Lessons Learned from a Pandemic Response: Working with Digital Nations to Accelerate Canada’s Digital Transformation

Speaking Points for the Honourable Joyce Murray Minister of Digital Government
FWD 50 Conference
November 4, 2020

Thank you. It’s a great pleasure to be here.

First, let me acknowledge that I’m joining you from the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg People.

Alastair, Rebecca and the entire FWD50 team-thanks for inviting me to speak and welcoming delegates from the Digital Nations Ministerial Summit which we just wrapped up.

FWD50 is THE Canadian conference to explore how technology can make peoples lives better.

Your conversations will build better digital governments in Canada and around the world.

Having just wrapped up the Digital Nations Ministerial Summit I can tell you these opportunities to share best practices, and lessons are incredibly useful.

And this year, amid the ongoing challenges of the pandemic, these conversations are even more urgent, and tangible.

So thank you FWD50 for making this event possible.

Today, I will speak about how we’ve responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and my vision for our government’s digital transformation.

Lessons along my personal path to leading a digital transformation in a global pandemic guide my vision for digital transformation.

I put myself through my languages, archeology, and pre-med studies by planting 500,000 trees in BC. But I also planted myself on a different career path then I planned and spent 25 years co-developing Canada’s leading international reforestation business. You, your colleagues or kids may have worked for Brinkman and Associates Reforestation—which planted its 1.5 billionth tree this spring!

Planting as we do it in Canada, is the hardest physical work ever measured by kinesiologists. We plant on all our post logging or fire terrains in all weather, during our buggiest seasons in remote wilderness locations, on steep mountain sides, and it definitely teaches you endurance and perseverance; useful skills when facing digital obstacles. My experience, and my MBA climate policy thesis in the nineties have made me a champion of ecological health issues at every stage of my political career.

First elected in 2001 as a BC MLA, I was appointed Minister of Water, Land and Air Protection, and laid the foundation for BC’s leading climate & carbon pricing program. Later, as Minister of Management Services I oversaw the BC Government’s procurement transformation and consolidations of government services, such as ICT – a mandate that probably sounds a little more familiar to folks here today.

In Ottawa as Parliamentary Secretary to Treasury Board President, I led the development of what became Canada’s Centre for Greening Government, and later became its Minister.

In representing Canada at the 2018 meetings of the Digital Nations meetings in Auckland, New Zealand, I first experienced the power of these gatherings to inspire our government’s digital transformation efforts.

And now, as Canada’s first stand-alone Minister of Digital Government, I lead the Government of Canada’s digital transformation, working with the teams at the Office of the Chief Information Officer, the Canadian Digital Service and Shared Services Canada.

My goal for this transformation is that every Canadian will be able to access any service, at any time, from any device.

The incredible way in which Canadians came together to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic also upended every industry and aspect of our economy. 

In response to the pandemic, our government acted, in record time, to roll out supports to sustain them throughout the crisis.

This was undertaken by a workforce which, in a matter of a few short days, had pivoted to remote work.

Shared Services Canada quickly expanded our network capacity and rolled out collaborative tools like Microsoft Teams to help public servants work together effectively from home.

Digital government’s back-end support enabled public servants to quickly roll out services to millions of Canadians like:

• the Canada Emergency Response Benefit;
• the Canadian Emergency Wage Subsidy; and
• and many others.

As well, we built tools to help Canadians stay informed about COVID-19 and the government supports that were available. 

Canada’s new notification service “Get Updates on COVID-19” was built using open source code from the UK Digital Service and has sent over 5 million important messages to Canadians by text or email since April. Because this tool is also easily scalable, it has been adopted by different orders of government across Canada.

This summer, we also launched the COVID Alert app.  An exposure notification app also built using open source code, COVID Alert lets Canadians know they may have been exposed to the virus—and does it without sharing any personal information.

Like digital increasingly is today, this too, was a collaborative effort.

Built using Apple and Google’s exposure notification framework API, we worked alongside Canadian-based companies like BlackBerry and volunteers from Shopify to develop a bilingual app that could be scaled across all provinces and territories, in coordination with the non-profit Linux Foundation Public Health, who developed the code, and Blackberry employees who provided additional security reviews.

Countries like Ireland, the Netherlands, Uruguay, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan, to name a few also developed similar apps using the Apple and Google framework.

People around the world are cooperating out of compassion to meet this crisis and like them, the digital world is increasingly collaborating to rise to its transformational challenges.

More than 5 million Canadians, and 8 provinces are currently using the COVID Alert app.  I encourage everyone who can, to download it today to help limit the spread of COVID-19 and keep themselves and their communities safe.

Canada’s digital successes have given us confidence in our capacity to react, decisively, and effectively.

I am focused on seizing this momentum so our government can be positioned to deliver better, faster, and more reliable services in an increasingly complex and uncertain future.

