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

2025/01/24 Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed under Government Tagged with , , ,

Former top bureaucrat calls for major overhaul of the federal government

2025/01/21 Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Salgo: Trudeau missed his chance to reshape the public service

2025/01/14 Leave a comment

Most governments do not want to invest valuable political capital in public service reform given the complexity of the public service, relative lack of public interest, pushback from pressure groups, and long timelines:

…The real failures of the Trudeau government vis-à-vis the public service have been ones of omission.

Public servants face a host of problems — outdated structures and hierarchies; too much accountability for process and too little for outcomes; and a failure to keep pace with modern skill sets and digital service capabilities — that don’t seem to have interested the prime minister much. Nor did he ever revisit the more questionable elements of Harper’s Accountability Act.

In fairness, the government’s early focus on the systematic delivery of identified priorities (so-called deliverology) initially held out some promise that public servants could focus more on outcomes. But the initiative seems to have fizzled out under a heavy paper burden, an indiscriminate sea of “priorities” and an underdeveloped sense of irony.

Of course, the failure to modernize during these years must also be laid at the doorstep of the public service leadership. Still, the government of the day plays an important role in shaping that leadership, its goals and the management policies under which it operates.

The Trudeau government’s most conspicuous legacy to the public service was to expand it massively during COVID. Was this good or bad? As Ho Chi Minh said of the French Revolution, it’s too early to tell, but a looming retrenchment suggests that the hiring went at least a little overboard.

And in addition to being hugely expensive, the expansion was strikingly non-strategic, arguably even haphazard. The Treasury Board’s equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives did reflect a kind of vision for the public service, but it had more to do with the government’s broader social agenda than a rethinking of what the bureaucracy does.

The government missed yet another opportunity to forge a new kind of public service in the post-COVID period. While in formal terms it left issues like return-to-office to the bureaucracy itself, the senior public service was as mindful of optics as the government could have wished. Public servants have no inherent right to work remotely, but it would have been nice to have data on functional matters such as productivity before decisions were taken.

And while public servants got respectable raises under Trudeau, the government didn’t exactly roll over when public sector unions went on strike in the wake of inflation and a return-to-office mandate. While it worked out a deal with PSAC in 2023, it has since proved willing to put the collective bargaining process to one side, undoubtedly in keeping with the sentiments of most Canadians.

All things considered, the Trudeau years amount to rather thin gruel for anyone who hoped for public service transformation. But these may yet look like halcyon days if a new and cost-conscious government arrives with a limited store of patience and a willingness to put a few agenda-friendly officials in place.

Source: Salgo: Trudeau missed his chance to reshape the public service

Filed under Government Tagged with ,

Lang: Deconstructing Canada’s ballooning $67-billion federal bureaucracy

2024/12/16 Leave a comment

Good column by Lang (our paths crossed when I worked in PCO and he in PMO):

Forty-three per cent.

That is how much Canada’s “core” federal public administration — the civil service — has grown since Justin Trudeau’s government took office in 2015. The raw numbers are even more striking. There are 110,738 more federal public servants employed today than a decade ago.

Not surprisingly, this rate of bureaucratic growth has faced some scrutiny.

Some have claimed that the increase was necessary to keep pace with population growth, yet Canada’s population only expanded by about 17 per cent over this period.

The COVID pandemic, and the programs and initiatives that were created to deal with it, is also cited as a factor. To be sure, the federal bureaucracy increased by about 35,000 during the three COVID years. But that means the rest of the personnel growth — more than two-thirds of it — happened before and after the pandemic.

If service to Canadians during this time had improved meaningfully, that might justify the rise, but there is little evidence of that. For example, complaints to the federal Office of the Taxpayers’ Ombudsperson about excessive wait times with Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) call centres were up 45 per cent in 2023. And stories of long wait times at passport offices are legion.

Such scenarios support the conviction that the federal government is bloated and in need of radical surgery. At the very least, some of this swelling of public service ranks should be examined and questioned.

Growth is concentrated in the Big Six

Where has most of the surge occurred?

