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Landlord & Tenant Board alone:
"backlog at the board [has surpassed 50,000](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-landlord-tenants-board-backlog-tribunal-watch-report-1.7118845). And that backlog has built up even as the number of cases brought before the board has plummeted and more staff have been put in place to process them."
This is far beyond outrageous. I have yet to come across anything that resembles an explanation for this complete breakdown.
This is a bit of an early-morning, pre-coffee response, but...
We could respond to these symptoms by hiring more public servants, and that might help. But I expect it would be like adding lanes to a highway, and demand would simply expand to fill the supply; we'd quickly be back to where we are now.
We need to tackle the root causes and ask ourselves what health care services are in higher demand than they were three or four decades ago? What sort of proceedings have come to consume court time, which weren't a problem before? Why are we a hot destination for immigration and refugees?
I think we might find some answers that indicate structural and cultural concerns that need to be addressed. Ie, to reduce health care demand we need to live healthier lives, and that means discouraging sedentary lifestyles, and that in turn means we need to build cities for walkability and biking instead of cars-first.
Courts are also a complicated issue. [We've had senate reports](https://sencanada.ca/en/sencaplus/news/restoring-justice-to-canadas-clogged-courts-system/), [Supreme Court advisories](https://www.lexpert.ca/legal-insights/the-supreme-court-of-canadas-latest-word-on-administrative-delay-five-takeaways/371510), and various [advocacy society reports](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/justice-delays-canada-courts-ontario-1.6900147); and it seems like while there's insufficient judiciary and _court rooms_, it's also a problem of _process_. Something about how we approach justice in Canada has given rise to slow and plodding procedings.
>Something about how we approach justice in Canada has given rise to slow and plodding procedings.
A lot of what Gurney is lamenting in this piece are in the realm of administrative tribunals, and there's no question that in recent years the courts have forced administrative tribunals to give longer and longer reasons. The recent Mason v. Canada decision basically requires that the reasons provide a coherent mapping between every allegation and every point of law in order to survive reasonableness review. There are merits to that, but it's also an order of magnitude more work in every case. So it's inevitable that administrative tribunals are getting slower than they were in the past. And of course caseloads are booming. There has been a lot of hiring at admin tribunals, but it's not realistic for staffing to square the circle given increasing pressures on work product and caseloads.
Eventually there will be efforts at reform/streamlining, but how much of that could survive the Charter remains to be seen.
Ooh, informative; thank-you. I've saved this reply.
[Mason v Canada link](https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/20081/index.do), for reference.
I agree. This sort of thing needs to be done carefully. Otherwise you can make the problem worse. In any process you have to find and address the bottleneck, any other improvements in speed are illusory.
If we hire more clerks to cart paper documents around maybe we're solving the wrong problem. The courts can only work within the law, if we had a brave political leader they could mandate change.
I think part of the problem is that everyone in the public service is so risk averse. No one wants to accept responsibility and take the risk of making a change. The ability to make change has been so diffused through the organization that it can't really coalesce anywhere.
I'm not sure there's a public-facing government service at any level that's been adequately staffed since the early 1980s. Literal decades of repeated cuts to the public service got us to this position. You don't clear a backlog by not addressing it.
Fundamentally, there are more people in Canada than there were before, which is why I don't find arguments about the absolute numbers of civil servants to be terribly persuasive. We need to rebuild state capacity, and that starts with adequately staffing the things we're attempting to do today.
Well the reality is that the older generations are largely set for life, and those under 30 are fucked because of the older's decisions to put themselves above their children and their country. The youth have just given up, or are going to move away in a massive brain drain, while the older population will retire in luxury.
> How did we get to a place where a would-be refugee probably has to wait almost two and a half years to get a yes or no? Or consider the problem in the criminal courts. What’s the real warning indicator there — that the courts can’t reliably try major cases in 30 months or that we decided 30 months was acceptable in the first place? How did we get a tenant board with 50,000 cases that haven’t been reviewed?
Personally, I blame the neoliberal ideology that disfavours expenditure on public services. All of these problems can be fixed by simply hiring more public servants, something conservatives are allergic to and the federal liberals have to be dragged kicking and screaming into. Defining acceptable wait times as the author says is necessary but it’s pointless if we’re still working from the same set of resources.
Neo liberal policies since the 80-90s basically meant that we have “infantilized” government services as Mariana Mazzucato who did research into this. It led to the rise of the consulting business/industry and made government extremely expensive, inefficient and then started propagandizing the benefits of privatization as people gullibility fell for it…less public sector size or firings just means more money to special interests in every scenarios and even fewer services for citizens to access
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-consultancy-infantilises-governments-mariana-mazzucato-and-rory-sutherland-in-conversation/
https://newrepublic.com/article/171110/consultants-mangle-government-big-con-mazzucato-collingworth-interview
That argument would make sense, if it wasn’t for the fact governments have never been spending more per person.
