Clerk’s Remarks at the 2016 ADM Forum

Speech

February 8, 2016

Check against delivery

It is an interesting and challenging time to be in public service and to occupy a position of leadership and stewardship, and I think the two go together.

I think that the way to approach a meeting like today’s is to reflect a bit on the past year and then also to turn the page to the future.

I want to thank people for what has happened over the last year, which seems to be receding into the rear-view mirror quickly, but it really was an extraordinary year since we were last together.

I am very proud of the role that the public service played in the last year: first encounter with a fixed election date, and the breadth and depth and quality of the work done across the public service to get ready for the election period, to serve a government with its mandate until the election was called, to keep the wheels of government moving the services to Canadians during the longest election campaign in a century. And then to move very quickly into the on-boarding and start-up of a brand new government, and all of the change that that represented.

It is a tremendous strength of Canada's public service to be able to do this. It is not to be taken lightly, it is not to be taken for granted, and it is a very important principle in Westminster government. It cannot be taken for granted that every government that Canadians choose can count on a public service, non-partisan, professional, excellent, to be there, to serve it loyally, and to implement the priorities that it's achieved a democratic mandate from Canadians to pursue. We do this really well, and I just want to say thank you. A big thank you to everyone.

The test of a transition is how short it is. It is a transition. It's a transition from campaigning to governing, and if it's taking a long time something's going wrong. So a lot of energy went into planning and preparing and thinking about it, so that it would move quickly. And we were ready so that Canadians could choose a government of any stripe and they would be well-positioned to hit the ground running following the election date. And that's exactly what happened.

The public service produced high-quality, non-partisan advice on which the Government could rely from its first day in power.

In fact, before the first day in power, the 16 days of transition between the election and the swearing-in day were jam-packed and there was an enormous amount of work that had been done to harvest during that period. And I'm very, very grateful for that.

The support provided during the transition allowed us to begin on a very, very positive note from the get-go.

So what does the new government mean for the public service? And I’ll just sketch out a few things to kind of provoke your discussions for the rest of the day.

It's very clear, this is a very ambitious and very energetic government. We know what the government wants to do. There really isn't a lot to discuss. You've read the Speech from the Throne, you've read public mandate letters. There are over 300 or so commitments that are out there for Canadians, and I assure you the government intends to get a very, very high score of having completed them by 2019. And if you want to put it in your daytimer, the next election is Monday, October the 20th, 2019.

The good news is we do have four years to pursue those mandate letter commitments. It may not feel like that in every department right now, but they were written with a four-year mandate in mind.

I think the bigger challenges for the public service are not in the what, although there's plenty there, it's actually in the how. The heavy lifting begins in earnest now for a government that has thought deeply about governance and governing before it came to power. Delivering on that agenda, adjusting to new personalities, new styles of decision-making and learning, and new ways of doing business is really the biggest challenge for us as a public service.

There are formidable challenges as the public service adjusts to this. And not least, because we're moving into another period of economic uncertainty and downturn, and resources, as always, will have to be managed very carefully and tough choices lie ahead.

So this community has a lot to take on and a lot to look forward to in the year ahead.

What's the new government like? What are the hallmarks of this new normal, to use the Tylenol commercial soundbite?

We talked about this a bit at the deputies' retreat, and I think it's beginning to crystalize for sure around three or four themes. I'll just leave them there for your discussion.

The first thing is, clearly, openness. Whether it’s making the mandate letters public, the initiative to make government open and accountable, designating scientists and heads of mission as spokespersons—this is a government that takes openness very seriously.

Autonomy for ministers to lead their portfolios and lead their departments. The Prime Minister fully expects his ministers to know what's expected of them and that they can manage their relationships with colleagues, caucus members, stakeholders, journalists, with a very light touch from the centre. This is a new way of working and it puts a lot of responsibility on ministers and the people that support them to handle those relationships.

The focus on objectives and results. And I think that you’ll be talking about and addressing this topic later today.

This is a big, big shift. A real focus in results and outcomes, and not just activity. Pay close attention to the language in the middle part of your Minister's mandate letter. We as a public service are going to have to become much more sophisticated, very quickly, about defining the objectives of the initiatives we're pursuing, whether they're policy, program, regulatory, service, negotiations, measuring how we're doing as we go along, learning and making adjustments as we go.

We've always had systems that have paid lip service to this. This government's serious about it. And the measure of an initiative is not how many dollars you spent or how many meetings you have, it's what change you made, what difference you made in the lives of Canadians and in the world.

The pace. This started long before November 4th, the pace of governing is fast and getting faster. Driven by technology, social media, and all kinds of other factors which you know very well. Citizens' expectations are rising, the pressure to“why haven't you responded”, “why don't you have something in place right away” is going to bear down on this government just as it did on the previous one.

