Annual public service report to PM should prompt ‘serious conversation’ about bureaucracy’s future, says former PCO clerk Wernick

2023/08/01 Leave a comment

Civil service renewal is ‘fairly low down on the political radar screen,’ says bureaucracy expert Andrew Griffith. 

Begs the question, if nobody in Parliament is paying attention, what is the value of the report? Part of the problem, as in many (most?) such reports, is the lack of frank language on failures and challenges and general bureaucratic tone (been responsible for comparable reports).

My comments on the relative success of government in increasing representation among the equity groups part of the article:

Michael Wernick, the former clerk of the Privy Council Office, says the annual report on the public service of Canada, released on July 19, should serve as a “jumping-off point” for a “serious, more grown-up conversation about the state of the public service going forward,” especially since the government has lost traction and focus on public-sector capability, but he says the report is usually ignored by Parliament.

“You want to tell a positive story. It’s a rare opportunity to push back against the usual negative feedback loops where people only pay attention to things that go wrong, and highlight some of the hidden stories and what’s going on and tell us the bigger picture,” Wernick explained to The Hill Times after last week’s massive cabinet shuffle. “The risk is always getting it right—you want it to also be candid about where there were issues, and you want it to sort of set up a conversation about the state of the pubic service ideally.”

Anita Anand (Oakville, Ont.), who most recently served as defence minister, was appointed as Treasury Board president in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s (Papineau, Que.) cabinet shuffle on July 26. Her arrival into the role comes not long after John Hannaford’s appointment as Clerk of the Privy Council following Janice Charette’s retirement.

Charette officially ended her time in the role and in the public service on June 24, telling The Hill Times that “anything that’s on the prime minister’s desk is on my desk; anything that he’s dealing with, I’m dealing with.”

Wernick told The Hill Times that, during his time in the top job, he signed off on annual reports four times between 2016 and 2019.

Wernick said his point was not to be critical of the report, given that “it’s a difficult balancing point.”

The former top bureaucrat called it “frustrating” that Parliament passed a law requiring an annual report on the state of the public service “and then has never shown any interest in it.”

The government first introduced the annual report in 1992, a requirement under section 127 of the Public Service Employment Act, according to the Prime Minister’s Office.

“I tabled four of them, and was never, ever asked to go to a parliamentary committee and discuss the report or the state of the public service,” said Wernick.

Wernick also said that there was nothing in the report about the service review which was alluded to a few years ago, and that digital government projects are “waiting in a queue.”

“And that’s where finance comes in—if you were going to be serious about public-sector capability, you’d have to spend money,” said Wernick. “You’d have to invest in training and leadership development, you’d have to put some money into it and buildings and equipment … it won’t come for free. And so far, this government has lost any sort of focus and traction on public-sector capability.”

“The idea of having a serious discussion at parliamentary committees about the public service would be a good start,” said Wernick, alluding to a Globe and Mail opinion article he penned earlier this year where he argued that the government “should work with Parliament to create a new Joint Committee of the House of Commons and Senate on the Public Service” as well as create a “permanent Better Government Fund in the care of the Treasury Board.”

“I’m not sure that the timing is great, which goes back to the cabinet shuffle, where we’re in this phase of the government where the hourglass sands are running out, there’s less than two years left, two budgets, maybe about 200 days of parliamentary time,” said Wernick. “The last two years of a mandate of a government that’s 10 points behind in the polls is probably not where you’re going to see bold ideas on the public sector.”

The disruptions caused by the pandemic were “enormous,” said Wernick, and the opportunities for some parts of the public service that hybrid work creates “are interesting.”

“Their promise in the strike settlement to add seniority to the algorithm for laying people off could be very relevant two years from now,” said Wernick. “If I was a younger public servant I’d be quite worried.”

Any return to the size of the public service when the Liberals took power in 2015 would involve tens of thousands of job losses, said Wernick. 

“Is this government going to try to tap the brakes in its last two years? I don’t know,” he said. 

But Wernick also noted that this government, at this point in its mandate, “wants to deliver stuff.”

“Climate change, green transition, hugely ambitious immigration numbers, housing, reconciliation, the defense policy review and implementing something out of that, the review of the foreign service—they’re going to run out of time in June of 2025, which is not so far away,” said Wernick. 

Data shows growth in public service, progress in diversity and inclusion

In terms of the diversity goals, Andrew Griffith, a former director general for Citizenship and Multiculturalism who keeps a close eye on public service survey results and reports, said that “virtually, for all visible minority groups, their relative share in promotions has increased.”

There has been significant growth in the size of the federal public service recently, with the report noting that the number of employees grew from 319,601 in March 2021 to 335,957 in March 2022.

The number of executives grew from 7,972 to 8,506 during that time period, with the number of deputy ministers increasing from 37 to 41. The number of associate deputy ministers fell slightly, from 39 in March 2021 to 36 a year later.

In the report’s “year ahead” section, Charette notes that the government’s agenda on diversity and inclusion “must be inclusive” and must advance commitments around reconciliation, accessibility, combating transphobia and better support for 2SLGBTQIA+ communities.

Charette also writes that the government must continue to prioritize the recruitment and retention of persons with disabilities, and “ensure employees in religious minority communities feel safe and supported in their workplaces.”

Griffith told The Hill Times that “the overall pattern of the public service becoming more diverse with better representation is there, at both the executive level and non-executive level.”

Griffith also said that based on the data he sees and analyzes surrounding the bureaucracy, the visible minority category as a whole is doing better in the last six years than the non-visible minority community—which applies to both men and women.

According to the report, which outlines disaggregated employment equity representation and workforce availability, the number of women in the public service increased from 127,043 at the end of March 2021, to 132,299 one year later.

The number of Indigenous Peoples in the public service increased from 11,977 to 12,336 over the same time period, with the number of persons with disabilities increasing from 12,893 in March 2021 to 14,573 in March 2022.

In terms of visible minorities, the total increased from 43,122 to 47,728, with Black employees increasing from 8,754 to 9,809. Non-White Latin Americans and persons of mixed origin both saw increases of 0.1 per cent in the public service population.

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and South Asian/East Indian employees also saw increases within the bureaucracy’s ranks, as well as Non-White West Asians, North Africans or Arabs, Southeast Asians, or other visible minority groups, according to the report.

At the executive level, the percentage of women increased from 52.3 per cent to 53.2 per cent, persons with disabilities increased 5.6 per cent to 6.5 per cent, and members of visible minorities increased from 12.4 per cent to 13 per cent.

Public service renewal ‘fairly low down on the political radar’

When asked about recent changes both at the top level of the public service with a new clerk, as well as a new Treasury Board president in Anand, Griffith said he thought “sometimes one reads a bit too much into these changes.”

“Public service renewal isn’t [something] that directly affects [most] Canadians,” said Griffith. “It’s fairly low down on the political radar screen—this is largely managed through the bureaucracy—there are checks and balances as there always are, but I don’t really think that any of these changes will drastically modify the path that the current clerk was on, and that likely the new clerk will have more important issues that take up his time.”

Wernick noted that the Liberals left Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne (Saint-Maurice-Champlain, Que.), Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland (University—Rosedale, Ont.) and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault (Laurier-Sainte-Marie, Que.) where they already were in cabinet, but “it doesn’t explain moving Anand out of defence, frankly, because now you’ve got to bring a new person in in the middle of a defence policy review.” 

Wernick also said going through the disruption of the pandemic and now trying to adapt in some places to hybrid work possibilities, there’s now a government “in the late stages, pedal to the metal, trying to deliver stuff.”

“So it’s going to be hard to pay attention to its actual capabilities,” said Wernick, who added that he agreed with what is flagged in the report in terms of organizational health, burnout, mental health, and diversity.

“But there’s not a lot in there about the basic capabilities of the public service,” said Wernick.

‘I know getting here has not always been easy,’ writes Charette on hybrid work

The report also highlights the shift in the past year towards a hybrid work model, a change that made headlines for months and raised the ire of many public servants both in mainstream media and on social media. 

“Once we were able to safely welcome more employees back into the workplace, I outlined my expectations for deputies, including that they encourage employees to test new hybrid work models, wrote Charette in the report. “The shift to a hybrid model was about putting our effectiveness first and making a change that would best enable us to support government and serve Canadians, while giving employees flexibility to support their well-being.”

Direction on the common hybrid work model was released in December 2022, which set out guidelines requiring that employees work on-site at least two to three days per week.

“I know getting here has not always been easy,” wrote Charette, noting that the public service is the largest employer in the country and is made up of hundreds of thousands of public servants in a wide range of roles across Canada and abroad.

