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 A newsletter about the federal public service. | By Kathryn May
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Hi all.
A lot of tech talk today – on trust and execution.
 
Let’s jump right in.
 
A sudden CIO departure: Catherine Luelo is leaving. It’s not clear why.
“It was a lie told to this committee.”: More intrigue at the ArriveCAN hearings.
“What Sean said.” At FWD50, Sean Boots’s top 10 “wild and radical” changes for revolution.
Here’s hoping: Public satisfaction with services is on the rise.
On the move: Daniel Quan-Watson and Ken MacKillop.
 
Chief Information Officer Catherine Luelo is leaving Dec. 31, after starting the job less than 2 1/2 years ago. It’s unclear why she is leaving. On Friday, I wrote about her departure and some early reaction to it.

Luelo often pitched tech workers to try a “tour of duty” in government, where there is lots of the kind of “complex, high-impact hairy work” they like to tackle. And now in the U.S., Uncle Sam is doing the same to nab laid-off techies.

Now that Luelo’s  “tour  of service” is over, the  big question is: who is going to take over Canada’s slow modernization of IT to bring government into the digital age?

As recently as a few weeks ago, Luelo was on hand at FWD50, one of the world’s biggest tech conferences, telling the Ottawa conference that modernizing big, old systems is critical in moving to digital.

She also talked about how the government has to rebuild trust and prove it can deliver – and be accountable if it doesn’t. “Hit your dates, hit your budgets” and deliver projects that work, she said. “Trust is built by doing what you say you're going to do.”
Catherine Luelo. 
“It’s terrible to end up on the front page of the newspaper when something doesn’t go well. That’s called accountability. In the private sector, you just get fired,” she said.
 
“I think it’s important for us to become more comfortable with being held to account by the Canadian public. And if that’s on the front pages of the newspaper, then that is the mechanism that we get to be held accountable for either performing or not performing.”
 
Speaking of headlines:
 
THE $54M APP
ArriveCAN, the hearings and the jaw-dropping allegations
The very expensive COVID-era app for international travellers keeps hitting the headlines with new plot twists and intrigue.

The government operations committee’s fiery hearings have had lots of traction on social media, leaving many wondering if there’s an untold story. If contractors and/or public servants are found to have gamed the system, this will get ugly.
For a year now, hearings into the app have been delving into the $54-million question asked by MPs: How can an app cost that much? The government’s breakdown of costs gives clues.

The app has now become embroiled in the broader issues of public trust in the public service and the barriers to government getting things done.

The latest drama came on Nov. 7, when senior bureaucrat Cameron MacDonald accused his former boss at the Canada Border Services Agency of lying to the government operations committee about who decided GC Strategies would build the ArriveCAN app.
Cameron MacDonald at committee.
Public servants are supposed to work in the shadows, so it was a jaw-dropper to hear MacDonald tell MPs, “It was a lie that was told to this committee. Everyone knows it. We have our team here behind us.”

I wrote about this and how the whole spectacle hasn't gone over well among many public servants who worry about whether bosses will have their backs.

“If ArriveCAN is the best and cheapest this government can come up with in a once-a-century emergency, it does not bode at all well for our longer term and much more pricey-to-fix concerns,” Chris Selley writes.

Not surprisingly, ArriveCAN came up at FWD50, which gathered digital heavyweights from around the world.

Canary in the coal mine. Digital converts fiercely believe good policy can’t be executed without strong technology. For them, more ArriveCANs are inevitable if government doesn’t evolve with the changing work it must do. FWD50 Co-founder Alistair Croll told MPs a year ago that ArriveCAN is a canary in the digital coal mine.
Sean Boots / FWD50. 
Bring on the revolution. At FWD50, it was soft-spoken public servant Sean Boots who grabbed the spotlight with his call for a revolution in service delivery. After mentioning ArriveCAN in his introduction, he laid out a list of recommendations that went over with huge applause and were referred to over and over at the three-day conference.
 
By the end, co-founder and organizer Alistair Croll joked FWD50 might be renamed “What Sean said.”
 
Boots’s thrust: “It’s not enough for politicians to say we’re going to do this thing. You need a public service that can actually do it. And too often, that’s not the case.”
 