So whether it's answering questions, running call centres, turnaround times, and regulatory processes, service windows, there will be pressure for pace. And we are pretty good at that. The pace in decision-making and policy-making; that we have some work to do, and to keep pace with these ministers is going to be a challenge, which I'm sure many of you are facing.

Last theme I would like to touch upon is engagement, and this is, again, something that started in the past, but is going to have to accelerate very quickly.

A two-way engagement, in both directions.

It won't be enough just to talk at Canadians, we're going to have to listen. We're going to have to learn to listen, and we're going to have to go out with more humility that we have the answers, and we're going to have to engage them in the forming of solutions.

So engagement will be closely integrated at all stages, from development of policy to delivery of services.

In fact, I'd go as far as to stay that thinking about communications as a separate function and community is kind of passé. Communications is built into development of policy, the deliberation of policy, and the delivery of services at every stage. It has to be built into our way of thinking and deciding.

This is a government that's taken on a very ambitious agenda, and for all the talk of sunny ways and new relationships and that sort of thing, I don't want you to be under any illusion. It's a government very focused on results and getting things done.

The public service is also going to have to develop that focus. And I think it's going to make a big difference. I'm very optimistic that we can meet that challenge.

So we learned a lot through Blueprint 2020 about what we need to do to meet the needs and expectations of Canadians.

We actually went out and engaged our workforce, deeply, broadly. We've listened to them. We have a very solid take on what they think we need to do to become the kind of public service that we aspire to. That's something we can build on. We have a code of values and ethics. Again, we engaged our staff on it. They worked it up with us. That's something we can build on. We have a lot with which we can tackle the challenges of the coming year.

So, I think that vision of an agile, high-performing, innovative, collaborative public service that we talked about among ourselves and with our staff, in town halls, online, is exactly the kind of public service that we're going to need. The big change is we're going to need it faster. 2020 is starting to arrive as we speak.

So, typically, people want to know around this time, as we drift into performance reviews and talent management and all that kind of thing, what are the Clerk's priorities, so I can write them down and put them in my own agreements?

Well, I have two, very simple. In the weeks and months ahead the Prime Minister's asked me to pursue two things. One, is to assist him and the government to pursue and deliver the agenda that they put to Canadians. The second, he's equally clear on, is to strengthen the capability of the public service, as we move forward, to meet the challenges and expectations of Canadians, both to deliver that agenda, and all of the rising expectations of Canadians on us.

Let me be clear about a few things. I intend to, with your help, and with the commitment of the deputy minister community, continue Janice Charette's ground-breaking work on mental health, and to pursue that commitment to a healthy respectful workplace, and I'm counting on all of you to pursue that.

We have been through a lot as a public service. I remember the public service of the 1980s and 1990s, but it's not the public service we need in 2016. We need a 2016 approach to sick leave and disability, and we need a 2016 approach to mental health and wellness, and the two are inseparable. We won't be able to get one without the other.

We need better tools and technology. It used to be that when you left home and went to work, work was where all the cool technology was. Now it's the opposite. When you go home that's where the cool stuff is. We have to get better and we have to get faster, and I don't want you to be under any illusions, we are under cyber attack 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We have to do this in a smart, secure way, and I'm telling you, Shared Services Canada is here to stay. We will fix it. We will learn from the issues of its start-up, but we cannot fix 282 institutions one at a time. We will have to do it altogether.

We have a lot ahead of us, and I could go on and on, but I just draw the highlights for the coming months. We have a second First Ministers' Meeting in less than a few months. Big work to do on climate change, the government's first project, and some very difficult allocative decisions about resources in an economy which is heading into uncertainty.

The first real wave of legislation will start to fill up Parliament and the Senate, and more summitry; this time with some very crunchy issues with our American, Mexican, and European partners.

So it's a busy year ahead, that's for sure.

So this Prime Minister—and this government—knows what he wants to do, as I've said. He's very focused on the how. And so what I'm really struck by, is that in addition to all of that agenda, how much time and effort and energy the government's going to put into governance. They are also taking on reform of fundamental institutions of the country: the Senate, how we conduct elections, how the House of Commons runs, how appointments are made, and yes, how clerks are chosen. It is a government that cares a great deal about governance and that's going to challenge a lot of our assumptions about how things work in this town.

Some of the new structures are still being stress-tested in their early days. Let's not forget they’re only about 100 years—well, it sometimes feels like 100 years—100 days into governing.

So we will learn. If this particular constellation of Cabinet committees or structures or taskings doesn't work, we'll change it. We have ministers who are just easing into their role as ministers and learning how to work with each other and so what I'm asking of you is a bit of patience.

What does this mean for an assistant deputy minister? Well, it won't surprise you to hear from me that ADMs are going to play a very, very important role in successfully attaining both my priorities, whether it's delivering the government's agenda, or raising the capability of the public service.

