Almost seven years after the Gomery Commission released its first report on the sponsorship scandal, its impact on how government thinks about accountability can still be felt across the system. In reaction to Justice Gomery’s findings, a host of new rules, processes and regulations have been introduced in an attempt to increase the transparency of government activity and improve accountability.
These changes raise the legitimate question of whether the increase in the number of rules to follow and forms to fill out has yielded a comparable increase in accountability. Did the return to a compliance and punitive view of accountability actually improve the system’s performance? Most often using the new lobbying regime as an example, many analysts have concluded that, in fact, government learned the wrong lessons from the sponsorship scandal. While increasing the bureaucratic burden on those who play by the rules, the new regime does little to shine light on the actions of those who have already decided not to follow them.
Such criticisms of recent changes are well documented. But as the federal government embarks on a system-wide attempt to reduce government spending, the unintended consequences of the Gomery inquiry are about to be felt in an entirely new way. To better illustrate, let us go back to the state of debate and knowledge on public sector accountability immediately prior to the Auditor General’s report that blew the sponsorship scandal wide open.
During the mid-to-late 1990s, governments across Canada began experimenting with shared services and citizen-centred government. Motivated by a desire to cut costs and reorganize government services around the needs of users, departments began breaking down the silos between them and set out to work on common policy problems in more collaborative ways. Over time, citizens were able to access a wider array of services through a single point of contact, and governments reorganized their back-office operations to eliminate waste and duplication.
From a service delivery point of view, governments learned quickly, and common delivery platforms like Service New Brunswick or Service Canada became the norm. Different levels of government engaged each other on how they could provide complementary services from common “service delivery windows” and for citizens in need of services, the complexity of the government maze was greatly reduced.
This newfound collaboration improved a citizen’s experience in accessing government services, but it raised important questions on how to account for these joint initiatives. If departments and governments worked together, how would they share credit when things went well? How would they share the blame when they didn’t? Were individual partners to be accountable only for their contribution to a joint initiative, or were all partners somehow collectively accountable for the initiative as a whole?
To answer these questions, a number of line departments, central agencies, agents of Parliament and outside groups like Crossing Boundaries conducted a number of research and pilot projects. By the early 2000s, a great deal of the uncertainty around shared accountability had been worked out, but the value of these projects went beyond what they allowed us to learn about joint initiatives. They also taught us a lot about how officials should account for their decisions and actions when the outcome of initiatives is genuinely unknown, and highlighted how critically important it is for any system of accountability to differentiate between fault and genuine error.
Then, Gomery happened. Rules needed to be tightened. Compliance needed to be enforced. And uncertainty needed to be eliminated. But herein lies the problem. The more we tighten rules, focus on compliance over learning and eliminate uncertainty, the more we reduce the system’s capacity to innovate. If the system equates error with fault and punishes both equally, there can be no incentive for officials to try new things. Innovation requires room for failure; if the system punishes genuine failure as it does fault, there can be no innovation.
In any circumstance, this trend would be detrimental to optimizing the performance of our public service. But it will be crippling in the next few years as officials set out to find the savings their political masters have identified and bring spending under control. While we will not know precisely the scale and scope of cuts until the federal budget, we can reasonably assume that they will be in the 8 percent range. Savings of that magnitude will not be achieved through attrition in the work force, the elimination of a few programs here and there and cutting a few positions in work units across the bureaucracy.
To meet the objectives that will be spelled out in the next budget, officials will have to rethink how government does certain things – programs will be overhauled, operations reorganized and services rethought. Especially if we also worry about preserving services to Canadians, tinkering won’t get us to those targets; only transformation can.
Such transformation is not possible without some failures, some of which may be spectacular. But if the government wants to achieve these savings, it has to signal to the public service that it understands the difference between fault and error. Auditors, Parliament, the Opposition and the media will have to follow suit, and gain the maturity to distinguish between them in their criticisms of government performance. Otherwise, our obsession with compliance will severely hamper our chances of success.
No organization manages to zero risk. Successful ones also understand the essential role failure plays in innovation. We shall soon see whether government and Parliament can do the same, and resist their own worst instincts regarding accountability.
