Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Senator Colin Deacon’s motion calling upon the Government of Canada to reform its program delivery and information technology systems by urgently accelerating the implementation of user-friendly digital solutions, to transform the public service delivery experience of Canadians while at the same time reducing costs. I support Senator Colin Deacon’s motion, colleagues. I imagine most of you do too.

I would like to speak this afternoon about the context of reforming public services more generally and to share my own experience in leading public service reforms as a former head of Ontario’s public service. I’m going to start with a public service delivery reform story and then draw some pointers that I think are important in the context of Senator Deacon’s motion.

Shortly after the first election of former premier of Ontario Dalton McGuinty in 2003, he tasked me with addressing some pressing public service delivery issues, including reducing wait times for key health care procedures, such as cardiac and cancer surgeries; improving standardized student test scores and reducing high school dropout rates; and addressing severe backlogs in the issuance of birth certificates. All of these things were subsequently accomplished. Today, I’m going to focus on the issuance of birth certificates because it goes directly to the benefits of digitization.

In 2004, colleagues, wait times for birth certificates in Ontario had reached nine months, causing analogies to be made with the time frame — you know what I’m going to say about the romantic evening. The former premier, though, was understandably not amused. Public service delivery had become a political issue. The public service team, led by former deputy minister Michelle DiEmanuele, who is the current head of Ontario’s public service, mapped the process chain and found that the birth certificate process was entirely paper-based, with applications arriving by mail in Toronto, being shipped by van to Thunder Bay for processing and driven back south to Toronto for final shipping out to applicants. Tougher security protocols, which had been tightened after the 9/11 attacks two years earlier, made things worse.

The team quickly concluded that digitizing the process could reduce processing times from months to days and reduce costs from dollars per transaction to cents per transaction. The cost was initially around $5 or $6 per transaction. It also provided the opportunity to redeploy staff to higher value-added work. I said, “Let’s do it.” I had a chat with the premier, and off we went.

In less than a year, the new system was launched after two or three offline test runs.

Wait times for birth certificates in Ontario were reduced from 9 months to 14 days, with an option for an expedited 7-day service delivery with a money-back guarantee if that was not met. This, understandably, became a popular service — and I’m not exaggerating — with complaint letters quickly being overtaken by thank-you letters, a rare occurrence in public service organizations.

What can we learn from this?

First, it helps if a transformation priority is a premier’s priority or a prime minister’s priority because that makes it a priority for the head of the public service.

Second, just like in any other organization, one of the key jobs for leaders is to identify big challenges and fix them or positively identify big opportunities and seize them.

Third, human resources leadership capacity is critical. This is a function that was and, I think, still is routinely underappreciated where it should be elevated. It is a key success factor in leading and managing change. The most important HR decision we made at that time was, instead of going out to consulting companies, to recruit a seasoned IT manager from one of Canada’s largest phone service providers who had led that company’s transition from paper-based to digitized public service delivery.

Fourth, we needed the right people working on these priorities — this was not just another job — so we assigned enthusiastic reformers who see the opportunity to change public services for the better. Believe me, there is no end of public servants with these skills who are waiting to be asked at every level of government, including the federal government. They just need to be asked and they need to be tasked.

If that was possible, what about reforming applications and access to birth registration at the municipal level, which is a precondition for birth certificates, driver’s licences, health card renewals and social insurance numbers at the federal level, which are, in turn, a precondition for passport applications, obviously, and other federal government services?

Colleagues, many of these services are now available online or in joined-up service centres such as Service New Brunswick, Service BC, Service Alberta and ServiceOntario. Other provinces and territories have similar service centres.

Colleagues, bringing Canada to this table joined up service delivery through digital means and through joined-up one-door, one-window service centres and was the last hurdle in making this multi-jurisdictional.

Following a frank meeting between Ontario’s then-head of public service and a senior minister representing the federal government of the day, the key logjam to bringing the federal government together with the province and the municipalities was solved. Everyone’s flag would be on the rooftop, and everybody’s name plate would be on the front door. That’s what it took eventually because it was about visibility, an understandable concern.

What did we learn from these reform initiatives? Just like everywhere else, leadership and expectation-setting from political leaders are important drivers of change initiatives. Virtuous reform initiatives focused on improving public services attract supporters and activists in the public service organizations, and breakthroughs happen. The tumbler locks, the combination falls into place, the lock opens, and change happens.

As we have heard, digitization reduces cost from dollars to cents per transaction.

Most importantly, improving public service delivery — and this has been proven — increases citizens’ confidence in government. Numbers don’t matter as much as consumers’, customers’ and citizens’ expectations and experiences at the focal point of delivery. They look at things like this: How long do I have to wait on the phone or in line for a public service or cancer care? Do I have confidence in my teachers? Is my kid’s school clean? How long do I have to wait for other medical services? I’ve mentioned cardiac, but what about hips, knees and eye surgeries?

Colleagues, improving public services is the right thing to do.

Lastly, I want to touch on something that is very important, particularly when we look at federal national organizations. This is true not only of Canada but also of other countries, and it’s certainly true of other federations.

Scale, obviously, matters. When we were creating this empowered service delivery organization, ServiceOntario, I wanted to know why New Brunswick was ahead of us. Why did New Brunswick beat us to the punch on this, and a couple of other smaller jurisdictions as well? It took a lot to get answers to this question. They had entrepreneurial leaders, of course, but part of the answer was that New Brunswick is relatively small, and the smaller the jurisdiction, the faster and easier it is to implement change.

Scale tends to be important internationally, too, with smaller countries and subnational jurisdictions advancing ahead of national governments. For example, Australian states, just like Canadian provinces, have been entrepreneurial in relation to their national counterparts. Those are two countries that public service colleagues and political leaders around the world look to for public service success stories. That includes at the federal level, colleagues.

The same is true in Europe. Smaller and recently modernizing countries are often ahead of their larger counterparts. Lithuania is a prime example of that, as is Albania.

But the U.K. has come a long way also — it is a large country with a large national government — especially with the digitization of passport renewals and, for a lengthy period of time, with automated income tax processing for those in regular employment.

As many of you know, regular workers earning hourly incomes and salaried employees can choose not to file tax returns. They are otherwise automated, and you simply receive a refund or an order for payment of deficits.

So, colleagues, yes, we must expect more from our federal government, and we know it can deliver. We’ve seen this with the rollout of the Canada Child Benefit, which has lifted almost 400,000 children out of poverty since 2016.

Here is another anecdote. When I was in the public service, we used to call poverty an intractable problem — too thorny to fix, too big to wrap our arms around — until poverty became too expensive. We then started to figure out how to tackle it. The Child Benefit is a terrific example of lifting large numbers of needy people out of poverty. It is the same with the Guaranteed Income Supplement for seniors. There will be myriad other examples.

Finally, it is important to highlight the work of the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service, formed decades ago by a group of federal and Ontario public servants, which still produces periodic benchmarking reports on key aspects of public service delivery. Some of my former federal colleagues around the room will recognize this.

Colleagues, we can be proud of our public servants working at all levels across this country. They are as hard-working and as entrepreneurial as those working in other sectors of the economy, but they — perhaps understandably — work in risk-averse environments. Colleagues, we have to send the right signals. We just have to unleash that entrepreneurial talent, and we can get, in a relatively short space of time, to where Senator Deacon would like us to be.

For every one of the stories of successful public service reform I’ve mentioned tonight there are countless more, but there is also much more to do. I thank Senator Deacon for opening up this important conversation. Thank you.

Thank you, Senator Deacon. I have seen organizations with exceedingly heavy regulatory and rule-bound systems, and it is remarkable how those can dissolve — maybe temporarily — when a prime minister or a premier and a head of public service task public servants with getting to an end goal quickly. Those barriers can be removed. I wouldn’t want to create the impression that we need to go through a long period of changing the myriad rules in public service organizations to get to the goal quickly.

Those things should be done, but my advice would be to not get tangled up with that. Let’s clearly identify objectives, put political weight behind them, put public service leadership behind them and get the right people in the right jobs from the right places who have done this before and demonstrated success, and we will move the yardsticks.