Source: Annual public service report to PM should prompt ‘serious conversation’ about bureaucracy’s future, says former PCO clerk Wernick

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May: The time and place for consultants

2023/03/02 Leave a comment

Good discussion and commentary on the issues which reflect some longstanding management failures at both political and bureaucratic levels as well as the overall complexity of government and accountabilities:

Canada’s budget watchdog says it’s time for a “deep dive” into the workings of the public service to unravel why departments are spending billions of dollars on consultants while also hiring a record number of employees.

Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) Yves Giroux said the recent spotlight on the government’s growing dependency on contracting for professional services — for everything from policy advice to running programs — raises fundamental questions about the role of the public service.

“Do we have the public service that we need right now?” he said in an interview. “Is it well equipped to deal with the challenges and the expectations that Canadians have of the public service — especially in light of its growth in recent years and the extensive use of outside advice and services?

“I think it’s time to do a real deep dive.”

Giroux is joining a growing chorus of experts who argue it’s time to fix the public service. Former clerks of the Privy Council Office, senior bureaucrats and academics are weighing in with views on what’s wrong and possible ways to fix it.

Giroux’s call comes with the release of his latest report on the government’s spending plans. They showed the cost of outsourcing will hit a record $21.4 billion this year. Spending on contracting has increased by more than a third since 2017-18.

He said the growth of consultants during the COVID-19 crisis was expected, but it hasn’t stopped. Rather than slow down to pre-pandemic levels, contracting which shot up 20 per cent in 2021-22, is still growing at a rate of more than 10 per cent this year.

The bigger question is why departments are adding thousands of employees to the federal payroll at the same time. The number of new hires has grown in lockstep with more consultants.

“If you increase the size of the public service, it’s because you feel there are needs that need to be met. That should reduce the use of consultants, but it’s not happening. They’re both growing in line,” said Giroux.

Personnel costs are the biggest single operating cost in government. The PBO estimates the seven-year hiring boom under the Trudeau government is expected to push the size of the workforce to about 409,000 jobs within five years. 

The PBO said spending on personnel grew an average of 6.7 per cent a year – from $39.6 billion to $60.7 billion since 2015. That’s about a four-per-cent increase in compensation for each full-time employee.

Giroux said it might make sense if services were improving, but the bureaucracy is taking a beating for backlogs and delays in passports, immigration, access to information and privacy (ATIP) requests, veteran services and employment insurance.

It also doesn’t add up because the government and unions claim public servants are as productive, if not more, since the pandemic and the recent shift to hybrid work.

“Services are not improving significantly. In fact, some would say they are improving not at all… So, I wonder what’s going on? It’s a real mystery,” said Giroux.

The House of Commons government operations committee is juggling three separate probes into federal contracting. The most politically charged is the $116 million the Trudeau government spent on scandal-plagued consultants McKinsey & Company. Canada’s auditor general Karen Hogan announced she will conduct a review into the McKinsey contracts.

The committee is also widening its study to contracts of other big consulting firms — Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), KPMG, Ernst and Young (EY) and Accenture.

Many worry the committee hearings are so focused on the political blowback of tarnished McKinsey and its possible ties to the Liberals, that getting at what’s behind the growth of consultants and employees is getting lost.

Consultants, who are hired for their expertise and new ideas, never seem to leave. Once in, they get a lock on work and prevent the public service from developing its own in-house expertise.

There are no hard-and-fast rules for departments to follow on what work is best done by public servants or contractors. Many expect such guidance will be one of the recommendations out of these studies.

Treasury Board argues both are growing simply because there is so much more work. An activist government, the Liberals have fingers in many pies and ministers have mandate letters with long to-do lists. Treasury Board President Mona Fortier has saidthe cost of professional services as a percentage of federal spending has largely remained the same since 2011.

Dominic Barton, McKinsey’s former global managing director, told MPs that McKinsey doesn’t provide policy advice. Rather, it “executes” what government wants to do, be it streamlining its pay or passport processes or digitization, moving paper-based operations to electronic.

But Barton also said the public service operates in the “stone age” and the government needs to up its game with more training and new technology.

“There’s a technology transformation that’s needed in this government and in all governments. I don’t want to be harsh about it, but we’re in the Stone Age. We have to spend the money. That will need a lot to be able to do it, but it will enable the organization to do more if we do it.”

The government is heavily reliant on IT consulting. Thirty per cent of its IT jobs are vacant and the experts they need are often not interested in becoming public servants. All this scrutiny will make public servants skittish about using them which could be a problem because “government can’t run without them,” said one senior bureaucrat.

The government contracts for all kinds of services. For cleaning, security, building maintenance, translation, temporary help and IT services. A Carleton University research team studying federal contracts took a run at breaking down the kind of services consultants offered departments.

Management consulting, which is typically for advice, is a small portion of government’s contracting bill for professional services. It has grown the most since in recent years and hit about $800 million in 2021-22.

But it’s the public service’s job is to provide frank and “fearless” advice to government – advice that puts the public interest first.

The growth in consulting raises questions whether public servants have lost its capacity to provide policy advice or their advice isn’t sought or trusted. Maybe they lack inhouse expertise or savvy to be good shoppers and buyers? Or are risk-averse public servants so cowed by years of bashing and criticism they opt for the safer course of running ideas by consultants or hiring those who provide the answer they think their political masters want to hear?

A common concern among those calling for reform of the public service is the centralization of power in the prime minister’s office and the frayed trust between politicians and bureaucrats. That relationship underpins Canada’s Westminster-style democracy.

Giroux, a long-time public servant before becoming an agent of Parliament, believes the public service has the capacity to provide advice if there’s an appetite for it.

“Is it because ministers don’t trust the advice they’re getting from the public service, which would be a big issue,” he said. “I think it leads to the need for a deep dive a thorough look at the state of the public service. Is it still the public service that politicians the executive, parliamentarians and Canadians expect.”

Giroux said the public service needs a top-to-bottom review of how the public service is structured, organized and equipped to deliver the kind of services Canadians expect today. In a 24/7 world, the public service has to rethink how it works, hires, pays, manage its workers, including where they work and hours of work.

Michael Wernick, a former clerk and Jarislowsky chair at the University of Ottawa agrees structural issues are key. He says the “core software” of government – its mountain of rules, job classifications, human resources regime and technology, are outdated.

“There’s very little attention to how it works. Its internal governance and processes and structures – basically the software on which it runs is like Windows 95,” he said

Donald Savoie, one of Canada’s leading experts on public administration, has argued for a royal commission. He said the “alarm bells about the public service have been ringing for a long time” and it’s time for a debate. Savoie says he was an “academic in the wilderness” when he warned about eroding trust and the concentration of power in the 1999 book, Governing form the Centre. Now, it’s a premise that’s widely accepted.

But Savoie said any efforts to reform the public service won’t get off the ground without the support of the prime minister.

Giroux said the state of the public service has been on his mind for a while. The pandemic dramatically changed the nature and how public servants work so the timing is ideal.

He recently mused at a Senate’s committee about a nonchalance pervading the public service, a ‘broken system” and the need to “crack the whip” in some departments. He lamented the lack of a “challenge function” for public servants. They set their own targets for the programs they run, often setting the bar “not too high so that it doesn’t look too easy but neither too low.”

“There are pockets of excellence, but there are also pockets of, I would say, nonchalance in the public service. They’re overwhelmed or something is not right. Not being inside the public service, unfortunately, I cannot pinpoint what is in need of fixing,” he said.

Source: The time and place for consultants

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Wernick: The never-ending question of contracting in the public service

2023/02/13 Leave a comment

Interesting how some former clerks remain silent in retirement and others like Wernnick, play a useful public role in sharing their reflections over the unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) systemic issues of government and governing:

Over the last few months, we have seen a rising tide of interest in the use of contracted services by the federal government. The latest episode seems to have crystallized around the use of consulting firms, notably McKinsey & Company. It has triggered another round of partisan squabbling at a parliamentary committee and the pack of journalists who cover politics are piling on, unsure of what narrative is the most important.

It is not clear what “theory of the case,” if any, is driving the current flap. At its simplest, the Opposition and the media are drilling wells hoping for a political gusher. Can they find something untoward in the contracting process? Can they find something troubling in the relationship with a particular supplier? Can you show poor value for money? If they can’t find proof of anything untoward, a stream of insinuation can still generate political rewards.

The more interesting angles to this are about whether the use of outside contractors is a sign of weakening capacity by the public service, at least the federal version, or augurs of a dangerous dependency. That is far from clear as a diagnostic and, once again, the point would be what tangible actions anyone is prepared to take to do something about it. For me, the issue is not whether to use outside suppliers of services, but how to use them to best effect.

There is nothing new about governments at every level acquiring services from outside suppliers, and no iron rule to lean on as to whether work is best done by public servants or contractors. It is a matter of judgment, informed by business choices around cost, timeliness and quality, and by ideological preferences about the role of the state.

