The Zombie Shambles On

 

Unfortunately, the skills myth - like the myth of a looming debt crisis - is having dire effects on real-world policy.  Instead of focusing on the way disastrously wrongheaded fiscal policy and inadequate action by the Federal Reserve have crippled the economy and demanding action, important people piously wring their hands about the failings of American workers.

 

Moreover, by blaming workers for their own plight, the skills myth shifts attention away from the spectacle of soaring profits and bonuses even as employment and wages stagnate.  Of course, that may be another reason corporate executives like the myth so much.

 

So we need to kill this zombie, if we can, and stop making excuses for an economy that punishes workers.

 

I'm not of the opinion that corporate executives (or conservative politicians) are consciously punishing, marginalizing and dehumanizing the front line as an excuse to make more profit.  Quite the reverse; I think a focus on profit is what's giving these folk cause to dehumanize the front line.

 

Apex predators, survival of the fittest and all that.

 

That's just one piece of the puzzle for me, though.  Looking at the big picture, I see wrong-headed focus, widening communication and social gaps and not a small bit of anger all emerging at the same time as the stagnancy of our political and social systems are causing public services to reach a breaking point. 

 

Then, there's a private-sector culture that was nurtured during the Industrial Age and is poorly-positioned to maximize their labour's full potential in a more knowledge (information, communication, advanced tech, social media) economy.

 

But we don't think about such things - not when we're worried about a zombie apocalypse shambling towards us.  It takes a monstrous catastrophe of class-shattering proportions to shatter us from this revere and realize that when we opt to react selfishly instead of planning ahead pro-socially, we are that zombie.

 

Of course, this has happened before, and it will happen again.

 

Time is mythical that way.

Political Church, Partisan State?

 

 

There's a strong sense that public servants not only have to be more sensitive to this but they need training on how to work more effectively with elected representatives and their staff, whatever political stripe, because if the gap continues to grow, there is a question of whether the public service will even remain a part of the government anymore in the traditional sense that it is part of the policy development and decision-making apparatus.

 

Culture change/sensitivity and communications training for public service staff - sounds a bit like looking at cognitive labour, for me.

 

Of course, if the public service is moving in this direction, would it not make sense for partisan staff to also come half-way?

 

But there're other pieces to add the puzzle, too - Open Government and Citizen Engagement (responsible engagement, as in a responsible society).

 

Also add the increasingly hyper-partisan (and fundraising focused) nature of our Political Parties and how murky the waters have grown between where public, taxpayer-paid salary staff end and partisan staff begin.

 

But don't worry.  There are plenty of "only so and so can deliver the manna" leaders out there selling themselves (or being sold as) the only solution we need.  I'm sure one of 'em has mapped this out and charted a course forward.

 

Divide, Conquer and Fall

 

 

David Mitchell, president of the Public Policy Forum, said a growing lack of trust and understanding between bureaucrats and their political masters will be one of the biggest challenges for the next generation of leaders who will be retooling the future public service.

 

Ah, but it's a poll - can we really trust it?  Probably not.  Which means it's best to ignore it, demonize it and keep on carrying on, business as usual, full steam ahead.

 

Or at least that's what the Canada Post-like people at the top seem to be thinking.  It's really too bad they think empires can deny social evolution.  They could save everyone a lot of headaches.

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Community Matters

 

Humanization.  Understanding.  Grabbing a pint, connecting as people, not functionaries.

 

That was the whole purpose behind Brownell Night.

 

When MPP Jim Brownell retired and chose not to run in the 2011 election, I got a lovely signed picture of Jim and Premier McGuinty, who attended the last Brownell Night, together with the intent of giving it to the Duke of York as a commemorative piece.  At the same time, I went around to a number of Liberal MPPs and asked if any of them would be willing to host, co-host or rotate hosting duties around an institutionalized Brownell Night - an ongoing, once-a-month opportunity for Provincial Liberals, friends and event political opponents to get together and just socialize. 

 

There were a couple of folk who expressed interest but, when it came to actually committing, faded into the woodwork.  More than a couple expressed concern that being associated with a bar night would harm their chances of Cabinet Posts down the road.

 

So it never happened.  I went on to join the Why Should I Care team and continue to support community and engagement at the Duke in a different capacity.

 

If there had been an internal community and engagement between the ranks within the OLP from 2011 on, would that have changed any of the shorter-sighted decisions that got made?  Probably not, but I wonder.

 

When it's really about supporting the community - moving forward together, as it were - it's hard to focus on choosing who to leave behind, isn't it?

