The wisdom to know the difference

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Hard things are hard.
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Today I want to talk about why.
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When you dig into it or open up the hood, there are a lot of issues.
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What can we change?
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You can change the basic premise from it's the government's data to it is the citizens' data.
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Are we just burying our head in the sand at this point?
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I think more than one thing can be true.
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Welcome to the Functional Government Podcast.
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In 1992, Michael Wernick sat in a room with politicians, indigenous leaders, and provincial premiers trying to write a constitutional deal that would hold Canada together.
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The Charlottetown Accord was the second attempt, after Meach Lake collapsed, to bring Quebec into the constitutional fold.
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It went to a national referendum, and Canadians said no.
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Three years later, as Assistant Secretary for Constitutional Affairs, Michael Wernick watched Quebec come within a percentage point of voting to leave Canada entirely.
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That's the sort of experience that will teach you which parts of the machinery of government you can change and which parts are bolted to the floor.
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Wernick spent 38 years inside the federal government.
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He started in finance in 1981 and eventually became Canada's 23rd clerk of the Privy Council, the most senior public servant in the country.
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He retired in 2019, and now he's arguing the machinery is overdue for an overhaul.
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But he draws a line that most reformers don't.
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Wernick uses a metaphor.
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Anyone who's struggled with an old computer will recognize some of what's wrong with government is like software.
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Procurement that takes years to buy things the private sector buys in weeks.
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HR practices that make it nearly impossible to move the right people into the right jobs and hold them accountable.
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Org charts that don't make sense in a digital world.
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These things can be rewritten.
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Other problems are hardware, the Constitution, the division of powers between federal and provincial governments, the architecture of the Senate, the conventions of responsible government.
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You don't rewrite hardware, you live with it.
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Try to change it, and you open a process so consuming it can burn through a generation of political energy and still fail.
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Wernick knows this because he tried.
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He watched two of the most ambitious consensus-building exercises in Canadian history come apart from the inside.
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In a Globe and Mail essay, he called launching the new round of constitutional reform a terrible idea.
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Not because reform isn't needed, but because you cannot open one question without opening them all.
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Every stakeholder arrives with a different list, and consensus becomes a mirage.
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I've wanted to talk to Michael Wernick about dysfunctioning government since we launched this podcast, and I finally got my chance.
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In our conversation, Wernick is candid, specific, and occasionally blunt in a way that serving public servants cannot afford to be.
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He spent nearly four decades learning the difference between the things the government chooses to do and the things it's stuck with.
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And most people, including most politicians, don't know which is which.
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Hi, Michael.
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Hi, thanks for inviting me.
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Thank you so much for being here.
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Before we get into the questions, at Ford 50 a couple of years ago, we made some t-shirts that read, I'm not speaking at a professional capacity.
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And they had a QR code leading to the free speech section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms with the text, We fix problems by talking about them.
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So I was delighted to learn when researching this that you'd told the Hill Times, you can't fix a problem if you aren't willing to talk about it.
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Since you left your position, you've been speaking a lot about topics that are often taboo.
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In preparing for this, you repeated a common refrain from many of your public appearances.
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Hard things are hard.
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And I guess today I want to talk about why.
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When someone hears hard things are hard, the natural response is, okay, but Estonia did it.
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Singapore did it.
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Why can't we?
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Okay.
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Uh well, there's a couple of things there maybe we can dig into.
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I would I would start with Estonia and Singapore, because I always bristle when I hear them as examples.
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Don't get me wrong, I think Canada always should be out listening and finding out what's going on in other countries and other societies, and you can you can take lessons for what went well and what went badly and try to bring them back to Canada.
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Uh I just keep insisting that ultimately you have to then implant them in the soil of Canada, and part of that is and make them work here.
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Canada is a fairly unique kind of political entity or governance entity, which you know, which means that uh to get things done, you have to do them in a very Canadian way.
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So the analogy I would I borrow from tech is there's firmware in Canada, and the firmware is that we're a federation and we're a parliamentary democracy.
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Uh, and that means you know things work differently.
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The Nordics and Estonia and Singapore are all admirable, but they're they're essentially micro-states.
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They don't have strong provinces, states, or municipal governments.
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There's no division of powers issues to worry about.
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Uh, but we do have that.
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And uh, you know, we we we have a system where the executive is very much accountable uh to parliament, which passes laws and grants resources.
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So a lot of governing is the interaction of ministers and public servants with parliament.
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And you know, we can talk a little bit about that.
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Again, borrowing the metaphor, if you want to update the software of legislation and regulation, you're going to have to involve the political actors as well.
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That's that's one of the one of the topics perhaps we could talk about.
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For sure.
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And I mean, Estonia only has 68% of the population of urban Montreal.
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Zelensky very specifically and explicitly made government on your phone a campaign promise.
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And in Ukraine, you know, the national government controls driver's licenses and registrations.
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So, as you said, we have this sort of firmware that we have to build things atop.
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It reminds me of the Serenity Prayer that says, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change I think the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
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So I guess I want to start with the things that we cannot change.
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You worked in the Constitutional Affairs Unit of the Federal Provincial Relations Office, which later became part of the Privy Council.
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Clearly, you know how hard it is to try to change the firmware or the fundamental structures.
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And in 2023, I think you said that it would be a terrible idea to try and revisit the Charlatan Accord.
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So for critics who say just do what Singapore did, they're basically asking us to reopen the Constitution.
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Are you saying we should just accept that we can't have that and move on with it?
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Well, I think even before we got into uh living in the era of of Trump and the autocrats and so on, I argued it was a bad idea to take very scarce attention and focus and energy of our political class and put them into constitutional reform.
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There'd be enormous cost with uh not a lot of of chance of success ultimately.
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It is extremely difficult to amend the Canadian Constitution and it cost an enormous amount of political capital and energy.
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And I went through some of that in the 1980s and 1990s.
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I would rather our political class was focused on climate and energy transition and security and you know, poverty, and you know, sort of immediate issues.
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So I think ultimately you just have to accept there are divisions of power as issues where employment insurance is a federal thing, but social assistance is a provincial thing.
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Many examples like that, that health and education are largely delivered by provincial governments, traffic, waste management, congestion, a lot of you know issues that are important to the environmental agenda are really decided at the city level.
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So you just have to, I think we're condemned to collaborate.
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We just have to find ways that different levels of government are going to work together to get back on topic.
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I mean, that has been a challenge for things like uh digital ID.
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We saw during the pandemic, not a lot of good examples of collaboration across provincial boundaries on mobility trackers and that sort of thing.
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So, but there are some successes.
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And uh so I think people that work in the digital government space have to be good at partnering and forming alliances and looking for solutions that are more about interoperability and mobility rather than here is the one big ring to rule them all.
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I mean, you named it there.
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It seems like for most of the countries that we've spoken with, they begin with basic government services that citizens access every day because those are the most easy to authenticate.
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So taxation, which obviously is split between the federal and the provincial uh levels, but most often it's things like driver's licenses.
