OGGO Committee Meeting

37th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION

Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Monday, February 3, 2003

Á

1105

The Chair (Mr. Reg Alcock (Winnipeg South, Lib.))

Mr. Ken Epp (Elk Island, Canadian Alliance)

The Chair

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth (Founder of the Public Policy Form, Executive Director, Driving Governments to Excellence Project, As Individual)

Á

1110

Á

1115

Á

1130

The Chair

Mr. Ken Epp

Á

1135

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Ken Epp

Á

1140

The Chair

Mr. Ken Epp

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt (Châteauguay, BQ)

Á

1145

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Á

1150

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

The Chair

Ms. Judy Sgro (York West, Lib.)

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Á

1155

Ms. Judy Sgro

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Â

1200

Ms. Judy Sgro

The Chair

Mr. Ken Epp

Mr. Gerry Ritz (Battlefords—Lloydminster, Canadian Alliance)

The Chair

Mr. Gerry Ritz

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Gerry Ritz

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Â

1205

Mr. Gerry Ritz

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Gerry Ritz

The Chair

Mr. Paul Szabo (Mississauga South, Lib.)

Â

1210

The Chair

Â

1215

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Paul Szabo

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

The Chair

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

The Chair

Mr. Paul Forseth (New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, Canadian Alliance)

Â

1220

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Paul Forseth

The Chair

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

The Chair

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

The Chair

Â

1225

Mr. Roy Cullen (Etobicoke North, Lib.)

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Roy Cullen

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Roy Cullen

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Roy Cullen

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Â

1230

Mr. Roy Cullen

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

The Chair

Mr. Tony Tirabassi (Niagara Centre, Lib.)

Â

1235

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Tony Tirabassi

The Chair

Mr. Tony Tirabassi

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Tony Tirabassi

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Â

1240

Mr. Tony Tirabassi

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

The Chair

Mr. Paul Forseth

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

The Chair

Mr. Roy Cullen

Â

1245

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Roy Cullen

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Roy Cullen

The Chair

Mr. Paul Forseth

Â

1250

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Paul Forseth

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Mr. Paul Forseth

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

Â

1255

The Chair

Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth

The Chair

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CANADA

Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates

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NUMBER 007

l

2nd SESSION

l

37th PARLIAMENT

---

EVIDENCE

Monday, February 3, 2003

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Á  (1105)  

[English]

    The Chair (Mr. Reg Alcock (Winnipeg South, Lib.)): Good morning, and welcome to the meeting of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates on this Monday morning. We are being televised.

    I want to draw members' attention to two items that will be in your packets. One is just a notice of the tabling of the annual report of the Privacy Commissioner. The other is a motion that has been circulated to everybody, which just validates what we're already doing. The Privacy Commissioner will be at this meeting next week on Monday morning, but under the standing orders there is a provision that says we have to notify the House that we are seizing control of this report. We will take the report, because there is a provision in the standing orders that says if it is not addressed within a certain number of days it will move to another committee.

    I will not ask you to deal with the motion yet, because I do not think we have quorum yet.

    Mr. Ken Epp (Elk Island, Canadian Alliance): There are enough guys on this side.

    The Chair: Yes. In fact, when we agreed to meet on Monday mornings, I also agreed that we would not deal with substantive motions unless there was unanimous consent. So I give it to you as notice. When we have quorum, I may interrupt the proceedings long enough just to ask for your consent. If anybody has a concern, let me know.

    Let me get on to the meat of today. We have with us Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth--he calls himself “Shelly”--who has a long career, some would say scary career and some would say distinguished, as an observer of how government does business, first as a senior public servant himself and then as the founder of the Public Policy Forum. I will let him give you all the details on that.

    I suspect all members will find this morning's presentation most interesting in light of the study topic that we have undertaken.

    With that, Mr. Ehrenworth, I will let you begin.

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth (Founder of the Public Policy Form, Executive Director, Driving Governments to Excellence Project, As Individual): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    I just found this document, and it might be relevant here. It quotes George Casey, head of the parliamentary committee on the public service. He said:

No matter how excellent might be the Government of the day, or how wise its administrative acts, it might be spoilt by the faults of the Civil Service.

And the civil service is what I'm going to speak about today. That quote was made in 1877.

    Mr. Chairman, I'm delighted to have this opportunity to speak here today. If these hearings suggest that public service issues are beginning to work their way onto the political agenda, then I'm very encouraged. I believe only politically driven reform will give us the kind of public service we need to succeed in a global economy and meet the needs of citizens.

    It's ironic that our gold-medal winning Government On-Line program, and the Canada website, in particular, sits like a hood ornament on top of a creaking, process-oriented bureaucracy that saw its heyday in the industrial age. E-government is all about empowering and engaging citizens in the decisions that affect them, while our public service continues to operate on the principle of “we know best”.

    I believe a country as huge and diverse as Canada needs a strong, effective, and above all relevant government--relevant in the eyes of citizens, that is--if it is to hold together. I believe we are losing that necessary ingredient of nationhood, and it alarms me that so few seem to be aware of what is happening or are willing to do anything about it.

    Much of the focus today in the media and in political and business circles is on corporate governance. Whether malfeasant or simply incompetent, when corporate leaders make mistakes a relatively small group of shareholders and employees suffers. What about government governance, where misdirected, poorly targeted, and ill-conceived policies and programs exact a toll on 30 million people?

    No government can do much more than mind the store without a strong public service, and as events have shown in recent times, even that can be a challenge. Thirty ministers on their own can't accomplish much, but history has shown, here and abroad, just what visionary ministers can accomplish with smart, creative, energetic officials to do the analysis, design programs, and put them in place.

    Unfortunately, what we see today is a public service that is losing the capacity to develop and execute policy and is becoming increasingly insular and controlling. Whether it should be up-sized or down-sized, it must become an awful lot better. I don't think we can afford to go through another electoral and leadership cycle without addressing the governance of our own government. With new leadership campaigns underway or recently completed in most federal parties, the time to act is now.

    The Glassco commission, with its clarion call to let the managers manage, launched the modern era of the public service 40 years ago. Since then, a whole industry has been built around poking, prodding, and examining the federal bureaucracy. It's still a growth industry today. There have been 37 government studies on public service reform since Glassco, speaking volumes to Sir Humphrey Appleby's law of inverse proportionality that the less you intend to do about something, the more you have to study it.

    But that's just Canada, where we hear, albeit only in Ottawa, that ours is the best public service in the world. Meanwhile, in other jurisdictions--the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, France, or closer to home in Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, and Alberta--they have done their studies and translated words into action. Their reforms have shaped up differently, but the common thread in their experience is that prime ministers and premiers have led the way.

    By contrast, conventional wisdom in this town has always held that the Prime Minister, ministers, and parliamentarians aren't interested in a public service; that there's no political upside to reforming the bureaucracy. To me that's like saying that good government is bad politics. I'm troubled by the logic, but it sure helps to explain why today's public service looks and acts much the same way it did when I joined Industry, Trade and Commerce in 1972.

    I started out as a junior commerce officer and left 15 years later as junior executive and director of public affairs at Labour Canada. My role was to build more productive relations between the government and the trade union movement. There was a huge understanding gap separating the two, but the problem went far beyond organized labour. The government, and particularly the public service, was isolated from much of the outside world.

Á  (1110)  

    In 1987 I in essence privatized my job by founding the Public Policy Forum. It had two real objectives then. The first was to bring closer together leaders from government, the private sector, academe, organized labour, and the not-for-profit communities, giving them a chance to walk a mile in each other's shoes. This, we thought, would lead to better interactions, a two-way flow of information, and eventually to better-targeted, more sensitive policy development and service delivery.

    The second objective was to harness the knowledge and experience of successful leaders from outside the federal government in order to help modernize the management system in the public service. By the early nineties we had managed to enlist supporters of all political stripes who believed the functioning of government was too important to be addressed in a partisan way. Despite our efforts, the forum failed to make much progress on either count.

