Canadian Politics Today

Not gonna happen. Especially under this government. The reason why every competitive process at every level takes a minimum of a year is the extreme efforts HR goes to in ensuring the competition is 'fair' to all the applicants.

"Especially".  Ok.  But this government will be gone at some point.  Why didn't Harper do anything ?  I am asking sincerely.

The reason is that it's very risky to fix anything, as evidenced by Phoenix.  Canadians don't help the issue by preferring long-term inefficiency over fixing things.

You can still have affirmative action programs and an efficient civil service.  The US seems to do better than us in many respects.

The great thing too about the private sector is competition, which drives all companies to excel at maximum, to be efficient and keep costs down at maximum, to innovate & find faster/cheaper ways to do things because if they don't somebody else will and you'll be out of business.

My experience, as a consumer, is that large corporations are largely indistinguishable from one another when it comes to prices and services.  Even if a particular organization does something innovative and nabs extra customers, the others quickly follow suit.  There is reason to not be different from the competition, but it's not clear to me that this translates into efficiencies within the company or benefit to the consumer.  I also think the larger an organization is, the less efficient it will be.  Efficiently managing 10 people in a single office is different than efficiently managing 100,000 people in offices around the country or around the world.   

The public service has little competition.  The only thing keeping them on their toes at all is the fear from the government in power that they might not be re-elected if they don't do a good job.

The government is composed of individual people carrying out the business of the government, and from my perspective are separate from the party in power; we are there regardless of who is in power.  Re-election is not our concern; although as MH said 'getting in the media' is a concern.  From my experience in the department I work in, individuals are concerned with providing good service, working efficiently and limiting costs.  I admit that I haven't been here long, and things may be different in other ministries, but as an individual who believed all kinds of negative things about 'government' and 'government employees' I have been impressed and inspired by my colleagues dedication to providing the very best service possible to the public.   But sometimes, one is in a position where Joe Citizen doesn't like the situation, goes to the media and the government is painted as a cruel, uncaring beast.  Yet, the person who has to make tough decisions and attempt to balance the needs of an individual against the wider needs of the public, work within the department budget, and with limited staff resources may care very much.  This is not to say that people in government never screw up; clearly they do, but government also has to take flack for acting in the best interests of the taxpayers, because a single 'taxpayer' doesn't like a decision that was made.

That only matters if voters care or even realize what's going on in office X in department Y.

Voters don't really know; they just know if they get 'good' service or 'bad' service. Dealing with government can be frustrating and confusing, but it can also can be frustrating or confusing dealing with large corporations if you want to interact beyond buying their service or product.   

We can hope for the emergence of a Canadian public that would push for reform.

We can hope for the emergence of a Canadian public that would push for reform.

The Canadian public has no idea of what the public service is like except for the general cliché of inefficiency and bureaucracy. They're not gonna push for anything.

1. This is counterintuitive.  See 'economies of scale'.  WalMart and such depend on that.

True, but I was thinking more of the people factor than things like inventory.  Government does at least pay their people more than minimum wage, but I think the difficulties of managing a large workface are similar whether its a private corporation, a charitable organization or government.

I had some experience in the civil service and I didn't find many examples of lazy individuals.  Other people would mostly create an environment of social pressure to keep people honest.  The inefficiencies happen at a higher level, in terms of deployment of resources towards questionable objectives.

Questionable objectives is very much in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?

Service culture is something that is generally lacking in Canada IMO.  Read Dale Carnegie.

I tried to, a long time ago.  Have you been to New Orleans?  Could not believe how unhappy store clerks were with paying customers when I was there.   On the other hand, service providers Cabo San Lucas made us feel like we were the absolute best customers they'd ever had.

the top corporations in the same sectors will behave fairly similarly to each other because they're in both following the best of how they know to maximize profits and not give their competitors much of an edge.

Or... alternately... they all make the same mistakes so there's nothing driving them to do better.  The banks come to mind, again.  Some retail will be dying this way, too, a la Sears.