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Ukraine's application began with your driver's license and car registration.
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So, I mean, if that's our firmware and we're sort of inheriting this Westminster model of parallel, often redundant systems, what can we change?
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It depends on the area you're looking at.
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I mean, you know, uh in the area of identification, you often find that one form of ID validates another.
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You use your your you know, your birth certificate to validate your uh passport, you use your passport to validate your application for health card and so on.
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I think there are ways of ironing out and finding sort of digital wallets and identity tools that make those processes easier for citizens at the, you know, at the service end of things.
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I think that there are there are quite a lot of things that governments can do to improve the service windows so that it doesn't really matter whether it's a federal or provincial or municipal service.
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You want to travel, there are certain things you need to go.
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And you know, you can find external service windows that are that are more integrated.
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Uh there was actually a lot of progress on this agenda through things like Service Canada and Service Ontario, Service Ottawa, trying to find ways.
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But I, you know, when you when you dig into it or open up the hood, there are there are a lot of issues about interoperability, technical standards, data sharing conventions, and so on.
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So it's actually quite a slog to make these things work well.
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I would say that the other thing about the Canadian context is Canadian society has a very strong and healthy skepticism of the state holding our information.
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I mean, one of the great historical successes of the last couple of centuries is curbing the arbitrary authority of uh of the state and putting it putting it accountable to citizens.
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So a lot of the current legal software comes from a political and social context, which is worried about Big Brother, about the nanny state, about, you know, what why does government need this information?
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What is it going to do with it?
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And you see lots of examples in the states right now, where ICE, which is supposed to be just dealing with immigration enforcement, is accessing data from veterans' health, from from voter registries.
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The axiom that more sharing across government agencies is always a good thing, depends how much you trust the state.
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And Canadian society wants to see privacy protections and it wants to see recourse and it wants to see reasonable defenses against identity theft and that sort of thing.
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So I guess my common refrain is it's always a little harder than it looks to do this in a way where you keep the trust of citizens who ultimately are the taxpayers and the voters.
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It sounds like some of these bugs are actually features when it comes to protecting your data.
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But it does also strike me as ironic when I look at Estonia, sorry to bring them up again, I can see every piece of data the government has on me and every time it was touched, which seems like a very strong reversal of the sort of big brother state where now you're able to monitor the government rather than the government monitoring you.
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If Canada has such a healthy appetite for privacy protection, why aren't we demanding that from government?
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Well, I think you know, governments are busy and there's a fierce competition for attention and focus.
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And the pace of government gets faster, the number of issues that are crashing in on uh decision makers gets larger and more acute.
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So it I think the biggest competition in in the sort of governance and decision-making world is a competition for attention and focus.
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And it takes it takes effort to get there.
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I mean, to go back to your opening question, there are only 343 MPs and 105 senators who can actually rewrite legislation.
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There are only about 30, 35 people around a cabinet table who set the policy direction of whoever we've elected in the last election and so on.
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Um, and so to get their attention and focus, public servants actually have a fairly privileged access to them.
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There are channels, you know, however bureaucratic, for delivering analysis and advice to decision makers.
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And then there are other channels like appearing at parliamentary committees and, you know, writing op-eds and lobbying and arranging site visits to get into that attention space of, you know, of the people that can actually change some of the fundamental things.
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I'm not making excuses.
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There's a lot of agency that public servants hold and their leaders hold, that I always encourage them to use the space they have.
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Uh, but at some point you're going to get to the point where the macro level allocation of resources is set by budgets and rewriting old, outdated uh legislation, you're going to need parliamentary attention to get that done.
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I think it's very useful to go to your last question.
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The more that elected politicians think this is something citizens care about and they're hearing about it, and they're getting, you know, news stories they read and posts that they come across and people who come in on their see them on Saturday morning and talk about these issues, then they will start to care about it more.
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Otherwise, they're making big assumptions about what Canadians expect from them.
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So uh to challenge the firmware thing a little bit, in 2024, you said in Canadian Public Administration that, and I'm going to quote here, it won't be possible to get a public service fit for purpose on its current foundations and scaffolding.
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So if there are some things we can't change, we have tried to make this a priority.
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We tried with Scott Bryson, then with Jane Philpot, then with Joyce Murray, then with Terry Beach being put in charge of digital services modernization.
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One reason or another, all of those things went away.
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Why didn't that stick?
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I mean, it seems like there was political will to do this stuff, and we certainly set up people with the responsibility for it.
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Yeah, I th I mean I would be a little more generous.
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I mean, they made some progress in some areas, and sometimes you get a burst of energy, especially in response to a political pain point like uh Phoenix or ArriveCan or uh going back older stories like e-health in Ontario, and then there is a political something must be done kind of response.
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What you see over and over again is that that kind of fizzles out after a year or two if you don't have sustained pressure from outside, or a really energetic political champion.
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And I think, you know, I'm not critical of any of those ministers, but basically when you're having elections every two or three years and cabinet shuffles, like you didn't have somebody stay long enough to really imprint any of those areas.
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And it'd be nice to see somebody in the space who really felt uh, you know, their their accountability, the prime minister was, you know, get some get stuff done.
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Uh, I would say that you can change, you know, there's there's a zone which is deep reform.
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You can change the whole premise of the access to information regime from a request-based model, you ask for stuff and people decide how much of it they can give you to an onus to disclose.
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You know, uh in the data world, you can change the basic premise from it's the government's data to it is the citizens' data.
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Those aren't, you know, those are big transitions, but they are available to the parliament if they want to go there.
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So continuing with your analogy, we have a firmware problem.
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Yeah.
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Uh we have a bandwidth problem.
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The CPU of the cabinet and the prime ministers is supposed to be this decision-making body.
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Do you think there's this idea that there's just some magical central power that if you just get its attention, you'd fix everything?
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Yeah.
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I mean, I wouldn't describe them so much as problems as constraints in the equation.
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You have to work in a federation, you have to work in a parliamentary system, you have a little fierce competition for attention and as much as for resources.
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And then you have to try to, you know, try to move forward.
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I mean, the thing about cabinet is it's a collection of 25, 30, you know, people with a portfolio responsibilities, a constellation of departments and agencies, laws that they're accountable to, you know, to deliver and administer, part of the government's uh elector, electoral agenda to implement and so on.
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So, you know, they're they're they're busy uh going uh uh out.
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I think part of the challenge in Canada, I don't know that it's that different in other countries, is the attention's gonna go to a particular policy or service field, like health, like the energy transition, like you know, border management, like a response to the pandemic.
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And then, you know, uh it's the job of the public service managers and leaders to mobilize money, people, information, back, you know, to to advance those agendas.
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You don't often see a lot of attention to state capacity as its own, you know, as its own sort of goal.
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I think we just have to keep lobbying and pressuring for that.
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But I I suspect that the more likely road in is offering solutions to things people care about in the world of education or policing or or health or or or safety and so on.
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Um let's talk about modernization from a public administration standpoint.
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You were the most senior public servant in the government in your role.
