{"id":1989,"date":"2024-08-28T19:31:07","date_gmt":"2024-08-28T19:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/secteur-public-sector.ca\/?post_type=video&#038;p=1989"},"modified":"2024-08-31T23:26:00","modified_gmt":"2024-08-31T23:26:00","slug":"maintain-legitimacy-in-populism","status":"publish","type":"video","link":"https:\/\/secteur-public-sector.ca\/en\/video\/maintain-legitimacy-in-populism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Moral Haze: How Civil Servants Can Maintain Legitimacy in an Era of Populism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The moral haze: how civil servants can maintain legitimacy in an era of populism\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Kb0RLrSV1AE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Transcript<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wherever you are joining us in the world today, welcome to this Global Government Forum webinar titled &#8220;The Moral Haze: How Civil Servants Can Maintain Legitimacy in an Era of Populism.&#8221; My name is Richard Johnston, and I&#8217;m the Executive Editor of Global Government Forum, which is a media and events company focused on bringing together public and civil servants from around the world to share best practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Um, and today&#8217;s webinar is on a very interesting topic. Um, public servants around the world, um, in a lot of different jurisdictions tend to have some form of code or rules that govern their work, which are intended to provide a basis to make sure that the work civil servants do is underpinned by values of integrity, honesty, objectivity, and impartiality. Um, however, that system has come under pressure in recent years in a lot of jurisdictions. Populist governments and political movements have pushed back against these principles through policies that they argue have popular support. Perhaps this was most prominently displayed, um, in the United States under former President Donald Trump, who implemented policies that were challenged and overturned in the courts. For example, he imposed a travel ban that prohibited issuing visas to citizens of, uh, seven largely Muslim countries, for example. Um, and he frequently made statements that were either verifiably untrue or misleading, um, from the size of the crowd at his inauguration, famously, to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. And, um, such, uh, statements placed public servants in a really difficult position where they had to either defend false statements at a time of national crisis or contradict, um, the president. And that, I think, is possibly the example that a lot of people think of when they are, um, mulling the issue of how, uh, public servants respond in an era of populism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But other countries have not been immune. In the UK, for example, the government of Boris Johnson took steps to prorogue Parliament to force through, uh, his plans for Brexit at one stage\u2014a move that was subsequently deemed unlawful by the courts. Um, and the same government also proposed plans that they said would clarify certain elements of the eventual Brexit deal for Northern Ireland but do so in a way that ministers admitted would breach international law. Um, and in Canada, um, the opposition Conservative Party has elected a populist leader in Pierre Poilievre who has, um, in an article by the Canadian broadcaster CBC put it on its website, &#8220;surfed the internet-fueled resentment-driven wave that has already flooded American and British politics, uh, to the fore.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Um, so that&#8217;s just a kind of overview of some of the, the kind of cases of populism that are, um, uh, kind of spreading across the world at the moment. And even if you&#8217;re in a government or national politics where you&#8217;re watching us today and hasn&#8217;t had a populist figure at the forefront of it, the growth of, um, misinformation on social media websites around key policy debates makes the work of public servants more difficult everywhere around the world. So what we want to discuss in this session today is how public servants should act in these circumstances. How can public servants balance the demands from ministers with their own professional ethics and personal ethics? How can structures maintain integrity under political attack? Um, and how can public and civil servants raise concerns over the honesty, objectivity, and impartiality of government requests?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Um, and we also want to look wider to how can governments encourage ethical behavior across the entire public sector, and how can behavior that falls short of those ethical standards be held to account? We have a great panel to discuss this topic today, and we are very keen to hear from you as well, the public servants who are watching along. Um, we&#8217;ll have some opening statements, excuse me, from our panel, who I will introduce momentarily, um, and then we will have time for questions. So please do submit them using the Q&amp;A button on, uh, Zoom that you will see, um, either at the bottom of your screen or on the app as you are using it. Um, and let us know your thoughts on this topic. How well do you feel your government policies, um, and rules around ethics are, um, implemented? Do you feel able and confident to raise concerns when you have them about government policies and that they will be received in a positive way that will not harm your