    Today, I believe the public service is more isolated than ever from stakeholders and citizens. Although the Public Service 2000 reform package appeared to respond directly to the forum's campaign for public service renewal, it accomplished very little. PS 2000 was an internally driven exercise with little political support and no continuing involvement from outside government. The panel of expert advisers on restructuring, which the forum helped put together, was simply shunted aside. I remember Paul Tellier, then Clerk of the Privy Council, saying only the public service can fix itself. Today he would be the first to admit that he was wrong.

    In fact, no public service in any country has been able to bring about fundamental reform by itself. Right on the heels of Public Service 2000 came program review, which may well have saved the country from bankruptcy. Departments were merged, functions were eliminated, business lines were hived off to the provinces or to the private sector, and something like 50,000 jobs were trimmed, at least on paper. Amazingly, however, there was no effort to change the management system or culture of the bureaucracy. Instead, they photoreduced the bureaucracy, and made it smaller, but gave no thought to making it better. That's pretty much what we have left here today.

    Except for one thing. There was no strategy during the downsizing of the mid-1990s to ensure that the best public servants had an incentive to stay. When you say, “Here are a couple of hundred thousand dollars, now go find a job where you can work half as hard and make twice as much”, people with options will exercise them.

    I don't want to imply for a second that all the good people are gone, but it has been difficult to replace the ones who departed, and the ones who are left behind are working harder than ever to hold things together.

    If you were to talk to Allan Blakeney, Bill Davis, Peter Lougheed, or Frank McKenna, they would attribute, at least in private, a fair measure of their political success to a competent, motivated, outward-looking, flexible administration. They let their managers manage because they knew their managers were plugged into the outside world. Those leaders understood their role and had confidence that their officials knew what to do when some ministers, many with limited experience, did not.

    Unfortunately, at the federal level, Lester Pearson was probably the last prime minister who understood the value of a strong public service. I'm astounded at the extent to which ministers have actually lost confidence in the ability of their officials to manage complex issues or come up with creative solutions to problems. Rather than say, we have to fix this system, they have allowed more and more of the real power to slip into the hands of the PCO and the PMO, where, I suggest, there is little capacity to do much more than keep a lid on things.

    If there has been one bright spot since program review, it's the decision to carve the government's revenue collection function out of the public service and accord it independent agency status. This was not a new idea. The British started to look at this kind of reform in the early 1980s. By the late eighties, they had moved 80% of their public servants into executive agencies, appointed CEOs with clear performance targets and the tools needed to do their jobs, rewarded success, and opposed consequences for failure.

    The rationale for creating the Customs and Revenue Agency was quite explicit: to free up the tax collectors from centralized bureaucratic rules and procedures so that they could do their jobs better. It was the vision and determination of a very strong deputy minister, Pierre Gravel, who was able to convince his minister and the government that efficient revenue collection required wholesale bureaucratic reform. Of course, Pierre is gone now, but from what I gather the transition to agency status is starting to pay dividends.

    However, there is an important question that remains unanswered. If the system was not good enough for the tax collectors, the people responsible for taking money from citizens, why is it good enough for the other 175,000 public servants who spend the money on citizens' behalf?

Á  (1115)  

    This may demonstrate the fact that we need more visionary and persuasive deputies, but it is also symptomatic of a culture that takes enormous comfort in the status quo; learns only grudgingly from experience, good or bad; and discounts lessons that originate outside its walls--in the private sector, the voluntary sector, or in other government jurisdictions.

    Where does this culture come from? Why do other organizations change quickly while the federal public service remains so stuck in its ways? Part of the answer is that very few senior executives in government have experience with any other way. When you join the public service, usually right after college, you're expected to stay for the rest of your working days. Promotions are almost always from within, and you can rise to the pinnacles of the bureaucracy without setting foot in the outside world, so most of the people in charge have never managed a real bottom line. They don't know what it means to have to meet--or worse, to miss meeting--a payroll, and they draw their inspiration more from their colleagues than from clients and customers. Unlike Washington, London, Paris, and some of our provincial capitals, Ottawa suffers badly from a lack of intellectual cross-fertilization of external people and ideas, and an inevitable consequence is bad policy advice followed by bad implementation.

    You can go back to the national energy program or look at the more recent trauma of the gun registry, and of course there is lot of ground in between. You discover that ill-conceived policy comes from people who have little first-hand experience in the world outside of government, whether that is the world of the oil industry or gun owners. Careerism has not shaped the public service culture on its own, but in cahoots with other villains. Given my limited time, I'll deal with only one, and that is the dysfunctional approach to accountability in the federal government.

Á  (1130)  

    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Ehrenworth.

    We'll begin a round on this side of the table with Mr. Epp.

    Mr. Ken Epp: Thank you very much.

    I really enjoyed your presentation. It's interesting that you hit on a note that I actually used not long ago in speaking to a small group of people. I said, I'm looking forward to the day when I am a minister of the Crown and I write the memo to every manager in the department for which I'm responsible that says, “From now on, decisions on funding, the granting of contracts, and management are to be made based on what's best for Canada and the taxpayer, and not for political reasons.”

    You alluded to this on a number of occasions. You said, for instance, we need visionary ministers and deputy ministers. You made mention of the fact that only politically driven reform will fix these problems. Yet at the same time it seems to me that it's the politics that have driven the civil service of our country to an almost all-time low in terms of their level of respect in the country and the bad things that are happening.

    How do you respond to that? How are we going to get a politically driven revolution here if it's in fact the politicians who are holding things back?

Á  (1135)  

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: I didn't want to give the impression that it's just the politicians who are holding things back. I think it's been our inability over the last number of years to step back and look at the system of government, and ask how it can best work in the 21st century.

    I used the examples of Allan Blakeney, Peter Lougheed, and Bill Davis, and I used the example of 30 ministers and 300 parliamentarians who really can't do the work of 250,000 people unless there is some interaction and coordination, and a recognition of who is responsible for what.

    I am convinced, though, that this does need to become a political priority. You talk about 37 studies in the last 40 years on the management system in government. Mr. Mulroney made the public service a political priority only because he received about 100 letters from opinion leaders from around the country saying, “You can't run a public service like this. You have to effect change in the management system.” But in reality, there was no interest in management.

    When you think about it, if I were the Prime Minister I certainly would want to have the best possible people working in my system, giving advice to ministers and administering programs. The Public Service 2000 process--and I'll use that as one example among many--became an exercise of, only the public service can reform the public service; we are the managers of the public service. But once you're in positions of power....

    To be perfectly frank, I don't believe any sitting prime minister can bring about the changes I'm talking about. I think it has to be someone who basically steps back and says, “Here's my vision of the country, and this is how we make it work”, because the status quo becomes the modus operandi once you become a senior public servant and once you become ensconced in a powerful position in government.

    Mr. Ken Epp: What you're saying is very interesting. I don't know how to say this without making it sound partisan--and I really don't want that--but I have read two books that I think are very important and offer potential for this kind of leadership in our country. Those books are both by Preston Manning. I'm talking about his book The New Canada, and the most recent one, Think Big.

    I read it all, and it's so unfortunate that the media focused on one part of that book and missed the last chapter, where he talked about all of the things that needed to be investigated and studied, and good solutions. Yet Canadian people somehow don't seem to be ready for this kind of political leadership.

    How do you think one could ever turn the perception around in the minds of Canadians that we actually need to have really strong political leadership in this country, so as to drive a very strong and principled civil service? How do we ever achieve that in political warfare, where elections are lost and won not on good sound policy and suggestions like this but rather on who can say the most sleaze about the other guy? What is believed and what isn't?

    I'm distressed about the shambles our country is in because of the lack of ability to have an open and free-ranging debate about issues and to talk about what the different political parties and political leaders have to offer rather than a bunch of innuendo and, frankly, lies about each other.

Á  (1140)  

    The Chair: Perhaps, for a rough comparison, you can suggest some additional books.

    Mr. Ken Epp: Straight Through the Heart, maybe?

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: When we started the Public Policy Forum, the idea was that how government works is very important. No one pays very much attention to it. It is not a partisan issue; the outputs of governments are partisan issues. Until the public, the media, and politicians recognize that we have to change the machinery of government to reflect realities....

    I didn't come here to speak about the reform of our political system. I will leave that to politicians. I'm actually sorry I had to come out as hard as I did on the public service, which I believe in very strongly, but the reality is that no one is raising these issues because of the traditions of Westminster.