The pandemic helped break down the bureaucratic structures and silos that typically slow us down.

The urgent need to put people first is driving our cultural shift to more responsive, agile and adaptive public services across all departments.

But in order to keep that momentum going, we need to work together. That’s why conferences like this are so important. These formal and informal national and international networks of people who are expert, and motivated, are collectively finding digital solutions for our challenges.

The 7th Annual Digital Nations Summit was a collaborative forum of ten of the world’s leading digital governments.

The summit’s theme was ‘responsive and resilient service’. Through candid discussions on issues like digital inclusion, addressing the environmental impact of our IT operations and recruiting and retaining digital talent, the Summit provided the opportunity to learn and develop shared solutions to common problems. A chance to borrow best practices from some of the world’s leading digital governments.

Above all, it was a chance to learn about the work other countries are pushing forward on.

For example, Denmark revamped their legislation to enable data sharing across departments;

Mexico and Estonia are doing interesting work on data interoperability through their signature InteroperaMX and X-Roads platforms.

Israel’s CampusIL- an open learning platform that provides free courses from leading academic and international institutions, professional training, and public sector diploma courses is something we could use here.

We are also applying lessons from Portugal and New Zealand, world leaders in digital identity, and from Korea – who have a cutting-edge digital government strategy.

Here in Canada, we’re interested in using projects like this to help us devise better data sharing solutions across our government and other jurisdictions.

For example, Canada’s Policy on Automated Decision Making was developed using the ethical principles of artificial intelligence agreed upon by the Digital Nations.

And I’m very pleased to see how other member countries are embracing it.

While 2020 will begin to bend the curve on GHG emissions and shrink our footprint on the living ecosystems on which we depend, Digital Nations’ digital footprint is growing.  So, the matter of greening IT is an emerging critical area of work for the Digital Nations.

As former Chair of the Council of Canadian Ministers of the Environment, advancing collective climate action is an on-going personal passion.

The world currently has a health crisis. We have an economic crisis. When those are behind us, we will still have the climate crisis.

Improving digital service delivery is about being better, faster, and more people-focused.  

And it’s also about taking a responsible and holistic approach.

Virtual and online services offer the opportunity to reduce human society’s environmental footprint.

And we need to make sure that our progress in improving digital service delivery also helps reduce the government’s environmental footprint.

There are data tracking opportunities to better leverage data and AI, to inform greening government IT decisions.

Canada is leading the Digital Nations working group on Greening IT, to make environmental sustainability a cornerstone of our digital recovery efforts.

This group of ten governments around the world will align to implement measurable, sustainable, and greener IT procurement practices.

This commitment includes holding suppliers accountable for their climate footprint and actively promoting built in environmental stewardship.   

Now, Canada’s Greening Government Strategy includes a greater focus on IT investments, and energy-efficient Cloud services to help reduce government operations emissions by 40% by 2030. And get to net zero by 2050.

That’s just a snapshot of the momentum of the Digital Nations, which I am pleased to add to the ideas being shared here at FWD50.

The events of the past year have brought stress and hardship to Canadians and people around the world.

But they have also accelerated governments’ efforts to improve our service delivery.

Now is the time to harness the momentum of this digital shift to position governments across the globe to deliver better, faster, greener, and more reliable services in an increasingly complex and uncertain future.

In Canada, our aim is that every Canadian will be able to access any federal government service, at any time, from any device. My key areas of focus are: 

• modernizing the way we replace, build, and manage major IT projects,
• supporting departments in meeting their digital operational needs,
• building whole-of-government platforms and components that make it easy for Canadians to find and use government services and finally;
• overhauling the institutional barriers to change that have held us back.
• Focusing on the principles of equality, inclusion, and trust that are so critical to a healthy democracy.

What will this ultimately mean for Canadians? Services that are secure, reliable and easy to use from any device. And better one-on-one service for those who need the help.

How would you like your transaction with the government to be?

My vision includes:

• No more paper forms and faxes. 
• No more confusing and hard-to-find government benefits and services.
• No more having to call — and sit on hold — to get an update on your transaction.
• No more complicated logins with credentials that are easily forgotten. And;
• Automatic tax filing for simple returns for as many Canadians as possible

And international collaboration will be the norm, not the exception.

This transformation will require finding and fostering the right people for the job – people like you.

So, I challenge those of you here today in the private sector to consider working for your government.

Your expertise and forward-thinking will be so valuable as we build multidisciplinary teams to deliver better services to citizens.

This is my message to Canadian private sector digital experts: consider working for the Government of Canada.

We have an exchange program to bring you in and harness your perspectives.

There is a lot of work ahead. And you will have a lot of challenges.

But if a tree-planting environmentalist like me can learn to lead the Government of Canada’s digital transformation, then there is nothing you can’t accomplish.

I encourage all of us, this FWD50 community, to seize this momentum.

Thank you.