There are three ways to get a flow of work done: by permanent public servants; by temporary public servants (term appointments, casuals, seasonal workers, students); or by outside contractors. The first two fall under “staffing” policies and processes, while the third falls under “procurement and contracting.” All three generate costs for the government. These days, Ottawa spends roughly $50 billion on its public service and $15 billion on contracted services. Is that mix the right one? If you want to dampen or cut government spending, which should be cut more deeply?

Permanent public servants are expensive, carrying a premium beyond their salaries in terms of benefits and future pension costs. They are difficult to move around and almost impossible to terminate for poor performance. They are entangled in a complex web of collective agreements and human resource mechanisms. They do however bring experience, expertise, loyalty, engagement and an orientation to the public interest, as opposed to short-term profit. The smart business choice is often to build up and develop sustainable capacity within a public service entity.

But the truth – uncomfortable for some – is that sometimes it makes more sense to go to an outside supplier where a pool of expertise resides. Just as the private sector does, it often makes sense for governments to outsource services, whether they are ongoing or related to a specific project with finite time frames. A large consideration is matching supply to demand.

The federal government is actually more than 300 distinct entities, most of them small, working on a vast array of tasks and projects. It would make little sense for each of them to build up permanent staff and cost structures to deal with the episodic need for some kinds of work. That is why there is a range of internal service providers such as Public Services and Procurement Canada, Shared Services Canada and the Translation Bureau. It is also why bringing in outside firms often makes sense.

It is commonplace and relatively uncontroversial now for governments to contract building maintenance and security, to retain external auditors and to hire legal counsel with specific skills. The federal government contracts translators and interpreters for specific events or tasks. It contracts communications firms to develop and place advertising, and to conduct market research to find out what users and citizens are thinking. I can recall a period of controversy about using temporary help agencies for administrative work.

As governments have moved more and more of their transactional and information services to the web and phone apps – while chasing rising expectations for speed, accuracy, cybersecurity and personalization – they have turned to firms that work with large private sector clients around the world that are wrestling with similar challenges. At their best, these firms help upgrade both the hardware and software of government technology, and train public servants to work with whatever is the emerging toolkit.

The pressure to continuously improve externally facing services and the internal services that support them make it sensible to retain firms that have worked with other governments and with private sector firms on queue management, customer relationship interfaces, customization of offerings, and protection of privacy and security. It is simply not true that public servants could keep up all by themselves. Nor is it true that all the people with the skills and knowledge needed by governments want to become public servants. Nor is it true that private firms always do good work – as we saw with the Phoenix pay system and with some apps, such as ArriveCAN – or do it at less cost.

What seems to be troubling some observers is the use of “management consultants,” which is a very elastic term. At their best, firms can offer an outside perspective on business processes, internal governance, organizational maturity, costing, risk management and other management issues. They can draw on international networks and expertise gained from working with a range of clients. For the public sector, they can be a useful antidote to inertia and the culture of “but that is the way we have always done things.”

The private sector uses external advisers extensively. I worked with several ministers who were highly sceptical of public service advice and insisted on running the issue by an outside firm with a big reputation before taking a decision. During spending reviews, ministers reflexively turn to outside advisers because they assume, with some justification, that the public service won’t be willing to challenge itself or consider new approaches.

The current McKinsey episode has surfaced concerns that advisory firms are starting to play a bigger role in decisions about policy – the “what” government chooses to do, as opposed to “how” it does it. It has also raised concerns that the public sector can become too dependent on outside firms with a profit motive and an interest in generating future work and billings. These are valid topics for scrutiny. Public service unions make valid arguments about the potential exploitation of gig workers with little job security or benefits at these outside firms. But there are valid arguments for using outside suppliers that can’t be dismissed as mindless privatization.

The boundaries between insourcing and outsourcing have always generated controversy. Can we use these brief periods of attention to do something about it beyond scoring short-term points?

The politicians and pundits who now argue for less use of external advisers should commit themselves in action or argument to a doubling of the resources allocated to training public servants and to a much expanded program for interchange of permanent staff between the public service, and the private and not-for-profit sectors. They should also endorse greatly expanding the resources used to acquire outside perspective and fresh ideas from the supply chain of think tanks and academic centres.

To be an intelligent buyer getting value for money for taxpayers and citizens, the public service must always invest in its leadership cadre, in its capacity in vendor management, in project management, and in its processes to onboard and internalize the skills and knowledge that working with outside advisors can provide. It should be possible to create a positive feedback loop and learning cycle that makes the public service better.

Source: The never-ending question of contracting in the public service

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Wernick: The pull and push of the centre that haunts the public service

2023/01/26 Leave a comment

Of note (my experience with Service Canada and the shift from initial ambition to provide a cross government platform for service delivery to returning to the more narrow focus on ESDC programs, with passports being an exception, is emblematic of the currents):

The federal public sector has been shaped by two easily identifiable democratic forces – the views of the people we elect about the role of the state in society and the economy as well as the federal government’s role within the federation. Federal institutions, direct programs and transfers to other levels of government have waxed and waned in response to these two forces and the public service has constantly adapted.

There is a third force that get far less attention but has driven fierce debates and waves of change initiatives within the public service itself. This third force is the ongoing tension between two perspectives. One sees the federal public service as a coherent entity that requires consistency, mobility and portability. The other argues for a public service that has more autonomy and flexibility for both the managers and their organizations. You can always find proponents of both camps and often it’s seen through the lens of “centralizing” or “decentralizing.” The debate is likely to go on forever.

Since 1970 the federal government has had a central management board – Treasury Board ministers and the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS). It is the guardian of a wide swath of policies governing financial management, internal controls, risk management, human resources, information management, asset management, contracting, real property, transfer payments, and more. It makes it the vortex where both centralizing and decentralizing viewpoints meet. I have been part of countless committees and task forces over the years where they clashed.

Recently this tension has been revealed in heated discussions of post-pandemic workplaces. Should the “centre” impose consistency on hybrid-work arrangements or leave the discretion to individual deputy heads who could in turn delegate decisions further down in their organizations? The policy that came out tries to have it both ways, creating a common framework but leaving a lot of flexibility within it.

This debate about workplaces will continue in collective bargaining. That’s a centralizing process for drafting common rules and standards to apply across multiple organizations. The approach to collective bargaining in the Canadian public service is a choice to centralize bargaining and put it in the hands of a few specialists on each side, while other countries may let each department bargain by itself.

For many years there have been regular updates from the TBS to guide externally facing services. The 2000 policy was updated in 2014 and again in 2020. Service Canada was created in 2005 to create a single point of access for a range of key programs. Norms have been applied across all federal entities to ensure bilingual programming and more recently to ensure services meet the needs of persons with disabilities.

The drive toward coherence built upon the Federal Identity Program has evolved since the 1970s to bring greater order to signage and other visual identifiers. Successive governments have brought ever greater central control on paid advertising by federal entities. By now you are familiar with the Canada wordmark and jingle.

The most recent update of service policies includes a heavy emphasis on “digital.” The ongoing shift to digital platforms regularly triggers a fresh wave of debate along the age-old centralist/decentralist axis. Shared Services Canada was created in 2011 to upgrade information technology infrastructure and keep ahead of the rising threats of cybersecurity breaches. It was overtly centralist in intention.

At the time it was resisted, openly or passive-aggressively, by some managers in the largest organizations. They argued that they needed to retain control of their IT to be able to innovate. Frankly, I was never persuaded how hundreds of organizations could manage the transition to digital separately – including cloud computing, cyberhacking by foreign actors and the shift to hybrid work during the pandemic. How would it ever work in practice? This is one area where a centralist approach makes sense.

Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that the failure to be as rigorous on information management behind the digital agenda is starting to show up elsewhere. The TBS should pay more attention to the disparate state of information and records management across the public service.

The landmark Federal Accountability Act of 2006 subtly strengthened the decentralist camp. By clarifying the “buck stops here” accountability of deputy heads, it bolstered the hand of those who would argue some version of “if I am accountable, I have to have full decision making authority over…”

Another line of argument used by the decentralist camp was the need for flexibility and customization, or the need to innovate. They argued that decentralizing was more conducive to innovation. The centralist camp, of which I was usually a member, argued that the friction costs were adding to costs, slowing down government, impeding internal mobility, leaving smaller organizations behind while the big departments looked out for themselves. In my view, decentralization often served the interests of vendors and consultants, not public servants.

Treasury Board has reached different landing spots between the two camps over the years, as have individual departments and organizations. Over the past decade there have been the creation of common service hubs and the standardization of basic work processes for human resources, financial and accounting practices and linking management information. Standardizing and centralizing pension services to public servants has gone well, but pay services? Not so much.

There are still battles being fought in many departments about who regional staff should report to and how much autonomy their leaders should have. And the tides go in and out.