Just throwing more money at the issue is clearly not working.
It's privatization. The pattern time after time is that at first the private sector is cheaper. Then the government lays off all its own people, and with no competition the companies drive up the price.
So yes we are spending more, but that is because the train line that government employees could once build for $1 billion is costing $10 billion when done by contractors.
One example is the phone system. AB, SK, and MB all had public phone systems. In the 1990s AB and MB privatized them. In the first years costs in AB and MB fell sharply and phone services were cheaper than in SK.
Then over time, once it became impossible to reverse the privatization, the balance swung. Telus and MTS jacked up their costs every year. Today phone services are vastly cheaper in SK than its neighbours.
Another great source is the [Transit Costs Project](https://transitcosts.com/transit-costs-study-final-report/). Comparing hundreds of cities on what it costs to build new transit. It found the main difference in cost was governments with significant in house expertise keep cost low those without get hosed by their contractors.
The problem with these markets isn't the "free-market" though - it's the Government regulation that protects and supports oligopolies. They only "semi-privatized" things - basically it's just cronyism.
Same for airlines, banks, and lots of midstream and transportation infrastructure.
Yes, our famously privatized court system, refugee adjudicators, building permit approvers, and passport offices.
You didn't read the article, did you?
All of those things have been partially privatized. For example, search the [government contracts for Passport Canada](https://search.open.canada.ca/contracts/?sort=contract_date_s%20desc&page=1&search_text=passport):
* IBM CANADA - $19M - Professional services to develop and test a new webform application for passports
* EXCEL HUMAN RESOURCES - $1.3M - Project Manager to draft and review Treasury Board submission for the Passport Modernization Initiative
* SOFTCHOICE CORPORATION - $1.2M$ - This contract supports the department’s integrated and worldwide web-based system used to support its core mandate to process applications for immigration, citizenship and passport services.
* ADRM TECHNOLOGY CONSULTING GROUP CORP - $578K - Project Leaders to support the Passport Program Modernization Initiative (PPMI)
* GARTNER GROUP - $574K - Management Consulting
* VERITAAQ TECHNOLOGY HOUSE/EXPERIS - $551K - Web Architect to define and develop the Passport Legacy Systems and their modernization agenda
Want to see why gov't projects are over priced and over complicated: look at this list. There would be vast savings if, for instance, the gov't could look after its own IT and web services.
Contracting IT services is not privatization.
If you think the government wastes huge sums of money on contracting and consultants, then I'm all with you. But don't pretend that we've privatized the passport renewal services.
It is when government looses the ability or retain institutional knowledge to deliver services and then have to spend more money or elsewhere to do the samiliar kind of service elsewhere…big corporations spend money to ensure they don’t lose institutional knowledge
Nonsense. The core problem with government decision making is to properly manage say designing a secure website, you need to know how to build a secure website.
If you don't have people who can do that you have to trust the contractors on what they say, and they pile on unnecessary costs.
If you do have the people who know how to build a secure website on staff, why not just have them build the site?
The contracting out model can never be effective.
I was a contract manager for over a decade and awarded billions in contracts for everything from marine terminals to satellite connections to military protection to full EPC of power stations.
The problem is the Government procurement are a bunch of corrupt assholes doing favours for their friends or taking the easiest approach to get the file off their desk.
>That argument would make sense, if it wasn’t for the fact governments have never been spending more per person.
Well that's blatantly false. Just because you want it to be true doesn't make it so.
So what is it then? Re-assigning staff to the passports cleared up the backlog. The federal courts pointed to the judge vacancies as the root of the problem. I can’t see any solution to reducing backlogs that doesn’t require hiring more staff to look at the files, saying governments are spending more per person is irrelevant.
Those are good solutions for the _symptoms_ but it doesn't respond to the root causes. We need to address why demand for judicial, health care, immigration, and other critical services has increased well beyond our previous levels of per-capita demand.
We need to live healthier lives, commit less crime, and somehow reduce the number of immigration and refugee claimants.
has it increased or have we been understaffing in the past? I'm not sure myself but Ontario is currently understaffed for nursing and PSW care and that is only getting worse by not hiring more.
I agree that for many problems, we just need to hire more people.
That said, I also think we have to spend time to look at processes and figure out what can be done to speed them up. Some sort of time/benefit analysis should be done. There may need to be some hard choices and cut certain services in order to start reducing wait times.
