, Stephen Harper and Trudeau, both Carney and Chrétien had experience working in government well before securing the country’s highest office.

Savoie said that means Carney, like Chrétien before him, knows which levers to pull.

The other thing both men share is a mandate to respond to a national crisis. In the 1990s, Canada’s federal debt was so large compared to the economy that a third of every dollar collected in tax went just to service its interest payments.

“I think what helped Chrétien immensely in 1994-95 is Canadians were seized with a real crisis,” Savoie said.

“So Canadians said: ‘we got a problem’ and so [Chrétien] could draw on public support. And in the same vein, Carney can draw on public support because Canadians see that dealing with Trump, dealing with tariffs, is very tough and some tough decisions have to be taken.”

For that reason, Savoie said, Canadians will be much more open to suffering through cuts than they were five to 10 years ago, which may be just enough political licence for the expenditure review to bear fruit.

Source: Carney’s plan to cut tens of billions in spending is tough but doable, experts say

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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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Former top bureaucrat calls for major overhaul of the federal government

2025/01/21 Leave a comment

Wernick is likely the clerk with the most active public role in contributing to debate and discussion regarding government and the need for serious public sector reform. But getting political backing for such reform, given lengthy and contentious discussions with no political benefits within a normal mandate, is virtually impossible.

Those of us who remember the Universal Classification System (UCS) in the 90s will remember the extensive job description rewrites and related efforts, and its abandonment given its unworkability and likely political questioning.

This excerpt focusses on the large number of executives and related levels (of note, the percentage of EX of total public servants has not increased as dramatically as stated in the article: from 2.6 percent in 2008 to 3.0 percent in 2023, and largely flat under the Liberal government):

…Another issue is the expanding number of executives, which has outpaced the growth of the unionized workforce over the last 15 years. There are now over 9,000 executives across five levels, with about 80 deputy ministers above them, ranked by four levels. 

Over time, the executive layer has become thicker with the proliferation of new “half-step” positions, such as senior and associate assistant deputy ministers—a pattern seen across other executive levels, as well. 

This thickening of the executive ranks raises significant questions. Are these appointments narrowing the scope and responsibility of executive roles, or are they necessary due to the increased pace and volume of work? 

Some argue that the proliferation of these positions contributes to high turnover, with many not staying in jobs long enough to learn the ropes, or be accountable for decisions under their watch.  

Additionally, some of the movement stems from using promotions to offer higher pay to keep or attract talent. 

As clerk, Wernick pushed to restructure the executive ranks and overhaul their compensation, but never gained political backing after the Phoenix fiasco. He suggests reducing the five executive levels to three: senior, middle, and junior. This would require a review of the need and scope of each position, potentially taking three years and offering buyouts to those displaced. 

Previously, the most discussed option was collapsing the five levels into three: merging EX-4 and EX-5, as well as EX-1 and EX-2, while keeping EX-3 intact.  

The executive ranks tend to be dominated by policy experts, and Wernick argues more weight should be given to those with skills and experience in operations and service.  

One possible solution is to create a separate track that would allow specialists in fields like IT or data to be promoted for those skills without having to move into management. This would likely mean raising salaries for the lowest tier of executives to make these jobs more appealing to executives while also rewarding specialists for their expertise.  

Source: Former top bureaucrat calls for major overhaul of the federal government

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Report highlights strained relationship between public servants and ministers

2024/09/03 Leave a comment

Of interest:

A recent report analyzing what makes a strong public service found that governments worldwide are grappling with building respect between ministers and bureaucrats. A former clerk of the Privy Council and an expert on parliamentary democracy and governance say the issue is prevalent in Canada.

The Global Government Forum report, “Making Government Work: Five pillars of a modern, effective civil service“, interviewed the top public servants from 12 countries, including Canada’s John Hannaford, to pinpoint five pillars of a successful civil service. One of those pillars involved a healthy relationship between ministers and senior officials — something Michael Wernick, a former clerk of the Privy Council, said was an “enduring” issue in Ottawa.

“The best you get is benign neglect and the worst you get is spirited hostility,” he said of how politicians treat public servants.

The report said its interviews with international leaders revealed “the growing challenge of aligning the immediate demands of political agendas with the long-term stewardship entrusted to civil servants” and highlighted “a lack of trust and understanding among ministers about the civil service’s fundamental role.”

