TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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Welcome to the Functional Government Podcast.
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According to the Pew Research Center, only 47% of Americans think their fellow citizens are morally good.
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Canadians, on the other hand, trust their neighbors.
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92% of us think other Canadians can be trusted.
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Our government gets no such love.
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Less than 50% of us trust the federal government, and only 17% trust politicians.
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And you know what?
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Fair.
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We have plenty of reasons not to.
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Phoenix turned paying civil servants into a$5 billion lottery where the prizes are underpaid, overpaid, and not paid at all.
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A 2020 credential breach that hit 48,000 people happened because nobody thought multi-factor authentication was worth a fraction of a dollar per account.
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And in My Native Quebec, a 2023 rollout of the Société de l'Assurance Automobile du Québec SACS online portal cost more than$1.1 billion, double its projection, with a judge recently ruling that top management knowingly lied to the government for years.
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So it's no surprise that when someone says digital identity, many Canadians think of the one ring.
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Digital identity is a hot potato.
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The Conservatives passed a resolution opposing it.
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They said it would increase surveillance, profiling, and centralized personal data.
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The Liberals went to Parliament and read directly from a script: the government of Canada is not implementing a federal or national digital identification credential.
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The BC Civil Liberties Association calls this kind of work the mother load of all databases.
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So everyone agrees, digital identity is dangerous, nobody's building it, and we can all go home.
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Except Estonia has a single login for government services.
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They save 2% of GDP every year.
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Citizens get five working days back annually.
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You update your address once and every department knows.
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And you get to see what your government knows about you, even more.
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You get to see when the government touches your file by law, a timestamp of who and why that's tamper-proof and available in real time.
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So Estonia is the exception, right?
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Well, Ukraine centralized its government interfaces to something called the DIA app.
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Zelensky campaigned on it.
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It started small with driver's licenses and car registration, and then gradually expanded features.
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And when Russia invaded, the country didn't shut it down, they expanded it.
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It became a tool of digital resilience.
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Within days, Ukraine added services for displaced people, property damage claims, and even reporting enemy movements.
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DIA has 20 million users, 130 services behind a single, secure, multi-factor login, and it even supports passport biometrics.
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And it was built during an act of war.
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Maybe the question isn't whether digital identity is dangerous.
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Maybe the question is what fragmentation is costing us.
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To properly understand this, you need to recognize that digital identity isn't one thing.
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There's authentication, which is proving who you are.
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Each government service has its own username and password.
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And in 2004, the federal government of Canada built a thing called GC Key to try and fix this.
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But the Canada Revenue Agency said, no thanks, we'll build our own.
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And then we added logging in with your bank, which was easier, but it's still weird to trust a private for-profit company with your government login.
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And then the government in 2019 announces Sign In Canada.
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It's now 2026 and the project has been renamed GC Sign In, and it's in pilot with a handful of departments, and the CRA still hasn't joined.
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Budget 2024 allocated$25.1 million to this problem over five years.
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Having so many logins in the current government platform means that hackers only have to find the weakest link.
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It's like having a house of 60 doors.
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You can't guard them all properly.
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In 2020, a credential stuffing attack compromised 48,000 Canadians.
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Social insurance numbers, banking details, tax returns.
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One victim had$40,000 in fraudulent CERB and unemployment insurance claims filed under their identity.
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The CRA sent that person a bill.
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$6,018.97 in taxes and interest on money criminals stole through a government security failure.
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Years later, he's still fighting to clear his name.
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The system hasn't failed us once, it just keeps failing.
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But authentication only proves who you are.
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It doesn't sign you into a service.
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For that, you need something called single sign-on.
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If you read the fine print on GC Key, it says GC Key is not an account.
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It's just an authentication service.
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You may need to separately register for each individual program and service.
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It even says, do not bookmark pages after you have signed in.
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This makes government services really hard to navigate, and plenty of people profit from that complexity.
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Tax filing services that charge you to navigate CRA's labyrinth.
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Immigration consultants who charge you thousands because the process is deliberately opaque.
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Grant writers extracting money from impossible programs.
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These people aren't adding value, they're extracting rent from the friction that exists within our government services.
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In a well-designed system, your taxes would be automatic.
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The government already knows what you earned.