More than half of the increase – 60,000 positions – has taken place in just six out of some 115 federal departments and agencies. Let’s call these the Big Six.

The largest increase – by 19,000 employees – has occurred at the CRA, a 48-per-cent expansion of its total staff.

That’s impressive, but in percentage terms it pales in comparison to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, which more than doubled in size with 105 per cent growth during that decade, equal to 6,700 additional employees.

Also noteworthy is Employment and Social Development Canada, which grew by some 18,000 personnel, or 86 per cent.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans increased by 4,800 or 49 per cent, while Public Services and Procurement Canada is bigger by 6,900 people or 57 per cent.

Rounding out the Big Six is the Department of National Defence, whose civilian workforce expanded by about 6,100. Ironically this occurred at the same time the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) have been hemorrhaging military personnel and are now more than 15,000 people short of the enlistment target set in the government’s 2017 defence policy. The CAF — which is facing major demands on its services at home and abroad — is probably now at its lowest military head count since the end of the Second World War.

Some of the hiring binges appear to be indicators of the government’s priorities and modus operandi. 

The big hike at Citizenship, Immigration and Refugees, for example, is related to the Trudeau government’s aggressive (if not reckless) immigration policy, which in 2023 alone saw 469,000 new permanent residents admitted and over one million foreign student visas approved.

The staffing boom at Employment and Social Development Canada likely reflects the establishment of new social programs such as the Canada Child Benefit, Canada Dental Care Plan and various housing benefits.

For the CRA we can safely say that at least some of the expansion is owing to government efforts to track the underground economy and collect more tax revenue to pay for its agenda.

The increase at Public Services and Procurement Canada may have been caused by the urgent need during the pandemic to acquire mass quantities of everything from masks to vaccines. The rationale for the spike at Fisheries and Oceans is less obvious.

The peculiar case of the PCO 

Looking beyond the Big Six, however, it is worth pointing out that the Privy Council Office (PCO) – the prime minister’s department – has ballooned by three quarters since Trudeau came to office, from 727 employees in 2015 to nearly 1,300 today.

Historically the PCO – which runs no programs and delivers no public services to Canadians – has been a secretariat of a few hundred people. Today it is 27 per cent larger than the Department of Finance, which is arguably Canada’s most important ministry, responsible for developing the government’s budget, tax and fiscal policies, among other things.

This nearly doubling of the PCO in just a decade is more evidence of the pernicious trend toward prime ministerial government, where collective Cabinet decision-making is replaced by prime ministerial fiat on most issues.

If Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre becomes the next prime minister, as is widely expected, and is serious about reducing the $40-billion federal deficit, trimming the public service payroll – which now runs to $67 billion per year, a staggering 68 per cent increase since 2016 – will have to be in his sights.

While Poilievre should definitely take aim at the Big Six, he also needs to lead by example and cut his own department in half. No Canadian beyond the shadow of the Parliament buildings would notice.

Source: Deconstructing Canada’s ballooning $67-billion federal bureaucracy

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Beech | The federal government is spending millions fighting a discrimination suit by Black employees. This is what it should do instead

2024/11/22 Leave a comment

Reminder that the public sector employment equity numbers for the past 6 years have shown Black Canadians having better hiring, promotion and separation outcomes than whites and most visible minority groups (Executive Diversity within the Public Service: An Accelerating Trend and How well is the government meeting its diversity targets? An intersectionality analysis):

…Knowledge of Canada’s legacy of racism against Black, Indigenous and other people of colour needs to become as mainstream as the multiculturalism that masks its existence.

Acknowledging anti-Black racism while simultaneously attempting to dismiss a class action lawsuit about anti-Black racism within the federal public service is an example of the paradox of progress that fuels the relentless cycle of performative politics. Working conditions in the federal public service are so hostile toward Black employees that it led to mental health challenges resulting in the use of antidepressants and suicide attempts.

More broadly, what are Black Canadians supposed to feel when a federal government seems so keen to avoid taking responsibility for bigotry in its own service? If we truly want to become the Canada we claim to be, and who Canadians believe themselves to be, we must live up to our stated ideals.