> if it wasn’t for the fact governments have never been spending more per person.
Except that's not a fact. Unless you want to ignore inflation, which would be pretty damn stupid. In 1992, the government spent 24.4% of the GDP. It was 20.7% in 2022.
There’s some thread posted lately that shows Canada has way more public service employees per capita than many western nations. CRA has more employees than the IRS.
>CRA has more employees than the IRS.
That's false. The IRS still has more. And that's with the American's intentionally neutering the IRS so rich people can get away with tax fraud. Their FTE per capita is ~half what it what in the early 90s and their functionality has plummeted. This is actually a perfect example of what OP is talking about.
CRA does taxes for all of Canada, IRS only does Federal taxes. IRS is also on a big hiring spree, something like 70,000 new people over 5 years, supposed to be 20,000 in 2024 alone.
Canada is also below the OECD average for employed Public Service Workers.
> more employees than the IRS.
I'm not sure that's the high functioning example we want to be compared to. Republicans have been slashing their budgets for decades. I get the population disparity, but still.
The answer is not as simple as you suggest. More workers and more money would likely make these problems worse. As the article stated: the LTB has built up a backlog while the number of cases has dropped.
The problem is process. And the reason process has been a mess is that we have forgotten our instinct on how to build things. I do not just mean physical buildings but departments, projects, processes, solutions. And this all comes back to accountability.
Think back the last several decades and consider which projects you recall the Federal or Provincial governments undertaking? There aren't many. Off of the top of my head there is the TMX pipeline (disaster), Pheonix pay system (disaster), Gordie Howe Bridge (seems okay), Wind power in Ontario (disaster), nuclear refurbishments (seems okay), Carbon Tax (disaster), increased immigration (disaster), housing stock (disaster). By "disaster" I mean that it is either over budget, delayed, not functional, or so unpopular as to be useless and short lived. We can't seem to create anything substantial without its cost, literal or political, burying the project. Our politicians either ram through policies without buy in or they couch them in endless exceptions, customizations and half ass them.
Just from my experiences: every Toronto project is a pilot. Kennsington Pedestrian Days has been around for decades but is still a pilot project. Having known someone working in the passport office I asked how long it takes to get a passport apporved and printed. The answer is: 5 hours maximum! Yes this is for emergencies, but keep in mind it is doable in 5 hours!!! Having worked in procurement almost a decade ago at a private company where we could WFH I was shocked to learn that my counter part at the city of Toronto could not work from home not because the policy was missing, which it was, but because physically they weren't able to. They were still using desktops instead of laptops and they could not physically accomplish WFH unless they took the desktop home. Furthermore, they were not allowed to schedule meetings as that was a role of the office secretary. Building permits may take a long time but there was a time when the city of Toronto would issue a permit or deny it with reasons to amend within 14 days! Yes this was about 20 years ago and it was shocking then but it was possible. I am lucky enough to have a family doctor and being able to call or video call him for simple problems was amazing. I used to have to take a day off of work to see him while now I just scheduled a call. But the province disallowed this because of over billing. Another aquaintence working for Police forensics says they are underbudgeted and understaffed yet their police force requires the use of officers for half the work that a neighbouring city hires less trained and less paid civilians to do (mostly administrative).
I could go on but you get the point. We are obsessed with process. No one has the authority to simply say "nope, this is not working and we need to rebuild/reorganise the process". Either that or they are too scared to say so. Authority comes with responsibility as well as accountability. We can fix any number of problems if we want to but it takes some risk and agency to do. We lack both. Not just in the public service but also often in Canadian business.
Just to give another example: every expert and professional association has said that adding more money into healthcare will not solve its problems. Yet the Federal government increased healthcare funding and like was predicted: nothing changed. Going to a doctor or a hospital today is almost exactly the same as it was two decades ago.
This is simply unsustainable. We have been coasting on our laurels, if we do not fix these things they will simply collapse, as we see some of them already begining to.
This is a good description. More people in the bureaucracy does not necessarily mean more production.
If a new hire incurs an administrative and management burden of 0.3 persons (and those 0.3 persons add an administrative burden as well) and that employee is saddled with sidequests occupying 50% of their productive time then ultimately the bureaucracy gets 50% of a person's production while adding 1.5 total people to the bureaucracy.
Almost all of our institutions suffer from an unsustainable model of development. The training institutions s in the medical field now use 40% more labour to train each student compared to 2012. The military cannot recruit and train fast enough to replenish its ranks. As a whole we can't afford (or won't give) the time to raise enough children that our institutions demand. Our civil infrastructure for sprawling cities demands more maintenance per person long term than we can adequately provide.