    So my response to you is that you're probably a lot wiser on how to de-politicize the functioning of government from a political perspective. My real concern is how to make the government operation function more effectively. I think the suggestion around accountability is a key factor.

    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Ehrenworth.

    Mr. Epp, I'll catch you again on the second round.

    Monsieur Lanctôt.

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt (Châteauguay, BQ): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    I think there should be major changes in the way in which the Government of Canada is organized. We know that the Prime Minister's Office has held all the power since 1993, and it seems the situation is getting quite out of control. Apparently, at the moment, the public service is merely agreeing to run things according to... I do not need to tell you this, we have seen it with the firearms, with the sponsorship program, with the HRDC programs, to mention just a few. I think the more we look, the more we will find. So what we have is complete chaos.

    I understand that you want to change the public service. But do the people in charge really want to change it? People say that the new public service managers have been in place for at least 10 years, and we see all the scandals that have happened and are continuing. We hope this will stop, because we are talking about public money here. I hope better procedures will be found than those we have at the moment.

    But, if we do not start with the main structures of government, how do we go about changing the Privy Council Office or the Privy Council and introduce some new approaches? I do not know, but perhaps we could look at what is being done by other countries throughout the world. The British system and the system in place in the Government of Canada must not be the only models available. There must be another system under which one man would not hold so much power. We have seen all the scandals that this has produced. Political factors are the first consideration, and we see nominations like that of Gagliano to a position in Denmark. A committee asked for permission to question this individual to determine whether he had the necessary skills for the position. The request was turned down. And yet, we are part of a government and we want to try to improve things. But that was a purely political appointment.

    We hear fine-sounding speeches. I listen to you, and I know that you can hear the witness but although you say that we need to look at people's competence, the government even refuses... I'm not referring to the people around this table, but I am looking at the vast majority of the people who are part of this government. How can we really believe that there is a genuine desire to change things when last year, 2002, the government turned down a request as simple as this? We wanted to ask this individual some questions to determine whether he had the necessary skills for the position. But our request was turned down. Why? Because one man in the Prime Minister's Office said no, that this was a political appointment and it was not up to the committee to review it.

    I don't know what you think about this, but I thing things are slipping very far very fast.

Á  (1145)  

[English]

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: I'm not a very political person, and I try to come across in a non-partisan way. I could probably answer some of the comments you made with some pretty good ones of my own, but I'm going to fight the hesitation. And I don't believe I'm wise enough to be able to say this is how to do it, but nowhere does it happen without political leadership.

    I used to be criticized a lot because I was always an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, not so much for her policies but for some of the things she did to try to get the public service to be more responsive and accountable. It was her, single-handedly, who insisted on a program to use simple English. In Canada we should have a program to use simple English and simple French. Government is not as complex as often we make it out to be.

    I'm going to respond to that with a conversation I had with a minister in the Canadian government a year and a half ago. It was an off-the-record meeting, so I won't mention who it was. I had raised these kinds of issues about an inward-looking system that is control and rules oriented, and how the public service was not getting any better. His comment to me was actually quite troubling. He said, “Often we sit around the cabinet table and when we get into a difficult situation we think that maybe we should privatize that function or hive it off to the provinces, because we have so little confidence that the public service can fix it.” Now, if that's not incentive enough to change things dramatically....

    I don't believe that 2% of the public service in Canada would disagree with any comment I made, and the people who would disagree would say that I haven't worked in government for many years and that I was never very senior and I just don't know how many dramatic changes have been made. As I say, I'm sorry for having to come here and do this, but it's a sense of looking at government since I left the Public Policy Forum, which was six years ago, and it's been one step forward and three steps back.

    How do we bring this about? A good start would be to examine those four recommendations to the next prime minister and the party leaders, to put it on the platforms of all the federal parties in Canada that the functioning of government, the working of government, is too important to be addressed in a partisan way. And that's how we're going to do it.

    I remember when we did delve a bit into parliamentary reform at the Public Policy Forum, we talked about question period. I believe the thought was, “Why can't we do question period as it's done in Quebec? It is much more civilized.” Yet, as I say, I don't tend to be the expert on these kinds of issues.

    The Chair: Could I just ask questioners and the responder to shorten up your questions and answers a bit so we can get a few more questions in?

    Monsieur Lanctôt, the normally allowed length of time has expired, but I'll let you ask one more question before we move on.

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: May I ask two other questions?

[English]

    The Chair: Go ahead.

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: Thank you.

[English]

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: How about if I answer one of them?

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: I'm also wondering what your vision is as a former public servant.

    Are public servants concerned to see that voter turnout is getting lower and lower, that fewer and fewer people believe in our system of democracy, which has been rather weakened by all the matters we were discussing a little earlier? How do public servants react when, for example, private discussions with a deputy minister or an assistant deputy minister are held in which we are told that a particular course of action should be taken, that the jurisdiction of the provinces or Quebec should be respected, and then something completely different is done? I think people see these things. People ask us why the voter turnout rate is so low—it is dropping all the time—for federal elections. People feel politicians are very far removed from their real concerns.

    We have laws and even a Constitution, but it is not even being followed. So how do you expect people to trust politicians and vote for candidates if their vote gives them very little, because there is not even any respect for the fundamental laws of the land?

Á  (1150)  

[English]

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: In response to the beginning, I think that public servants are concerned about what's happening and I think it's the reason why public service is not the career it was in previous generations. It was a calling, and it isn't a calling any more. I read an article in the paper about the public service going to Oxford and hiring elite students, and that assumes that these elite students are going to come from some of the best educational institutions and stay in the system. I don't believe they're going to stay in the system. I think it's way too confining and it doesn't give them the kind of satisfaction that coming into government used to have generations ago.

    The only other thing I might suggest is that I spent a couple of weeks out in Alberta in November, and that's when the gun registry program came out, and Kyoto. I don't believe Albertans are anti-federal government involvement in issues like guns and environment. I believe many people now are questioning whether, if the federal government gets involved in a particular issue, they're going to be able to deliver the necessary outcome. So I believe it's a confidence level.

    The Chair: Thank you.

    Members, for the benefit of the members who were not necessarily here at the beginning of the meeting, we have the motion. After Madam Sgro, who is our next questioner, finishes her questions I'm going to call the question unless somebody has indicated to me they have a concern. This is simply the one to confirm that this committee will be seizing itself of the Privacy Commissioner's report.

    So if anybody has a concern, would you please so indicate to me. Otherwise, I will call the question as we have a quorum present.

    Madam Sgro.

    Ms. Judy Sgro (York West, Lib.): Thank you very much, Mr. Ehrenworth. Thank you for being courageous enough to come out here and help us to start to deal with something that I think is immensely troubling.

    I've run into the brick wall already, and have found it immensely frustrating being “just” an MP. I thought being an MP was pretty important, but the role of the MPs to work with the bureaucracy and to work on issues is extremely difficult here, and trying to sort out just what is our role, which is the whole issue of accountability. It is not just the ministers. It's part of the role of MPs, of what they're supposed to do, but when you're cut out, because you're just an MP, from roles of moving agendas along.... Many of our MPs have done some great work, but that work stops, and then there's no role because the government, whoever those guys are, take over.

    So having you here today and listening to your comments, it is with great sadness that I note we have this enormous problem, and it is not something that's been here since 1993. I was disturbed enough about the issue to read, while on holiday in Florida, various books on this whole issue of the machinery of government in order to figure out how to deal with it, not knowing that this change was going to come and we were going to have this opportunity here to actually start work on this kind of an issue.

    But where do we go with it? You've outlined four points, and I believe it needs to have political leadership, but I think it probably needs a whole lot more than just political leadership. But where do we fit and how can we push this forward to break down the wall that's been created?

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: I don't want to say the wrong thing here, but I don't disagree with anything you say. I think it's outrageous, just outrageous, that you're “just” an MP. You've hit upon a reality of this country that we don't see in very many other jurisdictions around the world, and to me it's anti-democratic to a great extent.

