Restoring public service will take time
Culture change is happening, but we’re not done yet, says Scott Brison.
When auditor general Michael Ferguson cited public service culture as a contributing factor to the “incomprehensible failure” of the flawed Phoenix pay system, he did this country a great service by bringing a very important issue to the front pages.
While Ferguson’s critique disturbed me and many others in town, it provides an opportunity to discuss an issue our government has been tackling head-on from the day we took office in November 2015.
Far away from the political theatre that captures headlines, we have been seized over the last two-and-a-half years with improving how government can serve Canadians better by changing how we work. We have tackled this challenge together with the almost 300,000 dedicated members of the public service.
Since coming to office, our government has worked to restore a culture of respect for and within Canada’s nonpartisan public service, and to instil a culture of experimentation, evidence-based policy and implementation — what we call “results and delivery.”
But changing a culture doesn’t happen overnight, especially after 10 long years of disrespect and distrust at the hands of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.
Union leader Debi Daviau of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada called that decade the “big chill” for the public service in the wake of the auditor’s report. “They worried in fact about saying anything at all that might not be in line with the government’s ideology,” she said.
That’s why our government moved early and decisively by unmuzzling government scientists and reinstating the mandatory long-form census on our second day in office, showing our commitment to evidence over ideology.
In my first speech to the government’s top executives in the spring of 2016, I was clear: to succeed today, we need to empower and encourage people to disrupt the status quo, embrace and learn from failures, to innovate and to try new things.
As Treasury Board president and employer of the public service, I repeat that message every chance I get.
We’re restoring a confident, innovative, public service through measures that include hackathons, innovative funding solutions, embracing trial-and-error and a willingness to accept and learn from small failures on the road to big successes.
We have also modernized our policies to reflect the digital age, including giving greater authorities to the chief information officer to ensure digital projects are set up to succeed and support strategic priorities, and to implement new digital standards.
This re-engineering doesn’t fit the format of a splashy news release or announcement, but it’s very important. It’s like the plumbing of government. We have done a lot on the technical side, but we recognize that the needed culture change also comes from less technical measures.
Restoring respect and confidence and believing — once again — that government can and should be a force for good is critical to unleash the creativity, energy and enthusiasm of Canada’s world-class public service.
Within the public service, we’re already seeing positive cultural change: more employees are satisfied with their jobs, and government scientists are rediscovering the freedom to speak openly about their work.
Next week, as we celebrate National Public Service week, let’s remember that our public service — time and time again — has delivered amazing things for Canada: be it resettling 50,000 Syrian refugees, implementing the Canada Child Benefit and raising 300,000 Canadian kids out of poverty or lifting 62 long-term drinking water advisories for Indigenous communities.
No wonder then, that just last year, Canada’s federal public service was recognized as the most effective in the world by the joint Oxford University and U.K. Institute for Government’s International Civil Service Effectiveness Index.
We appreciate the auditor general’s report. It sheds light on a challenge that we’ve been hard at work to address since we took office. We agree with him that much more needs to be done, and Canadians can count on us and their public service to get it done.