career? And how do you think governments can tackle misinformation online and kind of help improve the media literacy of citizens to help tackle some of the underlying forces that can put pressure on the workings of an impartial civil service? Please do get in touch; we&#8217;re keen to hear the reflections of as many of the public and civil servants watching on today as we can around this issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Um, and I&#8217;m happy to, uh, voice the, um, the questions anonymously if that is, um, the best way to do so. As I say, we&#8217;ve got a great panel for this discussion, so let me introduce them. Uh, firstly, we&#8217;re joined by Dr. Claire Gilbert, the Director at the Westminster Abbey Institute. Claire is the founding director of the Institute and a public, uh, moral philosopher and author with degrees in theology, moral philosophy, and ecological ethics. As well as giving lectures, she runs the Institute&#8217;s Fellows Program for public servants and provides seminars for government departments to explore the moral dilemmas they face. She has edited and contributed, excuse me, to the Institute&#8217;s books, including &#8220;The Moral Heart of Public Service,&#8221; &#8220;The Power of Politicians,&#8221; which won a Parliamentary Book of the Year award, &#8220;The Power of Civil Servants,&#8221; &#8220;Integrity in Public Life,&#8221; and &#8220;Letters from Lockdown.&#8221; Uh, Claire was formerly Environmental and Medical Ethics Advisor to the Church of England and Lay Canon at St. Paul&#8217;s Cathedral, where she co-founded St. Paul&#8217;s Institute for Ethics. And in 2009, she founded the Ethics Academy, an educational charity teaching ethics through storytelling. She&#8217;s also a visiting fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. And so it&#8217;s great to have Claire with us, um, and we&#8217;ll hear opening comments from her shortly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We&#8217;re also joined today by Michael Wernick, the Jarislowsky Chair of Public Sector Management at the University of Ottawa and a former Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet in the Canadian government. Michael had a distinguished 30-year career, um, in the Canadian Public Service, um, culminating in serving as the Clerk from 2016 to 2019. In addition to his time as Clerk, he spent 17 years as a Deputy Minister, the equivalent to a departmental Permanent Secretary, um, for those familiar with the UK system, making him one of Canada&#8217;s most experienced and influential public sector leaders. Um, in October 2021, Michael published a book, &#8220;Governing Canada: A Guide to Tradecraft of Politics,&#8221; which serves as a practical handbook for Canada&#8217;s political leaders and those who aspire to understand them. And in his role as Jarislowsky Chair, uh, at the University of Ottawa, and as a Senior Strategic Advisor Associate at MNP Digital, Michael provides advisory services and mentorship to emerging leaders and to a new generation of students. So again, great to have you with us, Michael.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Um, and thirdly on the panel, we&#8217;re joined by Angela Glenn, Senior Investigating Officer from the Ethical Standards Commissioner in Scotland. Uh, Angela joined the, uh, Commissioner&#8217;s office in October 2019 as an Investigating Officer and was promoted to the position of Senior Investigating Officer in November 2020. In that role, Angela co-supervises the investigations team in assessing complaints, conducting investigations, and reporting on investigation outcomes when complaints are made against, uh, local authority elected members, appointed board members of public bodies, MSPs, and lobbyists in Scotland. Angela has a Master of Laws degree from the University of Cambridge, where she specialized in Public International Law, and she went on to complete a Postgraduate Certificate in Law from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is a member of the Law Society of Hong Kong. Um, so it&#8217;s a fantastic panel for this discussion, as I&#8217;m sure you agree, and we&#8217;re going to hear some opening comments now from our panelists. So I will ask Claire for her reflections first. Claire?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, hello, everybody, wherever you are in the world. It&#8217;s a huge privilege and pleasure to be here. I&#8217;m going to talk a bit about the inherent moral discomfort of being a civil servant or a public servant, something about the tension between the political and bureaucratic mindsets, and the challenge of building trust between officials and politicians, and finally the importance of civil servants maintaining moral sensitivity and exercising their moral muscle, and a little bit about how we do that at Westminster Abbey Institute. So, for most of us, the feeling of moral discomfort usually means, uh, that something&#8217;s wrong, and we need to pay attention to it because something&#8217;s wrong. For civil servants, uh, it comes with the territory. And in fact, it&#8217;s a sign that you&#8217;re still a morally healthy civil servant because you are paying attention not only to enacting the will of the democratically elected minister of the day, but you are also behaving as a custodian of propriety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And in the UK, this is particularly felt because, in the UK, all civil servants, from the most senior to the most junior, are appointed independently\u2014they&#8217;re not political appointees. So