    I will tell you something that I honestly believe. They used to have something here called the Parliamentary Centre, and it was trying to promote changes to the parliamentary system. The silent majority doesn't make public policy in this country; it's the vocal minority. What this issue needs is advocates. I just focused on the public service. I didn't focus very much on the political level. But there has to be a group outside the system that basically starts raising this issue and puts it in the public domain. The media has to start reporting on it. Opinion leaders have to start talking about it. I mean, the country is not going to come to an end, but I think what it means is that our federal government is going to become less and less relevant.

    In a country that is 9,000 miles wide, I believe we need a strong, centralized, effective, respected government, and that goes for the way the political system works and the way the administration works. There are a lot of people who can provide that kind of feedback and leadership, but they have to be mobilized. It's not going to be you or your colleagues getting up and saying, we need to change. It has to be Canadians who get up and say that. That's how the leadership of this country will learn and respond.

    But you've hit upon what I felt when I was a public servant, that they're only a member of Parliament. And the idea that a member of Parliament can call a public servant and not necessarily get a phone call back is something I find outrageous.

Á  (1155)  

    Ms. Judy Sgro: On getting Canadians to understand how “our government” works, or how the Government of Canada functions, very few people really understand it, and when we attempt to explain to our constituents that you can only get these different levels, frankly, they're not interested. All they want to know is they want a reaction. They're more comfortable with understanding how the municipal level works and they expect that this level should be able to turn around the same answers.

    Certainly, there is a variety of excellent public servants who I have met who want to do more; it's a question of the frustration they also feel in the system, the current system, that doesn't allow them. Is it just a statement from the top that will make this happen? It has to be much more than that in order to change the attitude that, well, we're here today, we'll be here for a long time, and you're here today and you may not be here tomorrow, so you're irrelevant. The approach is often tried to make us feel that way. A lot of us do not feel redundant and irrelevant and we aren't going to. That's part of the reason we're on this committee.

    That ministers are feeling very much the same way in some of those departments is basically what I'm also hearing, so it's going to take an awfully big move to change this, even with our current and fabulous new head of the Privy Council.

    Is it possible?

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: If I didn't believe it was possible I don't think I would be here. One of the things I've been feeling is that I've been fairly successful in terms of doing things like creating the Public Policy Forum and running it, but I feel very unsuccessful in it having achieved its objective, and I'm convinced.... That's why Canadians have to start telling it the way it is.

    I will probably never work again in Ottawa as a result of this statement and other statements I've made, but I feel very passionately about what's going on in the country. Again, I think we need to mobilize people from the outside to start speaking out. To be perfectly frank, it can't be done just with administrative reform. It has to be political reform as well. That's where leadership has to be mobilized, from outside.

    We're lucky because we live in a country that only has about 150 opinion leaders. We probably all know who they are. I'm not talking about people representing the business community, I'm talking about people who know their way around government systems and understand how government works and feel as passionately about it as I do. Let's get Red Wilson. Let's get Paul Tellier. Let's get people who are in very influential positions who have had experience in government to start speaking out on these issues and raise it as a political issue. But again, it needs to be on the political agendas.

  (1200)  

    Ms. Judy Sgro: Thank you for caring.

    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Ehrenworth.

    Mr. Epp.

    Mr. Ken Epp: Mr. Chair, I have just a brief interjection.

    You said there are only about 150 opinion leaders. There are 300 members of Parliament. Thank you for a very strong message.

    Mr. Gerry Ritz (Battlefords—Lloydminster, Canadian Alliance): And there are 104 senators.

    Mr. Ken Epp: Yes, 104 senators.

    Thanks for a strong message.

    Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

    The Chair: Of course, you haven't asked him the tough question, Ken, and that is, how many of those 300 count among the 150? But that's another question. We'll hold on that one, if we may.

    I have, in this order, Mr. Ritz, Mr. Szabo, Mr. Forsythe, and Mr. Cullen, before I come to a second round with Mr. Lanctôt.

    Mr. Tirabassi, if you have a question, I would add you on before we start the second round.

    You've all had notice of this motion, moved by Mr. Ritz and seconded by Mr. Szabo. Do I have concurrence to pass this?

    (Motion agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])

    The Chair:Thank you.

    We will move now to Mr. Ritz.

    Mr. Gerry Ritz: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    Thank you for your thoughtful presentation here today. There is a lot of wheat in amongst the chaff.

    One thing that popped into my mind when you were outlining your four principles, your four points at the end of your dissertation, was, where does comprehensive whistle-blower legislation fit in?

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: I notice Hugh Winsor is here. One of his columns was about that a little while ago.

    I think some people should be allowed to speak out. I think people should be allowed to speak out, and jeopardize their jobs by speaking out. And that's the problem in this town, because it doesn't happen very often. But there has to be a point beyond which one won't go.

    So in answer to your question, I think we need to be able to protect people, but regardless, you can have whistle-blowing legislation. It's like no one gets fired in the public service; they just get shunted off into a corner and made to feel in such a way that they have no choice but to leave the system. It's a means to an end, but it's not the end unto itself.

    As I say, we must protect people, but no amount of whistle-blowing legislation is really going to protect a person once the system has a go at them.

    Mr. Gerry Ritz: But in your very first point, you talk about the prime minister of the day articulating the values and openness, and so on, and you say that has to have legislation to enforce that.

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: There was an instance in Britain--and I remember using this as a case study with many public servants down at Queen's one year--during the Falklands War. There was a ship named the Belgrano that was sunk. It was an Argentine ship; it was sunk by the British. The minister got up and said, we sank it because the ship was going into battle, heading towards the battle, and we had warned everyone that they must get out of this particular zone.

    The public servant got up and said, that's not the case; that didn't happen. The ship wasn't coming into battle; the ship was moving, and it was sunk by mistake.

    The public servant was fired, and then eventually reinstated. But I remember that it was a very difficult thing for the people in this case study to deal with, the idea that you would question....

    That's why we have the tradition of Westminster. That's why deputy ministers are appointed by the prime minister, because in the end, they are accountable to the prime minister, not to their minister.

    I think this comes down to the same accountability process. If you're doing your job and you say something that is well within the rules and regulations of what you're entitled to do, then.... But we don't have any rules; there's no accountability process.

  (1205)  

    Mr. Gerry Ritz: Right--or transparency, for that matter.

    To follow up on a point that Ms. Sgro was making, is the size of the civil service getting to be a problem? There is safety in numbers, and safety in ambiguity.

    In my tenure as an MP, we've lost the contact numbers that we used to have directly into immigration, directly into CCRA, directly into agriculture. They are no longer there. She was making the point that at times, we, as MPs, feel like we've been disconnected from control and from being able to ask questions, and so on.

    How do we gain that back? How do we force these departments that have become silos, if you will, to give us back those contact numbers so that we can serve our constituents, the Canadian people who pay their salaries, to have access to those departments in a more direct way, rather than the toll-free number that everybody uses, and they don't redial, and this type of thing? How do we force that?

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: Well, I wish I could answer it in one simple response, but when a culture is a secretive culture, and.... I wish I were a better expert on governance, but I find that in the provinces there is not nearly the dividing line between politics and policy. The public service in many of the provinces seems to work more hand in glove with the political system than it does in the tradition of Ottawa.

    Beyond that I can't say anything other than if the figures that have recently been stated in the media are true and the public service is the same size it was before the downsizing or larger, I find that to be unbelievable. I'm just flabbergasted by that. I used to talk about how in the U.S. 11% of the public service was located in their national capital region, the District of Columbia, and that it was 30% in Ottawa and how we were way too centralized. Now it's 40%. That is unbelievable.

    Mr. Gerry Ritz: There are five new buildings.

    Thank you.

    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Ritz.

    Mr. Szabo.

    Mr. Paul Szabo (Mississauga South, Lib.): Thank you.

    Mr. Ehrenworth, I come from a chartered accounting background, and we like to grind out sausages and get right down to the grassroots level rather than the theoretical. So I usually like to be a little more pointed.