I guess it depends on the sector, but who is more efficient: Walmart, or your corner convenience store?  Walmart is a well-oiled machine.  It's methods are tested countless times everyday.  It knows exactly the type of plastic & how thick the plastic needs to be in its plastic shopping bags to have the lowest cost per unit that also doesn't break on the consumer.  It buys its goods on massive scales to maximize efficiency, which reduces costs, which reduces prices for us consumers, which is why we shop there.  It knows from experience that consumers would rather have dirt cheap goods and crappy low-wage clerks giving poor service than more expensive goods with quality well-paid/well-trained customer service.

Except that it competes with CostCo that somehow also does well and pays employees well, and provides great service.

How does that work ?  The answer is that both are very smart at what they do, and their competitors are slow moving and stupid.

North American car companies have been destroyed by Asian cars because their high-paid unioned workers make the companies inefficient & drive up costs.  That will either mean higher cost vehicles or lower quality vehicles, which consumers noticed.

Unions get the blame a lot of the time, but the same problem applied to American car companies who had bloated, fat management and resisted change.

Outside of what they feel they need to do, they often don't care what happens to everything else that has little bearing on their job security re: waste of funds & resources etc.  How different would each Minister of a department act if ie: their salary was tied to costs within their department? or if they got salary bonuses for every dollar they saved?

You don't know what motivates these people, and you're making a huge generalization.  For real insight as to how things work read Bob Rae's From Protest to Power.  Or read articles about Obama getting office.

If Doug Ford wins, he will have a massive bureaucracy affecting many millions of people.  Whether he wants to do the best job he can or not, the machine is massive and very hard to turn around.  Cash incentives for Ministers to cut costs is something the press would jump on pretty quickly.

What would help more would be for all Canadians, regardless of politics, to recognize that we employ tens of thousands of people and pay them as part of a machine that doesn't achieve its goals.  Peoples' lives are dependent on it though, so you have to fix it carefully.

Yawn. Now if you want to make this thread interesting then let's talk about Nawleans.

The effort required to reshape things would be huge, but the big problem is that there isn't anyone in the right positions, who has the type of expertise that could do this.

It's an inside the box thing. If you've spent your career in the public service you don't find anything wrong with how they operate. I started in the public service at 40. When I was a finance clerk making $50k I met a woman, a manager, actually, who continually told me how I was being underpaid given my responsibilities.  I thought I was getting terrific pay. The difference between us was she'd been in the public service her entire career.

By the time someone climbs up through the ranks of management to the point they have the influence and ability to make changes they often can't recognize that changes are even necessary. I mean, in order to get to where they were they had to make full use of things like 'policies' to protect their backsides, along with forcing their employees to generate unnecessary work to spit out reports to justify decisions (to cover their asses).

As to efficiency: If a light bulb goes out in the government they have to form a committee to explore options and seek alternatives. Can the light bulb be re-activated? Are there alternatives to the light bulb? Is the light really necessary to begin with? Experts will have to be interviewed. Studies reviewed. Extensive buy-in sought from end-users and clients. A list of options reinforced by long-winded rationals and costing will have to be developed and presented to management. Management will then review, recommend and push the recommendation up the ladder to be reviewed by a senior management committee. Ultimately, should they decide to change the light bulb, Procurement will be tasked to offer up bids to light bulb sellers. The competition will be reviewed by Legal to ensure fairness, and in due course, a contract signed, a purchase order approved, and a light bulb ordered. Once it has arrived Government Services Canada will be contacted to come and install the light bulb. Then a review of the end result will be undertaken, a report written up, buy-in sought, and the report forwarded to upper management. (to the simple minded, this is a parable)

But here's the thing. These people aren't idiots. They know it's all a tremendous waste of money. But the only one who can say so is the only beneficiary of it all. Because the point of all that effort isn't that public servants are morons who like to waste their time, but that the executive in charge will be able to justify the decision to replace the light bulb, and the cost, should this be questioned or should the project cause some unforeseen issues. All that work, all that consultation, all that buy-in is basically to cover the ass of the guy who ultimately makes the decision, so it can't damage his career if it goes off the rails.

And they all do it. So by the time you get to a very senior position it's second nature. It's your corporate culture. The only way to kick it over is from the outside but outsiders don't even know the system, so they don't know what to kick. And so we go on...