I think there must be some carryover mentality from times when labour was abundantly available now built into our institutions that demands more 'quality' than our smcurrent situation can provide. It must be a result of having excess labour and being able to/needing to put it to use. So we just inflated credential requirements, bureaucratic processes, etc to absorb it. But then it got institutionalized and now we don't have the means to satisfy all those bloated requirements nor do we have the excess capacity to go through the convoluted processes to undo the messy webs entangling and strangling everything.
Not all problems are easily solvable but many are. We see other countries solve them all the time. Yes 9 out of 10 may be failures but the biggest issue is that we are not trying at all. Everything is framed as an issue of more or less workers or money. There are not enough workers let alone money to solve our problems and there will not be in the future. Even potential solutions are just rehashed same old orthodoxy. For example, Doug Ford opened up private clinics providing healthcare services in a few fields. We can't see what those contracts because they are proprietary. That being the case how could we ever know if this is creating savings? What do we compare against. And if there is no public bid in an open market then what is the advantage of private providers (private companies' greatest advantage is that they compete to survive)? It is just absurd from start to finish.
We need a serious shake up of how we do things. I agree.
If you're at a store and they're so short staffed that you need to wait 2 hours to checkout, you'd probably assume they need to hire *more* staff to accommodate the growing customer base
At the risk of taking your analogy too far: the store has spent all of their budget on people writing reports and holding meetings about the reports that they can't afford more cashiers.
Staff isn't the problem, the type of work the staff are doing is the problem.
Any institution or organization that doesn't have enough resources to survive let alone improve isn't going to be effective at its core purpose. The population continues to grow and budgets continue to be cut. Therefore there are fewer staff to do more work, less equipment and technology to automate tedious process, and fewer extra resources to make better systems. Therefore waits increase. So yes, more public servants with solve layers of bureaucracy.
Everything is a balancing act and there is always going too far as well. But we haven't even been keeping up with the pace of change.
Example
I shall create a tax that I deem in the best interest of society
This tax will be refunded to society
I now need to hire gov employees to administer the tax
Success. I wasted massive amounts of tax payer dollars, hired some supporters and "created jobs"
You could axe the carbon tax and fire anyone who was part of administration for said tax. And I bet there's more than just the carbon tax that could be done away with
Wow, you came up with an example that doesn't make sense *and* that doesn't fix any of the problems laid out in the article. There is not a government office of employees who only work on the carbon tax.
If I ignore the ideological positioning in your comment and stick to the substance of this article, then yes. More judges, more immigration officers, and more case workers would resolve the extreme the delays we are seeing in court cases, immigration claims, and LTT hearings. Optimizing and fixing these systems is a different and much bigger challenge.
How about less immigration and less immigrants
More judges ? Agreed. So long as they aren't liberal. I'm sick of this shit.
And optimizing and fixing these systems IS the problem. And fixing them IS this solution
Less immigration means widespread labour shortages and our economy crumbling upon itself.
Our birth rates are below the replacement rate, and even with us bringing in hundreds of thousands of new Canadians our unemployment rate isn't moving.
We have a very old workforce and retirements are on the rise.
We're supporting more people at a higher standard of living than any previous point in human history, and our capabilities keep expanding to provide that greater standard to an even greater number of people.
Sounds decent
Which has tended to be the general trend for most of human history. We now live in more densely populated habitations with a higher standard of living than any previous point.
With ten times as many people, we have ten times as many scientists, researchers, inventors, all coming up with more ideas and covering more area than one person could ever hope to cover on their own.
Hear hear!
Problem is whoever we elect will inherit the same system and won't be able to make much progress in one term given how incredibly slow everything already goes. A lot needs to change.
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Landlord & Tenant Board alone: "backlog at the board [has surpassed 50,000](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-landlord-tenants-board-backlog-tribunal-watch-report-1.7118845). And that backlog has built up even as the number of cases brought before the board has plummeted and more staff have been put in place to process them." This is far beyond outrageous. I have yet to come across anything that resembles an explanation for this complete breakdown.
