The Functional Government Podcast

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The government already knows plenty about you, and much of that information is outdated or wrong.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.

We sometimes take transportation for granted. When you can tap a screen and have something from around the world show up a week later, it’s easy to overlook the incredible stack of logistics that’s in the middle. Transport Canada is at the center of air, land, and sea travel, and many of its services keep those deliveries coming.

One of the tasks that Transport Canada handles is marine safety and security, which includes things like boat registration, seafarer certification, and health checks for people who will be at sea for months. Many of those services are fee-based, and as of 2017, any government department that charges a fee must refund a portion of it if it doesn’t deliver on time.

You’d think that when such a law is passed, the government would also release the digital tools to implement it. But those two things are seldom in lock-step: legislation and the implementation are separate beasts, so it’s left to each department to interpret the law and implement its own processes.

(In a better world, laws and the code to implement them would happen simultaneously. This would lead to much more re-use and modularity in government applications—but also to lawmakers realizing that many of their policies simply aren’t implementable as written.)

Transport Canada designed its own fee-tracking system, which is now connected to the workload management application built under Lucie Bergeron's leadership in Marine Safety and Security. This worked, in part, because she fostered a three-phase approach to modernizing marine services and, more importantly, led a multidisciplinary team, including change managers, to make the transition happen.

Also, since Canada has two official languages and Lucie’s native tongue is French, Alistair and Lucie recorded this interview twice—so they’re slightly different—once in French and once in English!

On tient parfois le transport pour acquis. Quand on peut toucher un écran et recevoir, une semaine plus tard, un produit venant de l’autre bout du monde, c’est facile d’oublier l’incroyable logistique qui se trouve entre les deux. Transports Canada est au cœur du transport aérien, terrestre et maritime, et bon nombre de ses services permettent à ces livraisons de continuer à circuler.  
L’une des responsabilités de Transports Canada est d’assurer la sécurité et la sûreté maritimes, ce qui comprend notamment l’immatriculation des embarcations, la certification des gens de mer et les examens médicaux pour les personnes qui passeront des mois en mer. Plusieurs de ces services sont assortis de frais et, depuis 2017, tout ministère fédéral qui exige des frais doit en rembourser une partie s’il ne respecte pas les délais de service. 
On pourrait croire que lorsqu’une telle loi est adoptée, le gouvernement mettrait aussi en place les outils numériques nécessaires à son application. Mais ces deux éléments sont rarement synchronisés : la législation et sa mise en œuvre évoluent séparément. Il revient donc à chaque ministère d’interpréter la loi et de mettre en place ses propres processus. 
(Dans un monde idéal, les lois et le code nécessaire à leur application seraient développés en parallèle. Cela favoriserait une bien plus grande réutilisation et modularité dans les applications gouvernementales — et ça amènerait peut-être aussi les législateurs à constater que certaines politiques ne sont tout simplement pas applicables telles quelles.)  
Transports Canada a conçu son propre système de suivi des frais, désormais connecté à l’application de gestion de la charge de travail développée sous le leadership de Lucie Bergeron de sécurité et sûreté maritimes. Cette réussite repose en partie sur l’approche en trois phases qu’elle a mise en place pour moderniser les services maritimes et, surtout, sur sa capacité à mobiliser une équipe multidisciplinaire — incluant des spécialistes de la gestion du changement — pour concrétiser cette transformation. 
Aussi, comme le Canada a deux langues officielles et que le français est la langue maternelle de Lucie, Alistair et Lucie ont enregistré cette entrevue deux fois — avec de légères différences — une en français et une en anglais !

Michael Wernick worked as a public servant for decades. His career culminated in a term as the Clerk of the Privvy Council—the most senior public servant in Canada. But before that, he had a front-row seat to Canada’s constitutional negotiations, and the crisis that almost tore the country apart.

So when he says you have to accept what won’t change, and work with what will, he speaks from experience.

We’ve long wanted to talk with Michael about his time in office, and now that he’s retired—and writing about governing the nation—he’s able to speak more freely about the challenges to modernization. It’s a candid conversation on why change is hard, some of the misconceptions people have about the Federal government, and why he’s hopefuly that modernization is coming.

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.