The Functional Government Podcast

Alberta's Fouad Jallouli on dragging title transfer into the digital age.

In Alberta, $340 million in real estate every day moves through a system that, until recently, was built on paper, fax machines, and processes so old that some of them weren’t even documented anymore. When COVID hit, the province’s land titles system collapsed. By December 2022, a straightforward title transfer that should have taken a week was taking 84 days. Surveys took nearly three months. Sales couldn’t close. Developers couldn’t get financing.

Half a trillion dollars in private property was stuck.

The fix is a $60 million effort to replace decades-old infrastructure with the Alberta Registries for Land Online (ARLO). Fouad Jallouli leads service design for the Government of Alberta—a team of over 75 designers working to make government services actually work for citizens. In this conversation, he walks us through how his team maps out a system so complex that parts of it exist only in the heads of the people who’ve done it for decades; how they decide what to fix first; and how technology can help—but only if you start with the human experience.

Regulations.gov is a public feedback platform where citizens can comment on how laws affect them. It's democracy in action. But it's also drinking from a firehose, which Aaron Meyers was asked to fix.

In the US, there’s a platform for public comment. Canada has one too: the Canada Gazette, “the official newspaper of the Government of Canada.” These platforms are how the government tells citizens how laws are turning into regulations. But they’re also online, which means they’re a target for special-interest groups, automated campaigns, and even impersonation.
Comments aren’t votes. But that hasn’t stopped visible, coordinated feedback to controversial regulations from overwhelming the system. Aaron Meyers was part of a team brought in to modernize the feedback platform—and then told he couldn’t touch the data, or the process, since both were protected under the statutes.
So the team had to get creative. In this episode, we learn how Aaron hardened a system that’s been online for decades, and what it might mean for Canada’s recently-online equivalent service.

There are hundreds of different ways to log into the government of Canada. A citizen has to use different systems for benefits claims, taxes, passport renewal, business registration, title transfer, and so on. How can it be so hard to just have one login we use to interact with government?
Turns out, very hard. 
Canada's tried to fix this. There's even a system called GCKey that works across 30 departments, but the CRA—arguably the most important department for citizens—refuses to use it. We planned to roll out "Sign-In Canada" in the fall of 2019; it's now late 2025 and we're still waiting, and the closest thing we have to single-sign-on depends on our banking system (and almost 5% of Canadian households don't have bank accounts.)
Elsewhere in the world, things are far better. Singapore's SingPass processes 41M transactions monthly across thousands of services and is estimated to save businesses $50 per customer onboarding. Estonian citizens save days a year through digital signatures. Canada's Auditor General says Canada has "no funding" for a national digital identity approach—but 2% of GDP, which is what Estonia claims it saves, would be around $45 Billion a year.
Our guest on this episode is Tim Bouma, who worked for decades on digital identity within the government of Canada. He's the perfect person to untangle this complex issue and explain why we haven't been able to give Canadians a simple way to access all of their government services in one place.

When Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy ran for office, one of his campaign promises was "a simple government app." In 2019, the country launched a really simple first app: your driver's license and registration on your smartphone. At the time, Ukranian citizens had dozens of different versions of the same information scattered across many departments. But Diia, as the new app was called, served as a simple front end: It talked to all the departments for you, knew which to use for what data, and assembled all of this information in one place on your phone.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Diia became more than a convenience. It was a crucial part of the country's national security infrastructure. It authenticated citizens reporting spies and saboteurs, and even delivered radio and TV programming when attackers took over regular broadcast networks. Six years in, Diia isn't just a source of national pride—it's become a technology the country is actively exporting to other nations who want to modernize government themselves. We caught up with Tania Vakhrycheva, who was the lead for the DIA e-services team, to hear about this project straight from the source.

Digital ID is a spicy topic. Some view it as a slippery slope to the surveillance state, invoking images of Big Brother. Others claim that digital identity will magically unlock government services. The truth, as is often the case, is more nuanced.

The government already knows plenty about you, and much of that information is outdated or wrong. Signing into government services is inconsistent and messy. And finding out what data the government has is complex, time-consuming, and often impossible.

There are ancient laws that prevent us from fixing this—some created long before the Internet existed and we had apps on our phones. Some departments, consultants, and even political parties actively want to preserve those laws, and spread plenty of misinformation to keep things complicated.

Meanwhile, countries that streamline digital ID and single-sign-on reap huge benefits: 1-2% of GDP, and days of bureaucracy saved by citizens. Ukraine tackled this problem and fixed it during a war. But getting this right in Canada continues to elude us.

We like spicy. We’ve talked to dozens of countries about how they tackled these issues, and what they learned. Whether you think digital ID is the worst idea in the world, or long overdue, you'll want to listen to this.