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In your recent paper in Canadian Public Administration Journal, you proposed reducing five executive levels down to three, which you said would take three years and require buyouts.
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Is that the kind of reform that we could enact, or is even that too hard to do?
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No, I think that's very doable.
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And I would just put it forward as an example of where you get into a structural issue.
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Uh it's certainly no magic wand uh kind of solution, but I think it's part of an overall attempt to tackle some of the slow-moving, you know, sclerotic nature of bureaucracies, which happen in private sector organizations as well.
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I mean, there's a whole literature on organizational behavior and industrial organization that says you've got to sort of optimize your management layers, not too much, not too little.
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And that, you know, that's true of the public sector as well.
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I mean, it's a good example.
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I'm glad you raised it, because you know, right now what's being privileged is cost savings.
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And, you know, we will last budget said we will get rid of 1,000 of the executive jobs on a base of about 9,000.
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But as far as I can tell, following it, all they really are doing is squeezing the same structure, the same pyramid basically, uh, and and taking out, you know, 15% of the jobs.
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Uh, I would rather they started more from, you know, what kind of executive capacity do you need?
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You know, how many, how many layers were this compensation, you know, uh inversions with you know, senior professionals, you know, and what kind of incentives and performance pay.
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Work work the problem at a deeper level and then implement it.
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And I would just argue, you know, for two or three years to do that because with any project management, once you get started, there's a feedback loop of unintended consequences and surprises, and you need course corrections.
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I think people in the sort of political pundit space think that you can just, you know, implement something on a on a Friday press release and it will get done.
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And then time and time again, you find their unintended consequences and feedback loops.
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So I would just take some of the basic principles of sound project management.
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Uh, and what we learned in the government tech issue, I keep going back to what should be our focus.
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You know, in a lot of those disasters that you know that you know about from the government tech world, what comes out after the fact is an underinvestment in project planning, an underinvestment in training, you know, uh trying to do things on the cheap.
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Every government building and government IT system was the one that the lowest bidder prepared.
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So not necessarily the best.
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And sometimes governments are impatient to get launch or they're impatient to harvest cost savings.
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So I think sometimes you would do what you do in the private sector is that you really would think through the problem, you know, and you would have feedback loops and project management tools to stay on course.
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Yeah, we talked to Lucy Bergeron, who did some fantastic work at Transport Canada in the marine safety group.
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And she actually had change managers in her group whose job it was to actually move the needle in terms of culture and process and so on, and started with like, what is the existing process?
00:20:02.799 --> 00:20:05.359
What data does it have, and only then went into the technology.
00:20:05.599 --> 00:20:07.920
It's a fascinating example that I guess I want to bring up here.
00:20:08.079 --> 00:20:18.240
So government passed this law, the fee, the fee act, that basically said if the if a government department collects a fee, then it has to report on whether it delivered the service it promised, and if not, it has to refund things.
00:20:18.319 --> 00:20:23.440
And Lucy was tasked with implementing this and came up with a universal service that was sort of reusable.
00:20:23.519 --> 00:20:28.000
So now Transport Canada is not just using it for marine safety, but in other departments.
00:20:28.160 --> 00:20:37.680
It seems to me like if the government's about to pass legislation like that fee act, wouldn't it be good if they also said, and we've written the code to implement it?
00:20:37.839 --> 00:20:51.359
Like at what point do we start realizing that government and laws are technology, they are information management, and make the creation of a common component that all of government must use simultaneous with the passage of a law?
00:20:51.519 --> 00:20:57.599
It seems like that would go a long way to standardizing things and overcoming the sort of not invented here problem that we have right now.
00:20:57.920 --> 00:21:00.000
Yeah, I think you can aspire towards that.
00:21:00.160 --> 00:21:04.960
But again, it, you know, it's sort of baked in that it tends to be more sequential than that.
00:21:05.119 --> 00:21:11.039
I mean, you will get a policy decision and maybe a financial decision, uh, you know, to proceed in with something.
00:21:11.200 --> 00:21:18.400
And then you'll spend several months, in some cases longer, grinding through parliament to get the statutory language adopted.
00:21:18.559 --> 00:21:23.440
And then you find there's an operational issue in terms of regulations to implement it.
00:21:23.519 --> 00:21:28.079
That's done through a separate and very transparent process with loads of public input.
00:21:28.319 --> 00:21:31.519
You may have to hire people to do the job that you've created.
00:21:31.680 --> 00:21:34.160
We're seeing that with the Foreign Interference Commissioner right now.
00:21:34.319 --> 00:21:35.920
So, you know, it is very sequential.
00:21:36.000 --> 00:22:15.759
And I think, you know, what you what you you what you can do is try to shift to some parallel processing so that people that are working on implementation and tech issues and information, you know, um, or information systems are at multidisciplinary tables, virtual or real, with people that are doing the human resources and the staffing and the hiring or to the physical facilities or the regul, you know, but so and Any sort of medium to large size reform, you end up with sort of multidisciplinary teams, and you try to, you know, you try to implement it as in a kind of project management Gantt chart style way, with as many things going on in parallel overseen by somebody.
00:22:15.920 --> 00:22:19.279
The example I use with students a lot is cannabis legalization.
00:22:19.519 --> 00:22:25.440
You know, it's getting a bit old now, but you know, that that was 16 words in the Liberal Party election platform.
00:22:25.759 --> 00:22:32.079
They arrive in power and you know they they decide that they want to get it done roughly in 2018.
00:22:32.160 --> 00:22:33.039
And then you work.
00:22:33.200 --> 00:22:35.759
There were many, many, many aspects of implementing that.
00:22:36.000 --> 00:22:37.920
And then there were feedback loops after the fact.
00:22:38.079 --> 00:22:44.400
So I think to borrow another tech metaphor, good governance and delivery is a kind of learning software.
00:22:44.559 --> 00:22:48.559
It's not like you go to cabinet or you go to parliament and you've emerged with perfection.
00:22:48.640 --> 00:22:56.400
You've emerged with your, you know, your early version and it will has to survive contact with reality and implementation issues.
00:22:56.640 --> 00:23:08.559
We rely a lot on audits, on officers, watchdogs like the privacy commissioner or the auditor general, the parliamentary budget officer to do a lot of ex post examination.
00:23:08.720 --> 00:23:17.759
And I think that's another area where we, you know, governments just have to learn the lessons more quickly, perhaps in a more gated way and apply them faster.
00:23:18.079 --> 00:23:22.960
You don't have the luxury of acquiring 10 years of experience before you go back.
00:23:23.359 --> 00:23:30.160
I like the idea that now that we're building these things as more like software where you're sort of releasing the first version and then updating it.
00:23:30.319 --> 00:23:39.759
It does seem like many of the laws that we've implemented seem to be written in a vacuum and then kind of thrown over the wall to be digitally implemented and often make assumptions about how tools are built.
00:23:39.839 --> 00:23:44.079
And there's certainly a political climate where the opposition is going to say, why did your thing not work?