    I would like to have your comments on this. It appears to me that one of the areas you haven't touched on, which I think has a significant impact on our observations about the current state of the governance of government, is the culture of government. We have, I believe, a public sector governance policy that is based on principles such as the honour system. We have a whole income tax system that is based on the honour system of self-declaration. We presume that people who apply for funding will do the work as specified. We trust them. We have a system that says that the Financial Administration Act has all the safeguards we need to make absolutely sure that our suppliers are honest, and if they're not, we can fine them, and we can recover. We have a system that basically says that the bureaucracy is honest, because that makes a better environment for people to create innovation and progress in areas necessary for change in the bureaucracy. So the culture, as I see it, is that we have adopted this philosophy that we trust people and we assume good faith. I believe it's for one specific reason, and that is because it would be far too expensive to abandon those principles and say, let's check all the tax returns. Let's assume that our bureaucrats aren't honest and that our suppliers are out to get us.

    As an example, when the United States army does an audit of suppliers' goods coming in, in order to determine whether or not they meet the quality standards, they check only 1%. They have determined statistically that they are better off checking only 1% and absorbing the consequences of having some bad material come through, because it's cheaper. The Ford Pinto is another example. They knew they had a problem, but they were not going to fix it because it was cheaper to pay for the lawsuits than it would be to change the design of the Pinto, or something like that.

    There is this presumption within the civil service culture and within government governance that we trust people and assume good faith, and this has a very significant effect.

    You used examples such as the firearms registry, the HRDC boondoggle, and government contracting. These are spicy items. I think it's easy for people to say, you blew $1 billion. But you and I both know that, for instance, the Auditor General also reported on the firearms registry that 80% of the applications that were sent in were false. They were erroneous applications, which required manual intervention, etc. It was a sabotage job. I hope that KPMG comes out with that. When the story is fully told, the firearms registry is no longer going to be a spicy item. The HRDC item was supposed to be a $1 billion boondoggle, but when the facts came out, many people went to jail because they were applicants who defrauded the government. Most of the money was recovered. In fact, the net loss to the government was very small. It was $1 billion then, but after it all was shaken down, the system worked, and in fact we were there.

    On the sponsorship thing, we have civil servants who are potentially going to be charged with criminal wrongdoing and possibly suppliers who will be charged for some criminal act. All of this is pending RCMP investigations and the Auditor General's final report.

  (1210)  

    So I think you have to take the spiciness away and say this is reflective of something, because in the stories and any other example you've come up with, when you look at the bottom line, when it's all played out, the philosophy worked. The trust and good faith and the reliance on the safeguards of the Financial Administration Act in fact do provide a better financial safeguard and a higher productivity level of the civil service.

    That said, I also believe ministers of the Crown have jobs that are so broad, so extensive, that they can't possibly discharge their responsibilities without total reliance on the bureaucracy. Because they are so reliant, and because often they would change over, their vulnerability to being let down by the bureaucracy is very high. So there is this tentative relationship between ministers who are just passing by and the bureaucracy that is the continuity between governments, and so on.

    Finally, one of the things that the Auditor General's report brought out with regard to this whole governance scenario was that the bureaucracy has a tendency to find the path of least resistance, and they've certainly done that with regard to human resources recruitment. Yes, they have lost people but they have replaced that functionality--but not by hiring full-time people. The Auditor General pointed out very clearly a significant shift to and reliance on part-time and contract people, for one reason and one reason alone: It was faster to get that person at the desk than to go through the process of full time.

    I raise these aspects with you so that, should you make these arguments further, you can be cognizant and take into account that it's not just “The sky is falling.” The Government of Canada, any government, makes change, constant change, but it's like turning an ocean liner; it takes time-lapse photography to actually see the turn. A speedboat can do it.

    Mr. Chairman, I'm sorry, I took too much time. I'll stop there.

    I raise those for your consideration and possibly your comments.

    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Szabo.

    You left the questioner minus eighteen seconds to respond, but I will allow him to do that because I think Mr. Ehrenworth may have something to say on that.

  (1215)  

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: I'm probably not going to work at the political level now.

    If you believe the system works, and you say the system works, then I think you are not looking at it in a way that I'm looking at it, because the system is very broken, and it's getting more and more broken. We are trying to operate in a no-risk environment in government, and it can't happen. There's an incredibly great fear of making mistakes.

    Do you know how thick the Financial Administration Act is? We have a Financial Administration Act that's seven feet thick. The Public Service Employment Act is five feet in thickness. Do we really believe the people who are operating under those circumstances have read every page and are following every rule in it?

    You can't operate a system of government in--

    Mr. Paul Szabo: I'm not saying everybody has to read every page of the Income Tax Act to--

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: Well, I'm sorry, these days that's about the case.

    Mr. Paul Szabo: That's not true.

    The Chair: Mr. Szabo, thank you.

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: At the same time, we do have an honour system in our tax system, and I think it works relatively well. But once people lose confidence in their federal government, once people lose confidence in the tax system, it doesn't work nearly as well. That's what prompted the government to act on turning Revenue Canada into an agency, because they were afraid that they didn't have the tools necessary in order to do their job effectively, and third parties like the Treasury Board or the Public Service Commission would tell them who they could hire, who they could fire, and how they had to do their work.

    The Chair: Okay, thank you.

    We'll move on to Mr. Forseth.

    Mr. Paul Forseth (New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, Canadian Alliance): Thank you, and welcome to the committee.

    I want to shift a little bit and talk specifically about service delivery outcomes being driven from the bottom up, rather than always trying to fix something from the top down. Perhaps you can comment about ministries where there is direct public service on how we can get the federal government to be more responsive and accountable for basic service delivery standards and on the duty of a ministry to communicate with its clientele and to accommodate.

    It's citizens who pay the bills. All of this work is supposed to be done in their name, for them. I'll give you some specific examples, common ones.

    We're all going to be looking at the basic income tax form. It's unnecessarily complex, and it begins to bring the question of who serves whom. And seniors benefits across this country, certainly the whole system related to seniors benefits is not very client focused. Look at veterans benefits. What is the bureaucracy doing to meet the changing special needs of the clientele it's supposed to serve? I was recently at a town hall meeting of people just absolutely bewildered and crying out for somebody to help them receive a service related to veterans benefits.

    What about immigration processing? In a standard case of a Canadian who goes abroad and marries somebody, that ministry can't deliver landed immigrant status for that no-problem situation. It often takes about three years for the spouse to get landed immigrant status.

    Those are just examples from the bottom up of client service that I get in my constituency office and try to feed back to the ministry, and they're incomprehensible to communicate.

    The consumer of the service has no market alternative--there are no market forces--because they can't shop somewhere else. So I'm wondering about your thoughts of trying to give some kind of power to the consumer, whether it's a charter statement by the ministry on service delivery standards that the consumer can hold up and say, “You promised that on the average file I would get completion within 18 months. It's now been two years, and you're still not talking to me.”

    I try to say that the MP's office is the ombudsman of very last resort, when you've exhausted all your communication skills and all your options dealing directly with the ministry. Yet we get clients saying they can't even talk to anybody. They get a letter spit out by a computer that isn't signed by anybody. They can't phone anybody; they can't communicate at all. And in this age of ministries going on-line, increasingly we have call centres, and we have seniors and others who have never touched a computer.

    So I talk about this larger principle of the duty of a ministry to communicate whatever is necessary and at the level of the client, and to accommodate those they serve and try to change the malaise you're talking about, perhaps by empowering the citizen at the bottom level as well as trying to manage from the top and finding the Lee Iacocca to save Chrysler or finding a new management team to save the big blue machine of IBM and drive it from the top. What about mechanisms to drive things from the bottom, to give the citizens themselves, who are paying the bills, actual service and reasonable delivery standards?

  (1220)  

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: I don't disagree with what you're saying and I can't really add very much to it, other than this is where the big difference is between government and the private economy. The private economy has competition. But I don't want my passport to be handed out by anyone but one agency. It's much easier to deal with the passport office now than it used to be, because they never had different kinds of rules. If you really needed your passport quickly, unless you knew someone, you couldn't get it quickly. But now you can pay an extra $50 and get it in two days rather than a week, if you have to.

    It's changing. We're talking about culture change, and I know what has to happen, but I don't know how to make it happen. I think if you had a Lou Gerstner here, or if you brought in a Red Wilson, a former provincial public servant who ran Bell Canada, I think their perspectives would be very interesting, because they know something about government. They know the difference between government and the private economy, and I think that is where some perspectives on those answers might better lie, as well as with some very forward-thinking public servants in this town who know what to do but aren't given the tools to do it.