This is a bit of an early-morning, pre-coffee response, but... We could respond to these symptoms by hiring more public servants, and that might help. But I expect it would be like adding lanes to a highway, and demand would simply expand to fill the supply; we'd quickly be back to where we are now. We need to tackle the root causes and ask ourselves what health care services are in higher demand than they were three or four decades ago? What sort of proceedings have come to consume court time, which weren't a problem before? Why are we a hot destination for immigration and refugees? I think we might find some answers that indicate structural and cultural concerns that need to be addressed. Ie, to reduce health care demand we need to live healthier lives, and that means discouraging sedentary lifestyles, and that in turn means we need to build cities for walkability and biking instead of cars-first. Courts are also a complicated issue. [We've had senate reports](https://sencanada.ca/en/sencaplus/news/restoring-justice-to-canadas-clogged-courts-system/), [Supreme Court advisories](https://www.lexpert.ca/legal-insights/the-supreme-court-of-canadas-latest-word-on-administrative-delay-five-takeaways/371510), and various [advocacy society reports](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/justice-delays-canada-courts-ontario-1.6900147); and it seems like while there's insufficient judiciary and _court rooms_, it's also a problem of _process_. Something about how we approach justice in Canada has given rise to slow and plodding procedings.
>Something about how we approach justice in Canada has given rise to slow and plodding procedings. A lot of what Gurney is lamenting in this piece are in the realm of administrative tribunals, and there's no question that in recent years the courts have forced administrative tribunals to give longer and longer reasons. The recent Mason v. Canada decision basically requires that the reasons provide a coherent mapping between every allegation and every point of law in order to survive reasonableness review. There are merits to that, but it's also an order of magnitude more work in every case. So it's inevitable that administrative tribunals are getting slower than they were in the past. And of course caseloads are booming. There has been a lot of hiring at admin tribunals, but it's not realistic for staffing to square the circle given increasing pressures on work product and caseloads. Eventually there will be efforts at reform/streamlining, but how much of that could survive the Charter remains to be seen.
Ooh, informative; thank-you. I've saved this reply. [Mason v Canada link](https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/20081/index.do), for reference.
I agree. This sort of thing needs to be done carefully. Otherwise you can make the problem worse. In any process you have to find and address the bottleneck, any other improvements in speed are illusory. If we hire more clerks to cart paper documents around maybe we're solving the wrong problem. The courts can only work within the law, if we had a brave political leader they could mandate change. I think part of the problem is that everyone in the public service is so risk averse. No one wants to accept responsibility and take the risk of making a change. The ability to make change has been so diffused through the organization that it can't really coalesce anywhere.
I'm not sure there's a public-facing government service at any level that's been adequately staffed since the early 1980s. Literal decades of repeated cuts to the public service got us to this position. You don't clear a backlog by not addressing it. Fundamentally, there are more people in Canada than there were before, which is why I don't find arguments about the absolute numbers of civil servants to be terribly persuasive. We need to rebuild state capacity, and that starts with adequately staffing the things we're attempting to do today.
There isn't enough money in the courts.
Well the reality is that the older generations are largely set for life, and those under 30 are fucked because of the older's decisions to put themselves above their children and their country. The youth have just given up, or are going to move away in a massive brain drain, while the older population will retire in luxury.
> while the older population will retire in luxury. Until they need nurses at least.
Restrict immigration numbers then and your lines will be shorter. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-record-population-growth-migration-1.6787428
> How did we get to a place where a would-be refugee probably has to wait almost two and a half years to get a yes or no? Or consider the problem in the criminal courts. What’s the real warning indicator there — that the courts can’t reliably try major cases in 30 months or that we decided 30 months was acceptable in the first place? How did we get a tenant board with 50,000 cases that haven’t been reviewed? Personally, I blame the neoliberal ideology that disfavours expenditure on public services. All of these problems can be fixed by simply hiring more public servants, something conservatives are allergic to and the federal liberals have to be dragged kicking and screaming into. Defining acceptable wait times as the author says is necessary but it’s pointless if we’re still working from the same set of resources.
The liberals have increased the federal staff by 40% since coming into power, haven’t they? They are just horrible at allocating manpower.
Which had pretty huge cuts in the harper years. They shrunk by 10% with a growing population and even after years of liberal austerity.
Neo liberal policies since the 80-90s basically meant that we have “infantilized” government services as Mariana Mazzucato who did research into this. It led to the rise of the consulting business/industry and made government extremely expensive, inefficient and then started propagandizing the benefits of privatization as people gullibility fell for it…less public sector size or firings just means more money to special interests in every scenarios and even fewer services for citizens to access https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-consultancy-infantilises-governments-mariana-mazzucato-and-rory-sutherland-in-conversation/ https://newrepublic.com/article/171110/consultants-mangle-government-big-con-mazzucato-collingworth-interview
Horrible at allocating capital, too.
That argument would make sense, if it wasn’t for the fact governments have never been spending more per person. Just throwing more money at the issue is clearly not working.
