The repair job at Immigration

The department’s top bureaucrat answers a critical report, with rare candour

Seven months ago Neil Yeates, a retired former deputy minister of immigration, submitted a report on the organization of the department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to the current deputy minister, Christiane Fox.

Yeates’s 28-page report was blunt, plainspoken, critical but constructive. It said “the current organizational model at IRCC is broken.” At a time of global upheaval and dizzying growth in immigration levels, the department that decides who gets into Canada was no longer “fit for purpose,” he wrote. It was time for “major change.” When? “[T]he advice is to proceed now.”

On Thursday, a copy of Yeates’s report landed in my email inbox.

On Thursday night, Christiane Fox told me she is implementing many of Yeates’s recommendations, and described for me her plans for the department with a level of detail and candour I almost never see in today’s Ottawa.

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Copies of Yeates’s February IRCC Organizational Review Report have been floating around Ottawa because the department began implementing big changes this week. Some of the nearly 13,000 people who work in the department have asked for the rationale behind the changes. Yeates’s 28-page report makes the case succinctly.

Yeates was a top civil servant in Saskatchewan before moving to Ottawa in 2004. He held senior positions in three other departments before becoming deputy minister at Citizenship and Immigration Canada, the department now known as IRCC, where he served from 2009 to his retirement in 2013. That means he was Jason Kenney’s deputy minister for all of Kenney’s time at Immigration, but he was also a Trudeau Foundation mentor if you want to get excited about that instead.

His report’s purpose, he wrote, “is to provide strategic advice to the Deputy Minister on how the department can become a more efficient and effective organization.” After interviewing 36 people inside and outside the department, he decided it was a mess.

‘“[T]he current organizational model at IRCC is broken but is being held together by the hard work and dedication of staff,” he wrote. “At IRCC today department-wide planning is limited and some interviewees suggested it has in fact disappeared completely . There is no multi-year strategic plan, annual plans are not in place consistently across the department and consequently reporting is seen by many as haphazard.”

What the department did have going for it was a decent work environment: “In talking to senior managers at IRCC the culture was universally seen as ‘committed,’ ‘collaborative,’ ‘supportive’ and so on.” The senior managers Yeates interviewed saw this culture as “helping to overcome the shortcomings of the current organizational structure and of the weakness of the governance and management systems.”

The immigration department has always been the main portal between a messy world and an anxious nation. Lately the world had grown messier, Yeates noted, and the demands on the department were starting to hurt. “[T]he operating environment, both nationally and internationally, has grown ever more complex, unstable and frenetic,” he wrote.

In response, “the department has grown exponentially,” from 5,217 staff when Yeates left it in 2013 to12,721 this year, an expansion of 144%. The “Ex complement,” the department’s management cadre, grew from 135 to 227 over the same period, a smaller increase of 68%. That might explain why the department’s managers are so stressed, Yeates speculated. At any rate, the department’s structure was conceived for a much smaller staff and caseload.

To catch up, Yeates proposed big reform in four areas: Organizational Structure, Governance, Management Systems and Culture. He cautioned that tinkering with only one or a couple of those areas wouldn’t have the effect that a “Big Bang,” however difficult, would achieve.

The big problem in Organizational Structure was that the department isn’t organized along business lines: that one of the world’s leading destinations for asylum and humanitarian immigration doesn’t have an assistant deputy minister for asylum, for instance. The obvious challenge was that in a hectic world there will certainly be more crises, like those of recent years. “Should IRCC have a permanent ‘response team’ in place? The short answer is no.” Between crises that team of experienced trouble-shooters would just be twirling their thumbs. Instead Yeates proposed better contingency planning, including lessons learned from other crisis-management departments such as National Defence.

Under Governance, Yeates found a proliferation of over-large committees sitting through endless presentations and not really sure, at the end of each, whether they had decided anything. “Most of the actual decision-making occurs in DMO/ADM bilats,” he wrote, referring to meetings between the Deputy Minister’s office and a given Assistant Deputy Minister.