More battles are to come. One is about how much autonomy departments and agencies should have over buildings and real estate. Another is about how much autonomy and decentralization there should be in the areas of contracting and procurement. Yet another is about how much autonomy line managers should have over recruitment and hiring processes. “Let the managers manage” is an old slogan that sounds good but in practice the outcome of highly decentralized staffing has been far from optimal. Middle managers and HR shops continue to take infuriatingly long to perform basic staffing transactions.

Interestingly, major spending reviews can work both ways. The centralist camp uses them to argue for rationalization and efficiency by bringing things together while the decentralist camp uses them to argue for getting rid of administrative burden and oversight. There is a very rough analogy here to the private sector and its ever-shifting fashions about unlocking value by breaking things up versus creating value by bringing things together.

Anyone serving on a hypothetical Royal Commission would bring conscious or unconscious bias and preferences to this debate about centralization vs decentralization. They would have to declare on the future of staffing, procurement, real estate and information management. In the real world of practitioners, the public service is pulled back and forth between impulses to standardize and centralize versus arguments for autonomy by departments, agencies and for line and regional managers within larger organizations. Each camp argues its case fiercely convinced of the rightness of their views, fuelled by the ever-shifting fashions in management literature and private sector practice.

Source: The pull and push of the centre that haunts the public service

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Wernick’s Letter from Ottawa: an exhausting year shows the limits of foresight and the comfort of hindsight

2022/12/15 Leave a comment

Valid points on foresight, imperfect, and hindsight, which is always 20/20, as well as the environment under which decisions are taken. I always try to ask myself when being critical of the government’s action or inaction about whether I would have done better than the officials involved. Not necessarily.

But, as we have seen over the past few years, government does appear to have a systemic issue with foresight and, when there is foresight, it is often not taken seriously or acted upon (insert your favourite example!).

My favourite example is the decision by PHAC to cut the pandemic warning system shortly before COVID, one of the more irresponsible decisions based on very small savings, particularly compared to the costs of COVID:

The end of the calendar year typically brings with it occasions to take stock and look back. Across Canada, this is the season for holiday receptions and gatherings. It is also a season for year-end shows that recap the major events and for pundits to issue report cards on who among the politicians has had a good or bad year. Some will indulge in speculation about the year ahead.

What is striking about 2022 is how many of its highlights would have been missed in any crystal ball gazing last December. Many of the strategic plans and forecasts generated within governments and private sector firms would now be shredded or filed away. It was a bad year for the foresight community.

I will set aside the year of three prime ministers in the UK. 

The start of year saw Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, for Canadians, the ‘trucker convoy’ protests. Over the year inflation surged from the 3-4% range in 2021 to between 6-8% and the notable changes to the price of food, gasoline and home mortgages have made inflation the hot economic and political concern it hasn’t been since the 1980s. Our national politics have slumped into a somewhat dreary stalemate between an incumbent government starting to show signs of burnout at the seven year mark, and a new opposition leader betting on populism to create a mood for change in 2025. A central part of his strategy is to promote at every opportunity a sense that “everything seems broken”.

‘The extensive formal infrastructure of hindsight’

This effort to catastrophise has been given some inadvertent lift by the extensive formal infrastructure of hindsight that is a vital supply chain for media opinion writers and opposition politicians. There is no small irony in this because an array of institutions have been created with an overall purpose to increase confidence and trust in government – both the institutions of the state and the system of democratic decision-making – by correcting its behaviour and showing that it is accountable and responsive.

Here in Canada, the last month has brought a bountiful harvest of after action reviews. As provided for in the legislation, an enquiry is underway to review the federal government’s decision back in February to invoke the Emergencies Act to bring an end to the disruption caused by the escalating trucker convoy protests. The preeminent federal feedback institution – the auditor general – has just released two reports on the government’s efforts back in 2021 to cope with the pandemic. In Ontario, the provincial auditor has annoyed the premier with an aggressive investigation into money laundering through casinos. And in my home city of Ottawa, a commission has just reported on a particularly messy light rail infrastructure project.

To be clear, people who care about better government support having strong feedback loops that strengthen accountability. They inoculate against complacency and inertia. At their best they contribute to ‘learning software’ by which the public sector detects errors and problems and governments are forced to pay attention and strive to do better in the future. In my experience, it is far easier to mobilise the will to change laws and programmes or secure investments in the noisy aftermath of negative feedback than it is to secure support for preventive measures when things are quiet. Mechanisms like ombudspersons and review panels and tribunals are valuable outlets that often shed light on more systemic problems.

The uncomfortable truth is that all of the feedback loops have their problems – they are like a distorted mirror. The core software in a Westminster system is answerability of the executive to parliament but parliamentary committees never fail to disappoint. In Canada they often lapse into clumsy attempts to score partisan points or create clips to be shared on social media. Formal enquiries have a more rigorous methodology, and are seen to be impartial, but they are often driven by judges and lawyers, their idiosyncrasies and adversarial approach. Some have been truly impactful (the Krever Royal Commission into the tainted blood scandal) and some have proven to be useless (the Gomery commission into the use of a programme to raise awareness of the Government of Canada’s contributions to industries in Quebec). Arguably the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for those directly or indirectly affected by the legacy of the Indian Residential Schools system, which reported in 2015, has been the most important exercise of its kind in modern times.

The key feature of these reviews, and of the dozen or so institutions that make up the infrastructure of accountability, is hindsight, and the risk of hindsight bias. They cannot ever really capture the original context in which advice was given and decisions were made. They strain out all of the myriad other events and issues that were going on at the time, when the reality of governing is multitasking with limited time and imperfect information. They all use a version of what auditors call residual risk assessment that strains out the baseline to focus on the anomaly. Then the journalists and opposition only pay attention to the juiciest products among the many that are generated each year. The things that work aren’t newsworthy.

Reviews cannot capture the crisis

This hindsight effect is particularly true of efforts to look back at the response to the pandemic. I have yet to read any acknowledgement that the people involved, whether politicians or public servants, were themselves coping with the risk of falling ill, had children or elderly parents to worry about, and were adjusting to lockdown measures and disruption of workplaces. Whatever general appreciation there was in 2020 or 2021 of public sector workers has rapidly dissipated in 2022.

The fundamental limitation of ‘after action’ reviews is they cannot capture the alternative scenarios or timelines that would have unfolded if different decisions had been made. This is particularly true of the current enquiry into the Emergencies Act. As useful as it may prove to be in establishing the timeline right up to the point of the decision to invoke the act, we cannot ever know what would have happened in the days that followed had the government not acted. And yet that assessment of the trendline and the future scenarios would have been the core of the discussion at the time.

These reviews never quite recreate a typical problem set in public administration – the age old adage that one can prioritise speed, costs, or rigour but not all three at the same time. That isn’t quite true as many initiatives do find a way to achieve an acceptable outcome in all three – the stimulus package of 2008-09 comes to mind. But in a way, when you choose the priority you choose to be criticised later on something else. Choose rigour and the reviews will focus on slow delivery. Choose speed and the reviews will focus on execution. Order too much vaccine and be criticised for wastage – order too little and be criticised for not protecting the vulnerable.

That comes with the territory and isn’t about to change. But I have a growing unease that the very mechanisms created to bolster confidence and trust in democratic governance may be inadvertently contributing to a climate of demoralisation and defeatism that sows the seeds of future trouble.

As this turbulent year draws to a close it is easy to see the limitations of foresight, but feedback and hindsight are a necessary part of achieving better government. Flying blind is not a better way, and each time review should be an opportunity to focus on lessons learned and summon the will to make necessary changes and investments.

But we also should pay attention to the limitations and uses of hindsight, and rise above a short term partisan blame game and making risk averse politicians and public servants even more risk averse. In the 2020s the key quality the public sector will need is not clairvoyance, but resilience and the capacity to learn and adapt.

Source: Letter from Ottawa: an exhausting year shows the limits of foresight and the comfort of hindsight

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Improving record keeping crucial to open government, says former head of federal public service

2022/12/14 Leave a comment

Interesting comments by Wernick. Has been a long-time problem and I remember a number of initiatives and programs to address these problems during my time in government with limited success. Not an easy problem to solve given the vast amount of government information holdings:

The former head of the federal public service says neglect and underinvestment in recordkeeping is undermining the government’s “lofty language” about its commitment to open government, and making it harder to locate documents people ask for under access-to-information law.

Michael Wernick says the government’s archives resemble a scene out of an Indiana Jones movie, with boxes and boxes of records waiting to be scanned, sorted and organized.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, he said “the language of open government” … is built on “a very shaky foundation” because of a lack of investment in organizing records so they can be easily located.

He said there was a disconnect “between rhetoric and delivery” when it came to Ottawa’s stated commitment to open government.