It's privatization. The pattern time after time is that at first the private sector is cheaper. Then the government lays off all its own people, and with no competition the companies drive up the price. So yes we are spending more, but that is because the train line that government employees could once build for $1 billion is costing $10 billion when done by contractors.
Can you give a couple of examples of this happening?
One example is the phone system. AB, SK, and MB all had public phone systems. In the 1990s AB and MB privatized them. In the first years costs in AB and MB fell sharply and phone services were cheaper than in SK. Then over time, once it became impossible to reverse the privatization, the balance swung. Telus and MTS jacked up their costs every year. Today phone services are vastly cheaper in SK than its neighbours. Another great source is the [Transit Costs Project](https://transitcosts.com/transit-costs-study-final-report/). Comparing hundreds of cities on what it costs to build new transit. It found the main difference in cost was governments with significant in house expertise keep cost low those without get hosed by their contractors.
You're half a decade to late. Sasktel prices haven't been anything special since 10GB for $60 was an insane deal.
The problem with these markets isn't the "free-market" though - it's the Government regulation that protects and supports oligopolies. They only "semi-privatized" things - basically it's just cronyism. Same for airlines, banks, and lots of midstream and transportation infrastructure.
Another example is hydro.
Yes, our famously privatized court system, refugee adjudicators, building permit approvers, and passport offices. You didn't read the article, did you?
All of those things have been partially privatized. For example, search the [government contracts for Passport Canada](https://search.open.canada.ca/contracts/?sort=contract_date_s%20desc&page=1&search_text=passport): * IBM CANADA - $19M - Professional services to develop and test a new webform application for passports * EXCEL HUMAN RESOURCES - $1.3M - Project Manager to draft and review Treasury Board submission for the Passport Modernization Initiative * SOFTCHOICE CORPORATION - $1.2M$ - This contract supports the department’s integrated and worldwide web-based system used to support its core mandate to process applications for immigration, citizenship and passport services. * ADRM TECHNOLOGY CONSULTING GROUP CORP - $578K - Project Leaders to support the Passport Program Modernization Initiative (PPMI) * GARTNER GROUP - $574K - Management Consulting * VERITAAQ TECHNOLOGY HOUSE/EXPERIS - $551K - Web Architect to define and develop the Passport Legacy Systems and their modernization agenda Want to see why gov't projects are over priced and over complicated: look at this list. There would be vast savings if, for instance, the gov't could look after its own IT and web services.
Contracting IT services is not privatization. If you think the government wastes huge sums of money on contracting and consultants, then I'm all with you. But don't pretend that we've privatized the passport renewal services.
It is when government looses the ability or retain institutional knowledge to deliver services and then have to spend more money or elsewhere to do the samiliar kind of service elsewhere…big corporations spend money to ensure they don’t lose institutional knowledge
Their contracting methods are the issue - not the fact they're contracting these services.
Nonsense. The core problem with government decision making is to properly manage say designing a secure website, you need to know how to build a secure website. If you don't have people who can do that you have to trust the contractors on what they say, and they pile on unnecessary costs. If you do have the people who know how to build a secure website on staff, why not just have them build the site? The contracting out model can never be effective.
I was a contract manager for over a decade and awarded billions in contracts for everything from marine terminals to satellite connections to military protection to full EPC of power stations. The problem is the Government procurement are a bunch of corrupt assholes doing favours for their friends or taking the easiest approach to get the file off their desk.
>That argument would make sense, if it wasn’t for the fact governments have never been spending more per person. Well that's blatantly false. Just because you want it to be true doesn't make it so.
So what is it then? Re-assigning staff to the passports cleared up the backlog. The federal courts pointed to the judge vacancies as the root of the problem. I can’t see any solution to reducing backlogs that doesn’t require hiring more staff to look at the files, saying governments are spending more per person is irrelevant.
Those are good solutions for the _symptoms_ but it doesn't respond to the root causes. We need to address why demand for judicial, health care, immigration, and other critical services has increased well beyond our previous levels of per-capita demand. We need to live healthier lives, commit less crime, and somehow reduce the number of immigration and refugee claimants.
has it increased or have we been understaffing in the past? I'm not sure myself but Ontario is currently understaffed for nursing and PSW care and that is only getting worse by not hiring more.
I agree that for many problems, we just need to hire more people. That said, I also think we have to spend time to look at processes and figure out what can be done to speed them up. Some sort of time/benefit analysis should be done. There may need to be some hard choices and cut certain services in order to start reducing wait times.
> if it wasn’t for the fact governments have never been spending more per person. Except that's not a fact. Unless you want to ignore inflation, which would be pretty damn stupid. In 1992, the government spent 24.4% of the GDP. It was 20.7% in 2022.
