Number of federal public service jobs could drop by almost 60,000, report predicts
Number of federal public service jobs could drop by almost 60,000, report predicts
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I have a different proposal
The government needs to adopt tech. No, not just “we use Office and SharePoint”, but something like making 10-20% of the federal workforce tech workers.
Why?
In many departments there are maybe 1-3% of staff in IT and IT adjacent roles. I know of departments with less.
That means we have a ton of tasks which frankly can and should be replaced by technology.
Technology means systems, and systems decide how work happens. When the only option to evolve systems is to pay contractors (which we’re making harder) we see only stagnation and productivity declines — and we are seeing real productivity declines in the federal service.
I’m not implying federal workers are dumb or lazy, I’m saying they’re stuck in a massively outmoded way of working. Management doesn’t have the tools to make changes that will really increase efficiency, and frankly most of them are tech illiterate and don’t even know those opportunities exist.
And here’s an example of how tech can help. I write Model Context Protocols for LLMs to fetch specific files and documents for my work, which turn large data gathering efforts into short tasks. 5 years ago that was real work, but with cutting edge tools it’s an small part of my job.
Imagine if we gave the exact same tech to the CRA, enabling them to do bigger and faster and more thorough investigations into tax cheats and errors. That would be big revenue increases without needing cuts. Cuts that reduce our effectiveness and will reduce revenue because as I said we’re stuck in the past.
Every government agency needs teams working on internal tooling, relentlessly driving down the time spent on tasks, that way we can use more of our federal workers strengths. We don’t need contractors for this, they too are often behind the times and have perverse incentives to make departments dependent on them.
Tech could be an answer, but you have to also pause and think about the impact here. When FB or twitter screws up we shrug and move on, when people get improperly audited it could be literally life and death situation, or approval of drug grants for those with "exotic" illnesses. Modernisation of work has to happen however "just throwing tech" at it won't work. Instead of laying off 60k people they should be trained and equipped with better tools to do their jobs faster and better. So tech would be part if that, tech alone is a sure recipe for disaster. Now if we add government tech procurement standards - I see no hope in tech at all as surely winner of any contract will deliver past due date, over budget and with missing features.
One way to flip it would be mandating procurement OSS products only, produced in the open from day 1. This may help expose deficiencies early on and call BS o over-billed hours if all commits are accounted for. Still you need people with domain knowledge to steer those processes and to be able to actually scope future solutions.
The reason I think every department needs an internal tech team is precisely because "just throwing tech" doesn't work. We need bespoke tailored solutions to the specific problems that workers are dealing with.
Now if we add government tech procurement standards - I see no hope in tech at all as surely winner of any contract will deliver past due date, over budget and with missing features.
This is exactly the problem having internal teams building internal tools solves. You're not stuck waiting to go from 0 to 100% on an expensive project with long runway and out of date standards until finally the consultants to toss a solutoin over the fence and leave because they want to get the minimum done and move on to their next paycheque.
You can only do tech really well by understanding the domain and problem, and the people working on it.
I definitely think we should be going big on both OSS and Canadian owned tech. I don't expect the government to build Office, they should be using (and ideally contributing to) OSS. On the other hand, Statistics Canada has a ton of open sourced code that might as well be closed source, and would probably help them move quicker.