Your deputy ministers are interacting a lot more with ministers.

Be careful what you wish for... they are spending a ton of time with our ministers. They're being hijacked to go with them to meetings; they're being drawn into briefings; they're spending a great deal of time with them. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of energy and something has to give. And you are going to have to occupy some of that space and take care of things for them and make sure that things are moving forward while they're busy with the minister. And I'm sure they will try to bring you into the flow of things over the coming weeks.

It's a high-speed, change-filled environment.

This means that ADMs will have to make decisions without necessarily having all the information and answers that they will need; they will have to do so with more confidence.

So we need you to move fast, to be agile, innovative, collaborative, take risks, but take smart risks, focus on results and outcomes. Sometimes that means building on strengths and doing things well that we already do well, and sometimes it means thinking of doing things differently. Especially the engagement with people outside the public service. It's not a muscle that a lot of us have well-developed.

And so in this context, and it's easy to say but very hard to put into practice, we want you to take smart risks, to be innovative. It is going to be okay to make mistakes. If it doesn't end up working, whether it's a policy or a regulation or a service initiative, as long as we learn from them, we admit where we have had failure or less than what we wanted to achieve, be candid about it, learn from it and move forward, we're going to be okay. Don't sweep it under the carpet, don't look for somebody else to blame, don't duck and run for cover, or don't blame the central agencies. And certainly don't blame PCO…the Treasury Board maybe, but that's another story... [joke]

You have to occupy the space. You have to step into that space, you have to own it, and you have to create a work environment for your own teams that says it's okay; that they can take chances and they can take risks and that rather than running risk management with an awful lot of pre-clearance and templates and this is the okay way to do things, we're going to go through a period, especially this year, of trying new ways.

People are going to be out there without the safety net of checking with the Langevin Building, or checking with the Treasury Board or Finance.

So, there's an impression that sort of everything has changed or everything's gone out the window.

I should therefore reinforce a few fundamental elements of our role as public servants.

We're going to have to continue to treat taxpayers' dollars and public assets with great care and respect. We cannot be frivolous with public money. Nothing good can come of that. Very importantly, in this world of openness and open government, we will have to protect and safeguard the personal information of Canadians. It's a career killer for you, it can be a career killer for a minister and a government. The importance of protecting personal information cannot be underscored enough.

The ability of Cabinet to meet and deliberate and take decisions with an appropriate degree of confidentiality is fundamental to Westminster government. Those 30 women and men are the people with the democratic legitimacy to make those decisions. Not me, not you, not the stakeholders, and not the journalists. So leaking is never good. It erodes trust, it impairs decision-making, it harms the country. It's got to stop.

So, let me move to a little more cheery conclusion. I've been in the public service a long time, as you know. I think I came to my first ADM forum in 1996, and the mood was dark and gloomy. It was after the Quebec referendum and the near-death experience, and you were worrying as ADMs—we were—not just about our jobs and our budgets, but about the very existence of the country. A very different time.

There's a lot of reasons to be confident about the country and confident about its place in the world. And the public service has come through time and time again. We have proven that we are capable of anticipating and responding to the evolving needs of the country and the evolving needs of very, very different governments, their priorities, and their styles.

Shock and crisis management, we are very good at. It tends to be the kind of thing we give awards for in June during National Public Service Week. What I want us to do is apply some of those lessons of being responsive and creative to peace time, to the slow, deliberate, continuous improvement of our programs and services and what we do for Canadians, and to recognize that work more consistently.

I'm going to rely very heavily on this community, as your deputies will, to move forward, to deliver on that agenda, deliver on our shared priorities, and to make the adjustment to a new approach to governing. We have a foundation to build on, and there's always more to do. We always get together, we tend to focus on what's missing and what's next and what has to be done. It's very important to celebrate the strengths and the things we do well, and the set of values and the commitment that our employees and all of you have to come in every day, make a difference for Canadians, and make a difference through Canada for the world.

So, congratulations to you ADMs who have been recently appointed. It's a great club to belong to. Welcome to the ADM community. So my advice I usually give at the orientation sessions I'll share with you today.

Be the ADM that you wished you had. Be the kind of colleague that you need to have right now. For the seasoned and experienced members of the community, you have so much to contribute, you have no idea. Become a mentor, become a coach, become a colleague, develop the teams under you, develop the group of people, men and women who will be in this room five years from now and ten years from now. It is the most rewarding thing you can do in public service, to grow and nurture talent and see it flourish.

I hope that I’ve conveyed to you some of the sense of urgency and ambition that I have for all of us and the tremendous opportunity we have ahead of us.

For you that have so much of a responsibility of leadership and stewardship in the public service, the people look to for tone, for example, for direction, for clarity, it's such an important year ahead. It's 2016, we have a lot to do, and I'm counting on you. And the good thing is, I know I can count on you.

Thank you very much.

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