the division between bureaucrats and the politician is very clearly marked out. So, and it&#8217;s in the civil service code that you, of course, enact the democratically elected minister&#8217;s will because this is a democracy, not a technocracy. But you also must always, walking alongside that move, uh, attend to what is proper and right, and you must speak truth to power in that respect. And if you have, if you&#8217;re a human being, which all civil servants are at the moment, you&#8217;re going to have, uh, moral antennae. You&#8217;re going to have feelings about things as to whether they&#8217;re right or wrong, and they aren&#8217;t always going to agree with what the democratically elected minister who&#8217;s given you the policy to enact, uh, that they&#8217;re not always going to agree. So, so there will be that feeling of discomfort, and you have to pay attention to it because sometimes it&#8217;s telling you something you need to pay attention to and act on, and at other times it isn&#8217;t. And finding a way to, of knowing, uh, when it matters and when you can safely set it aside is one of the arts of being a good civil servant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Just a little bit about this, um, tension between the political and bureaucratic mindset, which I think is probably better understood by civil servants than it is by politicians. But generally speaking, you go into public service in order to make the world a better place, and most public servants are doing that\u2014that&#8217;s why they, that&#8217;s why they go there. But if you go into it as a politician, you go into it with the thought that the best way to make the world a better place is through politics. And it can be quite hard to understand that others might go into public service, uh, uh, not thinking that politics is the best way but thinking, for example, that you might be the one to set up the structures through which policies can be enacted. You might have a different way of seeing it. And we&#8217;ve seen how politicians in the UK have become, and perhaps always have been, somewhat suspicious of the bureaucrat who is trying to enact the policy in the best possible way for the country, which might not be quite the way that the politician wants them to, and certainly might act as a check or balance on the energy of the politician&#8217;s, um, uh, policy wish. And we, and we&#8217;ve seen this encroaching troublingly, um, perhaps particularly over Brexit, where there was this accusation, either explicitly or implicitly, made against civil servants that they didn&#8217;t have the right attitude to Brexit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So we don&#8217;t, we don&#8217;t know how, how civil servants voted in the, in the referendum, um, but it was troubling, uh, for a lot of them. But the ones who stayed and decided to make it work would have done so with the thought, &#8220;Well, whether or not I agree with this, I&#8217;m going to make it work in the way that&#8217;s going to do the least damage or be the best for the country.&#8221; But that&#8217;s not the same as saying, &#8220;I really, really believe in this thing, and I&#8217;m really going to make it work,&#8221; which is a political energy, it&#8217;s not a bureaucratic energy. And indeed, you wouldn&#8217;t want the bureaucratic energy to be\u2014you wouldn&#8217;t want the bureaucrats to have that kind of energy because then they might miss something. When we&#8217;re really, really positive about something we&#8217;re trying to achieve, we tend to miss quite a lot. You see this in medical research when someone wants to test something for a new treatment, and if it&#8217;s not in a randomized double-blind trial, they might just see the evidence that fits the thing that they believe in. It&#8217;s a, it&#8217;s a well-known problem in, in scientific research. So you have this huge desire to make something happen, and you&#8217;re going to make it happen, and all the force of your will goes behind that. But that&#8217;s not how the bureaucrat thinks. They need to see more than just the thing itself being achieved. They need to see how it&#8217;s going to be achieved and what harms there might be done on the way, no matter how good the, the thing that&#8217;s going to be achieved is, uh, what harms might be done on the way\u2014they need to pay attention to that. And so there is a tension. There&#8217;s, at its best, it&#8217;s a really, really good thing because you have this rush of the political will, and then you have this, this, uh, tempering quality that&#8217;s actually, in my view, protecting democracy because democracy is, by its very nature, volatile. Uh, people have to\u2014the politicians have to attend to power, uh, uh, and to have some sort of buffer against, um, just that political will, it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s no bad thing at all, in my view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so, uh, for civil servants needing to, um, hold this, this moral, uh, discomfort and not be concerned about it, we spend time with them in, in private sessions, in entirely safe spaces where it is safe to speak, where we will look at not specific policies but the ethics of policy drivers, let&#8217;s say like economic growth, the ethics of economic growth. And we&#8217;ll look at this all-important relationship between the civil servants and the minister, uh, this critical, uh, interface in our democracy, and, and give civil servants the chance to talk about this stuff, uh, in a way