00:23:44.240 --> 00:23:48.000
And it's hard to say, well, that was our minimum viable product or our first iteration.
00:23:48.240 --> 00:23:50.480
And there needs to be sort of more of a tolerance for that.
00:23:50.640 --> 00:23:57.440
So we had uh Professor uh Emily Tavalirias uh from Georgetown speak at Forward 50 last November, and she had this great quote.
00:23:57.519 --> 00:24:01.200
She said, Technology has become the spinal cord of government.
00:24:01.359 --> 00:24:10.480
Technical infrastructure is now the infrastructure of everything and can accelerate or obstruct policy goals, but the policy establishment has struggled to accept this.
00:24:10.720 --> 00:24:13.680
Do you feel like policymakers need to be technically illiterate?
00:24:13.839 --> 00:24:16.079
I mean, we have language tests for French and English.
00:24:16.240 --> 00:24:17.599
Should we have a digital language test?
00:24:18.000 --> 00:24:25.680
I mean, I I guess I agree that a degree of digital literacy or numeracy is a good thing to have.
00:24:25.839 --> 00:24:29.759
I don't think you have to be a specialist or a coder to be effective.
00:24:29.920 --> 00:24:33.119
Uh, you know, uh uh it kind of depends on the role you play.
00:24:33.200 --> 00:24:45.599
Uh to go back to an you know an earlier question, you may be there because you're really there to drive an agenda related to the energy transition or indigenous conciliation or or border security.
00:24:45.759 --> 00:24:51.359
That's what you're you're really there is to organize work, whether it's policy development or policy implementation.
00:24:51.519 --> 00:24:57.839
So you're managing how to put people and money and information together effectively.
00:24:58.000 --> 00:25:02.319
I think, yes, some degree of training and literacy uh, you know, it helps.
00:25:02.640 --> 00:25:07.519
Um, you know, I ran a big government department for eight years.
00:25:07.759 --> 00:25:25.200
I didn't need to be the CIO and I didn't need to be the CFO, and I didn't need to be the head of legal services, but I had to have enough knowledge of what they did and their world in order to ask good questions and put them together and you know, coming to a view as an organization where we wanted to go.
00:25:25.279 --> 00:25:34.160
Well, there's been a lot of experimentation in the government of Canada, as you would know, over the last 10 years with chief digital officers, chief information officers.
00:25:34.400 --> 00:25:38.640
Other people want to have chief risk officers, chief operating officers.
00:25:38.720 --> 00:25:40.880
At some point, the management table gets pretty crowded.
00:25:41.119 --> 00:25:45.920
I'd give a shout out to the efforts at the Canada School to have a digital academy.
00:25:46.000 --> 00:25:54.480
Uh, there have been efforts now with AI, generative AI really catching people's attention in partnership with uh with other, you know, some of the think tanks.
00:25:54.559 --> 00:25:59.519
There are thousands of public servants have had some rudimentary AI training over the last year or two and so on.
00:25:59.599 --> 00:26:02.160
So again, it's a kind of a learning software metaphor.
00:26:02.319 --> 00:26:05.119
I don't know about the badging, you know, uh, sure.
00:26:05.279 --> 00:26:14.799
I mean, I think if you create badges and micro-credentials that people can put on their CVs and make them competitive for advancement and promotion, people respond to that.
00:26:15.039 --> 00:26:38.720
What we tried to do in a lot of areas was connect to professional certifications and credentials that people would recognize, international or North American Canadian standards in project management or real property or audit, or so I think I would connect to external certifications that people recognize and count on sort of competition and advance, you know, to get there.
00:26:38.960 --> 00:26:41.680
I don't know how you'd keep the courseware current.
00:26:42.000 --> 00:26:46.559
Course five years ago didn't talk about generative AI the way that a course this year would, and so on.
00:26:46.640 --> 00:26:50.000
So um, you know, it's it's about continuous learning.
00:26:50.160 --> 00:26:57.759
I mean, you can't come in as a 24-year-old with a master's degree and coast off what you knew for, you know, for thir the next 35 years.
00:26:58.000 --> 00:27:06.960
Uh effective governments have to have this kind of learning infrastructure that makes sure that uh that people have access to new knowledge and new experiences.
00:27:07.359 --> 00:27:15.599
I want to come back to something you said earlier about many people at the table, each of them there to solve the problem, but each with an agenda for energy reconciliation, whatever that might be.
00:27:16.240 --> 00:27:18.240
In a 2024 paper for the C.D.
00:27:18.319 --> 00:27:23.680
Howe Institute, you said that progressives need to understand that efficiency improvements may lead to job losses.
00:27:23.839 --> 00:27:36.079
And the conservatives need to acknowledge that you have to invest in state capabilities, even if it costs money up front, which sounds like neither side actually wants the kind of reform because both of them have a challenge there.
00:27:36.240 --> 00:27:38.079
So let's talk a bit about alignment.
00:27:38.319 --> 00:27:42.960
Our current political discourse seems to be the opposition's job is to oppose everything.
00:27:43.119 --> 00:27:49.359
Do you think we can get alignment on these issues across the partisanship that exists in politics today?
00:27:49.759 --> 00:27:53.279
I remain guardedly optimistic it is possible.
00:27:53.599 --> 00:28:00.240
It's not inevitable, but I don't believe that the drift to sort of mindless polarization is inevitable either.
00:28:00.400 --> 00:28:08.160
These are choices that politicians make as to what they think is a winning political strategy, you know, and you know, to be repetitive.
00:28:08.480 --> 00:28:22.319
Canadians generally want their governments to work together, either across party allegiances in the legislature or across, you know, uh federal provincial jurisdictional boundaries, bashing your opponents or bashing Ottawa.
00:28:22.640 --> 00:28:25.519
It can pay off in the short term, but it doesn't pay off in the long term.
00:28:25.680 --> 00:28:29.200
So politicians are often aligned on the fundamentals.
00:28:29.359 --> 00:28:39.359
You know, they want Canada to be safer, they want it to be more prosperous, they want to see economic opportunity spread more broadly across geography and across society.
00:28:39.519 --> 00:28:43.200
They differ on ideology and policy and the role of government and all that.
00:28:43.279 --> 00:28:50.319
But when you look at, you know, across the world, it's probably like across two octaves of the ideological piano and not four.
00:28:50.480 --> 00:28:55.759
So yeah, those sound like pretty safe things, like everybody wants, you know, prosperity, health, happiness, whatever.
00:28:56.799 --> 00:29:01.119
But that doesn't necessarily mean that we're comfortable making difficult decisions or sacrifices.
00:29:01.440 --> 00:29:02.559
Well, I no, I agree.
00:29:02.640 --> 00:29:10.799
And and and uh, you know, I'm taking full advantage of being outside of government and and being able to write and say things in a more direct language.
00:29:10.960 --> 00:29:19.680
You see positional and performative politics, which is trying to play gotcha games when you're in opposition and trying to be defensive when you're in government.
00:29:19.920 --> 00:29:22.720
But most politicians go into it for the right reasons.