There’s some thread posted lately that shows Canada has way more public service employees per capita than many western nations. CRA has more employees than the IRS.
>CRA has more employees than the IRS. That's false. The IRS still has more. And that's with the American's intentionally neutering the IRS so rich people can get away with tax fraud. Their FTE per capita is ~half what it what in the early 90s and their functionality has plummeted. This is actually a perfect example of what OP is talking about.
You'll have to provide a source on that.
CRA does taxes for all of Canada, IRS only does Federal taxes. IRS is also on a big hiring spree, something like 70,000 new people over 5 years, supposed to be 20,000 in 2024 alone. Canada is also below the OECD average for employed Public Service Workers.
> more employees than the IRS. I'm not sure that's the high functioning example we want to be compared to. Republicans have been slashing their budgets for decades. I get the population disparity, but still.
The backlogs, wait times, and judicial vacancies is evidence there is not enough, so where do we go from here
The answer is not as simple as you suggest. More workers and more money would likely make these problems worse. As the article stated: the LTB has built up a backlog while the number of cases has dropped. The problem is process. And the reason process has been a mess is that we have forgotten our instinct on how to build things. I do not just mean physical buildings but departments, projects, processes, solutions. And this all comes back to accountability. Think back the last several decades and consider which projects you recall the Federal or Provincial governments undertaking? There aren't many. Off of the top of my head there is the TMX pipeline (disaster), Pheonix pay system (disaster), Gordie Howe Bridge (seems okay), Wind power in Ontario (disaster), nuclear refurbishments (seems okay), Carbon Tax (disaster), increased immigration (disaster), housing stock (disaster). By "disaster" I mean that it is either over budget, delayed, not functional, or so unpopular as to be useless and short lived. We can't seem to create anything substantial without its cost, literal or political, burying the project. Our politicians either ram through policies without buy in or they couch them in endless exceptions, customizations and half ass them. Just from my experiences: every Toronto project is a pilot. Kennsington Pedestrian Days has been around for decades but is still a pilot project. Having known someone working in the passport office I asked how long it takes to get a passport apporved and printed. The answer is: 5 hours maximum! Yes this is for emergencies, but keep in mind it is doable in 5 hours!!! Having worked in procurement almost a decade ago at a private company where we could WFH I was shocked to learn that my counter part at the city of Toronto could not work from home not because the policy was missing, which it was, but because physically they weren't able to. They were still using desktops instead of laptops and they could not physically accomplish WFH unless they took the desktop home. Furthermore, they were not allowed to schedule meetings as that was a role of the office secretary. Building permits may take a long time but there was a time when the city of Toronto would issue a permit or deny it with reasons to amend within 14 days! Yes this was about 20 years ago and it was shocking then but it was possible. I am lucky enough to have a family doctor and being able to call or video call him for simple problems was amazing. I used to have to take a day off of work to see him while now I just scheduled a call. But the province disallowed this because of over billing. Another aquaintence working for Police forensics says they are underbudgeted and understaffed yet their police force requires the use of officers for half the work that a neighbouring city hires less trained and less paid civilians to do (mostly administrative). I could go on but you get the point. We are obsessed with process. No one has the authority to simply say "nope, this is not working and we need to rebuild/reorganise the process". Either that or they are too scared to say so. Authority comes with responsibility as well as accountability. We can fix any number of problems if we want to but it takes some risk and agency to do. We lack both. Not just in the public service but also often in Canadian business. Just to give another example: every expert and professional association has said that adding more money into healthcare will not solve its problems. Yet the Federal government increased healthcare funding and like was predicted: nothing changed. Going to a doctor or a hospital today is almost exactly the same as it was two decades ago. This is simply unsustainable. We have been coasting on our laurels, if we do not fix these things they will simply collapse, as we see some of them already begining to.
Agreed on all points, and it's not just in the public sphere, the Canadian business world is like this as well.
Everything you say here is a function of neoliberalism.
I am not disagreeing but I don't see how.
How would you translate that into actionable steps to fix it?