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You wouldn't need an expert to tell you which benefits you qualify, because the system would tell you.
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But we've built something so complicated that navigating it has become an industry.
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And it costs us billions of dollars and years of human life.
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Then there's the next problem single source of truth.
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Once you're authenticated, so I know who you are, and you're authorized, so I know what you can do, I need to clean things up.
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I need one authoritative record of something like your address, rather than dozens of outdated records scattered across departments.
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That's hard too, because in Canada we have a law preventing departments from sharing information with one another unless it's necessary.
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That law was written around the time we invented the internet, before we knew every citizen would have apps in their pockets.
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And this means that when you update your address of the CRA or Service Canada or Canada Post or your bank or any one of dozens of other services, nothing is in sync.
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In fact, you become the synchronization layer.
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We have over 200 portals with 60 separate logins.
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That means 60 separate security perimeters to guard and 60 separate copies of your personal information, each one out of date because you haven't updated it yet.
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And there's a final piece to this digital identity thing, which is ask me once.
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Ask me once is a policy in some countries that says the government may only ask you once for a piece of information.
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That only works if there's a single source of truth.
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It doesn't work if your address is in ten places.
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But what it does is force government apps to work better.
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When you have a baby, you register the birth of the province, you apply for a social insurance number, you update your taxes for the Child Canada benefit, apply for parental leave through EI, update your health card, and three other things you'll forget until a letter arrives demanding to know why you didn't.
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In Estonia, you register the birth once.
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Benefits arrive.
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It's called the once-only principle.
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It's law.
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The government cannot ask you for information it already has.
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You tell them once.
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Every department that needs it queries the authoritative source.
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No copies, no re-entering data, no separately update your address with each department.
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The UK does this too.
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When someone dies in England, the family notifies once, and 2.4 million updates flow automatically to partner organizations every year.
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Meanwhile, here in Canada, we spend weeks proving to seven departments that we had a baby while caring for that baby.
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Our government treats you like a stranger who might be lying about having a child.
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And then finally, there's access logging, the right to see who's looked at your data and why.
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Except in Canada, we can't have any of these things, and everyone will tell you it's for your privacy.
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Plenty of Canadians think their government is big brother, and they're not wrong.
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The government already knows enormous amount your income, your employment, immigration status, health claims, travel, benefits, debts.
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But you have almost no way to find out what the government knows about you.
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Try writing an access to information request.
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You need to know what you're looking for per department in writing.
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The legal timeline is 30 days to get you an answer, but the actual average is 83 days.
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In Ontario, it's 182 days, and adjudicators found 59% of cases involve wrongful withholding.
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The Globe and Mail called this a broken affront to democracy.
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The current system gives the government maximum access to your information, and it gives you nearly zero visibility into what it has.
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And yet somehow, thanks to a bunch of special interest groups, we've been convinced that chopping it all up protects our privacy when in fact it makes it easier for the government to hide it.
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In Estonia, when a government employee accesses your file, you see it.
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In real time, time stamped and tamper proof.
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That's not Big Brother watching you, that's you watching Big Brother.
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We built the opposite.
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Maximum data collection, minimum citizen visibility, and we called it freedom.
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Countries that implement these systems save 1 to 2% of their GDP.
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For Canada, that's$22 to$40 billion a year.
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Even at a quarter of that, we're talking more than the entire federal housing budget.
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I said at the outset that we trust each other more than other countries, but we don't trust our government.
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It's worse than that.
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The current system erodes the trust we have in each other by forcing us into adversarial relationships with institutions and polarizing us politically.
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The fix isn't a moonshot, it's a login button, a legal framework saying departments must share instead of hoarding, passing laws that make it illegal for the government to ask you for data it already has, and the political will to make the tax authority get on board.
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Political will is the hard part.
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Because the debate we're having, should we build digital identity is the wrong question.
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We already have digital identity.
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It's 60 broken systems, each with your data, none of them talking to each other, none of them letting you see what's inside.
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The real question is whether we want one that works.
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One that gives you visibility into what the government knows about you instead of keeping you blind.
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One that saves you the time and money of proving you exist to department after department, year after year.
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One that costs billions less, delivers billions more, and gives you back your life.
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Right now we're choosing 60 passwords and calling it freedom.
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Thanks for joining us on the Functional Government Podcast.