00:29:22.799 --> 00:29:23.920
They want to make things better.
00:29:24.000 --> 00:29:25.519
They have different views about how to get there.
00:29:25.680 --> 00:29:35.119
And I think we have to just appeal, especially in this window in 2026, about where the, you know, the very existence of the country is a question mark to their better natures.
00:29:35.200 --> 00:29:41.839
And I guess my point is it's relatively easy to put housing on the agenda or infrastructure or energy.
00:29:42.000 --> 00:29:51.519
I'm just doing my best to put state capacity on the agenda, that there are certain enablers in terms of policy development and delivery which apply across a broad range of challenges.
00:29:51.680 --> 00:30:02.000
And to go back to the old analogy, a lot of the, you know, the structural issues within the public service and the governance are kind of like trying to do this on Windows 95.
00:30:02.240 --> 00:30:02.640
Yeah.
00:30:03.039 --> 00:30:06.400
Let's talk about old software since government policy is software.
00:30:06.559 --> 00:30:10.400
The Privacy Act from 1984, you know, which you've said, hey, good job.
00:30:10.480 --> 00:30:11.759
We've defending privacy.
00:30:11.920 --> 00:30:16.960
But it was really written for a time when there was no expectation that a citizen would access their data directly.
00:30:17.200 --> 00:30:23.839
You'd go into the office or make a phone call or further letter, and someone would read your letter, and they'd sit at a keyboard for whatever particular service they were using.
00:30:24.000 --> 00:30:36.400
And the siloed nature of departments, you know, each of them saying, I want to procure a turnkey system for maritime safety or passports or whatever, rather than getting a half-finished solution, meant that we have these very siloed systems.
00:30:36.559 --> 00:30:43.440
That today there are 270 different government services online with 60 different logins run by 30 different departments.
00:30:43.599 --> 00:30:46.640
There's even a page just telling you where these things are.
00:30:46.799 --> 00:30:53.759
And yet many departments cite this as a reason why it's okay to have dozens of your addresses spread across a dozen servers.
00:30:53.920 --> 00:31:00.000
So you live in a world today where, I mean, I have friends in Montreal who are simply trying to change the address of their business.
00:31:00.160 --> 00:31:08.559
And it's taken them six months and thousands of dollars in legal fees, and they can't do that because each one is sort of referring back to another that's out of date.
00:31:08.640 --> 00:31:21.119
And rules around data sharing and the privacy act and pipita that were set up in a time before everybody had a terminal in their pocket are really running head-on into delivering services that citizens can use easily.
00:31:21.279 --> 00:31:23.599
So how do we update that software?
00:31:23.920 --> 00:31:37.200
Yeah, I mean, I would start with it'll it'll be up to Parliament and getting, you know, those kinds of bills on the agenda and trying to define some balance points between sharing and need-to-know kind of approaches.
00:31:37.359 --> 00:31:39.519
That's really what you know what Parliament's there to do.
00:31:39.680 --> 00:31:43.440
I think people can put forward, you know, what is the problem that you're trying to solve?
00:31:43.599 --> 00:31:45.200
You did a good gave a good example of that.
00:31:45.279 --> 00:31:50.240
You know, where is this a barrier to better service or to uh productivity or or whatever?
00:31:50.480 --> 00:31:57.279
I would just I'll make a little bit of a jump because there's a paradox in terms of theories of how you make things better.
00:31:57.440 --> 00:32:16.799
It's pretty commonplace for people to argue the way to get innovation is to remove the shackles, get rid of the rules, let a thousand flowers bloom, you know, let departments and agencies just, you know, control their own budgets and procurement and innovate their way to solutions.
00:32:16.960 --> 00:32:21.680
Um, and and that goes with the sort of natural bureaucratic turf and autonomy.
00:32:21.839 --> 00:32:26.799
We're the RCMP, we're the Border Services Agency, we know our business, don't tell us how to do it.
00:32:26.960 --> 00:32:31.200
So there is a very strong kind of decentralizing kind of impulse.
00:32:31.440 --> 00:32:43.359
I'm in another camp, which you know, you use your question to jump into, which is sometimes the way to do that is you just have to say there's certain standards and norms which are not negotiable.
00:32:44.000 --> 00:32:46.319
And we we've seen governments try to do that.
00:32:46.480 --> 00:32:50.400
The CRA flat out refuse to use the same single site-on as anyone else.
00:32:50.799 --> 00:32:52.960
Well, I think this gets to the Westminster thing.
00:32:53.119 --> 00:33:00.960
I mean, ultimately the Prime Minister can make the Treasury Board the chief operating officer that can back them up on more stringent standards.
00:33:01.359 --> 00:33:03.119
But not for agencies, as I understand it.
00:33:03.359 --> 00:33:04.000
Well, you can.
00:33:04.079 --> 00:33:05.839
I mean, you can do whatever you want.
00:33:06.160 --> 00:33:11.039
That's just a matter of changing the laws and saying, you know, these apply to this list of agencies.
00:33:11.200 --> 00:33:11.440
Okay.
00:33:12.319 --> 00:33:19.279
The big players tend to seek out autonomy and exempt themselves from these things and plead special, special, special purposes.
00:33:19.359 --> 00:33:33.359
And that tends over time to penalize the smaller agencies, and that's a lot of government, who just don't have the clout to go to Treasury Board or to, you know, to argue, and they end up sort of like the pilot fish following the big whales and so on.
00:33:33.440 --> 00:33:38.000
And I come from a time when there were clusters built around particular tech vendors.
00:33:38.079 --> 00:33:42.799
You know, there was an SAP cluster and an Oracle cluster and a Microsoft cluster and so on.
00:33:42.960 --> 00:33:53.759
So I'm more in the camp that says part of the job of the CIO or the Treasury Board people, who are the management board of government for your listeners, is to say some things are not negotiable.
00:33:53.839 --> 00:34:02.559
Uh, you have to serve in both official languages, you have to meet certain standards on accessibility for people with the visual and hearing disabilities and so on.
00:34:02.720 --> 00:34:10.800
And there are standards of data portability and cybersecurity and you know, and protections that you have to meet, and they're not negotiable.
00:34:10.960 --> 00:34:13.840
Within that sandbox, so to speak, innovate.
00:34:14.000 --> 00:34:17.599
But you can't just go and build new silos and customization.
00:34:17.840 --> 00:34:23.119
I'm attracted to a lot of the literature around platform land and platform government and not.
00:34:23.599 --> 00:34:27.679
This is definitely David David Eves had a great talk about this uh in January.
00:34:27.840 --> 00:34:33.519
This idea that it's okay to use a product like Amazon S3 because it is the dominant product.
00:34:33.599 --> 00:34:42.320
But what you do is you build to the standard that that thing supports, and therefore you're not beholden to a particular vendor, but you have locked in a standard and said, this is what we will do.
00:34:42.480 --> 00:34:42.559
Yeah.
00:34:42.800 --> 00:34:44.880
But it's, I think it's more about the standards.