    Mr. Paul Forseth: Perhaps, then, because of the existence of this committee and the focus of our report, we had better send out a call to those who feel they really have something to contribute to contact the clerk of this committee and to ask to come before it. We need to hear all the ideas and answers that I'm sure are out there. I'm not so sure that the political powers that be want to hear those answers. But here in committee, where we're supposed to be a little bit more non-partisan and where we're trying to get back to better parliamentary oversight of the broad public service, those individuals should be asked to come forward.

    The Chair: Might I just come in on that, Mr. Ehrenworth? In answer to that, given your experience, you might speculate on this. If we were to send an open letter to all public servants, how many of them would actually come forward? How many of them would feel safe coming forward in the current environment?

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: I'll give you someone who would come forward.

    The Chair: It was more rhetorical.

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: No, but you have to understand this in the context. I am going to say it. The Minister of Finance is often introduced as the former Minister of Industry whose greatest accomplishment was connecting Canada to the Internet, to make Canada one of the most connected countries in the world. The person who is responsible for making that happen is a fellow by the name of Doug Hull, who headed the information highway in the federal government. He broke some rules, but he did it. He did it because of his own capabilities in his capacity. He didn't have his hand in the cookie jar, but he broke some rules.

    Well, Doug Hull is no longer in government. He was taken out of his job because he didn't follow the rules. But he certainly accomplished the outcome. I think those are the kinds of people you need to sit down with. He is one of the most capable public servants I have ever met and a true nation-builder.

    The Chair: If I may freelance in on this, though, I think Mr. Forseth puts his finger on a problem we have. It has been my experience also that there is a large number of public servants who are deeply concerned about what is occurring and who have thought things through and have ideas, but the culture is such that it is very difficult for them to come to this table to talk about it. One of the dilemmas we've been struggling with is how to create an atmosphere that is safe and allows people to really speak about the kinds of concerns they have without putting them at the kind of risk you identify when you say things such as, “I'll probably never work in this town again”. It's a dilemma, and I don't know that we have a solution to it.

    I'm going to move on, though, to Mr. Cullen, then to Mr. Tirabassi, back to Mr. Lanctôt, and then, as always, the chair is going to have a chance to ask a question.

  (1225)  

    Mr. Roy Cullen (Etobicoke North, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

    Thank you, Mr. Ehrenworth.

    First of all, with regard to your comment about bureaucrats not answering calls from members of Parliament, I don't know where that came from, but if a member of Parliament phones a bureaucrat and doesn't get a response and accepts that, then I think they kind of deserve what they get.

    On the issue of accountability, you wrote an op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail. I didn't read it. I have a summary here that says you would describe the new Canada Customs and Revenue Agency as a new public management focus trying to create...reflecting a governance structure that maximizes accountability. Would that be a fair summary of what you said? I didn't see the article myself.

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: I would be glad to make the article available to you.

    I implied that it is an experiment, and it's still an experiment. You can't step back and say, hey, it's working well, or it's not working. It appears to be a step in the right direction in terms of making the system accountable.

    Mr. Roy Cullen: I'm not really going to get into a debate about whether or not it's working. But in terms of it being a model for maximizing accountability, you see it as that. Is that a fair statement?

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: Not necessarily.

    Mr. Roy Cullen: Oh. So someone has taken some liberty with your remarks.

    But let's get at the question anyway. The government has set up a number of different agencies, including Parks Canada, Nav Canada, the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, and the airport authorities, and a lot of elected MPs see that their accountability has been diminished. Constituents come to us and we say, well, it's a new agency, and we don't have much control over it any more. That might be an unfair thing to say as well. Given the importance you seem to be attaching to the role of members of Parliament, how do you sort of square the circle in terms of accountability?

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: I don't want members of Parliament to be accountable for what Revenue Canada does or doesn't do. As a matter of fact, I don't want the minister to be accountable for what Revenue Canada does or doesn't do. I think the people who make those decisions....

    As a matter of fact, there is a perfect example of where the minister has virtually no say, or should have no say, on decisions that come out of that department. We're talking about tax issues and the like. The minister doesn't have a say on the Competition Bureau; maybe he does on how it's organized, but not in terms of the decision-making of the Competition Bureau.

     That's where accountability, in those particular instances, has to happen, at the official level, because they make the decision, and in the past they have not necessarily been accountable for that decision. You can go to Federal Court, spend yourself $50,000, and find out that you're right and they're wrong, but it doesn't matter to them because it's not their money.

    Mr. Roy Cullen: Yes.

    Perhaps the revenue agency was a bad example, certainly in terms of technical tax questions, but there are broader policy questions around taxpayer rights, etc. Even if you look at Parks Canada or the airport authorities...

    If the movement to setting up more arm's-length agencies of government creates, in your mind, more accountability, how does that reconcile with a feeling, then, even if it's not real, among members of Parliament that they have less accountability?

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: I don't think necessarily agencies are arm's-length agencies. Crown corporations might be more or less arm's length, although when you look at some of the people who are put in charge of running them you wonder if they were put in charge because they have the qualifications or they know the right people.

    My view of agencies is where the accountability lies, who's responsible for doing what, and I think it is a very simple process. Politicians have the responsibility of developing and passing legislation. By and large, they shouldn't have the responsibility of implementing or administering those decisions. That's the responsibility of the public service. There might be examples where that line is not a dividing line, but that's always been the tradition in this country and that's why we have a non-partisan public service. When our governments change it's not like in the United States, where the top four levels change. Nothing changes here because you're responsive to political direction, but at the same time, it's your job to administer the program.

  (1230)  

    Mr. Roy Cullen: I wanted to get on to some other things as well. I suppose, by logical extension, one could say that we should set up agencies and quasi-governmental authorities, crowns--in other words, the more the better.

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that someone should step back and ask how best we can do that. Should it be through agencies? Should it be through legislation? Maybe I'm just thinking about some of the things that I said; nothing was definitive, but at least look at the system now and step back and ask how we can make it work more effectively, because it's a dysfunctional system of government.

    The Chair: Mr. Cullen, I'm afraid your time has drawn to an end. We'll see if we have some more.

    I should mention one thing. You referenced an article from the Globe and Mail. Our very capable researcher has a copy of that. We will have it translated and circulated to people, if they would like.

    At the risk of being a witness, I suspect that the question around setting up agencies is not so much whether we should have more or fewer of them, it is do they divert us from dealing with the core? Do we focus on providing a short-term solution in this agency and that agency and forget about the beast at the centre?

    But I'm not a witness, so I couldn't possibly really say that for you, sir.

    I think we have Mr. Tirabassi and then Mr. Lanctôt.

    Mr. Tony Tirabassi (Niagara Centre, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I too would like to thank the witness for coming out here.

    Through my comments you might pick up on some of the frustrations I've had. I have to relate back to my municipal experience, 15 years in municipal government, because the similarity is that it really comes down to that one person, whether they're a ratepayer in a municipality, or as we refer to them here, one of our constituents. How well did you serve that person? That's what you try to measure, within reason.

    At the same time, when we were trying to accommodate ratepayers--and I've only been here two years, so 15 years in municipal politics kind of overshadows it for the time being--realistically, what was being asked of our staff? You want to create a satisfied ratepayer or constituent, but at the same time, you want to make sure you're maintaining an efficient, motivated, fairly compensated workforce. If you can make that marriage, then I think you've won.

    How do you get there?

    You know, in 15 years I've dealt with all the adages, wanting to create one-stop shopping. Then we had another council come in, and our staff was instructed that if it ain't broke, break it, examine it, and put it back together. Learn to do more with a little less; in other words, provide more and at the same time watch the taxes at the end of the year.

    So this was always going on. And at the same time, you want to monitor what that's doing to your staff, because they have to work within those demands. If you compare it to the private sector, they can measure the efficiency of their staff and how to compensate them by the bottom line. There is a bottom line in the private sector, and to the consumer by the sales. If you want to use the Pepsi or Coke analogy, as long as they're picking up their cases of Pepsi and Coke and there's a bottom line, they're succeeding there.