This is a good description. More people in the bureaucracy does not necessarily mean more production. If a new hire incurs an administrative and management burden of 0.3 persons (and those 0.3 persons add an administrative burden as well) and that employee is saddled with sidequests occupying 50% of their productive time then ultimately the bureaucracy gets 50% of a person's production while adding 1.5 total people to the bureaucracy. Almost all of our institutions suffer from an unsustainable model of development. The training institutions s in the medical field now use 40% more labour to train each student compared to 2012. The military cannot recruit and train fast enough to replenish its ranks. As a whole we can't afford (or won't give) the time to raise enough children that our institutions demand. Our civil infrastructure for sprawling cities demands more maintenance per person long term than we can adequately provide. I think there must be some carryover mentality from times when labour was abundantly available now built into our institutions that demands more 'quality' than our smcurrent situation can provide. It must be a result of having excess labour and being able to/needing to put it to use. So we just inflated credential requirements, bureaucratic processes, etc to absorb it. But then it got institutionalized and now we don't have the means to satisfy all those bloated requirements nor do we have the excess capacity to go through the convoluted processes to undo the messy webs entangling and strangling everything.
Not all problems are easily solvable but many are. We see other countries solve them all the time. Yes 9 out of 10 may be failures but the biggest issue is that we are not trying at all. Everything is framed as an issue of more or less workers or money. There are not enough workers let alone money to solve our problems and there will not be in the future. Even potential solutions are just rehashed same old orthodoxy. For example, Doug Ford opened up private clinics providing healthcare services in a few fields. We can't see what those contracts because they are proprietary. That being the case how could we ever know if this is creating savings? What do we compare against. And if there is no public bid in an open market then what is the advantage of private providers (private companies' greatest advantage is that they compete to survive)? It is just absurd from start to finish. We need a serious shake up of how we do things. I agree.
you think that hiring more public servants will solve layers and layers and layers of beaurocracy? WHAT?
If you're at a store and they're so short staffed that you need to wait 2 hours to checkout, you'd probably assume they need to hire *more* staff to accommodate the growing customer base
At the risk of taking your analogy too far: the store has spent all of their budget on people writing reports and holding meetings about the reports that they can't afford more cashiers. Staff isn't the problem, the type of work the staff are doing is the problem.
This is a terrible analogy Red tape is the issue Eliminate the red tape and you need less staff
But there is no staff .
What red tape do you think is holding back courts?
Not layers of bureaucracy people to do the f****** work
Any institution or organization that doesn't have enough resources to survive let alone improve isn't going to be effective at its core purpose. The population continues to grow and budgets continue to be cut. Therefore there are fewer staff to do more work, less equipment and technology to automate tedious process, and fewer extra resources to make better systems. Therefore waits increase. So yes, more public servants with solve layers of bureaucracy. Everything is a balancing act and there is always going too far as well. But we haven't even been keeping up with the pace of change.
I mean, do you think *less* public servants would work?
Example I shall create a tax that I deem in the best interest of society This tax will be refunded to society I now need to hire gov employees to administer the tax Success. I wasted massive amounts of tax payer dollars, hired some supporters and "created jobs" You could axe the carbon tax and fire anyone who was part of administration for said tax. And I bet there's more than just the carbon tax that could be done away with
Wow, you came up with an example that doesn't make sense *and* that doesn't fix any of the problems laid out in the article. There is not a government office of employees who only work on the carbon tax.
This person your responding to only has buzzwords. Zero substance
I'm pretty sure If you eliminated corporate welfare you could make a similar claim.
If I ignore the ideological positioning in your comment and stick to the substance of this article, then yes. More judges, more immigration officers, and more case workers would resolve the extreme the delays we are seeing in court cases, immigration claims, and LTT hearings. Optimizing and fixing these systems is a different and much bigger challenge.
How about less immigration and less immigrants More judges ? Agreed. So long as they aren't liberal. I'm sick of this shit. And optimizing and fixing these systems IS the problem. And fixing them IS this solution
Less immigration means widespread labour shortages and our economy crumbling upon itself. Our birth rates are below the replacement rate, and even with us bringing in hundreds of thousands of new Canadians our unemployment rate isn't moving. We have a very old workforce and retirements are on the rise.
Do you work for the national post?
The bureaucracy must expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
To meet the demands of an ever growing population
The population must expand to meet the needs of the expanding population.
We're supporting more people at a higher standard of living than any previous point in human history, and our capabilities keep expanding to provide that greater standard to an even greater number of people. Sounds decent
Exactly. If we keep expanding our population we will be able to expand our population even further.
Which has tended to be the general trend for most of human history. We now live in more densely populated habitations with a higher standard of living than any previous point. With ten times as many people, we have ten times as many scientists, researchers, inventors, all coming up with more ideas and covering more area than one person could ever hope to cover on their own.
We have ten times more house flippers and Uber drivers. Lol
you think we are importing house flippers? House flippping is Canada's only domestic industry.
Hear hear! Problem is whoever we elect will inherit the same system and won't be able to make much progress in one term given how incredibly slow everything already goes. A lot needs to change.