It's great to be here. Thank you very much for inviting back. I'm really excited to see that you are continuing to look at this issue.
I'm an associate professor at Carleton University's school of public policy and administration. By way of context, I've been researching public administration in Canada and internationally since about 2010.
My perspective on the issue of management consultants in the federal government is a product of the data tool Mr. Boots just presented, which I helped launch, but also research interviews with public servants, where I have them explain to me in their language what it looks like on the ground when you're working in government. This happens at all levels of authority across all departments, central agencies and line agencies. I'll say that they're pretty illuminating when you hear directly from public servants how they see this particular issue playing out. I think it's good that you're spending time on it, because it's definitely something that concerns a lot of public servants.
Looking through the transcripts of your first meeting, there are obviously a lot of questions before you. The one I want to focus on is the one that I think is the most important, which is whether the federal government’s contracts with management consulting firms betray principles of responsible public administration, and if so, what should be done to prevent this going forward.
On the first part, yes, absolutely. My research suggests that in a number of ways the federal public service breaches acceptable best practices in responsible public administration when it contracts with large management consulting firms.
There are three main issues that come up generally. First is questionable value for money. Second is clear breaches of reasonably expected standards of public accountability. Third is the hollowing of state capacity. I can elaborate more on each of those in the questions, but I think the media—and, frankly, the long-standing literature on this topic—does a really good job of diagnosing that problem. There's really no debate about whether that problem exists.
What I think I want to focus on in my opening remarks is what I think the solutions are. I think there's a lot this committee could do that would help solve this problem. There are also routes you could go in the recommendations that would actually make the problem worse, so I've tried to flag those as well.
In terms of what we need to do to fix this, the first—and this speaks to the comments Mr. Boots just gave—is really focusing on the data. It's really impossible to do your jobs, frankly, given the low quality of the data we have to describe management consulting firms—what they're actually working on, what they produce, whether it has value—and to track the contracts over time. You got a little bit of a taste of that in your study of the ArriveCAN app in trying to follow the paper trail there.
There are lots of models we can look to internationally and as long as there's some money on the table. By that I mean that we actually have to hire people in government and say that their job is to make this data good, to release it and to work with the stakeholders, as opposed to it just being an add-on. That often happens with these kinds of data projects. There's a demand for more data and then there are no resources for public servants to actually generate, produce and share it. That's the first thing.
Second, as I'd say for IT projects specifically—which is a huge chunk of the amount of money that the federal spends on management consultants—there are some best practices around capping contract size and recruiting more IT talent in order to be smarter and more skeptical shoppers of some of these products and services. We actually elaborated on that in the report we tabled to you the last time, when we spoke on ArriveCAN, so I won't get too much into that but I'm happy to discuss it more as well.
Then third—and I think this is the most important thing—is that this issue of spending a lot of money on management consultants and seeing a lot of core public service work being done by management consultants is not an accident. It's an inevitable dynamic of a public service that has suffered from a lack of investment in talent and recruitment and in reforming HR practices to make it easier to bring people in.
Also, I think over the years it has suffered from unhelpful oversight and reporting burdens and a kind of error-free “gotcha” mentality in a lot of scrutiny, and the demands for error-free government make it very difficult to be creative and innovative in the public service. I think also, in tandem with that, when you see a lot of the important work you care about being outsourced to management consultants, it's clearly bad for morale and doesn't motivate the workforce.
Saying we need to reform the civil service perhaps sounds large, daunting and not specific enough, but I think it's actually not as hard as we think. There are many jurisdictions globally that are facing the exact same problems the federal government is, and they're taking action. They've already experimented with different solutions. We can turn to those countries for examples of what needs to be done.
We don't need to spend a lot of time diagnosing the problem either, because there's pretty much consensus from anyone who's ever studied Canadian public administration, and from most public servants, regarding what the issues are. It's that the organization is too siloed and there are too many unhelpful rules and processes.
I think that if you want a nice testimony of it, one document I really like is the 2016 internal red tape reduction report that a group of public servants prepared.
I invite you to look, in particular, at some of the snapshots of internal red tape that they described. When you read about what it takes to try to do anything in the federal government today, you can understand why it's hard to be creative and innovative and why it might be that an incoming government quickly turns to a management consultant who promises a fast solution. However, those fast solutions don't tend to be good value for money. They also happen in secret. That's what we should be worried about.
The last thing I'll say is that in proposing solutions, the committee and the government really need to avoid adding too many new rules, processes or onerous reporting requirements in the name of accountability. This is what we've seen historically. It actually has this effect of further eroding public servants' abilities to do the work that you want them to do, because they spend a lot more time filling out those forms and running complex procurement processes. It also has the effect of making it difficult for smaller and perhaps more innovative...or at least a broader range of firms to bid for government work because really complicated procurement processes take teams of people to bid for. Small firms just don't have that.
I'll leave it there. I look forward to your questions.
Thank you.