Fair Elections Act a Perfect Project for Open Data

"We'll keep listening to them, but I don't think there needs to be any panic," he said.  "There's plenty of time to consider all of these ideas and the committee will look at them and decide accordingly before the bill even comes back to the House of Commons for a vote."

 

You know what's happening at the same time as this debate around Bill C-23?

 

There's an international conversation going on about how to open public data for public scrutiny and Open Government for public engagement. 

 

It's a really important one, too, because one thing all Political Parties are agreeing on (at least in theory) is that they themselves don't have all the answers. 

 

Whether it's the Free Market or Grassroots engagement, everyone's looking for someone else to help with the answers.

 

The reason that corporations aren't unhoarding their capital and average Canadians aren't engaging in politics is largely because they have no faith that their efforts will pay dividends.  Harsh partisanship and over-the-top partisan rhetoric isn't helping matters any.

 

The Harper Conservatives have a fix this.  Pierre Poilievre has a chance to be immortalized as the man who brought transparency back to Canadian democracy.

It wouldn't take much.  He could start by having a little conversation with his cabinet colleague Tony Clement about what this Open Data stuff is all about.  He could then expand his conversation to include bureaucrats within the federal public service, private organizations that can provide for-profit perspective to the value of Open Data like Microsoft or Socrata and even engaged, non-partisan Open Data catalysts like Richard Pietro.

 

The Conservative Party of Canada loves its websites - they could easily build one that record in user-friendly format every piece of discussion and which elected official/bureaucrat/interest group has a say on it.  They could include tags on the conversation and participants, allowing anyone to go on the site and do a search on percentages and see how the conversation is being informed.

 

It's the right thing to do.  It's pretty easy to do.  Best of all, it's where we're going anyway.

 

Pierre Poilievre has a perfect opportunity to place himself on the right side of history and be forever recognized for having done so.

 

Which certainly beats the alternative, no?

 

Political Credibility and the Peaceable Revolution

 

 

But Hudak said "it defies credibility that she could have been leader of the Liberal Party and Premier and said that she had no idea what was going on."

 

Really, Tim?  Do you feel the same way about Prime Minister Stephen Harper when he says he didn't know the details about the Duffy deal?  Remember that time you fired Peter Shurman after saying he followed the rules?  Or that time you embraced, then backed off of Doug Ford?  Or fired a locally-elected candidate for disagreeing with a policy position, then changed it anyway?

 

I'm sure you equally had no idea that, when you were Minister of Tourism way back when, bureaucrats actually feared your walk-abouts because they knew that while you'd play good cop, your hand-picked staffer would come around right behind you and bully everyone to tow the partisan line.

 

Oh, but there's so much more.

 

These were your words, Tim - "Now she wants to spend time and taxpayers money coming after me and my team with a lawsuit instead of focusing on issues like creating jobs in our province and getting the books back in balance."

 

First off, love how you implicated your team, too - real leadership there, Tim.  Secondly - you have intentionally, proactively and by your own admission done everything in your power to grind the Legislature to a halt, refused to work with the other Parties to make government work and as a result, have pissed away precious tax dollars with ringing bells.

 

You've done all this because you want to be where Stephen Harper is, meaning a majority government where you, in turn, don't need to work with anyone but can force through whatever the hell you want.

 

But Hudak knows he's being a hypocrite.  He doesn't care.  It's both his personal inclination and the advice he's getting from his team (that he just put in the line of fire) to step on Wynne's throat and hold it there until she is gone, or at least reduced to a tertiary threat, at which point the foot will go on Horwath's throat.  Nowhere in here does the public interest play any role whatsoever.

 

Not that he's alone in this; as with his Federal counterpart, he's merely the worst provincial offender of the moment.  Team Harper continues to do the exact same thing, bullying (and there can be no other term for it) each and every opponent, attacking their character and dehumanizing or de-Canadianizing them to suit his partisan narrative.  Frankly, it's what McGuinty's team did towards the end of his term as Ontario's Premier, too. 

 

This is simply where our politics is at - unelected backroom partisans playing our democracy like it's a videogame, high-fiving each other for particularly devastating hits.  There's no focus on structural solutions or even properly identifying structural problems - the goal is to kill off one's opponent, full stop.

 

Backroom political operatives are punting for narrow-minded, aggressive political frontmen and in the process have turned our Legislatures into poorly-written courtroom dramas.

 

"I met with her on January 28 before these documents were destroyed in the premier's office.  I expected I was talking to the premier of the province at this time."

