Clerk’s Remarks at the Second Blueprint 2020 Interdepartmental Innovation Fair

April 20, 2016

Check against delivery.

Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody! Is everybody paying attention? Are you listening? Good morning. Hi, up there. Hello out there on the Internet.

I'm very pleased to be here and have a chance to speak at this interdepartmental fair. Not so happy to have to follow Scott Brison as a speaker. That's a bit of a setup. I've known Minister Brison for a while. But it is great, and I do want to pass on to him our thanks. He's going to be a great friend and champion of the public service in the years to come. I'm really looking forward to working with him.

Thank you Paul and Yaprak for hosting this event and for joining in today. It is a coming home for me. My first day in the public service and my first six years were at the Department of Finance, and it is always nice to be back on the traditional territory of the Department of Finance.

I’d like to acknowledge the contribution of our MCs, Peter Edwards and Alexandra Young, and the team who organized this event. You’ve done a stellar job.

And I know it's going to be a wonderful day for everybody. All the things that are going on upstairs and around us, so thank you, thank you very much.

And a shout out to those of you who are joining us through webcast. I'm much better looking in person, but you can see me there on the screen. It's great.

So I've got just a couple of themes I wanted to touch on and for some of them, I’ll repeat themes that Yaprak and Paul and Minister Brison had already identified. And that's no accident, because I think there's a great deal of alignment about where we want to go in the Public Service of Canada in 2016.

Let me just do one more shout-out, though, which is to welcome—I believe you're here somewhere—a group of students who are still in their studies and joining the public service on summer and co-op assignments. Are you here? Anybody there to wave? You out there participating by webcast?

Hi, welcome to the Public Service of Canada. Give them a welcoming round of applause, please. These are the vaunted millennials who are going to replace all of the old model baby boomers, like me.

Thank you for that introduction, Paul. Takes me back to when there were Expos in Montreal. I may be old, but I saw all the cool bands, when they weren't old.

Okay. As you know, we have a government with a very ambitious agenda. I have two tasks from the Prime Minister.

One is to help his government achieve results on that agenda and, in four years, deliver on the agenda that they laid out for Canadians. There's not a lot of secrecy about what they want to do. You can go and read the mandate letters to ministers, the 300-plus commitments. You can read the Speech from the Throne, you can read the budget. It's a government which is very clear on where it wants to go and it has a mandate from Canadians to do that. The first job that we have is to help them deliver their commitments to Canadians.

Now, the second priority is connected because we won't be able to do the first if we can't do the second one. That is, we have to rapidly increase the capacities and capabilities of the public service, as an institution, as a family of organizations. We have to make sure that we have the tools, the practices, the processes and the people to meet a rising tide of expectations from the governments we serve and through them, Canadians.

Those are two inextricably connected priorities, and your senior leadership is spending a lot of time on the second: our capabilities, as a public service, and the stress and the challenge that that puts us under to keep moving forward and to keep up with a very ambitious government, and with the expectations of Canadians.

The Blueprint 2020 engagement exercise told us what we need to do and what our vision is of our public service.

We did a deep, wide, broad engagement with our workforce and they told us pretty clearly what they want. And we are trying very hard to accomplish that collectively across organizations, and individually, work unit by work unit. There are more than 300 federal organizations, agencies and institutions, and within that there are many work units, all with their own culture and leadership. Moving the Public Service of Canada in the same direction is a big undertaking. It's not going to be an email from the Clerk, or a policy directive from the Treasury Board, or a speech from the Prime Minister that's going to get us there. That's all very helpful, and it creates incentives, it creates room, it creates possibilities.

But it’s really us who will determine the success of this initiative.

It's us. It is us that is going to make the difference in building the kind of public service that we want to pass on to the people that are joining us and that we want to pass on to Canadians as an institution. That really is the urgent challenge of the coming year.

We have a lot of areas where we're being challenged, and this started before November 4th, let me be clear on that. These were trends and pressures that were on us before, under the old government, and would have been there whatever government Canadians had picked last October.

We are going to be called on for more engagement and collaboration with people outside government to bring them more into shaping of policies, refinement of services, the processes of rule-making and regulation. Engagement—consultation—is now the norm, not the exception. It's hard, and it requires skills, and it requires patience and diligence, and we're going to have to become much better at it.

As Minister Brison insisted, yes, we have organizations that are built for purpose. They have specialized roles, they have specialized expertise and capabilities. But there's almost no issue of any importance to Canadians that isn't going to mobilize many institutions working together, the kind of leverage examples that Minister Brison gave. 
And we have to create the incentives and the culture where people automatically reach out and partner with each other to help us achieve our objectives.

The public service of turf and territory and ego has to go. It's a public service of collaboration and partnership that we have to build.

That means a culture of respect, of openness, and of transparency. What we're trying to accomplish, measuring whether we're getting there, learning from our mistakes, fixing things that aren't working, reinforcing things that are, and moving on.

And that means that renewal is not one of these one-off exercises where you declare a victory and roll out the banners. It's a continuous exercise. We're going to be at it for years and years to come, continuously trying to get better at what we do for Canadians.