00:34:44.960 --> 00:34:49.920
And it's tricky stuff because it's very difficult to just pivot and and start all afresh.
00:34:50.079 --> 00:35:03.599
If you know, if the government is heavily, heavily invested in Microsoft suites and implementation and they've trained their staff how to use them and operate them, you can't just sort of come in and say, forget about that, we're moving to a completely different platform.
00:35:03.760 --> 00:35:07.920
We've seen that go very badly, you know, even at a smaller scale.
00:35:08.000 --> 00:35:16.000
So there is a real risk of vendor capture or and these days about worries about dependency on non-Canadian vendors.
00:35:16.079 --> 00:35:17.599
Uh, that presents certain issues.
00:35:17.760 --> 00:35:28.800
But uh, you know, I come from a time when a sort of made in Canada, let's use Canadian champions like Corel and BlackBerry worked well for a while, but it as a long run play, it didn't work well at all.
00:35:29.199 --> 00:35:34.960
Uh there just wasn't enough to keep Blackberry near the front of, you know, the front of the pack.
00:35:35.119 --> 00:35:41.920
I I remember a period, no disrespect to BlackBerry, but I would have rather had an iPhone by the time we got to 2009.
00:35:42.239 --> 00:35:46.719
That gets into governance of procurement and ensuring a degree of competition.
00:35:46.880 --> 00:35:50.159
But um I'm I'm I've written about this in other places.
00:35:50.320 --> 00:35:53.599
I'm more in the it's not a loose federation.
00:35:53.760 --> 00:36:03.679
It is one public service, and and there's plenty of room for sort of common standards and norms that are you know just not really negotiable, and then you innovate within those.
00:36:03.840 --> 00:36:17.280
And if that limits the full range of possible innovation, so be it, because there's a price to fragmentation and not being able to move a personnel file from department A to agency B, kind of things that we've lived with in the past.
00:36:17.519 --> 00:36:17.920
Let's go.
00:36:18.079 --> 00:36:31.119
I'm very much into sort of comparability, interoperability, mobility, you know, those sorts of things, because productivity is ultimately about moving money, people, and information to their best use at a faster pace.
00:36:31.519 --> 00:36:32.239
That's a good definition.
00:36:32.400 --> 00:36:32.639
Okay.
00:36:32.719 --> 00:36:34.559
So um let's talk about productivity a bit.
00:36:34.719 --> 00:36:44.960
The estimates I've seen are that when countries get digital government right, they save between one and two percent of GDP and they free up four days of citizen work.
00:36:45.599 --> 00:36:53.039
Astonishing benefits that would lead to, you know, billions of dollars in savings for the country, uh, more than we're projecting from some of the civil servant cuts.
00:36:53.199 --> 00:37:10.719
In early September of 2025, the Parliamentary Budget Office projected that the cost of civil servants will hit$71.1 billion this year for the 442,000 employees at a time when the government aims to cut employee costs by 15% by 2029-2030.
00:37:10.880 --> 00:37:22.880
Despite this, when the government recently completed its study on public sector productivity, Minister and Ann released it just after Parliament went home, and the government rejected a recommendation to even measure productivity.
00:37:23.039 --> 00:37:25.280
Are we just burying our head in the sand at this point?
00:37:25.519 --> 00:37:27.360
I think more than one thing can be true.
00:37:27.519 --> 00:37:40.320
I mean, I think it's now clear as the new government approaches the sort of first anniversary that government reform, state capacity, government transformation isn't really on high on their agenda.
00:37:40.480 --> 00:37:51.119
That doesn't mean that they won't deal with aspects of that as they deal with, you know, trade or economic or energy or other issues, and they will end up dealing with issues of state capacity.
00:37:51.280 --> 00:38:00.559
I think right now we're in one of these periods which come along every once in a while where the major vector of change is driven by the financial constraints.
00:38:00.800 --> 00:38:07.039
We went through that with, you know, Cretchen Martin program review in 95, the Harper Flaherty DRAP in 2012.
00:38:07.119 --> 00:38:13.360
You shrink the resource envelope and people are forced to rethink their business processes and their service windows and so on.
00:38:13.440 --> 00:38:19.039
So I mean, I think the point with reducing the body count of the public service, it's partly political.
00:38:19.199 --> 00:38:29.280
There was clearly a consensus, you know, building that uh federal workforce had got too big, partly its cost savings relative to a$500 billion federal government.
00:38:29.440 --> 00:38:34.800
This isn't as big as some of the program areas, but every everything is worth worthwhile to the Department of Finance.
00:38:34.960 --> 00:39:02.239
I think we would be dealing with, even if we weren't in the fiscal sort of context, AI would be rippling through any number of professions and trades and uh practices, and you'd be looking at how how to augment and assist uh some of these functions with AI, whether it's externally facing services or people that do costing and financial analysis or people that are doing approval of drugs at Health Canada and so on.
00:39:02.480 --> 00:39:09.119
So I just keep sort of saying, put up my hand and say those aren't perfectly interchangeable public servants.
00:39:09.280 --> 00:39:17.199
They have particular roles in particular trades and professions and organizations with you know with particular mandates that they've been given.
00:39:17.360 --> 00:39:27.039
And so what it means to be the best, you know, parks, parks agency you can be is different than being the best Coast Guard or being the best uh you know border management agency and so on.
00:39:27.199 --> 00:39:34.000
There are there are you know platform issues about making all of those things work as well, you know, better in the future.
00:39:34.079 --> 00:39:42.320
But you're gonna end up with a lot of working the problem at a very applied level, the traffic management in and out of harbors for the Coast Guard and so on.
00:39:42.480 --> 00:39:45.679
What I would say is you alluded to some of the cost savings.
00:39:45.840 --> 00:39:53.519
I think what people are less aware of is there's just massive multiplier effects of having a strong and effective public sector.
00:39:53.679 --> 00:39:55.840
And they're not always transactional services.
00:39:56.000 --> 00:40:00.480
Your mind tends to go to passports and immigration visas for students and so on.
00:40:00.559 --> 00:40:04.000
But a lot of what government provides is reliable, authentic information.
00:40:04.159 --> 00:40:08.719
So, you know, stats can information is used by businesses for planning.
00:40:09.039 --> 00:40:15.039
The most used service by Canadians is Environment Canada weather forecasts.
00:40:15.199 --> 00:40:15.920
Oh, yeah, of course.
00:40:16.639 --> 00:40:25.519
Everybody uses them multiple times a day, and they and they have measurable economic impacts on tourism, on recreation, on people's decisions as to, you know, where they're gonna be.
00:40:25.679 --> 00:40:26.960
Agriculture, yeah, all kinds of things, sure.
00:40:27.280 --> 00:40:27.760
And so on.
00:40:28.400 --> 00:40:36.719
You know, there were major upgrades in the technical capacity of Environment Canada about 10 years ago, applying supercomputers and remote sensing and so on.