 

Is that really what you thought, Tim, or is that a line designed for a soundbite?  You know that she was sworn in as Premier on February 11th.  You can see, same as anyone else, that the email deletion happened on the 6th and 7th which, I'm pretty sure we can agree, happen before the 11th.

 

You could be specifically asking about the nature of the transition and seeking clarity.  You could be probing with Leg Services as to when Team Wynne actually took residency in the Premier's Office.  Hell, you could even be directing your team to craft legislation that could close the loophole that allowed for this to happen or better yet, doing one of your famous white papers on Open Data and Open Government.

 

But you don't care about fixing the problem, do you?  You're focused on blame.  You want punishment, removal - you think that the way to win is by eliminating all of your opponents. 

 

What happens when it's not just a couple of Political Parties and Unions disagreeing with you - what about when/if you win and it's stakeholders from every sector, bureaucrats, researchers, parents, employees, service providers, members of the Conservative base?  Are you going to try and bully them into silence, too?

 

There's plenty of blame to go around, if blame's your thing.  I don't know about you but I'm getting sick of the constant attack-and-defend, bluster and prevaricate when we have clear fiscal, social, structural and even democratic deficits that desperately need fixing.  You wanna talk about switching chairs on the burning platform?  Well, this is it.

 

Lots of emotional plays, transactional vote-buying projects and attempts to rig the system in favour of one Party or another going on, but because of this we have no co-designed strategies at any level.  This means that whatever programming or nudges that are brought forward are doomed to failure.  Harper can dance with joy that he's cut funding for the social programming he doesn't like; all it'll take is a bad plague, an economic collapse or a civil result for the pendulum to swing  back again, and it'll all be time wasted.

 

But we don't do long term thinking in politics and it's not about systematic wins, but partisan ones.  A percentage of a win is good enough to hang a campaign narrative on, and that's all that matters. 

 

What gets me angry is the absolute short-sighted waste of it all.  I don't care if you paint a rusted old Ford red or blue or how much you spend selling it, the car itself is the problem.  It needs fixed or replaced, not promoted. 

 

The war roomers don't care about that, though.  In fact, they'll spin any such argument as favouring their candidate and putting another nail in the coffin of their opponent because they're so functionally fixed, like a runner in a race, that they simply can't see it any other way.

 

They're lost, and they're taking us in circles around that afore-mentioned burning platform.  They aren't the solution, they're the problem, but like an addict, they simply aren't capable of seeing it that way.  They somehow literally believe it's possible to oppress oppositional perspectives and paint over one's own faults (in no small part by picking fights and dehumanizing opponents) in perpetuity without there ever being any long-term consequences.

 

It breaks my heart how wrong they are; it drives me nuts seeing them ignore the advice that can actually help them and help us because they're so convinced in their own infallibility.

 

There is a solution emerging - not from the top, but from a growing community of virtuous schemers within bureaucracies, community groups and countless partners in the private and not-for-profit sectors.  As the sustainability of our politics is closing, the strength of an emergent responsible society is growing.

 

At some point there will be a shift in balance from the political laggards to the Open Government innovators.  The only question is whether the political people will have any credibility left when they finally get on board.

 

Is Open By Default Magna Carta 2.0?

As a result, while our recommendations are few in number, they are ambitious and practical.  Taken together, we believe they provide a foundation on which the government can build an agenda to change how business is done.

Some of our recommendations may make government uneasy.  We recognize that, but real change should be unsettling.  And, in any event, we think Ontarians are ready for it.

Open By Default: A new way forward for Ontario is just a report, arranged and paid for by the Government of Ontario.  Said Government can choose to ignore the whole thing if they want to, sticking this report on a shelf to collect dust with countless others that have come before it.

And quite frankly, from both a political and clay layer bureaucratic level, there's much reason to ignore the whole thing because many of the recommendations, if implemented, would lead to some uncomfortable reveals and require some anxiety-causing culture change.

But, as Lenihan said, that's the point.

Politics as usual is letting us down.  It's letting the politicians themselves down, as has been clearly indicated by reports such as the MP Exit Interviews done by Samara.  Increasingly, the focus is shifting from anything even remotely resembling decent policy to blatant partisan positioning, rhetoric and factually challenged messaging.

And it all costs money - lots of money.  Money that could otherwise be going to actual charitable causes, to children's education funds or to support social entrepreneurs.

Political Parties have become capitalist enterprises, pushing for more and more donations for the return of a sticker or a sweater, with the end goal being to put their CEO on the throne.