    And like Mr. Szabo, I've come to the conclusion after several years in that realm of government, and certainly up here in my short time, that most people who work for the government at any level are there to do an honest job. But there are isolated cases. And most people who come in to the office or to city hall are well served. So when we hear that we have to do a better job or that there's low morale, I want to know specifically how that is ever to be measured.

    In the case of Pepsi and Coke, both those companies have had total flops when it comes to soft drinks. They've tried to go in a certain direction, and they've always gone back to the original. Could you imagine, if you want to make that comparison, if we ran more like private corporations? And I've heard that many, many times. Could you imagine if the government said we were going back to the way we were doing things?

    I want to be very clear--these are more comments, from someone who's tried to be in between the constituent, the ratepayer, and the government employees--we have to start knowing how to measure, and we know enough is never enough. How do you measure the outcomes, unlike the way you measure them in a private corporation where you have competition? Who's your competition to compare it to?

    That's my question. Very specifically, not in generalities, how do you measure?

  (1235)  

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: If I were a measuring person I'd tell you how to measure. As I said before, don't shoot the messenger. There is a big problem in the way our government functions, and the reality is that we don't measure. Why can't you measure? Can you measure how much money it costs to deliver cheques? Probably 80% of what government does can be measured, and to some extent, to give government some credit, it is making every attempt to measure. But how do you know whether you're doing a good job or a bad job unless you measure?

    There was a study on morale in the public service 15 years ago, and there was a study 10 years ago that said morale had become worse. Let the same people who did those studies do another study and see whether the morale is the same or better or worse. Those are measurement capacities.

    But on the other side, is it the objective of government to have high morale in its system? The objective of government is to be able to develop effective public policy and to implement that policy in programs. You can ask me for those specifics, but that's not my bag and I can't give them to you. I am telling you that the system of government is more inward-looking, more secretive, and more control-oriented. It's less collegial than it was 15 years ago. It's not that we don't have anything to learn from the private sector. Isn't management management, and isn't dealing with human resources the same whether you're in the private sector or the public sector? If you can't treat people with respect....

    Government, I find, hides behind the differences between what goes on in our system--we can't change it--and what goes on in other systems. I'm trying to promote the fact that some other governments are light-years ahead in addressing some of these issues. This is the competitive advantage many of these countries have over us.

    When you consider the government takes up 50% of the economy, our standard of living depends upon the quality of our government, not necessarily the quality of our industries.

    Mr. Tony Tirabassi: Do I have time for another quick question?

    The Chair: Yes.

    Mr. Tony Tirabassi: When you say, and you've referred to it quite often, that other governments are light-years ahead, have they been able to measure the satisfaction of their populations versus ours, comparing these improvements or the modernization they've gone through? Can you tell us--

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: I think this committee should go and find that out.

    Mr. Tony Tirabassi: Is it out there, that information, that they are more or less satisfied?

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: Yes, it is.

  (1240)  

    Mr. Tony Tirabassi: Okay, fair enough.

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: Paul Volcker is the former chair of the Federal Reserve in the United States. In 1987 he became the chairman of the National Commission on the Public Service to deal with the same issues we are talking about here. I went back to get a quote from him, and found that he is now chairman of the National Commission on the Public Service II.

    Things have not become a great deal better in the United States, but there's still this concern from outsiders. The reality is that foundations in the United States play a much more effective role than they do here. They are watchdogs over government and will promote the kinds of things you were talking about. We need a better political system. We don't have those kinds of foundations in Canada. Most of the funding of these kinds of activities takes place through governments.

    The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Ehrenworth.

    Mr. Tirabassi, I'm intrigued by your question about measurement. One of the dilemmas is always that in order to measure something you have to be able to identify that it's occurring. A question you've heard me ask at committee, and I keep asking the departments, is, “How many cars did we buy last year?”

    Well, the last time they arrived they told me they were ready for that question and they were going to answer it. Okay. So you're the PS to Treasury Board, and we're meeting at 5:30 tomorrow. Why don't you see if you can report back here on how many cars the Government of Canada bought last year and what kinds of cars, by company, or even simpler, what provinces they were bought in? Simple questions; you should be able to answer that fairly quickly. So if you can report back at 5:30, then, if we have that information available, you can start to measure the satisfaction outcome. But you have to identify the activity first, so let's just see if you can.

    Mr. Paul Forseth: Which time was that?

    The Chair: At 3:30; I'm sorry, 3:30.

    This should be simple. They say they already have the information on how many cars, because they know I keep asking. Let's see if they can drill down into that.

    Monsieur Lanctôt.

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    I am going to back to the firearms registry. People throughout the country, not just in Quebec, are deeply concerned about this issue, because it is true that the political and organizational problems are huge. I agree with you regarding Mr. Szabo's earlier comment. The firearms registry did result from a sound political decision, but the problems lie in the way the registry has been administered.

    How could public servants have prevented such a fiasco? There was nothing wrong with the initial political idea, but there was something very wrong with the way in which it was administered. The conditions surrounding the operation of the registry turned it into a fiasco. The government is trying its best to save it, and is now facing a black hole of close to $1 billion for a registry that was supposed to cost $2 million a year to run. Something escapes me here.

    Why is it that public servants did not sound the alarm? It is true that there is a great deal of staff turnover. Is this enough to explain how a politically correct initiative became a black hole for all citizens, who have spent $1 billion on this program? How can we explain that one or more public servants did not do something? Where did they go and who refused to listen? Do you think some people went to the minister and had their concerns dismissed? How could such a fiasco have happened?

[English]

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: That was only a billion dollars. What about the time the public service went through a downsizing? It was supposed to cost $1.5 billion, and it cost $3 billion. I haven't read anything, anywhere, about the fact that it was estimated to cost $1.5 billion and it actually cost $3 billion.

    I don't know enough about the firearms registration, but I can almost create a reality to it. We have this program, someone is trying to put it in place, and there's a realization after about a year that things aren't going very well. So they bring someone in and say, you're in charge of the firearms registration program, fix it, at any cost. Ultimately, that becomes the driving force--fix it, at any cost--because ultimately the accountability is going to rest with the minister.

    I'm not sure I'm giving a good enough response, but there is a potential scenario that may have happened.

[Translation]

    Mr. Robert Lanctôt: That is all, Mr. Chairman.

[English]

    The Chair: Thank you, Monsieur Lanctôt.

    Mr. Cullen, Mr. Forseth, and I think that about wraps it up for questions.

    Mr. Cullen, and then me.

    Mr. Roy Cullen: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

    Mr. Ehrenworth, we've been talking a lot in this committee about the need for better horizontal management. We have a little subcommittee looking at the public service renewal.

    One of the questions we're going to be looking at is, is the public service capable of organizing itself, or being organized, in such a way as to provide better horizontal management of issues? When I think about it in those terms, I think about the corporate sector, where, over the last many years--in fact, these things go in cycles, so it may be changing again, I haven't kept track of it--the corporations went flatter, and they started to manage with more of a matrix style of management. You get a multidisciplinary group together and you track the project, and hierarchies fall away to some extent.

    Given the public service, and its culture, and all that goes with it, is the public service able to manage issues horizontally in a substantive way, rather than just say, we're going to do this? Can we break through and do that in a meaningful way?

  (1245)  

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: When I first got involved with government, I used to hear the word “collegiality” all the time. It was Michael Pitfield's favourite term. He was the cabinet secretary, and quite a brilliant man. He believed that in order for government to work effectively, government departments had to work effectively together, and as one government.

    This doesn't happen. The assumption is that we have one government. We don't have one government; we may have 20 governments. I can tell you that it comes back down to culture. I remember my days in government when I'd get a phone call from the Department of External Affairs, saying “You're from the labour department. What are you involved in trade issues for? That's our bailiwick.” As long as you have this kind of culture and response, and not recognize the fact that the sum of the parts is not equal to the whole, you'll never be able to move towards horizontal government. This has to be recognized.

    Using the term “collegiality” in government--it's an oxymoron. I wish I could say something different, but that was the case when you had the Department of Industry and DRIE and they would never talk to each other. Billions of dollars were put into the regions and the Department of Industry was never consulted. It's as true today as it was then.

