Canadian Government Executive - Volume 24 - Issue 01

12 / Canadian Government Executive // January/February 2018 The Interview We have to get to a point where public servants are paid accurately and on time. And that’s going to take a lot of my focus and energy in the first part of next year. and it’s affected the federal government, and it’s affected the federal public service as the largest employer in the country. I can trace a similar arc: the country’s at- titudes about what used to be called gay rights, and now the LGBTQ component of our society and in public service. That’s been a massive societal shift over ten or fifteen years, even in my lifetime from when I was a student. So we’ve adapted to that, and we have embraced that part of our diversity and inclusion, and one of the highlights of the year was certainly the Prime Minister’s apology in the House of Commons for what we had done to LG- BTQ public servants in the past. And reconciliation is probably the big- gest of all of these, I’m convinced. As you know, I’ve worked in the area closely for more than a decade. We’re on a national journey of reconciliation, started before this government and even before the TRC, but the TRC crystallized something in the country and gave shape to an agenda and a conversation which is carrying on. It will probably ripple through for another de- cade, and I don’t know all of the manifesta- tions and currents it’ll take, but we will be different for sure. And I think it’s picking up speed and momentum. In the federal environment, it couldn’t be clearer. The Prime Minister’s public man- date letters put out within days of taking of- fice, made very clear how important it is to him personally, and how important it is to the government. There are lots of tangible efforts going on within the public service here, obviously working with indigenous organizations, provincial governments and others, and that’s everything from boil-wa- ter advisories to indigenous language, to re- thinking our approach to completing trea- ties in areas where there are no treaties. It’s a very broad and deep agenda, and it draws in a lot of people. You will have seen that we changed the machinery of the federal government this year. The workload is so heavy that we wanted to have two minis- ters on the file with two distinct organiza- tions supporting them – Obviously working closely together. So I think looking into 2018, the crystal ball’s a bit murky, but indigenous recon- ciliation will be right near the very top of the government’s agenda. And again, Canada 150 provided that national frame to think about where we are, and I think you saw a lot of expressions that some of the unfinished business for Canada 151, and Canada 152 is around reconciliation. Q: I want to talk a little bit further about 2018. So my ques- tion for you is what’s keeping you awake at night right now, and what are you thinking in terms of challenges and opportunities for the year ahead? I mean, my general answer is just the workload and resilience of the public ser- vice. The government’s got a very busy agenda, and it’s heading into the third year of a mandate with lots of implemen- tation issues and a few more big files to land. A lot of things deployed in year one and year two are now in the implemen- tation and rollout phase, and there’s a lot of work involved in that. So you can go to Canada.ca/results and see the gov- ernment’s mandate letter commitments and where we are on them, and that’ll continue to be updated. So delivering the government’s agendas is the main sort of across-the-service kind of challenge. We have a very specific challenge, which is the thing I worry about the most, which is our pay system. It’s unacceptable; it’s not working; it’s causing a lot of stress, and in some cases, real hardship for pub- lic servants. I think you’ll have seen the auditor general’s report. We have to get to a point where public servants are paid accurately and on time. And that’s going to take a lot of my focus and energy in the first part of next year. Q: You’ve brought up the issues with the Federal Pay system that we are all reading and hearing about. I don’t want to dwell on this, but our readers will want to hear your thoughts and in particu- lar what the focus will be for the near term, and how can we learn from these kind’s of big system’s failures. Specific to the pay system, we’re learning as we go. We have the auditor general’s chap- ter; we have work by Price Water house. There’s other reviews and studies that are available, and we’re going through lessons learned, and what can we do better with respect to the pay system. We have a work- ing group of ministers that’s met many, many times. We have, obviously, groups of officials working on it. What you are allud- ing to though is this was clearly a failure of project management, and what can we learn about project management? So there’s a very specific piece of work was commissioned on that. Goss Gilroy did a report specifically on six lessons in project management, and yes, they can be applied to other projects, whether it’s in the IT world, or building projects, or else- where. I think good project management is actually a teachable skill, and we’re going to work on building that skill and competency and capacity across the public service. And that’s work that was started several years ago. My message, as head of the public ser- vice though, is that that, as serious and un- acceptable as the pay system project was, it is not indicative of the work of the public service in project management, or even in IT projects. So in my annual report to the PM, there are lots of successful projects, and many of them rolled out this year. So I hope your readers have downloaded the parks Canada app or the Canada border app CBSA – the Border Services Agency has replaced the little cardboard landing cards with electronic kiosks. The parlia- mentary precinct project is 22 construction projects that have been delivered on time and on budget. So to go back to where we started, we’re actually pretty good at project manage- ment and at delivery, and that’s what makes the pay system failure so frustrat- ing, because it is really an anomaly, and we have to learn from it, and we have to make sure, A, that we fix the pay system as soon as possible, and B, that we learn the les- sons from it.