So it's pretty clear from some members of the audience that we are in the face of a generational change. People like me that joined the public service in the 1980s and '90s will be taking our leave gradually—or not so gradually—over the coming years, and we will be welcoming new cohorts of people, educated, formed in a different kind of environment and for whom social media is the air they breathe, collaboration is the way they learned at school. We're going to have different expectations and disparate cultures co-existing in the public service for the next few years. And, as the Minister said, it behooves us, the older, experienced ones, to become mentors and coaches and to pass on what we can to the new people that are coming in. And that requires a commitment to continuous learning, to training, to orientation programs, to development, to internal communications. It's not going to happen if everybody sits in their cubicles all day, not talking to each other. So internal communications and learning are going to be a big, big, big priority.

We have to work on the workforce, and there are many things we have to do in terms of recruitment. We have to recruit, smarter, faster, better to find the kinds of people with the values and the mission-driven outlook that we’re going to need in the years ahead.

We're going to have to also develop the skills. You cannot come in with a university degree and coast on it for 35 years. We're going to have to continually upgrade our skills, our knowledge, learn about areas of policy and programs, ways of working. And so a commitment to continuous learning and renewal is going to have to be part of our employee workforce

The other aspect is our workplace environment, and here I am very optimistic.

We are finally, I think, going to be able to move forward on the kinds of workplaces, work spaces, work tools, work processes and systems that really unleash the creativity, the passion and the commitment of public servants across Canada.

We need, yes, good buildings to work in; we need technology, tools that will allow us to move information around, to collaborate and learn from each other. Yes, we're going to have to have online tools, video conferencing, all the kinds of things that are now commonplace. These are going to affect our outside services to Canadians; they're going to affect the way that we regulate; they're going to affect the way we make policy. Most important, and the hardest of all, they're going to affect how we deal with each other as public servants. And the internal tools of the public service are probably the ones in the most need of upgrading and renovation.

That is why I am very pleased to have an announcement to pull out of my hat today, which is that we are able now to unveil a significant upgrade in the kinds of tools that will allow public servants to do the collaboration with each other that I've been talking about.

So we are launching, officially today—99 per cent sure it'll work, Yaprak—a suite of GC tools. So this will take the GCconnex, the GCpedia and the GC intranet tools and add a whole new wave of functionality to all of them and bring them together for access by public servants across the public service.

I’d like to thank and congratulate the team for their hard and dedicated work on these tools. I believe this change will really improve the quality of work across the public service.

So thank you to the GC tools team on your behalf.

So there's a tendency at an innovation fair to talk about change, new ways of working, new tools, new policies, new programs. It's all true. But I do want to insist, in the role that I have as the public service head, that some things will not change. Some things are permanent and fundamental about the Public Service of Canada, and they need to be repeated and taught and passed on, and they need to be celebrated. And that is our values and our role in our democracy.

We are, and always will be, a professional, non-political, non-partisan public service that will serve the government that Canadians choose for us. That is a rare gift in the world and it is something to be celebrated and nourished, and I want to reaffirm that commitment.

Our values are what continue and what will shape our future. These are well defined. We've talked to our workforce over the years and they are tested day in and day out by real cases and real situations.

They are respect for democracy, respect for people, integrity, excellence and stewardship.

These are values that are going to continue to guide us as we move forward in the years ahead.

Last year was an extraordinary year for the public service. We went through our first rendez-vous with a fixed election date; we had lots of time to get ready during the longest election campaign in a century, and we were able to welcome whatever government that the Canadian people chose—majority, minority, red, blue, coalition—and we were ready. And all of the feedback I've had from the Prime Minister and from ministers, is that they were incredibly pleased and impressed by the support the Public Service provided to them. They were eager to get to work as a new government, as new ministers, and new members of Parliament, and they have really, really enjoyed their relationship with the Public Service of Canada.

And I think what we have to celebrate is that this is something we are really, really good at in Canada. The peaceful passage of power from one group of politicians to another group of politicians, with an unbroken continuity of services to Canadians is not something that you're seeing in Brazil this week; it's not something that you'll see in the United States later this year. It's something Canadians particularly excel at, and I do want to publicly thank all the public servants who contributed to the transition exercise in 2015.

You did a tremendous job and I am so proud of the job that you did last year. Thank you very much.

So before I get the hook, I'm just going to give you a little commercial. I will be having an annual report to the Prime Minister coming out in a few weeks. I'll have a little bit more to say about some of these themes, and I do want to take the opportunity to reinforce a very strong personal commitment, which I know is shared by all of the senior leadership of the public service, which is to a workplace where well-being is nourished and cherished; where we make serious progress on mental health issues; that we provide the culture and the capacity and the support to be the kind of workplace that we want to be, and we are going to be doing a lot of things in this space in the next year. I'll have more to say about that in the weeks and months to come.

But it is a personal commitment that the senior leadership of the public service shares. We are going to make a huge difference on the kind of workplace that we provide to you. That's our pledge to you.

Thank you.