While Hannaford declined a request for an interview, a report by deputy ministers on public service values and ethics prepared for the clerk highlighted the division between public servants and politicians. It said that participants from more than 90 conversations across the public service raised concerns about political interference in the public service.

“Some participants expressed concern with their ability to maintain political neutrality when dealing with political staff in a minister’s office,” the report said. “Striking a balance between political neutrality and providing expert advice, as well as the faithful implementation and delivery of programs and policies, can be challenging.”

It noted that there had been changes in the relationship between ministers and their offices given the “significant growth in political staff across the system.”

Wernick said the challenge of relationships between ministers and officials was not unique to the current government.

“There’s not really any sustained interest in the public service,” Wernick said, noting a pattern under both Liberal and Conservative governments. “I tabled four annual reports on the public service as clerk, and the number of times I was invited to a parliamentary committee to talk about it over those years was zero.”

Politicians, he said, are only interested in the public service when there’s a scandal.

“I’m sure there’s lots of cases every day and every week where ministers and their departments work effectively together … but the broad trend line seems to be that there’s an erosion of that relationship and the more populist sort of style of politics is about going for conflict.”

Wernick said the lack of respect between politicians and officials was most apparent during Parliamentary committee meetings.

“This incredibly disrespectful treatment of witnesses of parliamentary committees is just one symptom,” Wernick said, adding that officials were often “used as props” for social media posts and fundraising videos.

The report said one solution could be better training for ministers, political staff and officials to “bridge knowledge gaps” between their operations.

“If we were serious, there’d be an ongoing professional development, support for ministers and MPs and staffers,” Wernick said, adding that public servants could learn how to better support politicians and staffers.

Lori Turnbull, a professor in Dalhousie University’s faculty of management, whose research focuses has been on parliamentary democracy and governance, said the relationship between politicians and officials was always affected by the political climate at the time, noting that the current government is almost nine years old and has seen a lot of change in leadership.

“People know that this government is not doing well in the polls and, unless all the polls are getting it wrong, whenever this election is held, Pierre Poilievre is going to form a government,” Turnbull said, adding that in Canada there’s an expectation for the public service to be loyal to the government of the day until the moment it changes.

“Over time, there’s always going to be chafing in that relationship and there’s always going to be some trickiness when you get to that late stage of a government’s life where conflicts are going to come up, there’s going to be trust that is broken.”

Turnbull said the government’s reliance on contracting out advice and services was likely also causing distrust among public servants.

“Not that they ever have a monopoly on giving advice to the government, but it seems like this government has really gone out of its way to pull in advice and support from non-public-service entities,” Turnbull said. “Those sorts of things send a message to the public service that, ‘We don’t want you as you are.’”

Turnbull said ministers, political staff and senior public servants needed to be better educated when they took on a role on what it meant to have a healthy tension between the two sides based on trust.

“Our system needs trust or else it won’t work, but now we’re seeing that trust break down,” Turnbull said.

Source: Report highlights strained relationship between public servants and ministers

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Wernick: Can angst about productivity lead to serious public-service reforms?

2024/06/29 Leave a comment

Quite a good list along with good advice. The degree to which a Conservative government will not only have the courage to engage in public service reforms but equally important the intelligence and sophistication to ensure effective and sound reforms remains in question. And yes, of course, avoid across the board cuts and focus on programs that are lesser priorities or of questionable value:

…Borrowing the language of the productivity economists, the agenda that flows from a serious discussion of public-sector productivity would include:

  • The quality of the labour input – and whether there is enough investment and effort put into training and enhancing skills;
  • Management acumen – and the effort and investment put into developing the capabilities of middle and senior leadership;
  • Substitution of capital for labour – and the effort and investment put into continuous upgrading of technologies used for external and internal services;
  • Process efficiency – and the scope for gains in time and quality that are still to be harvested by pushing farther on end-to-end digital and harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to assist humans;
  • Stripping out layers of middle management but equipping those who remain with the training and tools to do their jobs;
  • Shedding assets and right-sizing the physical footprint: spoiler alert: this will encounter stiff political resistance from MPs and mayors;
  • Enhancing the quality and timeliness of information for decision-making;
  • Streamlining the heavy burden of internal controls and reporting that has accreted over the years;
  • Reviewing the oversight system of incentives and disincentives to intelligent risk-taking that shapes behaviours;
  • Hacking away at barriers to faster hiring, redeployment and termination of staff;
  • Reviewing which functions can be outsourced and which should remain in-house, while making sure there will be adequate training in effectively managing external contractors.