The section of Yeates’s report that deals with Management Systems reads like a parable of contemporary Ottawa: a “series of periodic crises” that somehow nobody anticipated, “descend[ing] into ‘issues management.’” What’s needed is much better planning and reporting, he wrote. When he was running the department barely a decade ago, every part of the department was reporting on progress against targets every three months. That system has fallen by the wayside. A department that’s obsessed with its “priorities” or with the to-do items in “a minister’s mandate letters” is “inherently limited” and guaranteed to be side-swiped by events intruding from the real world, he wrote.

The upshot of all this tunnel vision was that the department was expecting to “lapse,” or leave unspent, $368 million in projected spending for the year underway, even as passport-related spending was projecting a $238 million deficit.

Yeates’s report closed with the sort of plea that’s traditional in this sort of exercise, essentially pleading not to be ignored. “IRCC is at a crossroads and as Yogi Berra famously quipped ‘when you come to a fork in the road, take it,’” he wrote. Change is hard, but a “substantial majority” of the people he interviewed told him it was overdue.

Neil Yeates and Christiane Fox.

And that’s where the report ends. I had to decide what to do with it. First, always consider the possibility that you’ve been handed a fake report, or the first draft of something that was later amended beyond recognition. I emailed the office of Immigration Minister Marc Miller looking for comment. They handed me off to the civil servants in the department’s communications staff. But I also emailed Christiane Fox, the deputy minister, offering her a chance to comment. This is the sort of chance that people in Ottawa usually don’t touch with a barge pole.

But Fox called me on Thursday night and responded in detail. I asked: was the conversation on the record? She thought out loud for a few seconds, working her way up to a “Yes.” I don’t want to belabour this, but that answer is very rare these days.

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Christiane Fox had been the DM at Indigenous Services for all of 22 months when she was sent to run IRCC in July of 2022. The new job “felt like crisis”: the department was sending weekly updates to an ad hoc committee of ministers whose job was to fix months of chaos in airports and passport offices.

“They felt like they were under duress,” Fox said. “Everyone was exhausted.” New staff were just “tacked on when there was a problem,” including the creation of an entirely new sector for Afghanistan. Fox talked about this with some of the most experienced public servants in town, including Yeates and Richard Dicerni, Fox’s former DM from her days as a young public servant at Industry, who passed away this summer and whose contribution to public life in Canada is hard to measure.

“I kind of said, ‘We’ve got to make some changes. And I don’t want to do it overnight. But I also don’t want to spend two years figuring out what a new model could look like.’” Yeates, whom she didn’t know well but who knew the department’s history, seemed like solid outside counsel.

While Yeates was doing his thing, Fox and the previous immigration minister, Sean Fraser, were consulting — with “business leaders, academics and clients” — about the department’s future. By June of this year, she had a plan, based on Yeates’s report and those consultations. She’s been rolling it out since then, from top managers on down, and on Wednesday, by way of explanation for the changes that are coming, she sent the Yeates report to enough people that I got a copy. A department-wide meeting is scheduled for this coming week.

What’s changing? “The model is now just more of a business-line model,” she said, reflecting Yeates’s first big recommendation.

So there’ll be a stronger crisis-planning sector. In a world that keeps producing humanitarian crises, the goal is to learn lessons for next time from Ukraine, Afghanistan and elsewhere. “Most importantly, we’ll have a group dedicated to thinking about these issues, planning for crisis.” It won’t eliminate the need to “surge,” or quickly add new staff when something flares up. “But in the past, we ended up surging so much that all of our other business lines suffered every time there was a crisis.” The goal now is to get better at anticipating so the department’s regular work doesn’t suffer.

“Asylum and Refugee. There was no Asylum ADM,” she said, reflecting another Yeates critique. “This is probably the thing that causes me the most heartache, in terms of, how are we going to deal with this as a country, globally? What are some of the tools that we have? How do we support the most vulnerable? How do we have a system that is fast and fair? So Asylum and Refugee will now be a sector within the department.”