    Mr. Roy Cullen: I was going to ask, first of all, isn't the Privy Council Office meant to play some kind of a role in pulling this together? Second, can we move towards a better model, or is it just so embedded in the culture that we're knocking our head against a wall?

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: I think we can move to a better model. The Privy Council Office has an important role to play as an intermediary between departments and the Prime Minister's Office. When they brought in Public Service 2000, they made the Clerk of the Privy Council the leader of the public service. But I'm not sure you can actually be a leader of the public service and be accountable to the prime minister at the same time, because the response of the public service to the political side is so overwhelming.

    Mr. Roy Cullen: Thank you.

    The Chair: Thank you very much.

    Mr. Forseth.

    Mr. Paul Forseth: In my previous question, I talked about public service renewal being driven from the bottom up. But let's talk a little bit about the top down, and these central agencies, such as the PMO and PCO. The public doesn't even know what the PCO is. The PMO is the Prime Minister's Office, which has a growing staff, and the PCO is the Privy Council Office.

    Perhaps you can just explain very briefly what they are and what their reason or role is. Why do we have them? Are these central organizations problematic? If so, what needs to be changed in the structural problem with them?

    We've often heard the case where the cabinet minister of a particular ministry hears a radio announcement in a taxi on the way to Parliament Hill. This is because there were issues in the works, with the final decision or what's going to happen generated out of the PCO and PMO, leaving the minister out of the circuit in the final analysis. So if we can imagine how a minister is left out of the circuit, then we can imagine how parliamentary oversight in the broadest sense is really out of the loop.

    So perhaps you could address your comments to the relevance and problems around PMO and PCO in the overall structure of ministerial accountability.

  (1250)  

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: That's where the power lies today. The PCO has never been as powerful, nor has the PMO, for reasons that I outlined in my presentation. I don't have much more to say on this in that the PMO is a political institution and the PCO is supposed to be the intermediary between the non-political government and politics. I don't think, in this day and age, that's possible.

    I think I was brainwashed by a lot of people in the early days...which was, you know, Canada is best served by a non-partisan, professional public service responsive at all times to political direction. I don't know how you can't be political, how you can give advice to a minister without being able to step into that person's shoes and say, “If you do that, this is what the opposition could do.” But I do believe it's possible for someone to give the same advice to a Liberal government, a Tory government, or an NDP government.

    To use the analogy of the Bob Rae government, I think his biggest mistake was that he didn't recognize that he had a weak caucus and weak ministers, and he didn't utilize the public service the way he should have, because they were able to compensate over the fact that they ended up winning an election they weren't supposed to win.

    I'm not sure I've answered that well, but that's about as well as I can say it.

    Mr. Paul Forseth: We had Mr. Savoie's book Governing from the Centre, and he documented over a period of time how, for a variety of political reasons, expedience reasons, or whatever, power and decision-making had really come into the centre, perhaps inappropriately. If that's the case, that might be part of the blockage to the public service at large being able to respond to new realities. If the power has been taken into the centre, then you have to deal with the centre as part of the problem.

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: The power has been taken into the centre. I'm even suggesting that the power be taken into the centre in dealing with this particular issue. The power has been taken into the centre because there's very little trust in the ability of departments to deliver. The same thing is happening in Ontario. The Premier's office makes all the decisions, and I think to the detriment...it's virtually impossible in such a complex environment to manage. I used the expression “keeping a lid on it”, but that's about all you can do.

    In previous times, ministers had enormous power. The idea that a minister of finance can't say, “Okay, I'll let you merge”, and says, “Sorry, you can't merge because the PMO says no” would have been unheard of in past times.

    Mr. Paul Forseth: Okay, you say it's perhaps difficult to drive change from the top down. You've made my point that another way of driving change is from the bottom up and looking at consumer-client oriented issues to get some equivalent of market forces. If the client can't get veterans benefits by going down the street, then the client has to have some kind of charter or performance standard that the agency has committed itself to so that individuals at the bottom have something to hold in their hands to get response from the bureaucracy.

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: Give departments the tools they need to do their jobs. Give the authority. Give the accountability. That's top down. Then tell people to manage, and if they achieve what they set out to achieve, fine. If they don't, then they will face the consequences. That's true in the public, private, or any sector.

  (1255)  

    The Chair: We are drawing to the end of the meeting, and I simply want to ask two questions to focus on a couple of things I thought were missed a bit or that intrigued me in the conversation.

    One of them is this question of centralization. Ken, I believe, when he started, made the comment that this is a phenomenon that started in 1993. My response to this is not necessarily to provide the political or partisan defence. I would argue that the centralizing of power is a trend that started shortly after the Second World War, and it is accelerating now. As the world is moving faster, as the demand for decisions and globalization have advanced, the government's response has been to centralize decision-making far more. One of the enablers for that, it is argued, has been television, which has tended to focus things on the individual dissenter, etc. But the real pressure for the change has been driven by this need for response.

    Rather than, as you were pointing out, attacking the organizational structure, as other organizations have done, to reform the structure, reform the decision-making, reform the information management to allow them to respond in a more timely way, government has tended to resist it, in some ways by doing the things Paul refers to, building more and more layers to try to give people rights to get to the conclusion they want, rather than changing the system to make it automatically deliver the conclusion. Greater transparency and greater knowledge of what government is doing on a day-to-day basis may reduce the real need for things like charters and whistle-blowing legislation, if you can actually understand what the beast is doing.

    I'll ask the second one in the same context. As we've got into this, one of the things we've been doing is going through simple things like how government actually makes a decision--walk me through the steps. If you're in a department trying to deliver something and it requires any legislation or change to legislation, you have to negotiate the legislation with the Department of Justice, which has responsibility for it, you have to get approval in principle from PCO, the policy coordination arm, and that implies some sort of relationship with PMO. If it costs any money, you have to get approval from within the finance department for the budget. If it requires any hiring, you have to get approval from PSC. If it requires any spending, government services will do that for you. And Treasury Board has to sign off on anything you want to spend. It just strikes me that structurally, by building in all these checks and balances, what we have truly done is immobilize good work by public servants.

    I would be interested in whether you think that's a fair analysis. From the work you've done, are there other models for government coordination and oversight that reduce this incredibly complex matrix public servants have to work within?

    Mr. Sheldon Ehrenworth: I'm not going to make the mistake of jumping into that, but I would be glad to work with the committee to put you in touch with people in other countries. The OECD has done a lot of work on this. Don Johnson is very keen on comparative governments for this particular purpose, as an element of economic and social competitiveness.

    You've talked about the constraints outside government departments. You used to be a public servant yourself, Mr, Chair, so you understand the constraints that actually apply in a government department. Writing a memo for a signature by the deputy minister does not necessarily mean it goes to the deputy minister. It goes to about 10 people before it gets there, and then it comes back down the same way. That's the kind of environment and culture we're talking about, and no number of changes to the employment act or the Financial Administration Act are going to change that. It's a fundamental change that has to occur. That's what I hope this committee, with a lot of help from people from the outside, will help to mobilize. Again, it's not with this government; it has to be with the next government before it becomes a government.

    The Chair: Mr. Ehrenworth, with that, I want to thank you very much for spending today with us. I suspect we will have more than one conversation with you and others as this rolls out.

    For the information of members, tomorrow we have Michelle d'Auray, Chief Information Officer for the Government of Canada, and she's going to talk about some of the systems issues that are part of this study. On Monday we have the Privacy Commissioner, who, as you note in that motion we passed, is coming in specifically on his report, because we wanted to address that quickly. We will also have him back to talk about the privacy problems within the structural changes at a later date.

    The Clerk of the Privy Council and the Secretary of the Treasury Board will both be before us. The clerk has requested a little more time, given that there is something called a budget that is being prepared, and he may have something to do with that. So in fairness, he's asked whether he could delay his presentation. He's eager to come and talk about things--and I suspect he'll have a few comments, Mr. Ehrenworth, on your comments. We'll negotiate a date with him, and I'll keep everybody informed.

    Finally, there is a suggestion that this bill on public service reform may actually hit the House on February 6, which is this Thursday. We'll see if that indeed happens, and then we'll be talking to Mr. Cullen and the subcommittee about how we proceed with that.

    We are now adjourned until 3:30 tomorrow in room 362 East Block. Thank you.