These happen to be many of the issues that a serious attempt at public-sector reform would want to tackle.

One key difference between a serious productivity-centred approach and the simple across-the-board austerity that governments tend to use is that it could draw attention to the high cost of neglecting the internal government-to-government functions such as finance, human resources, information management, procurement, comptrollership and oversight.

These are functions that in past periods of fiscal retrenchment have taken a heavy share of cuts because they are glibly labelled as “overhead,” with unfortunate consequences.

The growth in the number of people employed by the public sector, especially at the federal level, has drawn a lot of attention. There are better and worse ways to think about bringing the number down. Hoping for the best from random attrition isn’t a good one.

The best approach, in my view, would be to recognize that those numbers are attached to specific programs, services, functions, occupations and locations.

Simply ordering an arbitrary across-the-board cut to operating budgets may achieve short-term fiscal results but will be laden with unintended consequences, sowing dragons’ teeth and causing damage to the longer-term capabilities and effectiveness of the public sector.

If the courage is there, the 2026 budget that follows the next federal election is the next window of opportunity for a thorough program review along the lines of the ones in 1995 and 2012.

Reshape the programs and the impacts on the public service would follow, but the impacts would be intended and proactively managed. There are many ways such a review could be designed.

Setting the table for this program review should be a serious exercise to delve into public-sector productivity that is honest about the longer-term goal of reducing staff numbers. Pretending that there won’t be job cuts in the next decade isn’t being honest with public servants or Canadians.

A bolder way to approach the inevitable downsizing would be to say clearly that we want the public service to be smaller, flatter and more agile.

The core idea could be to borrow the constructs from climate policy of setting targets that guide decision-making and investment, and incent technological innovation.

An ambitious version of this would be “20 by 30” – the government could set a goal to reduce the size of the federal public service by 20 per cent by 2030.

Using this target, it could then move on to seriously attack the issues of productivity and effectiveness, embrace the challenges and opportunities of AI and focus on strengthening the longer-term capabilities we need in our public sector.

Source: Can angst about productivity lead to serious public-service reforms?

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Deputy ministers’ report on values and ethics in public service lacks ‘a point of view,’ says expert

2024/01/13 Leave a comment

Valid critique and yes, the need to be more pragmatic and I would argue, concrete:

….Michael Wernick, a former Clerk of the Privy Council, said that while the document was a “decent consultation ‘what we heard’ report,” it left him asking “what now?”

“It’s oddly lacking a point of view or position or a stance on anything. It kind of just sends the ball back to the Clerk and the Secretary of the Treasury Board and says we really should have policy on acceptable use of social media, but there’s no advice on what that policy should look like,” Wernick said.

“It identifies a problem with the incursions of political staff, but there’s no advice on what to do about it. So it kind of left me hanging.”

The report’s authors said the document is “intended to serve as a prologue to a broader dialogue on values and ethics in the public service, and we begin by sharing what we have heard, frankly and without filters.”

Pierre-Alain Bujold, spokesperson for the Privy Council Office, said the Clerk is taking time to reflect on the report’s observations and recommendations and consider the best options for next steps. He said the report will inform the “next phase,” including how to broaden the discussion on values and ethics.

When Hannaford created the group of senior officials tasked with discussing values and ethics within the public service, he said he expected to see a “milestone report” by the end of the year.

Wernick said he agrees with the report’s call for more engagement, adding that he’d like to see the next round “drill deeper and be more pragmatic.” He added that it will be interesting to see if Parliament shows interest in the report and if the House of Commons committee on government operations invites the Clerk to speak about it.

“This looks like a picture of how the public service sees itself,” he said. “I don’t know exactly who they talked to but it sounds like they talked to a lot of those who were involved in diversity, equity issues. The report is a bit light on things that voters and taxpayers would probably be more interested in like money, productivity, excellence.”

Daniel Quan-Watson, a deputy minister for just under 15 years before his retirement last year, said he supports the report’s recommendation for conversations to be furthered “institution-wide” within federal government departments.

“We need to keep talking about this because things are evolving quickly and in different ways and because people have a lot of questions,” Quan-Watson said, adding that conversations will differ substantially from organization to organization. “I think that this goes a long way to making sure that they do that.”