In addition, there’ll be a sector focused on Economic Immigration and Family. “The business community didn’t really feel like we were actually talking to them about labour shortages, about skills missions, about what is the talent that the country needs.” And a sector on francophone immigration, identifying French-speaking sources of immigration and taking into account the needs of French-speaking newcomers.

“Other sectors remain kind of consistent. Like, we’ve always had a focus on border and security, but we will now have a team that’s really migration integrity, national security, fraud prevention, and looking at case management in that context.”

Fox said she’s working on more of a “client focus” in the department’s work. “When I joined the department I remember, my first few weeks, thinking, ‘Everybody talks about inventory and backlog and process.’ But I didn’t feel clients and people were at the forefront.” This may sound like a semantic difference. But anyone who’s been treated as inventory and backlog can testify to the potential value in any reform that restores a measure of humanity to recipients of government service.

I’ve been arguing for months here that simply acknowledging problems and identifying possible solutions is better communications than the happy-face sloganeering that passes for so much of strategic comms these days. Here, quite by accident, I’d stumbled across somebody who seems to have had similar thoughts. (There’s an irony here, because Fox’s CV includes a long stint as a director of strategic communications in the Privy Council Office.)

“There will be things that will come up,” Fox said, “that may not be as smooth a transition as we thought, or maybe a bit clunky, that we need to rethink. What we’ve told the employees is, it won’t be perfect. We needed to change, we’re going to change, but there’s going to be room for conversation around issues that arise as we go through this process.”

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It Gets Late Early These Days: Time To Bounce Biden & Trudeau?

Published on May 2, 2024

Bruce Dowbiggin

“Take out the papers and the trash, or you don’t get no spending cash.”

Whether you’re in the stock market or real estate the question of when to sell is paramount. When to dump a tanking investment or sell a house in a bad market is an art form. Hence the expression, Timing is everything.

For the incumbent governments in Canada and the U.S. the time has come to make that risky decision of when to fish or when to cut bait with their respective leaders.

In Canada the federal Liberals, still shacked up with the NDP in a common-law embrace, have been doing denial for an extended period since they used the Covid-19 lockdown to sneak out a minority government in 2021. As soon as voters awoke to the lockdown hoax they’d lived through— courtesy of Justin Trudeau— they began to abandon him as a marketable product.

With five years to procrastinate, however, they indulged their radical agenda of climate and culture rather than address how they might be re-elected with Trudeau and his Quebec-dominated cabinet. They blew black holes in Canada’s debt load. There was a PR strategy to label Pierre Poilievre as a mini-Trump. And to buy up the floundering legacy media sources before there 2025 vote.

But for the most part the Liberals still saw Happy Ways where the mainstream saw an intellectual lightweight tilting at every Woke windmill. Since 2021 the polls have shown a steady erosion to the point where they see a Conservative majority— maybe even super-majority— if an election were called today.

Now all governments get tired over time. The biggest complaint about Stephen Harper from the talking classes in 2015 was the sense of fatigue he projected to Canadians who want their PM to be a rock star. But the collapse in Trudeau’s support has come via other very serious underpinnings from corruption (Lavalin, ME Charity, Chinese influence) to entitlement (the Carbon Tax, deficit).

However you see these issues they have led to the point where Liberals, more than half of whom will lose in the next election, must decide if they want to go to Davy Jones locker on the HMCS Skippy. Many of them will qualify for federal pensions if they hold on to the bitter end with Trudeau in October of next year. So he has that assurance of support. But if he is punted by the party he resurrected in 2010, who will succeed him? The taint of Trudeau on his most loyal sycophants will disqualify anyone in cabinet from being taken seriously for the top job.

Outside the immediate junta, names like Mark Carney— former Bank of Canada head— and deposed justice minister Jody Wilson Raybould have been put forward. The problem for anyone aspiring to replace Trudeau is they will have to face his fanatical loyalists in the PMO who’ve slapped down any pretenders so far.

The most recent forlorn hope for Trudeau was that the Federal Budget might calm the waters. Running up the deficit to perilous numbers with a menu of profligate policies to slake the restless NDP was going to force Poilievre on the defensive. So were limp attacks such as this from Trudeau cabinet pal Marc Miller.

