The Functional Government Podcast

If you spend more than five minutes talking to governments about modernization, someone will inevitably mention Estonia. The country's vast sprawl and relatively small population made it a natural fit for digital government, because it was prohibitively expensive to deliver services to tiny towns and far-off citizens. Now you can complete virtually any government task, from paying taxes to registering a business to filing for divorce, via an app or a website. Estonians trust their government's services, and the country estimates that it saves 2% of GDP every year because of them.Ironically, this happened because of a lack of trust. When Estonia declared independence from Russia, there was a deep-seated mistrust of bureaucracy and the public sector. Estonians demanded transparency, and built for it from the outset. By law, every time the government interacts with a citizen's data, the citizen sees that interaction in their government app. Every politician's spending—down to the hotel they stayed in last night—is visible to anyone.Joel Burke has lived in Estonia, working on some of their government services. And he wrote a book about the country's remarkable rise. We talked with Joel about what Estonia built, how it got there, and the benefits it reaps as one of the world's leading digital governments.

Canada's been trying to fix the passport system for a long time. Back in 2013, a small team of designers, developers, and policy experts got together to modernize the application process. They took a lean, iterative approach, focusing on the simplest fixes to the biggest problems first. This meant addressing boring things that offered huge improvements: they spent six months tweaking and testing the application form—which is where most applicants got stuck.And then the government shut down the program, and rolled it into IRCC's massive Global Case Management System, where it ran into multi-year delays and huge budget overruns.If you wonder why Canadians can't have good government services, Lisa Fast is the right person to ask. A career designer with a degree in computer psychology, she explains how the initiative launched, what it got right, and why short, iterative test-and-learn approaches trigger the immune system of big government..

A decade ago, Ireland's passport service was in the same place as Canada: long queues, paper processes, and spiking delays. And then they decided to fix it.The country started small: a reservation tool to book time in the office freed up workers, letting them tackle the backlog. Then online renewals for adults, then children. Eventually, online applications with your identity certified by your local police station.It wasn't easy. It took political support, a willingness to experiment, careful design—and a willingness to rewrite outdated laws for the modern world. In the second of our series on passport modernization, we talk to Professor of Practice at the University of Limerick, John Savage, who worked on the modernization effort, to find out how it happened—and what Canada can learn about modernizing every government service.

Before 1970, if you asked for a passport, the government just believed you. But after 9/11, Passport Canada—a small, self-funding department that printed little blue booklets—found itself at the forefront of international security. After multiple failed attempts at modernization, and two entirely predictable backlogs that delayed hundreds of thousands of passports, Canada is finally launching a limited trial of online passport renewals.Passports are a perfect lens through which to analyze a country's digital readiness: 70% of Canadians has one, they involve security and personal information, and we can analyze their cost and delivery cleanly. To kick off our three-part series on passport modernization, we dive into the tangled history of Passport Canada, and what it says about our country's ability to deliver modern government services.

In Canada, there are 134 ways to apply for federal grants and loans. They aren't connected, so a Canadian has to try them all, like whack-a-mole. If you don't qualify for one, you have no idea why another might be perfect. Using a service like this isn't easy, either. The Federal government has 270 separate online services, which you sign into with 60 unique usernames and passwords you have to keep track of, administered by 33 federal departments. When we decided to launch Functional, there was one person we knew we needed to speak with. He's an independent Senator from Nova Scotia. When he was appointed, he was given a simple mandate: Challenge government. He's a sensible, plainspoken, advocate for simplifying the government. He has a background as an entrepreneur, and a good understanding of technology. He's driven by data, and he's not afraid to ask questions—often publicly. On this week's episode Alistair sits down with Senator Colin Deacon 🇨🇦🇺🇦 to talk about breaking our own rules!