Evidence of meeting #62 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was service.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Irek Kusmierczyk Liberal Windsor—Tecumseh, ON
Thank you.
I just want to take a quick second and say thank you to my colleague across the table. All of us were convinced that we could find the common ground, that common ground did exist and that we were all united in that pursuit. I just want to thank MP Barrett for his work in crafting a motion that, really, reflects all of our voices and concerns. I just want to say kudos and give credit where credit is due. Thank you for that. I appreciate it.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Mr. Clerk, go ahead, please.
(Motion agreed to: yeas 10; nays 0)
Colleagues, thank you very much.
I understand that Mr. Jowhari has a couple of minutes, and then I have just one quick question. Then we'll adjourn and go vote.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Thank you, Chair.
Once again, thank you, Mr. Wernick, for your service over so many years.
We've heard consistently that management consulting firms were brought in for different areas. Their focus was on benchmarking and helping different departments with getting data on best practices based on the mandate that was given to those departments.
Also, in your opening remarks, and a number of times after that, you specifically talked about training public servants on leadership as well as other areas. You talked about the training courses you took as the Clerk of the Privy Council to ensure not only that you understood project management but you understood its activity.
Can you expand on what type of training for public services you would recommend so we reduce our dependency on consultants? It's more of how and when we need them, rather than needing them on a regular basis.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
I'm sorry, Mr. Wernick, but I'm going to interrupt. One of my questions is a similar one.
If you can be relatively brief, then perhaps we'll ask if you can provide a longer response in writing. I'm going to ask for a response in writing as well, because of the lack of time.
Please go ahead.
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
The IT course I took was about 20 years ago, when I was a middle manager.
If you want to make the best use of external contractors, I think it's in the middle-management categories. It's project management, costing, risk management and a lot of these areas of expertise.
In the specific field of information technology, I think the newest developments are always going to come from outside, from the private sector. You will need somebody to bring that expertise and ask how they apply this to service delivery or internal processes within the public service.
I do think that the leadership programs are crucial. It's the middle and senior managers who actually steer and lead the organizations.
I think that the termination of the two big executive leadership programs in 2012 was a mistake and needed to be reversed. I'm not saying that the budget from 12 budgets ago explains what's happening 12 years later, but it's a very good example of how one of the first things to go is training and leadership development. I hope we won't repeat that now.
Liberal
Majid Jowhari Liberal Richmond Hill, ON
Thank you. I have one more quick question.
We saw highlighted, especially after 2019, with COVID and the number of challenges and gaps, that there was need for us to go out and quickly get a response.
The fact is that the costs of the consulting increased. Do you attribute that to the opportunity that it presented us during COVID and the aggressive mandate that the government had?
I know you haven't been in that position since 2019, but as an outside observer, what are your thoughts?
Thank you. That was my last question.
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
Well, I mean it's clear that all kinds of government services—federal, provincial and municipal—had to adapt to the pandemic new methods of service delivery and working with a distributed workforce. When everybody is sent home, then how do you do the internal functions of government? Everybody had to learn very, very quickly. There are probably some very good lessons from that which can be applied to the new normal after the pandemic, for sure.
That's the whole point. The metaphor I like to use is that the public sector should have learning software. It should always be looking forward, looking for new ideas, learning from its mistakes and adapting.
I have to warn against generalizing. There's something called the “fallacy of composition”, which says that if it's true of one thing then it must be true of the whole thing. That's not the way that the public service works. It's over 300 different organizations. Some have problems, some have issues; that does not mean that the whole thing is broken.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Thank you, Mr. Jowhari.
Mr. Wernick, thanks for your time.
I just want to ask a couple of quick questions. The first one, if you could be kind enough to provide a response to us in writing or write another book on it, is regarding procurement. Canada obviously has an issue with defence procurement. One issue we have is that someone who is a deputy minister in Immigration today might transfer over to Defence the next day, and they're told, “Hey, guess what, you're buying F-35s.” We don't have the longevity in positions or the scale that perhaps England or the U.S. does. I'd certainly love to hear from you on training issues or how we can build up a proper defence procurement staff.
But I want to get back to something that might be a bit more anecdotal. A couple of years ago I “Order Papered” all of the contracts for the outside consultants—many hundreds of pages. I went through and picked out individual ones on everything from auditing the strawberry festival to doing random RFP fairness checks repeatedly on the same RFP. I looked at that example and then I looked at the Nuctech. We studied Nuctech in this committee. It was about giving a contract or a standing offer to a Chinese security company to provide scanners for our embassies, and the government stepped back from that. It was great, but they said, “Well, we'll investigate how it happened” and they went to my favourite, Deloitte, and gave them a quarter of a million dollars for a report that basically said don't buy sensitive security equipment from despotic regimes.
For fun, I went to West Edmonton Mall and filmed a video asking random people if they would buy security equipment from despotic regimes. Everyone said no. Why did we pay a quarter of a million?
You talked about generalizing and, yes, these consultants have a lot of experience that isn't available in the public service, but how do we get past these kinds of contracts, the government sending out almost CYA contracts. We have a public service to do fairness checks. Why do we need to subcontract that out? We have a public service to say don't buy such equipment—
We're getting rather short on time. I'm happy to have you come back. I'm happy to have you put it in writing to us, but if you are able to give a quick, one-minute comment, I'd appreciate that.
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
A lot would have to do with the volume of work that has to be done. There's a long history of how, when something happens, new rules are brought in, and more and more new rules keep being added and they are very rarely taken away. It's a big conversation, but procurement carries probably a dozen different policy objectives, from small business to regional...to supporting diversity, to value for money, and some of it is in very protected sectors.
You're looking at shipbuilding. You can buy from only three suppliers. That limits competition and has its issues. It's a very big topic.
I guess the only thing I would say is that from observation I don't know of another country or jurisdiction that thinks they got it right and that we could just copy. It's a very tough thing to balance industrial policy, value for money and the things that the armed forces and the Coast Guard are looking for.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
That's great.
Thank you again for your time.
Colleagues, unless there is anything else, we will adjourn and go to vote. We'll see everyone on Wednesday.