ArriveCan failings demonstrate deep structural flaws in senior public service ranks

OTTAWA—The failings of the ArriveCan procurement process should be analyzed from multiple perspectives. There is obviously the political angle. But there is also the role played by sundry bureaucrats, who now sit stupefied at parliamentary committees, shifting blame and pointing fingers. Like the Phoenix fiasco under former prime minister Stephen Harper, the ArriveCan scandal is only the latest in a long list of misguided undertakings that prime ministers push through to show their managerial aptitude at automation. They hope to save costs and make the public sector behave like the productivity-gaining machine they presume the private sector to be. It always flops. Not having learned from Harper’s mistakes, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had to have his own personal boondoggle. He followed the same old approach: to bring in private consultants, put a few sycophants from the bureaucracy in charge of the project, and ignore any alarm bells as long as the project builds the prime minister’s political branding and image. In fairness, neither Trudeau nor Harper can be held accountable for how these initiatives unravelled once handed over to the bureaucracy. The culpability thereafter lies with executive oversight by the public service. As ArriveCan and Phoenix have shown, that oversight is mired in incompetence, egos, and a false belief in the competency of consultants and private sector corporations. The problem is far-reaching and deeply structural. It starts with the tenure of deputy ministers. Unlike in the distant past, when deputies were required to stay put in one place for most of their careers, they now hop from one department to another with short, time-limited stints. That is insufficient for them to know the full nuts and bolts of their portfolios and all their personnel, let alone to take responsibility for their failures. This is precisely what transpired with ArriveCan when it was launched in April 2020. It has cycled through deputies. The current deputy minister Erin O’Gorman was appointed in 2022 to clean up the mess. The person who made the mess meanwhile is long gone. With rotating chairs at the helm, the oversight was left to managers who were mostly missing in action. They had no project plans, no risk management, and no budget tracking. They did it seems, have time for dinners and cocktails with the private consultants. Structural problems invariably spawn organizational ones. With no one specific deputy responsible for a department’s long-haul performance, the management culture degrades. It starts promoting kowtowing careerists who pretend everything is rosy and avoid the ethics of telling the truth like, “Minister, we have a serious problem. We need to shut this down, now.” The problem of cultures and deputy minister tenures is easy to fix. It requires a simple edict by the Clerk of the Privy Council. The more serious problem of the over—if not exclusive—reliance on private consultants is not so easy to fix. It requires a political will and strategic, non-partisan foresight. As the Auditor General Karen Hogan notes, almost all the work on ArriveCan was done by consultants. The main beneficiary was GC Strategies, which bagged $19.1-million of the ArriveCan bonanza. It’s a two-person Ottawa outfit that supplies IT consultants for an average cost of $1090 per diem and takes a cut of 15 to 30 per cent in commissions. Since 2015, GC Strategies has had 219 contracts worth $239-million dollars from the federal government. That’s not all. A full-time federal employee at National Defence also got in on the action with a side-gig to supply IT consultants. According to Press Progress, he was awarded over $100-million in government contracts since 2015, including $7.9-million of the ArriveCan budget. It turns out he was also a candidate for the People’s Party of Canada in the 2021 federal elections. Nice work if you can get it. An ArriveCan consultant made double of what a full-time IT worker in the public service makes. With the monies paid out to consultants, the federal government could have hired 600 IT workers and developed the app entirely in-house, for likely under the initial $80,000 estimated cost. Instead, thanks to the consultants, the price paid by Canadian taxpayers is nearly $60-million. The problem is acutely structural. Like Trudeau, Harper had also fallen for the IT consultants same scam. His Phoenix program was supposed to cost $15-million and cut 1,400 jobs. When the consultants and the multinational corporations were done with it, it shot up to $350-million, requiring an extra 500 temporary workers to come and fix the muddle. This too can be fixed: by hiring permanent IT employees. Prime ministers, however, are loath to trade consultants for employees. They fear accusations of bloating the bureaucracy. Until that changes, we can expect more repeats of the ArriveCan phenomenon, where, as Hogan discovered, 78 per cent of the paid private consultants actually did no work at all. It is clear that with ArriveCan, the entire bureaucratic system failed, from procurement, to oversight, and the enforcement of codes of conduct. The good news is that systems like our federal public service don’t fail that easily. It takes careerists and calculating politicians. The bad news is that like Phoenix, we should not expect any fixes—at least not until the next big disaster. Bhagwant Sandhu is a retired director general from the federal public service. He also held executive positions with the governments of Ontario and British Columbia. The Hill Times

ArriveCan failings demonstrate deep structural flaws in senior public service ranks

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ArriveCan failings demonstrate deep structural flaws in senior public service ranks

As the ArriveCan and Phoenix scandals have shown, mismanagement in the public service is far-reaching and deeply structural.

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