“As with many things with this government … there is a gap between the lofty language and the execution or delivery,” he said. “What you will find is it is very spotty.”

Ottawa’s National Action Plan on Open Government commits it to being more transparent and accountable.

The Access to Information Act also places a legal requirement on the government to keep organized records and to publish guides each year to help people find them.

The act requires it to publish a detailed description of the types of records held by government departments.

“Open Government is about making government more accessible to everyone. This means giving greater access to government data and information to the Canadian public and the businesses community,” the government’s website on open government says.

Mr. Wernick, who was the federal government’s top bureaucrat – the Clerk of the Privy Council – from 2016 to 2019, said there was overall a lack of dedication to recordkeeping in Ottawa and a great “mess of things.”

Records were scattered around different government departments on floppy discs, diskettes, paper record files and in boxes, as well as on servers and in the Cloud.

He told The Globe that some federal departments and institutions organized their records well and had put tools in place to make them easy to find, but others were chaotic.

“Like many things, you’ll find pockets of excellence and some really cool things that are happening, and then there are other areas which are … rusted and shambolic. There’s a lack of consistency of effort around,” he said.

He said the amount of information being generated by the government – including e-mails – was more than its “absorption capacity” to get it digitized and scanned.

The government’s archive, he said, has “an enormous warehouse, like something out of Indiana Jones movies” full of boxes of records waiting to be organized, but there are neither the people nor the money to do it.

He said there should be more investment in developing search tools so that government records can be easily located, including if someone requests them under freedom-of-information laws. Organizing records would also help the federal policy of proactive disclosure, he said.

“What is really important is the navigation and recordkeeping. It’s just so uneven,” he said.

Mr. Wernick said with some records dating back centuries, as well as stacks of paper and a plethora of e-mails, deciding what to keep for posterity was a skill.

Retrieval and information management should be an integral part of an open-government agenda, including how to tag, classify and sort records, he said, but it was far down the government’s priority list.

He said “investing in basic conservation” and protecting records from flood and fire was also crucial, to stop them from being degraded.

Mr. Wernick told a Commons committee last month that the offices of the prime minister and federal ministers should no longer be exempt from access-to-information law, and there should be a greater onus in Ottawa on pro-actively disclosing as much information to the public as possible.

Monica Granados, press secretary to Treasury Board president Mona Fortier, said the government has “enshrined pro-active publication in law, strengthening openness and transparency across government.”

“The open-government portal now holds 34,000 data/information records, 2 million pro-active disclosures from more than 160 institutions, as well as summaries of completed access-to-information requests,” she said.

Source: Improving record keeping crucial to open government, says former head of federal public service

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Wernick: Leaving the comfort zone: Difficult issues in public sector reform

2022/11/14 Leave a comment

Good diagnostique by former Clerk. If any of these were easy to resolve, they would have been addressed.

The one I am not sure of is the degree to which pay is an issue at senior levels. What does the data say about separations (departures) from the public service at the EX and DM levels? Is that really that much of an issue, particularly for the policy folks who are attracted by the influence they can have on policy? Do departures vary by level and department and, if so, what are the motivators? Money and/or others? I don’t believe it was money that attracted Barton or Sabia, to highlight two of the more prominent examples.

On classification, I remember the Universal Classification System attempt in the 1990s. A lot of work and effort that was abandoned and no doubt other former colleagues have similar scars or wasted time that went nowhere.

And yes, get rid of the bilingualism bonus although Francophone public servants will likely complain given their higher levels of effective bilingualism:

Much of the commentary on the public sector stays at the level of generalities. Exhortations to become more strategic, more inclusive, bolder in advice and better in delivery are impossible to contest. Too often, the discussion stops short of analyzing resistance or tradeoff among objectives. As in so many things, we are much better at diagnosis than agreeing on the remedies.

The list of issues in play these days for the federal public service is already daunting. As well, provincial, territorial and municipal governments have their own agendas. On top of the formal reviews of service delivery and spending launched earlier this year, an incomplete list would include: a new round of collective bargaining just as inflation has spiked; figuring out the post-pandemic workplace; replacing retirements and departures; fragile legacy IT systems; the reverberations of Black Lives Matter and Indigenous reconciliation; cybersecurity and foreign interference; and a trendline of eroding trust in public institutions.

What follows is a brief thought experiment. If the federal government took the advice – something that is unlikely in my view – to create some sort of royal commission or advisory panel on its public service, what are some of the more difficult or “wicked” questions – that would surface? We do not have to wait; we can start debating these issues now. There are more, but I set out just a few of the most uncomfortable ones here.

Insourcing, outsourcing and offloading 

The core question of what we should ask the public service to do for us usually comes up only in formal spending reviews, such as the Chretien government’s 1995 program review or the Harper government’s 2012 deficit reduction action plan. They sometimes provoke a re-examination of whether this area of responsibility should be done by public servants, rented from outside contractors, or offloaded to the private sector and civil society.

Sometimes, the federal government retreats from an area and leaves it to provincial and local governments. The mix has shifted and the federal public sector has waxed and waned. The truth is that there is no right answer and we will get an outcome heavily driven by the ideological and political preferences, and the view of federalism, of the government of the day. The point for public sector management is that you can drive for effectiveness or drive for spending cuts, but realistically you can’t do both well at the same time.

Dealing with poor performers 

An uncomfortable truth is that not every hire works out and not every employee or executive contributes as much as they should. Some are not effective and some actually drain energy and poison their workplaces. Many people are squeamish about discussing poor performers and toxic employees, and deny they exist in any significant numbers.

It is far too difficult to demote or terminate the small number of truly poor performers. An employee can use the multiple recourse processes to drag out proceedings for as much as two or three years. Instead of taking on the exhausting challenge, managers either do their best to work around them or sometimes try to fob them off on others with less than honest references. Colleagues see team members coast along as passengers without consequences and lose motivation.

The solution lies in changing the legal standard for dismissal to a lower bar than the current definition of “cause.” However, it is a wicked problem in practice because making it easier for managers to terminate employees may give some of them an instrument for bullying and harassment that may be wielded with bias. Striking the balance won’t be simple.

No longer letting middle managers do all the hiring

As long as I can remember people have lamented the slow pace of hiring, whether from outside the service or moving people within. The managers and the human resources community point fingers at each other. The uncomfortable truth is that not every middle manager or front-line supervisor is good at hiring – even the ones who struggle to find the time to wade through the huge pools of candidates. They default to looking for credentials and past experience because it is much more effort to assess future potential, but the tools for doing so aren’t very good.

The solution to slow staffing, and to recruiting more talent from outside, could lie in a more directive approach that gives much more authority to the human resource community or a central staffing agency to do the screening and proactively match candidates with vacancies. This is a really uncomfortable topic because the main bottleneck has been a cultural one – middle managers believe they should pick every person on their team, no matter how long it takes. Departments and agencies are culturally averse to shared hiring processes or relying on others. They are scared of false positives and believe they would do a better job. More leeway to remove poor performers could also be a key to faster hiring.

Which forms of inclusion matters more?

Bilingualism has been a cornerstone inclusion policy since 1968, a mindful strategy to ward off Quebec separatism by ensuring that the one-quarter of Canadians who are francophones see themselves in the federal government. The future of bilingualism is a wicked problem in the 2020s, not for externally facing services ­– which are now largely delivered on websites, apps and call centres – but for the workplace.

Requirements for a degree of proficiency in both of our official languages by supervisors and executives raise uncomfortable issues, including that they have come to be seen as a barrier for some racialized communities and for Indigenous peoples. Should the public service give in to pressure to loosen requirements for French-language proficiency in the pursuit of inclusion? Or would that marginalize francophones and harm recruitment, lead to a downward spiral in language capacity and erode national unity? The uncomfortable truth is that the subtle pressure to work in English is relentless unless the people convening and chairing meetings, asking for documents and performing basic supervision are mindful and proactive.

Even more baffling, why are we still paying bonuses to people who are bilingual instead of investing the same millions of dollars in language training for people who are not?

How flat can you go? How thin is too thin? 

One of the common criticisms of the federal public service is that there are too many managers in too many layers. It is contended that there has been a proliferation of new half-steps such as assistant directors, associate assistant deputy ministers and associate deputy ministers. The cumulative effect has been identified as a “clay layer” of management and it is widely believed that the leadership cadre could readily be made leaner, flatter and thinner.

It is an uncomfortable issue because many of the remedies that have been tried or suggested would make it more difficult for the most senior leaders to solve workload and personnel problems for which they are accountable and to keep their organizations up to date with evolving challenges. More constraints means less organizational agility. Any arbitrary reductions, caps or buyout schemes tend to land unevenly and unfairly. The larger organizations are always much more capable of coping than the more numerous smaller ones.