Boots is a dyed-in-the-wool tech geek, but none of his radical changes involves technology. They are all about freeing people from rules, processes and structures that slow everything and kill incentive.
 
Here are Boots’s top 10 “wild and radical” changes to “bring on the revolution” in the public service:
 
– Hire people from across Canada, and if they work at a desk, let them work from wherever. “Last year’s return-to-office implementation took all the wind out of the sails of every conversation I’ve seen about making a better and more representative future public service,” he said. “Until we admit that that was a mistake, I don’t think we can call ourselves an evidence-driven public service.”
 
– Give public servants the tools they need to do their work. Word and Excel aren’t enough for 2023. Roll out open-source data science tools to every public servant tomorrow.
 
– Get rid of at least one layer of executives. “We have way too many talented leaders that are just stuck acting as mailboxes.”
 
– Let digital experts climb the non-management ranks without becoming managers.
 
– Move Shared Services Canada to the chief information officer and make all of SSC services optional for departments and not mandatory. “That will create competitive pressure for their services to actually be good.”
 
– Phase out traditional corporate networks and just start using the internet like the U.K. did a decade ago and the U.S. is moving to now.
 
– Stop making IT staff work in chief information officer (CIO) shops. They should be everywhere.
 
– Split the IT classification in two so we can hire senior software developers and cybersecurity experts at competitive market rates.
 
– Make digital experts deputy ministers. “Don’t smother them under a layer or two of our longest-serving and most traditional senior public service.”
 
There’s lots more. And here’s the open letter he wrote to PCO Clerk John Hannaford.
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Croll said Boots’s speech resonated because his proposed fixes are practical. They will affect people at the coal face and show deep internal understanding of how things work. He’s got lots of credibility with the technology folks, but Croll said he’s also warm, friendly, empathetic and seen as a voice of reason who selflessly helps others.
 
“Even his revolution sounded like a guided meditation tape” in spots, Croll said. And he didn’t sell out and go the private sector. “He left because he couldn’t do what he knew was needed, but stayed in a career of public service.”
 
Boots recently took a job with the Yukon government.
 
He is a founding member of the Canadian Digital Society, the swat team of techies that the government just moved from Treasury Board to Shared Services Canada, the agency that provides IT services across departments. (The jury is out on that move. Some worry that the team will die at Shared Services.)
 
He has worked for nonprofits and co-founded Ottawa Civic Tech. He is big on open source and open data in government. He went on leave in early 2022 to work with Carleton University professor Amanda Clarke to unpack the black hole of federal contracting and figure out how to reform IT procurement. On his own time, he blogs about technology, has tweeted about it and has interviewed public servants who inspired him for his Public Service Heroes series.
 
Sounds like an everyday hero himself. But it seems he was too much of a maverick for some federal public-service bosses who prefer their employees to stay in the shadows.
 
Boots had been booked at FWD50 last year to discuss the findings of his Carleton research, much of which related directly to ArriveCAN, said Croll. Back in his public-service job, he had to bow out. Some conference-goers responded by wearing buttons saying “I know why Sean Boots isn’t here.”
 
So how does the cost of ArriveCAN compare with nine of the largest IT projects underway in government? Here’s a chart Boots presented:
Credit: Sean Boots / FWD50. 
Ray of hope. On the topic of satisfaction, the public service’s reputation took a beating last year with long lines and delays at airports and for passports and immigration applications. But an Angus-Reid poll shows Canadians are more satisfied with the federal government.
Source: Angus Reid
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre says everything is broken and his calls to get rid of the gatekeepers includes bureaucrats. In fact, 53 per cent of past Conservative voters are dissatisfied with federal service compared to previous Liberals and NDP voters, who are much happier with the service they have been getting.
Source: Angus Reid
On the move. Daniel Quan-Watson, head of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, officially retired last week after more than 14 years as a deputy minister. Ken MacKillop, associate deputy minister of Veterans Affairs, became secretary to the Governor-General.
How was this edition? Let us know. The archive is here.
A bit about me. I cover and analyze the federal public service for Policy Options as the Accenture Fellow on the Future of the Public Service. I've been reporting on the public service for 25 years. My work has appeared in the Ottawa Citizen and iPolitics, and has earned a National Newspaper Award. My full bio is here. X: @kathryn_may. 
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