Quan-Watson said it would have been “deeply problematic” for a tool on all values and ethics in the public service to have been developed or for any major changes to be made to the Values and Ethics Code over a few months.

“That would miss 90 per cent of the public service, I’m not sure that those changes are ones that would be that effective,” Quan-Watson said, adding that he hopes public servants feel free to raise their questions and concerns to managers and senior leadership. “I think the sensible thing to say is listen, here are the areas that we looked at, we’re getting consistent themes in this, so let’s go see what the broader public service has to say about it.”

“That takes time. It makes it stronger and it makes it incredibly more valuable when it’s done.”

Source: Deputy ministers’ report on values and ethics in public service lacks ‘a point of view,’ says expert

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Articles of interest: Government and politics

2023/12/08 Leave a comment

More of a grab bag:

Wernick: The pay-as-you-go proposal on cutting federal spending not as simple as advocates say

Michael continues to provide interesting commentary based up his experience in government:

There are two interpretations of what pay-go legislation could mean in Canada. One is that the proponents know it is just for show – a form of fiscal virtue signalling – and they have no intention of applying it with any rigour. The future would be full of exemptions, waivers and extensions. It makes the base happy and looks like decisiveness. But it isn’t serious.

The other possibility is that it is serious and would at regular intervals create a hot mess for future governments and for future fiscal choices. It isn’t going to deliver more effective government to let an algorithm stack the deck, distort the options, create unnecessary and artificial crises, and stealthily erode those parts of government that don’t have political and media champions.

So, which is it – empty virtue signalling or a hot mess of fiscal distortion? We can do better, either way.

Any political party that wants to take real action on restraining spending should do it in a serious way: Let Canadians know before the election what it considers cuttable and what it considers a priority. Once in office set up a deliberative process. The 1990s program review would be my starting point for designing the next one.

What is essential and what is discretionary in government spending is a political judgment informed by ideologies and values – a judgment that must be responsive over time to new facts and realities.

There are many better ways for democratically elected politicians to approach spending restraint and to achieve it. Pay-go legislation isn’t a good one and should be discarded before the platforms for the next election are written – after which it will be difficult to turn back.

Source: The pay-as-you-go proposal on cutting federal spending not as simple as advocates say

Buruma: Geert Wilders may have shock value, but he harbours an ‘outsider’ rage we’ve seen before

Of note:

Mr. Wilders may not be a fascist, but his obsession with sovereignty, national belonging, and cultural and religious purity has a long lineage among outsiders. Ultra-nationalists often emerge from the periphery – Napoleon from Corsica, Joseph Stalin from Georgia, Hitler from Austria. Those who long to be insiders frequently become implacable enemies of people who are farther away from the centre than they are.

Source: Geert Wilders may have shock value, but he harbours an ‘outsider’ rage we’ve seen before

Kurl: Pierre Poilievre needs to choose his words much more carefully

Yes, the risks are there:

The last six weeks have brought out the worst in us. Bomb threats and shootings at Jewish schools. Calls for doxxing, censure and harassment of students and faculty who sympathize with Palestinians and ceasefire calls. In Toronto alone, police are reporting 17 incidents of Islamophobic or anti-Palestinian hate crimes since Oct. 7 (compared to just one in the same period in 2022). Antisemitic hate crimes numbered 38 (last year it was 13 in the same period) and now comprise half of all hate crimes reported to Toronto police since Oct. 7.

At such a fraught time, leadership from Poilievre would see his words about these highly sensitive issues focused on appealing to Canadians’ better natures, not further driving them into suspicion and division.

But will the opposition leader and his strategists do this? We are not so far removed from the failed Conservative campaign of 2015, notorious for its “barbaric cultural practices” tip line. The director of that disastrous campaign is reportedly tipped to direct the upcoming one.

Poilievre and the Conservatives for now, anyway, have the support of a plurality of Canadians. They need to start acting like it means something to them.

Shachi Kurl is President of the Angus Reid Institute, a national, not-for-profit, non-partisan public opinion research foundation.

Source: Kurl: Pierre Poilievre needs to choose his words much more carefully

May: Chief information officer Catherine Luelo resigns from job revamping federal tech

Doesn’t bode well:

Private sector executives, unfamiliar with the culture and complexity of operations, have historically had rough time making the adjustment, said Michael Wernick, a former clerk of the privy council and now the Jarislowsky chair of public sector management at the University of Ottawa.