For a brief fortnight the polling seemed to stabilize. But now more recent polls show that Trudeau’s popularity bottom was not a bottom at all, just a transfer station en route to the Marianas Trench of politics. Leaving the question of who and when as the only measurables in the equation. How much runway does he deserves and how much his successor gets are the operative problems when Liberals spend the summer in their ridings.

Meanwhile Joe Biden’s faint hope of putting his opponent in jail before the November election has done nothing to move his polling. If anything the prosecution of Donald Trump as he runs against Biden in 2024 is seen as a distinctly underhanded tactic by many outside the MSNBC mouth breathers.

While polls are a mugs’ game, the news that Biden trails Trump in all seven of the swing states he needs to be re-elected has sent shock through Team Obama, which runs the Democratic Party at the moment. There are a lot of sinecures and cushy salaries at risk here. The addition of Robert Kennedy Jr. to the presidential ballot in key states like California is further diluting the DEMs base. While RFK Jr. draws from both parties it’s expected he’ll hurt Biden most.

As if that wasn’t enough the recent pro-Palestine occupations by students and paid agitators is seen as a referendum on Biden’s support for Israel among the fanatical left-wing base of the DEMs. And polls indicate the effect has been disastrous.

Unlike the Liberals who have time to effect a palace coup, the DEMs are up against the clock with their convention coming in July. While he still plays to the Hollywood and Wall Street donors, the general public sees Biden getting more decrepit by the day. His persona as a pleasantly dazed crossing guard has worn thin.

While replacement scenarios have dogged Biden since his election (saved only by the utter dislike for his VP Kamala Harris) the party pros are talking about one last pierce of theatre: letting Biden take the nomination in July, replace Harris with a star candidate like Michelle Obama or Tom Hanks and have Biden then take a knee for health reasons.

Let the untainted replacement take on Trump, who produces a puke-in-your-mouth reaction with half the American electorate. A squishy Obama/ Bill Clinton replacement could rout Trump in a debate and bring single white women and blacks/ latinos back home to the DEMs. Seems like a longshot?

This is the party that orchestrated at least four separate legal assaults on Trump, coincidentally in the year of the election. Don’t under-estimate their chicanery. And while they didn’t pay off the media as Trudeau has done, they don’t need to. They get the love for free.

Give them credit if they do, because doing nothing is a ticket to four years of The Don.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Now for pre-order, new from the team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin . Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey. From Espo to Boston in 1967 to Gretz in L.A. in 1988 to Patrick Roy leaving Montreal in 1995, the stories behind the story. Launching in paperback and Kindle on #Amazon this week. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/

Automotive

Vehicle monitoring software could soon use ‘kill switch’ under the guise of ‘safety’

Published on May 2, 2024

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Caryn Lipson

Ambiguity surrounds the definitions of ‘impairment’ and the consequent privacy implications of such technology, raising fears of government overreach and erosion of rights.

In the name of safety, the government has taken steps that critics say have denied citizens what used to be considered inalienable constitutional rights.

Citizens are concerned that their right to freedom of speech under the First Amendment is being denied, ostensibly, to keep citizens safe from “harmful misinformation,” and fear that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is being infringed upon to combat gun violence. Watchdogs further contend that citizens are being denied the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination and the Sixth Amendment’s right to face one’s accuser when technology is used to gather evidence.

READ: Vietnam’s new biometric ID cards raise fears of privacy violations, data breaches

The fear now is that increased use of technology will soon mean an even greater loss of privacy and further erosion of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, due to certain provisions in Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill which will soon become mandatory. Under the guise of keeping citizens safe by preventing drunk driving, it may amount to ceding the freedom to travel to government control.

H.R.3684 – Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act

The infrastructure bill, HR. 3684, passed by both chambers of Congress and signed by Biden on November 15, 2021, includes a provision for several vehicle monitoring technologies to be installed in cars, which have recently or will soon be required in new vehicles, including technology to determine if a driver is drunk or impaired.

