Clerk’s Remarks at the 2016 Public Service Award of Excellence

October 20, 2016

Check against delivery.

Thank you. Hello, everybody. It is a tremendous honour to be here to celebrate with you and to celebrate you -- recipients of this award. Let me start by thanking a number of people.

So first of all, I of course want to thank His Excellency for being here today. He’s asked to be part of the celebrations. Your participation in this event has created some memories for the recipients and for all of us. You’re a tremendous friend, a champion of the public service and a great public servant in your own right. Thank you very much.

I would also like to thank the teams who organized this event, who did all the work to make this move forward so smoothly.

First, I want to thank the team at the Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer, the group at OCHRO that has participated in the organization of this. So to Anne-Marie and her team at OCHRO, thank you very much for your participation. And of course, all the people across departments and agencies, right across the public service, who as volunteers serve in awards and recognition committees, put their peers and colleagues forward, take the time to serve on selection committees and make recommendations. On top of all the wonderful work you do, it’s a tremendous contribution to the public service and I want to thank everybody who’s involved in awards and recognition across the Public Service. Thank you very much.

A special shout out, if I may, to a friend and colleague, Marie Lemay, who is the chair of this year’s selection committee, and who had the difficult task of selecting today’s recipients from a very strong pool of nominations and candidates. There were so many wonderful stories across the public service. Somehow you found time, as well as co-chairing the charitable campaign and a few other difficult files you’ve been wrestling with, to make a contribution to today’s event. Thank you very much Marie.

I want to also shout out to your department, Public Services and Procurement Canada, who have played an instrumental role in rehabilitating this wonderful space in which we are meeting. We are working through the renovation of Canada’s parliamentary precinct. Public Services and Procurement are managing the project on budget, on time, and are handing a wonderful legacy to our children and our grandchildren.

We are meeting on Algonquin territories and it is very meaningful to me meeting in this room, named for our first prime minister in this country, who had a troubled relationship with our First Peoples, in a week where we made solid progress on reconciliation with those very Algonquin peoples. So it’s particularly meaningful to me and to all of us to be meeting here today. Miigwetch and thank you to the peoples of the territories here.

So just a few comments. I will be brief, I promise you. If you want to read more about what I think about the public service, you can read my report to the Prime Minister. You can go to my website. You can follow me on Twitter and Facebook because that’s the kind of public service we are now. So there are many things I would love to talk about today but I will just touch on a few if I can today.

I think that today’s celebration is important for all kinds of reasons. It is a reminder of the important role of an institution, an organization, a group of men and women and the service they give to their country and how important that is to the country. The Governor General has talked about this eloquently on many occasions. It is a particularly unique relationship between the people that Canada elects to make decisions and make laws, and the people that support them in making those decisions and serving Canadians through programs, services, regulations, and representation abroad. It’s a precious legacy and one which we have to continue to work hard to pass on to future generations of public servants and of Canadians. So these moments come too rarely to celebrate what we do, who we are, what we contribute to the country.

At a minimum, you show what we can do. You show your colleagues, you show your peers, and hopefully you show Canadians what we can do. And you can inspire, you can coach, you can mentor, you can be ambassadors, you can be inspiration to other public servants, and to the men and women who are thinking about career choices and coming into the Public Service of Canada. So thank you for that.

It’s also proof that we are very good at what we do and it helps build trust and confidence in the Canadians who pay for our services and expect ever-rising quality of services and programs from us, and rightly so. That bond with Canadians is very important. We serve the public, we serve a public interest, we manage public monies, and keeping their trust and confidence is very precious. And so the examples you’ve set out today are so important.

I believe that the range of recipients has also demonstrated the tremendous diversity in the Public Service of Canada. As we learned this year, we have everything from astronauts to cooks, chemists, to accountants, lawyers, soldiers, people in every discipline and everything that you could think of. And in many cases, the very best work being done in Canada is being done by federal public servants. Certainly the most interesting work in many, many fields and people have made tremendous careers. And I was just really struck today. The career paths of some of our long serving public servants, the teams that have been brought together, the variety.

You see the leading edge of where we’re going as a country when you’re honouring people who work in space and robotics and pathogens and all these cool leading-edge things. And then you see the continuity of our history. You see our evolution as a society and a country as we strive to become more inclusive, more diverse, more representative of the Canada we serve. And we saw examples of that today. So it’s really inspiring to see how the Public Service of Canada is both an agent of change and changing, but also an agent of continuity and stability in a country which bobs around in an increasingly changing and turbulent world. It’s a precious thing.

And I would just reinforce in my own way what the Governor General said. I’ve had a lot of visitors and I’ve been a number of places. There is no country in the world with which we could exchange public services and be better off as a country. We are that good, and we should remember that and we should celebrate it.

We accept the scrutiny and the transparency and the role that the media and parliamentarians and many agents of Parliament and others play in holding us to account and shining a light on the things that we have not done well, or as well as we could, because we aspire to do better and to make a difference in our country.

That is why celebrating excellence is so important in this field as in so many others. I don’t think any public servant really comes in to work in the morning saying, “I think I’m going to be mediocre today. I think I'm going to settle.” People come into the Public Service and they come in to work every day, trying to make a difference in some way to their organization, to the programs and services that they deliver to their country. That’s what motivates us. It always has, and I hope it always will.

And so it’s really important to celebrate those that have achieved real excellence in that.

Excellence is not a word to be avoided. We must celebrate excellence.

It inspires others. It gives us purpose and meaning and it will draw other people, men and women from all walks of life, into this wonderful institution and we will be able to hand it on to the next generation.

As we go through the massive generational change that the Public Service is facing these days, it is great to see the whole spectrum from people like me closer to the end of their careers, and the tremendous path that they have taken, and the inspiration of some of our young and up-and-coming talent. It gives me a lot of confidence and a lot of hope for the Public Service and, frankly, for Canada.

Thank you very much.