Little boxes 

The box-by-box model of jobs dates backs decades and is taken as a given. It is used to define in excruciating detail the duties and accountabilities of each individual position, which then is used to assess what it is worth and therefore what it should be paid.

That model and especially the job classification system used by the public service is well past its best-before date. It slows down staffing, falls behind the shifts in skills and competencies in the real-world labour market, adds enormous complexity to the pay system, and has long favoured policy-related jobs over operations and services. It creates a lot of unproductive busy work.

Past attempts to fix it or to negotiate change through collective bargaining always turned into a quagmire. There are no evident paths forward, but arguably we need a public service that is more nimble and able to shape shift – to move people more easily and to quickly create jobs around specific projects. The daunting and truly wicked challenge is to find a thoughtful approach to streamlining how jobs are classified and paid, and the courage and persistence to look at the core software of the employment model.

Are we serious about leadership or not? 

It is common to point to the crucial role of leadership but we don’t back up the rhetoric in practice. We need to find better tools for classifying and compensating executive positions than the ones that have caused us struggles for the past decades. We need to invest heavily in learning and development of the leadership cadre. Politicians are squeamish about what a serious review would tell them – that generally public service jobs are well-paid with attractive pension coverage and benefits, but the higher you go, the less compelling the comparisons with the private sector become. The uncomfortable truth is that compared to the private sector, the public sector underpays its leaders and underinvests in leadership development.

Part of it is ideological – some politicians are so averse to government that they don’t see what public sector leaders do as value-added. This is reinforced by a relentless flow of hostile punditry and media stories about executive “bonuses,” travel expenses and leadership programs. Some politicians are beholden to the public service unions who would balk at higher compensation for managers.

Is better possible? 

These are just some highlights of the challenges that would face serious public sector reform. My hope as a new academic is to provoke some research and dialogue that may create actionable options for a future government. As for a royal commission, why wait? Take up any of the issues or go even deeper into structural reforms and propose solutions, not just diagnosis. We can start by leaving the comfort zone.

Source: Leaving the comfort zone: Difficult issues in public sector reform

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May: What are we losing with the elimination of our digital government minister?

2021/11/08 Leave a comment

Good discussion of some of the deeper issues and considerations, none of which are easy to address or resolve:

The Trudeau government’s decision to drop a digital government minister from the cabinet lineup comes when many argue just about everything on its agenda requires some kind of digital transformation to fix or implement.

Digital technology is central to tackling any policy issue whether it’s fighting the rest of the pandemic and rebuilding a shaken economy, climate change, child care, housing and Indigenous services. Digital tools are used to gather and mine data to develop policies, implement them and deliver services Canadians can use.

In fact, FWD50, an Ottawa conference of the world’s leading digital experts is virtually meeting this week to discuss using technology “to make society better for all.” They argue technology is policy. Can’t have one without the other.

The pandemic that forced thousands of bureaucrats to work remotely created a level of basic digital literacy so quickly that the Treasury Board is now rethinking policies around the future of work and modernizing technology.

So why is the government separating them with two ministers, one responsible for policy and the other in charge of technology?

Joyce Murray, Canada’s fourth digital government minister, was shuffled to Fisheries and Oceans with no one appointed to replace her. Her job appears to have been carved up between Treasury Board President Mona Fortier and Public Services and Procurement Minister Filomena Tassi.

The loss of digital cabinet clout is being criticized as a significant setback. It takes away much-needed political leadership, a single voice at the cabinet table and a focus to navigate a responsibility that is already fractured among too many players.

“We’re now living in a world where every policy issue is a digital issue,” said Ryan Androsoff, director of digital leadership programs at the Institute in Governance.

“Government can have the greatest policy ideas in the world, but if they can’t execute on them, it gets them nowhere,” he said. “Today, good delivery and execution inevitably means digital. It’s tough to imagine any area of government activity that won’t have some kind of technological underpinning to how policy is delivered and implemented.”

The decision came out of the blue for the technology industry, setting off concerns that the government is backing off from its digital strategy as progress toward a co-ordinated approach was being made. The government spends more than $7 billion a year on technology.

“A digital minister at least brought it to the forefront,” said Michele Lajeunesse, senior vice-president of government relations and policy at industry association TECHNATION.

“It showed government recognized a need to focus on its digital transformation… and I would say it progressed somewhat. The fear is this is taking a potentially major step back, and if the decision is to split it between TBS and PSPC (Public Services and Procurement Canada) will we be better off? We don’t think so.”

It also comes when the world is scrambling for tech talent in the face of a global shortage.

Countries like the U.S. and U.K. are bolstering the role of tech to better manage remote work, attract more tech workers and make sure citizens have easy online access to government services.

The head of the U.S. General Services Administration recently summed up the shift: “It’s super clear that bad delivery sinks good policy. To be able to deliver anything, we have to have the tech talent in the room at the beginning of the discussion, not bolted on at the end.”

Digital experts boil digital transformation down to technology, data, process and organizational change – and people with the skills in each are the lynchpins to make it work.

Murray, who was also the first standalone digital minister, launched a digital strategy with four overarching goals that the government isn’t close to achieving:

  • Modernize the way government replaces, builds and manages IT systems;
  • Provide services to people when and where they need them;
  • Co-ordinate the approach to digital operations;
  • Transform the way public servants work.

From the start, however, many argued the kind of big, transformational change that digital can bring requires a fundamental rethinking of the government’s rules and policies underpinning how public servants work – from human resources, staffing and hiring to budgeting and procurement.

Former treasury board president Scott Brison was the first to throw the spotlight on digital in the aftermath of the disastrous Phoenix pay system, which brought urgency to changing the way government does business and provides service to Canadians.

He successfully pressed to have digital minister included in his title, pitching a digital strategy as a way to improve the lives of Canadians and restore the trust and confidence they have lost in all governments.

But the success of the digital minister has been much debated.

Amanda Clarke, a digital and public management expert and associate professor at Carleton University, said the job had little clout, no effective carrot-and-stick to force change. The minister didn’t control contracting decisions on major modernization projects. And most of the powers to push needed reforms rest with Treasury Board.

“I don’t actually think it’s a strategic loss for the bigger movement,” said Clarke.

As digital minister, Murray had some key pieces of the government machinery. The biggest was Shared Services Canada, the giant IT agency that operates with a $2-billion budget and more than 7,000 employees.

The long-troubled agency redeemed itself with an almost overnight rollout of equipment, network access and digital tools so public servants could work remotely during the pandemic. It is being folded into PSPC, which some worry could shift its focus to procurement and compliance rather advancing the digital strategy.

She oversaw the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), which provides direction to departments on information management and technology. She also had the Canadian Digital Services, the U.S.-inspired swat team of tech geeks to tackle IT problems and harness digital to help departments design and build better services.

But there is a constellation of all the other departments and agencies, each of which had their own CIOs who report to their deputy ministers. Several executives from technology firms admit they didn’t even bother with the digital minister and went directly to departments where decisions are made on what to systems to upgrade or buy.

The government has yet to explain the rationale for dropping the cabinet post and the fate of digital strategy is expected to be answered in the ministers’ mandate letters. In a statement, Shared Services Canada said its mandate to accelerate digital transformation and build a more open, people-centric and resilient digital government will continue under PSPC.

Digital transformation requires leadership

Androsoff argues it’s political leadership, not bureaucrats, that has to drive changes in governance and accountability to make such sweeping changes happen.

“I think there has to be a recognition that… the governance structure we have for digital right now is not set up to deliver on results,” he said. “If the government is serious about trying to really change how government works for the digital era, it has to do some real thinking around how to put in place the type of authorities and decision-making structures that’s going to actually let change happen.”

But that takes time, and Clarke argues the talent crisis is the most urgent problem, and some changes could be made during the typical two-year governing window of a minority government.

Some of these reforms could dovetail with the Treasury Board’s planning for the future of work as pandemic restrictions are lifted and public servants can return to in-office work.

The government is widely expected to move to a hybrid workforce – a mix of employees working in office and remotely – to attract and retain talent, which could force a rethink of the hiring and classification policies.

That resonates with former privy council clerk Michael Wernick, who as Canada’s top bureaucrat pushed for a top-to-bottom structural reform – delayering, fewer levels of executives and a massive overhaul of its human resources regime, including reducing the 670 occupational groups and 80,000 rules that affect public servants’ pay.

The limits of the killer app

Wernick argues the government has made improvements to public-facing online services but can’t go much further without a deeper overhaul of back-end systems and how government works.

“The fork-in-the-road question is: are you going to continue to look for cool apps and outward-facing things we can do? Or are you going to deal with some of the deep structural issues in the public service?” he said.

Under the hood of some of those online services and apps are old mainframes and technology, some on the verge of collapse. And under that are the lumbering operational processes and procedures created by outdated rules and policies.

Right off the bat, Clarke argues the government needs new job titles and descriptions so departments can hire and develop the kind of in-house skills needed and wean off the IT consultants it spends billions of dollars on.

Job classifications for IT workers were written before the internet, and jobs like product managers and user-experience specialists didn’t exist. Job listings that describe positions designed for another era – which also scream a dated organization – hold no attraction for tech job seekers. They won’t apply.

“A lot of the problems we see with technology today in government are a people problem. When you don’t have people on staff who know how to design modern services, projects will fail,” said Clarke. “They also have to know how to be smart shoppers when it comes time to select partners and to procure new solutions.”

A multi-disciplinary team working on a new policy, for example, used to be not able to bring in IT workers to help figure out how to deliver the program to users because of an old rule that required IT workers to report only to CIOs. This also forced the team to recruit consultants from outside to advise them. That rule was changed, but the practice is still deeply rooted in departments.

And then there’s the months it takes to fill a job, which sends managers to the private sector, which can fill openings with consultants within days.

“This is how the rigidity of the classification becomes antithetical to good policy work,” said Clarke. “One of the best practices in modern digital government is bringing in experts around technology and implementation early in the policy design process so that you kind of set up the project for success.”

But Clarke said the government also has to get a handle on its over-reliance on outsourcing, which has hollowed out the skills of in-house IT staff. The government should track who gets contracts, how competitive they are and potential conflicts of interest. She said it’s shocking how many companies that worked on bungled or failed projects are then hired back to fix them.

The unions have fought IT contracting as too expensive, locking in the government to specific vendors and atrophying skills among in-house technical workers. A 2020 report found spending on IT consulting more than doubled between 2011 and 2018, when it hit $1.3 billion.

“Big projects are still business as usual. They’re still massive and they still involve these classic players who have their fingers all over every digital failure and yet keep getting hired by government to lead digital projects,” said Clarke. “It’s absolutely baffling.”

Source: https://irpp.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f538f283d07ef7057a628bed8&id=1261e9c10f&e=86cabdc518

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Wells: Michael Wernick has some advice

2021/10/14 Leave a comment

Good and informative interview and comments:

Brian Mulroney was the prime minister the first time Michael Wernick sat at the back of a cabinet committee room, taking notes. One time the young civil servant found himself transcribing John Crosbie’s remarks as the powerful fisheries minister recited arguments Wernick himself had put into Crosbie’s briefing notes. That particular ouroboros of influence was “quite exciting for a young desk officer,” Wernick said in an interview shortly before the recent federal election.

The venue was my back yard. The occasion was the release of Wernick’s new book, Governing Canada: A Guide to the Tradecraft of Politics (UBC Press). Wernick was a senior official for decades in Ottawa, a deputy minister under Paul Martin and Stephen Harper. Justin Trudeau made him Clerk of the Privy Council, a position from which Wernick retired amid the SNC-Lavalin controversy in 2019, after Jody Wilson-Raybould released a surreptitious recording of a conversation with Wernick.

Wilson-Raybould, clandestine recordings, and the doctrines of independence for attorneys general are not topics of Wernick’s book, and he made it clear he preferred that they not figure in our interview. I relented, mostly. I’ve known Wernick for 26 years. He’s been learning how Ottawa works for longer than that. The lore he’s accumulated, poured between the covers of a slim volume aimed at students of political science, is a valuable contribution to Canadians’ understanding of how they’re governed.

“I didn’t want to write a memoir,” Wernick said. What came out instead is “a kind of an amalgam of many experiences with different ministers and three prime ministers that I got to work with reasonably closely. I was trying to capture those conversations—what it’s like to sit across from the new minister after swearing in, or some of the conversations that go on. Particularly in the early days of a government as they’re finding their feet or learning their skills.”

For the longest time he couldn’t settle on a format. He finally found a model in Renaissance Florence.

“I have a daughter who’s studying political science at U of T. She was doing a political theory course. And she was home for Christmas, but still working on a paper. And one of the things on that second-year political science course, that I took umpteen years ago, is [Niccolo Machiavelli’s] The Prince. It’s second-person advice on statecraft. It’s held up for a long time. And that gave me that sort of lightbulb moment. ‘Oh, I can do something that way. I could do it direct and second-person advice to somebody who’s coming into that position.’ That unlocked the whole thing for me.”

The resulting book is nearly devoid of juicy insider gossip—never Wernick’s style—but full of pithy advice to political leaders in general. “If you can end a meeting early and gain a sliver of time,” he tells prospective prime ministers, “get up and leave.” And, elsewhere, “It is rarely to your advantage to meet the premiers as a group.” And, ahem, “The longer you are in office, the more courtiers you will attract.”

From various perches in the senior ranks of the public service, Wernick watched three prime ministers land in the top job and try to figure out how to govern. “There is a skill set involved in governing,” he said. “We seem to expect people to learn that skill set on the job quickly, without a lot of help.”

And yet the days after a gruelling election campaign are nearly the worst time to be starting a new job. “One of the things I try to emphasize is the human element of it. People come in off an election campaign, exhausted. Physically exhausted. And in a state of considerable disruption. Often they’re new to being a minister. They’re also new to being an MP. They have to make decisions about their family, relocate or not to Ottawa. They’re changing locations. They’re changing careers, fundamentally. And I was always warning public service colleagues, ‘You have to allow for that. Allow for some of that exhaustion and shock.’”

New governments have only a few weeks to get up to speed. And habits that are formed early are not likely to be substantially revised later, with the benefit of hindsight. By then it’s too late. “The Prime Ministers I saw settled into the job very quickly. But then it’s hard to change. They get into a comfort zone or routines and patterns. It’s a very human thing to do. So part of my purpose in the book is just to say, ‘Pause and be a little bit mindful of the how of governing before it all gets locked in.’”

One of the recurring themes in Wernick’s book is how little time everyone has. A federal cabinet will have 100 hours in a year for all of its plenary discussions. Maybe 120. It’s never enough. “It’s overbooked from day one until the day they leave. And you’re always making choices: to do one thing means not doing something else. And mindful management of the allocation of time is really important. It can get away on you.”

The cabinet is going to need a lot of help. That was Wernick’s job, and that of all his bureaucratic colleagues, as well as countless political staff, operating with different aims and methods. “When it works well, you have a certain balance in what I call a triangle between the decision-maker—could be the PM, could be a minister—the support network they get from the public service, and the support network that they get from the political side.”

Sometimes the triangle gets out of balance. “The system gets into trouble when the public service tries to anticipate politics too much. And it clearly gets into trouble when the political side starts trying to run departments administratively. If people keep in their swim lanes and understand each other’s roles, each can add something. I always found it irritating when people chided ministers for being political. They’re supposed to be political in a democracy.”

I asked Wernick about a favourite Ottawa worry, that the public service is losing its ability to generate new ideas and policies. He didn’t bite. “I think there’s a little bit of a mythology that there was some other time when the great and good mandarins of the town—all white males, by the way—generated the ideas and pushed them towards the political system,” he said.

“I think there’s a competing narrative that the policy space is much more open and inclusive than it ever was. The costs of entry are much lower. Anybody with a laptop and a Google account can be a policy analyst. When I joined government, we had a quasi-monopoly on the ability to run big simulation models on income-security programs. Now many university professors can do it better.”

Besides, “I don’t think it’s really the role of the public service to be the originator of new ideas. Those usually come from democratic politics: ‘We wish to decriminalize cannabis.’ And then you work through the problem of how to do it competently.”

Governing Canada includes some pointed advice to cabinet ministers about the fact that they’re probably not going to get a chance to choose the date of their departure from politics. Prime ministers and voters have a way of making those decisions quickly and at inconvenient moments. Did I detect an autobiographical element to these passages?

“That’s largely true of clerks and public servants as well,” Wernick said. “Or hockey coaches. Like, there’s a lot of job jobs where you can’t arrange a perfectly-timed departure. I’m not the only person who’s been backed into a corner where it was impossible to continue to do the job. It’s unfortunate, but it happened.”

“But it’s happened to other people. Circumstances get away on people. People fall into all sorts of things that make it untenable for them to continue in the job.”

When things got weird for Wernick, did he draw any comfort from those earlier examples?

“No. I mean, that’s not the way I’d put it. I was conscious, during those last few months, that I was drifting towards a zone where I couldn’t do the job anymore. I was becoming part of the story. You have to enjoy at least some basic level of trust from the opposition leaders. I didn’t have that. And that just made it impossible to carry on.”

If he had a do-over, would he handle SNC-Lavalin differently? “That’s probably for another day, in another interview. I did not pick up on some of the warning signs about the trouble that was coming…. But I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that. You work and live in the moment and you do the best you can at the time.”

