Thank you for your question.
I am not saying the public service is perfect or does not make mistakes, even serious mistakes, from time to time. It was created by human beings and is managed by human beings. Further, its services are delivered by human beings. So mistakes are made. That said, we have a strong culture of learning and feedback. I invite you to look at the chart I gave the clerk.
There are many layers of oversight, lines of accountability, and feedback on the senior public service, all of which are, in an engineering sense, a negative feedback loop: what you did wrong, what you could have done better. There are almost no positive feedback loops other than performance, pay, and promotion within which senior public servants operate. I think you have to look very deeply at the incentives structure, which is the one in which human beings act, and culture is shaped by incentives and disincentives. There are opportunities to create incentives and disincentives that reward innovation and creativity, or that stifle it. That's a big topic, and I'm happy to exchange with you on that.
The importance of my report is it is a very rare opportunity to talk about the successes and the accomplishments. I've never been asked to a parliamentary committee to talk about three annual reports on the state of the public service. I've never been asked a question about the innovation fair, which showcases all the examples of letting people loose and asking them to come forward. I've never been asked a question about the prize challenges through which we're trying to develop solutions by working with outside partners. I could go on and on about those, but because your attention as parliamentarians, quite reasonably, is drawn to all of the feedback loops from almost a dozen institutions that are there simply to look very closely at particular issues and point out what could have and should have been done better.
I'm not complaining about that. I think that is the explanation for why we are as good as we are.
To jump to Mr. Christopherson's question—and by the way, it's the Auditor General who calls his opinion pieces “chapter zero”—if sweeping generalizations are made about the culture across 300 different organizations and all of their subunits spread across 10 provinces, three territories, and 100 different countries, none of those generalizations will stand up to scrutiny, and I bring you evidence. I bring you three annual reports full of stories showcasing the accomplishments and the successes of public servants. I bring you those six indicators that tell you of this success. If you want to ask somebody who knows organizations, I can suggest another witness to you: the global managing partner of McKinsey, who's looked at every big, top, high-performing private sector company in the world. He's is a Canadian, Dominic Barton. He's worked for Stephen Harper as part of his advisory committee on the public service and he's worked for Prime Minister Trudeau as chair of the growth council. Ask him what he thinks about the public service of Canada.