The federal government must stop fighting for a dismissal, and the Federal Court should greenlight the lawsuit and reckon with this country’s legacy of anti-Black racism. Only then can we build a future rooted in truth, transparency, equity and inclusion. Until then, Canada will remain a hostile homeland.

Source: Opinion | The federal government is spending millions fighting a discrimination suit by Black employees. This is what it should do instead

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Public service job cuts loom as Ottawa misses spending and deficit targets

2024/11/18 Leave a comment

Will likely be brutal with a change in government:

…Some argue part of the problem is today’s bureaucrats aren’t used to austerity and have only known growth for the past decade.

Today’s leaders may have been in the public service during the Harper government’s downsizing, but few were in senior positions directly responsible for managing those cuts. Back then, the government did regular strategic reviews, which were key to identifying budget cuts and the thousands of jobs that were eliminated. The Liberals had pledged a similar strategic review in their election platform, but it has yet to materialize, leaving some to question how prepared departments are to tackle current fiscal pressures.

It’s unclear what progress the government had made on these reductions. In fact, a PBO report that tracked the Liberals various spending reviews flagged the difficulty tracking the “overall plans, progress, and results” because there is no central document publicly available…

“There’s a coming squeeze here…and something has to give,” said Khan. A Liberal or a Conservative government in the future is “going to face the same stark choice. Before you cut programs that people want or need, the outsized growth of the public service has to be on the table. The unions will face this no matter who’s in power. It’s not going to go away.”

Source: Public service job cuts loom as Ottawa misses spending and deficit targets

Filed under Government Tagged with , , ,

Layoffs on the table for permanent government employees as part of spending review

2024/11/11 Leave a comment

These will be mild compared to what is likely coming under a likely Conservative government:

The federal government has been looking for ways to tighten its budget and curb the size of the public service, which has swelled in recent years. While the Liberal government has said it would do so through attrition and hiring freezes, cutting the jobs of permanent government employees wasn’t on the table.

But Canada’s biggest public sector union, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), says that no longer seems to be the case.

During a meeting on Thursday between Treasury Board officials and PSAC, the union said it was told the government will be  “widening the net” to reduce its spending, looking to cut term and casual employees and “opening the door for departments to slash permanent employees” through layoffs.

The union said the Liberal government has assigned budget reduction targets “in salary line items” to federal departments. But it has not released those targets, claiming they were protected under Cabinet privilege and would only be made public in June 2025.

“It’s just really disappointing that, once again, there’s this doublespeak from the federal government,” said PSAC’s national executive vice-president Alex Silas, who noted that the government said the meeting was not a consultation.

Silas said the idea of cutting casual and term positions “is bad enough,” but the idea of cutting permanent positions is “shameful.” He said there was a lack of detail in the government’s presentation about the potential cuts, but that departments and agencies were coming up with their own plans and were “encouraged” to consult with unions.

In April, the federal government announced it would seek to cut the size of the public service by 5,000 full-time positions primarily through natural attrition over the course of four years, as part of an effort to save $15.8 billion over five years and reallocate it elsewhere.

According to the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, the size of the public service in 2024 is 367,772—up from 300,450 in 2020….

Source: Layoffs on the table for permanent government employees as part of spending review

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Number of federal executives grew by 42% since 2015 under Trudeau Liberals

2024/10/23 Leave a comment

Not sure whether this reflects time-challenged journalist that simply report what an organization says, or whether this reflects synergies between Postmedia and right leaning organizations.

The percentage of executives in the public service is largely unchanged since 2015, the last year of the Harper government: 3 percent:

The Trudeau Liberals added thousands of executives to the ranks of Canada’s public servants since 2015, government documents reveal.

According to human resources statistics published online by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Canada currently employs 9,155 public servants in the executive categories, responsible for interpreting policy and managing government departments and agencies.

That’s up from the 6,340 executives recorded in 2015….