He said the government has never resolved how technology should be managed. Is it a single service with common standards, interoperability and cybersecurity? Or is it a loose federation of 300 departments and agencies where deputy heads and managers have autonomy? It now operates with both philosophies, depending on the agency.

Source: Chief information officer Catherine Luelo resigns from job revamping federal tech

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Terry Beech’s tall order: revamping service delivery

2023/08/11 Leave a comment

Count me among the sceptics on this one. My experience with Service Canada 2004-7 and efforts to implement a citizen-centred approach ran into resistance from the policy hierarchy and its original vision of being a one stop shop shrunk into remaining service delivery of ESDC services. The one non ESDC service, passports, was poorly managed by the policy centre, IRCC, and ESDC service delivery, with the large backlogs when predicted travel resumes.

Given the complex nature of government responsibilities and accountabilities, not to mention the concrete challenges in any modernization effort, I wouldn’t expect any significant results before the election:

Terry Beech claims his new job as Canada’s first ever minister of citizens’ services shows the government means it this time. Delivering services to Canadians is a longstanding weakness of government, and he says a big problem is that politicians have had little interest in it.  

“I think first and foremost, we just haven’t focused enough of our attention and time on it,” Beech said in an interview.  

“This is an opportunity for us to better understand all the systemic challenges that exist, but also to say our government and prime minister is committed to high-quality service delivery. We are so committed, in fact, that we are setting up a new ministry.” 

Service delivery has been an Achilles heel of government for 30 years. It’s why Service Canada – which Beech is now responsible for – was created as a one-stop shop for all government services to focus on delivery and citizen satisfaction.    

Service has always taken a back seat to policy. Prime ministers, ministers and even deputy ministers pay little attention until a crisis hits. That approach was on full display as Canadians eased out of the pandemic and faced shambolic lineups for passports, immigration and air travel.   

Beech acknowledges cabinet ministers haven’t kept a close enough eye on the “end-to-end customer experience.” Cabinet puts all its effort into making policy decisions and assumes they will be implemented and delivered the best way possible.  

As minister, he will make sure delivery will be part of policy discussions from the start. That way, ministers will have a better handle on what government does well and what it doesn’t, which will reduce snags or setbacks when services are rolled out.  

“Without cabinet ministers having an eye to potential constraints or opportunities to provide exceptional levels of service, those opportunities get missed. Now those opportunities will be front and centre in the discussion.”  

Beech founded the company HiretheWorld.com. He understands tech and is customer-oriented, and sees his new job as a natural fit. “This is really an entrepreneurial opportunity.”  

He said Canadians’ user experience is his priority, making sure their needs are first and at the centre of all services. (Critics have long argued departments tend to design services around what government does rather than what Canadian want.) 

And what do citizens want?  

Canadians live digitally when they shop and work and expect the same when dealing with their governments. They want single IDs, digitally issued permits, applications, approvals and information. And they want it fast on their personal devices, 24/7.  

They roil when they can’t get the same service ordering a passport as they do when buying from Amazon. Why can’t government track Canadians’ interactions with departments and use that information to improve or customize services?  

Beech wants to do all that and more.  

“My number one priority probably goes back to my vision for this role, which is waking up every day thinking about how I can improve customer service and the customer service experience for every Canadian,” he said. “That’s literally what’s going to be on the piece of paper that I pull out of my desk every morning and think about as I go into every meeting,” he said.   

Waiting to see 

All this should be music to the ears of critics who have long pressed for government to put the customer back into service and bring it into the digital age.  

So far, reaction is mixed. Public servants are waiting to see what levers and authority Beech will have. The pieces of this new portfolio have started to come together, but there are more to come, including ministers’ mandate letters. 

Service Canada opened in 2005 with the vision of a one-stop shop for all government services. It is housed at Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) and most of the services it offers are bundled around the benefits ESDC provides – EI, OAS, CPP and disability benefits.  

Service Canada also includes the team that runs Canada.ca, the government’s website and digital home. A new order-in-council transferred the Canadian Digital Service (CDS), a swat team of tech geeks, from Treasury Board to ESDC.  

A chief service czar with access to the government’s digital swat team, “could be a pretty big deal,” according to Aaron Snow, the former CEO at the digital service.  

But the devil will be in the details, tweeted Ryan Androsoff, founder and CEO of Think Digital, a consulting firm on digital transformation.  