00:40:36.960 --> 00:40:47.199
Nobody would know that, but they, you know, it leads to weather forecasting, which is now about twice as accurate as it was 10 years ago, and there's an economic impact for that.
00:40:47.360 --> 00:40:55.519
And if you can get ships in and out of the Vancouver harbor, there's a measurable economic benefit to you know to the supply chains for doing that.
00:40:55.679 --> 00:40:58.159
So I give lots of examples, you know, like that.
00:40:58.320 --> 00:41:05.440
So it's not just sort of going to where the big problems blow out and create a political pain point for the government.
00:41:05.599 --> 00:41:12.000
They happen and you learn from them and you correct them, whether it's Lacamagantic or the, you know, or or RiveCand.
00:41:12.239 --> 00:41:18.000
It's also just the quiet work of continuous improvement, you know, how can we do this better?
00:41:18.159 --> 00:41:23.360
And ultimately, they're there going to be macro-level choices about the boundaries of government.
00:41:23.519 --> 00:41:26.079
Government's role in the state, government roles in the economy.
00:41:26.239 --> 00:41:39.199
Well, you elect team red or team blue or team orange, and you'll get different sort of views on, you know, this is something government should rush towards and do something about, or this isn't really for the state to do, this is for the private sector or the not-for-profit sector to do.
00:41:39.360 --> 00:41:50.800
In Canada, we don't have the extreme ideological swings you see in some countries, but it does sort of zoom in and out with privatizations and expansions, depending on the preferences of the parties that we choose.
00:41:51.119 --> 00:41:53.280
So I have many more questions and we're running out of time.
00:41:53.360 --> 00:41:56.800
So I'm going to try and get through some of the really interesting ones that I can't wait to ask.
00:41:56.880 --> 00:41:58.639
But thank you so much for your candor so far.
00:41:58.800 --> 00:41:59.360
This is great.
00:41:59.519 --> 00:42:01.280
Let's talk about the courage part of this.
00:42:01.440 --> 00:42:02.079
Yeah.
00:42:02.559 --> 00:42:06.159
The paradox is that there's always bureaucratic reformers out there, right?
00:42:06.239 --> 00:42:08.559
The Canadian Digital Service was this independent initiative.
00:42:08.639 --> 00:42:12.880
It was sort of a skunk works, and then it got subsumed back into ESDC.
00:42:13.039 --> 00:42:17.599
Is there something structural within the public service that kills reform efforts?
00:42:18.000 --> 00:42:23.920
I don't know that it's unique to the public sector as it is to large complex organizations.
00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:34.880
I've read enough business histories to know that old banks and airlines and private sector companies have also, you know, turned into sclerotic dinosaurs blown away by new entrants and so on.
00:42:35.039 --> 00:42:42.559
So some of it is just about large bureaucratic organizations and and uh and how you know how they learn and how they take decisions.
00:42:42.880 --> 00:42:46.480
The public sector context is is different.
00:42:46.639 --> 00:42:54.719
You can't just sort of take the lessons of the private sector and say, here, run with that, because you have all of this complicated accountability to parliament.
00:42:54.960 --> 00:43:03.360
You've got all, you know, you have distributed authority to acquire additional resources, you know, as a particular kind of process in the in the public sector.
00:43:03.519 --> 00:43:15.440
So I find a lot of it is about just a continuous struggle to try to get large, complex organizations with distributed authority and multiple accountabilities to change.
00:43:15.599 --> 00:43:21.920
My predecessors dealt with it, and I, my cohort of senior leaders dealt with it, and and my successors are dealing with it.
00:43:22.079 --> 00:43:29.199
But I remain sort of guardedly optimistic because the fundamental drivers are governments that we choose want to be better.
00:43:29.360 --> 00:43:33.280
They will, they have a political incentive to deliver better services.
00:43:33.440 --> 00:43:45.760
And what you what you end up uh observing actually is a kind of a curve of rising expectations in terms of accuracy and timeliness and customization.
00:43:46.000 --> 00:43:55.599
Um and and government tech sometimes feels like that old metaphor of you add a lane to the highway through your town, it will fill up with traffic.
00:43:55.760 --> 00:43:59.679
So uh, when you get better at government services, especially the transaction.
00:44:00.960 --> 00:44:02.960
Then politicians will add features.
00:44:03.119 --> 00:44:04.559
They'll add customization.
00:44:04.719 --> 00:44:10.960
They will make the programs more complicated and more detailed and more specific to particular pressure points and so on.
00:44:11.199 --> 00:44:18.960
One of the challenges in the pandemic was stripping some of that out in order to simplify and get the CERB benefit out as fast as possible.
00:44:19.119 --> 00:44:26.400
A lot of what happened, as far as I understand, it was stripping out some of the customization and the features and saying we'll go with the very basic model here.
00:44:26.639 --> 00:44:38.320
But all, you know, um, so I mean, I don't want to sound sort of like I'm making excuses, but provincial and local and government services are light years better than they were 25, 30 years ago.
00:44:38.400 --> 00:44:41.039
And it, you know, if you look back in the snow, you'll see the tracks.
00:44:41.360 --> 00:44:45.280
I guess I'm not comparing us to other to us 20, 30 years ago.
00:44:45.360 --> 00:44:46.880
I'm comparing us to other countries.
00:44:47.039 --> 00:44:51.840
And I've said it many, many times, but we've fallen behind a quarter of the countries in the world in terms of digital arts.
00:44:52.159 --> 00:44:58.960
I mean, I think the fact that we have been able to make progress and have some successes in the past, I take it more as encouragement.
00:44:59.280 --> 00:45:02.320
I don't find that cynicism and snark is a strategy.
00:45:02.480 --> 00:45:04.480
You know, you see a lot of that in social media.
00:45:04.559 --> 00:45:10.880
Uh, you need to take the, you know, the opportunities and the successes and the possibilities and get people excited about them.
00:45:11.519 --> 00:45:14.480
Sometimes that's, you know, as you say, bureaucratic reformers.
00:45:14.559 --> 00:45:16.159
No, it's not an oxymoron.
00:45:16.239 --> 00:45:27.039
They're known lots of them, and and uh these are the people that really they come in uh not to sort of serve time and get out three years later without having made a mistake.
00:45:27.280 --> 00:45:34.719
You find strong public service leaders and strong ministers, they come in saying, what can I get done in the three or four years that I'm here?
00:45:34.880 --> 00:45:37.920
Will I leave the organization better than I left it?
00:45:38.079 --> 00:45:40.800
Will I have strengthened the team that I inherited?
00:45:41.280 --> 00:45:47.280
I find the inherent motivations of people are, you know, towards better is possible.
00:45:47.360 --> 00:45:59.519
Uh, you know, navigating through some of the cultural issues of risk aversion uh, you know, and turf and territory are sort of well-known problems, and and they present themselves in a different way with you know, with every generation.
00:45:59.760 --> 00:46:04.480
There is definitely bureaucratic culture issues that have to be overcome.
00:46:04.639 --> 00:46:07.760
I don't think ultimately they're inevitably going to win out.