Source: Number of federal executives grew by 42% since 2015 under Trudeau Liberals

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Federal public servants are to report back to the office again. Their bosses say they mean it this time

2024/09/11 Leave a comment

Unlikely that DM messaging will convince many and the unions risk attracting negative reactions given the prevailing practices in the private sector and setting the stage for even more rocky relations should, as likely, the Conservatives form the next government:

…A 2023 survey by Capterra found that 69 per cent of Canada’s hybrid workers are onsite two to three days per week; about 25 per cent have mandatory in-office days. In the U.S., Gallup found that 50 per cent are structured hybrid, with 22 per cent onsite a minimum number of days and 40 per cent are in the office 2-3 days per week.

But the government is different from the profit-and-loss-driven private sector. A non-partisan public service is built on an attachment to a mission, a public service ethos that Fox argues is best instilled by teamwork and working together.

The issue goes beyond worker and management rights. It goes to the core role of the public service.

Fox worries the sense of mission – which shone in the public service during the pandemic – will be lost if employees aren’t working together enough, raising questions whether they could handle another crisis on that scale.

“I think we do see a gap where people are not spending enough time together. That is big in terms of culture, and you’re not going to see productivity data (showing) how well you’re doing culturally,” said Fox.

The bureaucracy has also grown like gangbusters, with 80,000 people added over the past few years – many of whom haven’t worked in an office and haven’t been introduced to the culture in-person.

“There’s a risk that connections would be harder to establish in a crisis moment without that a basis of relationships and teamwork and things we had done together,” said Fox.

The compliance protocol for the return to office is onerous, with a heavy emphasis on protecting employees’ privacy while monitoring metrics like entry-card swipes at turnstiles and computer login locations.

The burden falls on front-line managers and supervisors, some of whom are not themselves keen on the mandate. Many of them, too, would prefer more freedom and flexibility and now must track daily attendance and ensure employees are where they should be, whether working in the office or from home.

Managers are expected to take daily attendance. The results will be compiled for bosses to monitor. If they spot anything that requires looking at specific employees, a whole process kicks in that can involve union representatives and privacy officials.

And those who fail to comply will face progressive discipline, including a warning, verbal and written reprimands, suspension without pay and, finally, dismissal.

It’s unclear how deep the resistance to the mandate runs. But what is clear is that the kind of workplace they are returning to has changed dramatically. Offices are being retrofitted or have disappeared entirely as the government pushes to cut its real estate portfolio in half.

While some junior employees have never worked in an office, others are going to  to workspaces with no assigned seating and personal space. Desks must be booked. Raffles are sometimes held to see who works on what day with their team to ensure there’s office space. Many pack up their equipment as they shuffle between office and home.

It’s a perfect storm for discontent.

At the same time, as one senior bureaucrat underscored, there may soon be a change of government. With Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s argument that the public service is too big and broken, the question won’t be whether they are at home or the office but rather whether they still have a job.

The Conservatives haven’t said anything about where they stand on return to office. They have been content to let the Liberals take the heat. Meanwhile, Liberals are dodging it by saying this is a public-service decision, not a political one.

Experts have also turned the spotlight on the bureaucracy, saying it is bloated, unable to deliver basic services, and is a drain on the country’s productivity.

Next week, Donald Savoie, one of Canada’s leading scholars on public administration, is releasing his latest book, Speaking Truth to Canadians About Their Public Service. He has long argued the public service has lost its way. The book chronicles how that has happened.

“I believe the federal public service is overstaffed; that it is providing a lower level of service to Canadians and that Canadians are losing trust in the institution,” he wrote. “I argue that it is the responsibility of the public service to provide evidence that I am wrong, not the other way around.”

Fox says that while public perception doesn’t factor directly into the return-to-office decision, decision-makers can’t ignore it, either. “It goes to trust: trust in government, trust in the public service, trust we are working to serve Canadians,” she said.

Source: Federal public servants are to report back to the office again. Their bosses say they mean it this time

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Report highlights strained relationship between public servants and ministers

2024/09/03 Leave a comment

Of interest:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Report highlights strained relationship between public servants and ministers

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →