I think it's an excellent question. It's something that, in my own public service career, is very top of mind. How do we better enable public servants? How do we better empower them? How do we better equip them with tools?
As an outside-of-work side project, one of the websites I built several years ago was a website called "Is This Blocked in My Department", which is a crowdsourced list of, as a public servant, depending on which department you're in, whether you can use Zoom, Trello and all these different software tools that teams around the world use all the time but are often blocked or forbidden for public servants to use.
This is just an example of how risk-averse public service culture holds public servants back, and it means that they're working the same way that they might have worked in the 1990s, even though the rest of the world has moved on to much faster and more effective ways of working.
There are a few challenges. One is that public-sector IT salaries are competitive at the lower levels and really not competitive at the top. If you're just leaving a university or a college program to become a help-desk technician at the bottom level, that's a pretty good job, but if you're trying to hire some of the world's best cybersecurity experts, maybe you'll make $130,000 or $150,000 in the Canadian public service, and you'd make $400,000 Canadian working for a U.S. tech company.
Because technology professionals can move between jobs, companies and even countries so easily, it's really hard to hire people who are world-class professionals, and when you're delivering services that millions of Canadians depend on, it's actually very important. You don't need a thousand of those people, but you need five or 10 who are really good, and there's no mechanism for the federal public service to be able to do that right now.
The other challenge is that in government HR, the ability to move up the ranks without having to become a manager of other people is almost impossible. Even from the middle levels of the IT classification on up, you're expected to be managing a team, and that's the criteria you're judged on to be able to move even further up.
In modern tech companies, they realized decades ago that with your really great programmers and your really great cybersecurity people, you don't want them to stop doing that and spend all their time managing HR conflicts and approving people's leave requests. You want them to just keep on doing that craftwork that they're really good at. Modern tech companies have dual-track career progression frameworks, and those do not exist in the federal public service, so we're taking our best people and saying, "You're not going to touch a keyboard writing software for the rest of your career; you're going to manage a team of 40 people and deal with all the HR drama that ensues.” That means that even if we were to pay people more, if we're asking them to be people managers when they really want to be great cybersecurity people, great programmers or great designers, we're not letting them do that.
That's such an obvious fix that the Treasury Board has not done and has not prioritized, and that is just really at odds with how the rest of the industry has evolved.