Original Article
Source: iPolitics
Author: Graham Fox
These changes raise the legitimate question of whether the increase in the number of rules to follow and forms to fill out has yielded a comparable increase in accountability. Did the return to a compliance and punitive view of accountability actually improve the system’s performance? Most often using the new lobbying regime as an example, many analysts have concluded that, in fact, government learned the wrong lessons from the sponsorship scandal. While increasing the bureaucratic burden on those who play by the rules, the new regime does little to shine light on the actions of those who have already decided not to follow them.
Such criticisms of recent changes are well documented. But as the federal government embarks on a system-wide attempt to reduce government spending, the unintended consequences of the Gomery inquiry are about to be felt in an entirely new way. To better illustrate, let us go back to the state of debate and knowledge on public sector accountability immediately prior to the Auditor General’s report that blew the sponsorship scandal wide open.
During the mid-to-late 1990s, governments across Canada began experimenting with shared services and citizen-centred government. Motivated by a desire to cut costs and reorganize government services around the needs of users, departments began breaking down the silos between them and set out to work on common policy problems in more collaborative ways. Over time, citizens were able to access a wider array of services through a single point of contact, and governments reorganized their back-office operations to eliminate waste and duplication.
From a service delivery point of view, governments learned quickly, and common delivery platforms like Service New Brunswick or Service Canada became the norm. Different levels of government engaged each other on how they could provide complementary services from common “service delivery windows” and for citizens in need of services, the complexity of the government maze was greatly reduced.
This newfound collaboration improved a citizen’s experience in accessing government services, but it raised important questions on how to account for these joint initiatives. If departments and governments worked together, how would they share credit when things went well? How would they share the blame when they didn’t? Were individual partners to be accountable only for their contribution to a joint initiative, or were all partners somehow collectively accountable for the initiative as a whole?
To answer these questions, a number of line departments, central agencies, agents of Parliament and outside groups like Crossing Boundaries conducted a number of research and pilot projects. By the early 2000s, a great deal of the uncertainty around shared accountability had been worked out, but the value of these projects went beyond what they allowed us to learn about joint initiatives. They also taught us a lot about how officials should account for their decisions and actions when the outcome of initiatives is genuinely unknown, and highlighted how critically important it is for any system of accountability to differentiate between fault and genuine error.
Then, Gomery happened. Rules needed to be tightened. Compliance needed to be enforced. And uncertainty needed to be eliminated. But herein lies the problem. The more we tighten rules, focus on compliance over learning and eliminate uncertainty, the more we reduce the system’s capacity to innovate. If the system equates error with fault and punishes both equally, there can be no incentive for officials to try new things. Innovation requires room for failure; if the system punishes genuine failure as it does fault, there can be no innovation.
In any circumstance, this trend would be detrimental to optimizing the performance of our public service. But it will be crippling in the next few years as officials set out to find the savings their political masters have identified and bring spending under control. While we will not know precisely the scale and scope of cuts until the federal budget, we can reasonably assume that they will be in the 8 percent range. Savings of that magnitude will not be achieved through attrition in the work force, the elimination of a few programs here and there and cutting a few positions in work units across the bureaucracy.
To meet the objectives that will be spelled out in the next budget, officials will have to rethink how government does certain things – programs will be overhauled, operations reorganized and services rethought. Especially if we also worry about preserving services to Canadians, tinkering won’t get us to those targets; only transformation can.
Such transformation is not possible without some failures, some of which may be spectacular. But if the government wants to achieve these savings, it has to signal to the public service that it understands the difference between fault and error. Auditors, Parliament, the Opposition and the media will have to follow suit, and gain the maturity to distinguish between them in their criticisms of government performance. Otherwise, our obsession with compliance will severely hamper our chances of success.
No organization manages to zero risk. Successful ones also understand the essential role failure plays in innovation. We shall soon see whether government and Parliament can do the same, and resist their own worst instincts regarding accountability.
Original Article
Source: iPolitics
Author: Graham Fox
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