Strategic Review: the answer is, we can’t answer

I had an excellent day giving a speech to the Canadian Club of Kingston and chatting with students at Queen’s University. At 12:20 p.m. this email arrived from an official at Media Relations at the department of Public Works and Government Services Canada. It answers, after a fashion, questions I’ve had for a while about many hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of twice-announced cuts to federal spending.

Here’s the email in its entirety:

Hello Paul,
This information is for you follow-up questions you had last evening.
PWGSC has developed implementation plans for the results of our strategic review. Until we communicate these plans to stakeholders and employees, we are not in a position to provide greater details.
Budget 2011 provides a high-level overview of the strategic review decisions.

Maybe I should translate. Public Works knows what it will stop spending on, but it has not told the people who benefited from those programs (or laboured under the yoke of their inefficiency), nor has the department told, um, itself. So it can’t tell me. The bit about “a high-level overview” means the items in Annex 1 of Budget 2011 weren’t supposed to be comprehensible. And on that front, all I can say is, bang-up job, guys, because there’s no way stakeholders and employees will be able to make any sense of the $170-ish million in cumulative savings “described” in Table A1.12 here.

How, for instance, is “Realign programs to gain efficiencies and improve results” different from “Improve efficiency and the delivery of programs and services?” And how are those two different from “Improve use of internal resources and administrative efficiency”? Because they’re three different categories in the PWGSC “high-level overview.”

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Source: Macleans