“I think even the most well-intentioned person is being set up to fail if they don’t actually have the authority to make change across that entire service spectrum,” he said in an interview.  

It’s unclear whether Beech will have authority to direct departments, such as Canada Revenue Agency, Parks Canada or the Canada Border Services Agency, which also provides services. As services improve, Beech hopes other departments will want Service Canada to deliver its services.  

The growing fear among digital-government advocates is that CDS, created to help all departments improve their services, will move to ESDC and die.  

The big question is whether CDS will remain independent and report to Beech or be folded into ESDC’s IT branch – which one IT expert called the most risk-averse and “slowest moving IT division of any department I know.” (Beech says ESDC is a department that jokes its archaic computer system is nearly old enough to collect old-age benefits and uses so much paper it has to be stored in the basement because it’s too heavy to be stored on the floors above.) 

Looks like 1998 

Ralph Heintzman, a former senior bureaucrat, said many of the problems with service delivery are the same as in 1998, when he first presented Treasury Board ministers with a plan for Service Canada.  

On top of disinterest among politicians and senior bureaucrats, there are all the systemic reasons – chronic underfunding, old technology systems that need replacing; outdated procurement, poor trained and disengaged staff, lack of planning and little accountability for poor service.  

The Service Canada rollout was billed as the single biggest operational reform in federal history. It was the first agency to cut across the government, creating much debate over how traditional ministerial accountability squares with the way government works – a conundrum that continues today. 

The Trudeau government took several stabs at fixing service delivery, including a ministerial task force to deal with fallout over passport delays. But the government is now in its third term with trust falling like a stone and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre jumping on any botched service as another sign that government is broken. 

Former Treasury Board president Scott Brison took a big step to fix things when he pressed to have digital minister in his title and to have departments use technology to change the way government does business and serves Canadians.  

He pitched it as central to making government relevant and restoring Canadians’ confidence. He set up the Canadian Digital Service, modelled after a service in the U.S. The American service recruited top Silicon Valley talent and embedded its own start-up in government, known as 18F, to help improve services. 

Beech’s appointment also comes at a time when some Liberals feel the public service dropped the ball on service and let them down in executing their policies. Former top bureaucrat Janice Charette said in her annual report that the public service is focused on upping its game.  

“I know there were moments when the public service fell short of Canadians’ expectations on service. In these instances, we faced the situation humbly and adjusted how we did things to improve results. We remain steadfast in our commitment to learn from these experiences and continually improve how we deliver,” she wrote.

Ambition exceeded capacity 

Sahir Khan, executive vice-president at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy, said the Liberals’ activist agenda was simply too ambitious for the capacity and capability of the public service.  

“The Liberals count on the state being able to deliver. The Harper government did not. It was trying to shrink the state, but a progressive ideology that enlarges the state depends on that state being able to deliver, and it is difficult to do.”   

Michael Wernick, a former clerk of the Privy Council Office and now Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management at University of Ottawa, said the Liberals “lost their focus and traction on public service capability” and “if you don’t invest in capability, you can’t deliver.” 

But Androsoff worries the cultural and organizational changes needed to improve services, from the way it hires, recruits, manages and procures, are getting lost.   

The service conundrum is wound up in the way the government is organized, its structures and rules. It’s built on a Westminster principle of ministerial accountability, in which ministers are responsible for their departments, but policies and services straddle all departments.  

Some argue the heart of the passport fiasco is that the program is run by three departments with no one ultimately responsible.  

“You’ve got a bunch of very complex governance arrangements shared between a variety of actors across boundaries,” said Androsoff. “That situation makes it almost impossible to drive change. That’s the core structural piece that has to change if we really expect government to make dramatic progress on service delivery.”  

Many argue that Beech’s success could hinge on what kind of role Treasury Board takes under its new president, Anita Anand.   

Anand holds many of the cards. She oversees spending, has the chief information officer reporting to her and has all the policies governing digital and service, people management and information. Beech didn’t land a seat as a member or an alternate on the powerful Treasury Board cabinet committeethat Anand chairs.  

“She can be the gigantic rubber stamp of a cabinet committee or be air traffic control that keeps a third-term government out of trouble,” said Khan. “You’ve got to figure out which one you want to be. (Treasury Board) has all the tools, legislative and otherwise, to do it. It’s a matter of capacity and will.” 

Source: Terry Beech’s tall order: revamping service delivery

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