I tried one more question that was a little closer to the concrete example of the current government than to the trends and aphorisms Wernick’s book prefers. In the book, he writes to a hypothetical prime minister: “You will not be successful if you hang on to the same closed circle of close advisors and confidants for your whole time in office. There is an inevitable drift into a comfort zone and a form of groupthink that can create blind spots and put you at risk.”

Gee, did he have anyone in mind?

Butter would not melt in Wernick’s mouth as he told me he had no examples from current events. “The example I was actually drawing on was Stephen Harper in 2011. You know, the opposition leaders [Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh, in the election that had not yet happened when Wernick and I spoke] probably have a transition team, who will give them some advice on how to set things up. And I worked with Derek Burney from the Harper team, and Mike Robinson from the Martin team, and Peter Harder from the Trudeau team.” Those new governments are always “very conscious and mindful about how they want to set things up.” But re-elected prime ministers “tend to just start up again, with the same people in the same processes. People have argued, and I think I agree, that Stephen Harper missed an opportunity in 2011, to pause and think.

“I would say to any Prime Minister, when they’re going into a second or third mandate: ‘You should pause. It’s going to be different. Think about the processes and the people.’”

Source: Michael Wernick has some advice

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Five years on, Trudeau’s vow to build a diverse public service still unfulfilled

2020/06/13 Leave a comment

I find this report unbalanced and does not reflect that the government largely met its commitment to increase diversity in appointments as I wrote in 2019 (Taking stock of Ottawa’s diversity promises) while public service diversity continues to increase for women and visible minorities for both employees and executives albeit at a slow but steady pace.

The main issue is with respect to Black Canadians at senior levels and I will be looking at data to take this concern from the anecdotal and symbolic (only one Black DM) to quantify the occupational groups and levels where this is most prevalent, as well as looking at other relatively under-represented particular visible minority groups.

I agree with Michael Wernick that while the employment equity act is ripe for a review, opening it up would indeed be a hornet’s nest. And looking back over the over 30 years of EE data, hard to argue that it has not been a success in improving representation given its focus on representation:

When they took power in 2015, the Trudeau Liberals promised to “build a government that looks like Canada.”

But their government, now in its second mandate, still hasn’t hired enough minority senior staff members to truly reflect the country’s diverse makeup.

Only four chiefs of staff to 37 ministers are people of colour — roughly 11 per cent of the total — while they constitute more than 22 per cent of the national population, according to the last census in 2016.

As protests against anti-black racism — triggered by George Floyd’s police custody killing in Minneapolis — have grown in size and spread around the globe, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been talking more about “systemic” racism in Canadian institutions. The prime minister also kneeled in a crowd of anti-racism protesters in Ottawa last Friday as a symbolic gesture of support for their calls for change.

“Systemic racism is an issue right across the country, in all our institutions, including in all our police forces, including in the RCMP. That’s what systemic racism is,” Trudeau said Thursday morning.

“Here are the facts in Canada. Anti-black racism is real, unconscious bias is real, systemic discrimination is real,” the prime minister said in a speech in the House of Commons last week, vowing that his government is committed to breaking down barriers and providing opportunities for marginalized communities.

The lack of diversity among Liberal staffers was keenly felt by Omer Aziz, who worked briefly as an adviser to Chrystia Freeland when she was foreign affairs minister.

“I would go into meetings and I’m the only non-white person there. I felt that when I would raise my voice and give my advice, that it wasn’t taken seriously,” Aziz told CBC.

“That is eventually why I left what was my dream job.”

Getting better … slowly

Other senior staffers told CBC that while being one of just a few people of colour around the table may not be an ideal job situation, diversity in the higher ranks of the federal public service has come a long way in the past decade.

The government is also responsible for appointing people to hundreds of bodies outside the core public service, such as agency boards, foreign missions and Crown corporations.

The Trudeau Liberals reformed that hiring process early in its first mandate to serve its goal of attracting diverse applicants. The result: a dramatically improved ratio of people of colour to other hires, from 4.3 per cent when the Liberals were elected in 2015 to 8.2 per cent as of June 2020.

As for the most senior civil servants (deputy and associate deputy ministers), the number coming from diverse backgrounds is still less than 10 per cent of the total — so low that the Privy Council Office won’t release the figure, arguing it would compromise privacy rights because it would be easy to work out who these senior civil servants are.

‘You have to represent’

“We are in 2020. How come it took so long? It shouldn’t have,” said Caroline Xavier, the only Black person serving as an associate deputy minister in the federal government. She was appointed to the post at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada back in February.

“Sometimes the burden is heavy because you have to represent. It’s a burden I’m prepared to take on because it’s my job to open more doors for others.”

Xavier said there’s no easy solution, but conversations about breaking down barriers “are happening” within government.”There is a recognition at the most senior levels that this has got to be rectified.”The federal government fares far better when it comes to appointing women; the ranks of deputy ministers and other high-level positions are close to gender parity now.

The Trudeau government isn’t the first to pursue greater diversity in the upper ranks of the public service.

In 2000, a task force struck to look into the participation of people of colour in the federal public service cited an “urgent imperative to shape a federal public service that is representative of its citizenry.”

Seven years later, the Senate published a report on employment equity in the public service with the title: “Not There Yet.” Ten years after that, in 2017, a Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat task force reported that “many gaps in representation persist in the executive category … the very leaders who shape and influence the culture of federal organizations are not sufficiently diverse.”

‘People don’t want to admit that’s going on’

Since 2000, there has been a slow but steady increase in the number of Canadians of colour in the public service — from just under six per cent of the total then, to more than 16 per cent today.

But annual employment equity reports and the census show that Black civil servants, along with Filipinos and Latinos, are still grouped at the lower end of the salary ladder.

Liberal MP Greg Fergus, chair of the parliamentary Black caucus, told CBC News this week that he wants to see the government address that disparity.

“It doesn’t make sense that there’s been no Black deputy ministers — you can’t convince me that there aren’t Black people who are competent,” he said. “But there’s something that went into the calculation over time, that that person didn’t make the right fit, or didn’t get that promotion. We can justify any individual decision, but when you aggregate all these decisions, you end up with a biased result.

“Those are the things that we’ve got to take a look at. But it’s hard to do the things which are hard to do. And it’s hard to see bias. People don’t want to admit that’s going on.”

Trudeau has tasked his parliamentary secretary, Ontario MP Omar Alghabra, with looking at public service renewal. While the Black Lives Matter protests have given the file more urgency, the government has no clear plan yet.

Sharon DeSousa has suggestions. A regional executive vice president with the Public Service Alliance of Canada, she served on the 2017 task force on diversity in the public service. She points out that only one recommendation out of 43 was implemented.”We keep having committees and reports and, to be honest, we’re coming up with the same data,” DeSousa said.”We’ve got systemic barriers and we need to address them,” she said, adding that if the Liberals were serious about going after unconscious bias, they would take a hard look at how data on hiring are being collected, and the problems baked into legislation like the Employment Equity Act.

A ‘hornet’s nest’

The Employment Equity Act hasn’t been updated in nearly two decades and still uses the broad term “visible minorities” — a phrase the United Nations has called discriminatory because it lacks nuance and assumes the experience of a Black employee is the same as that of a South Asian one.

Former head of the privy council Michael Wernick said he believes now is the time to look at changing legislation.

“I think to get at issues in the 2020s, you’re going to want to dig down into each of those communities and have more precise strategies for them,” Wernick said, adding that employment equity laws are still an important tool for promoting diversity.

Still, he said, opening the act up for debate could be like turning over a “hornet’s nest” and coming to a consensus won’t be easy.The Liberals also have flirted with the concept of “name blind” recruitment for the public service — the practice of concealing a candidate’s name to protect those with more ethnic-sounding names from conscious or unconscious bias in the hiring process.A pilot project in 2017 produced a report suggesting name blind recruitment made no difference to outcomes, which prompted former Treasury Board president Scott Brison to declare that “the project did not uncover bias.”

But it turned out the methodology was flawed. Departments had volunteered to take part in the pilot and knew their hiring decisions would be evaluated.

The Public Service Commission is still examining other random recruitment processes.

Some factors that serve to prevent people of colour from being hired by the federal government — the country’s largest single employer — are harder to work around, said Andrew Griffith, a former director-general with Citizenship and Immigration Canada who has written extensively about the issue.

“There’s a preference in the public service to hire Canadian citizens and not all visible minorities have become citizens yet,” Griffith said. He said he believes that factor narrows the gap between the diversity of the general population and that of the federal public service.

Other factors that could be frustrating the push for a more diverse public service, he said, are language requirements and a need for regional representation in parts of Canada that are not so diverse.

That second factor could be less of a problem in the longer term, with a pandemic crisis forcing many civil servants to work from home. But Griffith said getting into government work is “just a long convoluted process.”

Source: Five years on, Trudeau’s vow to build a diverse public service still unfulfilled

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

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