The Center for Automotive Research’s Eric Paul Dennis reviewed the bill and summarized “key sections.” Dennis, a senior transportation systems analyst, reviewed the section on “Drunk and Impaired Driving Prevention Technology” (HR 3684 Section 24220) and explained that Congress gave the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) the role of determining exactly what this section means and how it will be implemented:

This provision directs NHTSA to issue a rule to require ‘advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology’ in new light vehicles.

Congress tasked NHTSA with interpreting this law, including establishing the statutory meaning of ‘impaired.’

The legislation directs NHTSA to adopt a new safety mandate by 15 November 2024 and begin enforcing it by September 2027 (at the latest) if this is feasible. [Emphases added.]

Impaired driving not defined

Others, such as Michael Satterfield, writing as The Gentleman Racer®, were more detailed in their review of the legislation. Satterfield poured through the 1,039-page infrastructure bill. He agreed that good roads, bridges, and safety are important to automotive enthusiasts, but wrote that he uncovered some concerning legislation “buried deep within HR.3684.” The legislation calls not only for changes in crash testing and advanced pedestrian crash standards but also for a “kill switch” to be standard for all new vehicles by 2026.

Satterfield explained that all new vehicles will be required to have passive monitoring systems for the driver’s behavior and an algorithm will determine if the driver is too impaired to operate the vehicle. If the algorithm decides that the driver is too impaired to operate the car, the program will have some means of taking control of the vehicle. But what constitutes impairment and what the program will actually do was not explained by the legislation, as Satterfield noted:

What is not outlined in the bill is what constitutes impairment, outside of the blood alcohol standard, how does the software determine the difference between being tired and being impaired? Passive blood alcohol testing won’t detect impairment from prescription painkillers or other narcotics.

The bill also doesn’t outline what happens when a vehicle detects a driver may be impaired other than that the system must ‘prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected’ which is all well and good in a bar’s parking lot. But what will this system do if an ‘impairment is detected’ while traveling at 75 mph on the highway? [Emphasis added.]

Accused by your own car’s surveillance system

He also expressed concern that most drivers will not be aware of the new technology until it affects them in some way:

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the legislation is the lack of detail. The main concerns expressed by many, including former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, come down to privacy. Who will have access to the data? How long will it be stored? Will this capability be exploitable by third-party or government agencies to shut down vehicles outside of the function of preventing impaired driving?

Privacy concerns and the 5th Amendment’s right to not self-incriminate, and the 6th Amendment’s right to face one’s accuser, have already been used to challenge data collection from license plate readers and redlight cameras. Automakers have little choice but to comply with new federal mandates and the majority of consumers will likely be unaware of this new technology until it impacts them in some way. [Emphasis added.]

Freedom or control?

John Stossel recently interviewed former vintage race car driver Lauren Fix about what she believes are the implications of the soon-to-be-implemented impaired driving technology, as reported on FrontPage Magazine.

READ: High-tech cars are secretly spying on drivers, resulting in insurance rejections: NYT report

Fix pointed out that the algorithm cannot determine what exactly is happening in the car and with the driver and asks Stossel how much control over his life he is willing to give up:

Are you willing to give up every bit of control of your life? Once you give that up, you have no more freedom. This computer decides you can’t drive your vehicle. Great. Unless someone’s having a heart attack and trying to get to the hospital.

California, Fix pointed out, already requires vehicle software to limit excess speed to 10 miles over the limit, legislation about which Frontline News reported.

Fix also revealed to Stossel that some companies already collect and sell driver data and proceeded to outline further abuses that could occur as a result of computer surveillance technology, such as charging for mileage or monitoring your “carbon footprint” and deciding that you maxed out on your monthly carbon credits so you can’t drive anymore until the following month. Or perhaps the car won’t start because the software determines you may be on your way to purchase a firearm.

What about hackers?

Can hackers access a vehicle’s software and take control of someone’s car? This possibility is another worrying aspect of the infrastructure bill, which Frontline News will discuss in an upcoming report.

Reprinted with permission from America’s Frontline News.