Clerk’s Remarks at the APEX Induction Ceremony

Speech

November 2, 2016

Check against delivery.

Such a good-looking group but I can't actually see anybody.

Anyway... Thank you, Donna. Thank you for a very generous presentation, and Michel for your remarks. I'm totally in agreement of course with everything you said and I want to, before I forget, thank APEX for being a wonderful partner in trying to move the Public Service towards its future. We've done a lot of good work together in the past and I know that you'll be a tremendous advocate for this community and people in the room and we'll do a lot of work together in the future.

So thank you. And I encourage you to stay involved in APEX in the years to come.

I am very proud to be here today as Clerk. Like many of you, I got a new job this year and mine has three hats. I like being deputy minister to the Prime Minister – it's pretty cool many days – and I like being Secretary to the Cabinet and sitting in the corner. But I'm especially pleased to be statutorily Head of the Public Service and to be an ambassador and a spokesperson for this wonderful institution. And to be here and celebrate your personal accomplishments in getting into this community and to collectively celebrate who we are and what we do makes me especially proud. I’m really proud to be with you this evening.

I said it at a couple of occasions and I'll say it again. We should be very proud of what we are, what we do, and the contribution we make to this wonderful country. There are things that other public services do really well. Some of them do some things better than us and we should learn from them and adapt in a global environment. But I am convinced from many visits in and many visits out, there is no country in the world with which we could change public services tomorrow and be better off as a country. We are that good and we should celebrate ourselves.

Part of that is acknowledging that not everything goes well and we have our rough spots and we have bad days and bad files. We have all kinds of people telling us how we could have done things better or differently. And that's the bargain we accept as leaders. The transparency, the media, the opposition, 17 or 18 officers of Parliament, some of whom are here today – hi! That's important. It's important in a democracy and it's important in pushing us and encouraging us and making us get better in what we do serving governments and serving Canadians. That's the bargain that we accept as public servants.

I was not going to talk about Donald Trump tonight but I will talk just for a few minutes about the world. When you look around, if you watch the news at night – and I don't do that very often, it's too unsettling and I lose sleep – there are not many countries that have really strong functional governance where a group of men and women elected by their citizens, operating under the rule of law, can thrash out the issues of the day – Where will wealth and prosperity come from? How will we reconcile economic growth and our environment? How do we engage with the world? How do we keep people safe and free at the same time? I could go on and on. Many countries, many formerly successful countries, are now struggling with that in terms of their system of governance and their ability to even have the debate in a rational and respectful way. Or having had the debate, to actually make decisions. Or having made the decisions, the ability to implement and execute them. It's still something that Canadians do really well and we should hang onto that and we should be proud of that.

And I am convinced that one of the reasons for our success, our success as a country, is the fact that, since the beginning, we’ve had a non-partisan public service based on merit and excellence… that has been there, government after government, decade after decade, in the service of Canadians–doing policy, regulation, services, keeping us safe. It is an enormous national asset. Many, many countries are envious of us.

And so that leads me to the key message I hope you take away: what you do matters. You are the leaders of this community – 280,000 – I forget, Marie will tell me because she is well aware how many public servants we have these days. You are the people who lead. You're executives. You make the decisions. You have the financial and human resource authorities. You create the tasking. You set the work. More than that, you create the work environment.

I can rail on or give inspirational speeches about mental health and well-being and workplace well-being and resilience and all those things.

I completely agree with Michel’s comments. Whether we get there or not is going to be up to you. You imprint the culture and the values of your teams and your organizations. You will be stewards of a group of women and men for the period of time that you lead them. And you want to leave that group of men and women better off than when you started leading them.

They will imprint on you. You have no idea how chameleon-like the Public Service is. The tone you set, whether it's cynical or optimistic, resilient or defeatist, bad-tempered or whatever, it will resonate through your organizations, and in six months your teams are going to mirror you more than you think. So you have to be mindful every single day about the imprint that you make on your teams and your organizations.

So my usual message – and I've said it many, many times – be the kind of boss that you always wished you had, and be the kind of colleague that you're going to need to reach out to. And if we all do that to some extent every day, we will be a much better public service. And the other 200 and whatever thousand people will be better off and more productive and more happy and be able to make the kind of contribution to the country that we hope for and we aspire to.

So there are certain themes in terms of diversity, our workforce, mental health, working conditions, innovation, risk management and so on. I'm not going to go through them all. You can read my report, you can go to my website. I think that my colleagues in the Deputy Minister community are all very firmly committed to making the work environment and the workforce the kind that Canadians deserve.

We need you. We need your input. We need your ideas. We need your creativity. So my other message is, you have more impact than you think you do. You may think, “well if only Treasury Board did this, if only the Clerk knew that, if only the Prime Minister knew this.” You actually have an enormous amount of influence. The power of a good idea and the power of a business case is more than you think. Nobody comes to government saying, “let's be mediocre, let's be crappy, let's have a bad work environment”. If you have good ideas, if you have business cases, if you have the energy to drive them, go for it. I can tell you that your senior leadership is listening and responsive and open to them.

Take charge of your future, take charge of the public service, because you are, now, Destination 2020's leadership. You are the people running the show. You are our replacement. There’s no doubt at least one or two future Clerks in the room, future deputy ministers. That doesn't matter. If you retire at the level you are at today, you still have an opportunity to make a big impact on the Public Service, and the men and women that are looking to you for leadership.

So be mindful, be active, take risks. Make at least one really risky hiring decision this year. Don't play it safe. Don't hide behind rules. Don't hide behind “this is the way we've always done it” or “this is what the process is”. Push the envelope and drive your organizations. Be a little bit annoying and irritating to your Deputy Minister. It's okay.

They're looking for advice. Right?

We need your energy. We need your advice. We need your innovation. This is not the public service that I joined in 1981. It is a different kind of environment. You are going to have to live with social media trolls in a way that I never had to. It's a different environment. You're going to be out in the open, very much, before parliamentary committees and the media and operating out in the limelight rather than in the background much more than I did when I was starting. I know you're up to that.

You make a big difference to the country. You make a big difference to the rest of the Public Service. What you do matters to the Public Service and, more important, it matters to Canada, and Canada matters to the world.

So be proud, celebrate, strut, go home at Christmas and the holiday period, and puff out your shoulders a little bit and say I am an executive in the Public Service of Canada, the best public service in the world. What I do matters! And I am going to get a little bit of rest over Christmas.

Thank you very much.

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