00:46:07.840 --> 00:46:17.039
And there's a feedback loop from the outside, media coverage, officers of parliament, inquiries and autopsies that lead to a kind of generalization.
00:46:17.199 --> 00:46:21.280
Well, if that happened at ArriveCan, it must be true of all government procurement.
00:46:21.440 --> 00:46:28.079
Well, yeah, but at the same time, the government's not doing itself any favors by refusing to put into place some kind of performance measurement system.
00:46:28.239 --> 00:46:30.400
It sounds like an outright rejection of accountability.
00:46:30.719 --> 00:46:33.679
Well, that's the that's yeah, I I don't understand that decision.
00:46:33.760 --> 00:46:36.639
I mean, it really is a question for them and for the Treasury Board.
00:46:36.800 --> 00:46:49.360
I thought that would have been a relatively easy give for them to try to, you know, there's a lot of people do work on sort of customer satisfaction and resource allocation and feedback loops.
00:46:49.599 --> 00:46:52.079
There's an awful lot of reporting when you're in government.
00:46:52.159 --> 00:46:54.400
So I think streamlining and simplifying that.
00:46:54.559 --> 00:47:00.639
And tackling the productivity issues, it's relatively easy to try to do time and motion at the passport office.
00:47:00.800 --> 00:47:04.719
What's the productivity of national defense for the bad things that didn't happen?
00:47:04.960 --> 00:47:09.440
A good chunk of the Canadian state is basically into risk management.
00:47:09.599 --> 00:47:14.639
There might be a forest fire, there might be a bad guy trying to slip through our borders.
00:47:14.800 --> 00:47:20.320
And so I don't know, uh, measuring the productivity of those is often about risk averted.
00:47:20.480 --> 00:47:21.840
Those are conversations worth having.
00:47:22.079 --> 00:47:26.800
You know, I'm not ducking them, but uh it's not as it's hard to prove a negative, right?
00:47:26.880 --> 00:47:32.800
Yeah, it's hard to prove a negative, and you do see generalizations, sort of fallacy of composition, they call it.
00:47:32.880 --> 00:47:34.800
If this is true, it must be true of the whole thing.
00:47:35.199 --> 00:47:52.320
You know, I think it it behooves people that care about better government, uh, you know, just continually tell the stories and continue to create pressure, get into the attention span and the bandwidth of MPs and senators and senior decision makers so that they they they feel this is something Canadians want.
00:47:52.559 --> 00:47:52.800
Yeah.
00:47:52.880 --> 00:47:54.719
I mean, that's sort of why we're doing the podcast.
00:47:54.880 --> 00:47:56.000
I'll leave you with this question.
00:47:56.239 --> 00:48:04.480
How do you tell the difference between a real problem and bureaucratic resistance when you're trying to affect change?
00:48:04.880 --> 00:48:16.880
I think that's kind of what the most senior leaders get paid to do is to have that kind of judgment, to recognize sometimes it's inertia, sometimes it's turf, sometimes it's personal just conduct.
00:48:16.960 --> 00:48:18.400
Some people are more change resistant.
00:48:18.639 --> 00:48:20.800
There's lots of literature around change management.
00:48:20.880 --> 00:48:26.079
You've got early enthusiasts and you've got resistors, and you've got to convince the people in the middle and so on.
00:48:26.239 --> 00:48:32.320
I always land somewhere in the middle, which is don't assume it's always resistance or mindless or just oppositional.
00:48:32.480 --> 00:48:34.559
Ask yourself, where did it come from?
00:48:34.800 --> 00:48:45.519
They may have had an issue with a cybersecurity leak that got everybody in trouble for a year, or it may have been learned experiences that you want to find out what the context was and so on.
00:48:45.679 --> 00:48:54.800
But by the time you get to assistant deputy minister and deputy minister level, you are paid and evaluated on whether you get things done and how you got them done.
00:48:54.960 --> 00:48:57.920
You don't get a good score for being passive and neutral.
00:48:58.159 --> 00:49:03.199
You need to show up at performance reviews saying, I move things forward.
00:49:03.360 --> 00:49:16.000
And so I think you want to motivate people through, you know, the performance review systems and performance pay and the feedback loops within the public service and then also the feedback loops that come from outside.
00:49:16.320 --> 00:49:23.199
Well, thank you so much for spending time with us today and also for speaking out openly about this stuff after your considerable career in government.
00:49:23.280 --> 00:49:26.000
It's really nice to hear from the proverbial horse's mouth.
00:49:26.159 --> 00:49:28.880
So someone who knows how the systems work.
00:49:29.119 --> 00:49:32.239
I wish we had time to get into more of the things that we could discuss today.
00:49:32.400 --> 00:49:38.719
I only recently recently learned that the the Privy Council has like the Department of Government Architecture or something like that.
00:49:39.039 --> 00:49:41.679
You have like a whole the mechanics of government departments?
00:49:42.000 --> 00:49:43.039
Yeah, machine Yeah.
00:49:43.119 --> 00:49:45.440
I mean, that's that's uh something we can go into.
00:49:45.760 --> 00:49:48.559
My friends at the Institute on Governance have posted on that.
00:49:48.719 --> 00:49:52.559
I mean, uh, we could talk about the role of the prime minister and the hats.
00:49:52.719 --> 00:50:01.760
I think I count, you know, my I'll put in a plug for my book that you know, the prime minister wears six or seven distinct hats, and then there are parts of the public service that support each of those.
00:50:01.840 --> 00:50:06.159
You're seeing the prime minister run around the globe meeting with other countries.
00:50:06.239 --> 00:50:08.480
So there's a there's a sort of foreign affairs shop.
00:50:08.639 --> 00:50:12.559
You see him uh meeting with premiers, there's an intergovernmental affairs shop.
00:50:12.719 --> 00:50:19.599
In our system, configuring the constellation of organizations and departments and agencies is something the prime minister gets to decide.
00:50:19.760 --> 00:50:28.320
So you saw that last year with the creation of some new entities around Major Projects Office and Build Canada Homes and a Defense Investment Agency.
00:50:28.480 --> 00:50:33.679
So, you know, creating, merging, uh, you know, abolishing organizations is something the prime minister does.
00:50:33.760 --> 00:50:39.119
And there's a specialist shop at Privy Council office, which is the Prime Minister's department, that supports that.
00:50:39.199 --> 00:50:42.400
Uh, there's an excellent primer by Ellen Sutherland on the topic.
00:50:42.559 --> 00:50:50.719
So if your listeners are interested in government and how to make it better, perhaps we can have some other conversations uh as the year progresses.
00:50:50.960 --> 00:50:51.280
For sure.
00:50:51.440 --> 00:50:52.880
Thank you so much for spending time with us today.
00:50:52.960 --> 00:50:53.519
This was fascinating.
00:50:53.679 --> 00:50:54.559
Well, thanks for reaching out.
00:50:54.800 --> 00:50:58.000
Thanks for joining us on the Functional Government Podcast.