The publicly paid-for staff closest to leaders are wholly partisan operatives, nudging actual public servants and elected officials away from serving the public interest and instead delivering wins and slug-lines for the Party.

Ask them why.  They don't know why.  They'll tell you it's all about getting a leader in charge who will best be able to support one class or another, but scratch at that message a bit and you'll find that immediately underneath lies nothing but more pushes for money and ambitions to entrench one Party or other into the national fabric in perpetuity.

And this makes sense - because partisan politics is all about winning, full stop.  A Party can deride an Opposition position with gusto and then assume it themselves without batting an eye, if they think it serves their purposes.  They can decry wrongdoing in one Party at the same time they employ the very same tactics themselves.

Why?  How can politics be so cynical?

Because Harper was right; Canadians fundamentally don't care about how the system works, but this is only because we can't see how it works - or fails to work.  We can't see just how much money and time is wasted by lateral departments that don't communicate, work at cross-purposes or establish programs based on narrow mandates and include embarrassing excuses for metrics.

We might know sub-consciously that by and large, any consultation processes are token exercises to foster the illusion of listening, but we don't see how that plays out in real-time, or over time.  It's not crystal clear to us how poorly the left and right hands of government fine-motor skill is missing.

But it could be.

With Open Data, every transaction, process, tidbit of information shared would be open by default.  It's not a process of micro-managing individual bureaucrats - it's a matter of illuminating the systematic flow of information to identify where the blockages are and fix them.

More than that, Open Government will fundamentally change the way information is aggregated, analyzed and acted on by ensuring the people have a collective say.  This isn't to say we get whatever we want, which should never be the case; people aren't rational actors, which is why laissez faire capitalism is such a bust.

No, the point is that we can communicate what we want, be encouraged to see how our pieces fit into a bigger picture and plan accordingly.  In this model government becomes a conduit, a facilitator, ensuring a balance of responsibility and action that best reflects the needs first, and wants second of the people.  Which is how our democracy is supposed to work.

Magna Carta was the first step taken in Britain to wrest absolute power away from the Crown and provide it for the first time (not return it) to the collective people.  It's important to remember that before William the Conqueror there really was no State to work with and people functioned much more independently.  Increasingly complex society, however, requires increasingly complex (and, to actually function, representative) governance.

Partisanship was not part of this system.  Partisanship is a political convention, not a policy law.  And increasingly, it's getting in the way of good governance.  Funding gets allocated based on a few ideological/vote-winning tricks, only to be shifted when power switches, meaning no big-picture work gets done.

As we're seeing in Ontario, the political culture has become so toxic that schoolyard taunts are now being met with threats of legal action, reducing the capacity of ideological opponents finding common ground.

They may feel they have no common ground to stand on, but they're wrong.  There is one land, we all inhabit it together, and if they can't work together, they've become part of our collective problem.

Open Data presents a real challenge, a culture change that partisans aren't open to; it implies a loss of power and a level of accountability they aren't interested in.  This is why we haven't seen as much traction for the Open Data Movement in Canada as has been the case in other jurisdictions.

But it's not about what's convenient for the partisans; it's about what's good for our country, our province, our communities.

Partisan operatives may not feel the need to consider the recommendations of reports like Open By Default and may not see value in respecting the opinions of elected officials, but those elected officials know that they will never get a Minister's position if they don't first win a seat - and that relies on votes from citizens more than it does money from the Centre.

Like weeds cracking through old cement, there are individuals and groups at all levels within the entrenched system trying to implement change.  They're leading open lives, proactively engaging on social media and trying to open up their data as best as they can.  Within politics, there are some Members and staff who are tired of the constant pressure of playing Machiavelli and would welcome a return to a properly functioning democracy.

There's not so much will, though, because there's not enough demand.  It's the political special interest groups that dominate their attention and hold their feet to the fire.

If we ever want to get out of the hole we've let partisans dig our democracy into, it's we, the public, that needs to step up.

Governments can ignore reports like Open By Default if they feel there's no pressure to act on it.  But if Open By Default were a position with a million signatures of rank-and-file citizens from every corner of the country, that would be a different story.

Especially if, courtesy of open data, you could map out those signatories and show how much demand for openness was concentrated in places that partisans need to curry favour to win government.

If we truly want change, we have to stop waiting for the powers that be to deliver it to us.  There is no power greater than that which we wield collectively, as the people.

Real change is possible, as unsettling as it may be, but it's up to us to demand it.

Are we ready for it?