that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s not going to be made public, where if they stumble into opinions that they feel they perhaps might not express but shouldn&#8217;t express, it&#8217;s a safe place to do it. And, and the effect of this is to, um, where they talk about it, uh, having their moral agency restored to them. Um, it is a bit like a Pilates class where you exercise your core muscles. Here, we&#8217;re exercising our core moral muscles. We&#8217;re not trying to come to any conclusion; we&#8217;re simply practicing moral thinking and moral feeling and articulating it. And in particular for civil servants, getting, getting clarity between what might just be an opinion about whether something&#8217;s a good idea or not and what&#8217;s, what&#8217;s a genuinely important moral concern and distinguishing between the two. If you don&#8217;t, um, if you don&#8217;t do that, you might be in danger of simply setting aside all your moral concerns and just doing the will of the minister, and therein lies trouble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Thank you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Great, thank you, Claire. Really interesting contribution there on, uh, exercising the, the moral muscle. I, I very much, uh, very much like, um, the, the issues you discussed on, on the UK side, um, are very pertinent to this conversation, and I&#8217;m sure we&#8217;ll touch on them, uh, in the, in the Q&amp;A portion as, as well. I will use my chair&#8217;s prerogative at this moment, uh, to just share a link, uh, with, um, with our attendees of another webinar that we hosted that was about that, um, ministerial and civil servant relationship and how to make that relationship, uh, work well, both on a practical level and, and kind of touching on some of the things that you, that you mentioned, uh, there, Claire. It&#8217;s a very, that is a very interesting part, I think, of, of this dynamic when those people do work, uh, so closely together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Um, thanks for that, that, uh, excellent, uh, opening, uh, contribution, Claire. And we&#8217;re going to hear from Michael now. Michael?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Thank you, Richard, and thank you for the invitation, and thank you to Claire. I think, Richard, we may have one of those panels where people end up mostly agreeing with each other, so we&#8217;ll count on the audience to stir things up a bit. Um, I will just offer, I think, some, some observations drawn from Canadian experience and, and from being a practitioner, and, and hopefully provoke some reaction and then some dialogue with the people that are joining us today. Um, and also put in a plug for my book because I do go into some detail about how the Permanent Secretary role and the Clerk&#8217;s role manages that interface between the political culture and the, uh, and the bureaucratic culture that Claire described. It really is one of the reasons they get the big money and the big jobs, to manage that relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Um, so your promotional material, uh, made much of sort of the, the growth of, uh, populism, the more the wave of authoritarian populism that we&#8217;re seeing emerge in a number of countries. I, I mean, I have to say, um, Canada has yet really to see that kind of populism take flight in our politics. Uh, the only adventures I can think of in Canadian, uh, history and populist politics were more, uh, rural farm protests against the banks and the railways and, you know, in, in earlier times. Uh, but as you alluded to, um, we, we now have, uh, the possibility that maybe why you&#8217;ve drawn some Canadians to your audience. Uh, post-2025, we may have a very different government. Uh, the\u2014we now have the most overtly populist contender for government in, in, in our history, really, and certainly in generations. Um, uh, you know, a party which is now practicing sort of American-style &#8220;rage farming&#8221; is the, is the expression, trying to get people upset and angry, campaigning against the elites, against the state, and so on. And that, that definitely will have challenges for the public service, even while in opposition\u2014it certainly will make a for an interesting government to have to serve if that&#8217;s the scenario that plays out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I would say that there certainly have been periods of challenges where public servants&#8217; moral compass or personal, um, personal compass has been tested by the currents of politics. Um, the, the ones that come to mind, and I remember searing experiences of, you know, similar perhaps to your Brexit dynamic, uh, were the attempts by elected Quebec governments to get a mandate for secession from Canada in 1980 and 1995. Very difficult for, um, public servants with Quebec roots and, and families\u2014with, if you were a federal public servant who was sympathetic to the separatist cause or you were a Quebec public servant who was sympathetic to the Federalist cause\u2014you were offside your government of the day, and it did raise, uh, quite a lively debate about loyalty. Uh, you know, uh, why, uh, it was a very, very, uh, painful time in many ways. Um, I can see it being relevant in Scotland in some scenarios in the, in the next few years, uh, perhaps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There&#8217;s always been a, um, tension that&#8217;s particular to Canada perhaps, and maybe a couple of other countries, of Indigenous public servants who come in and work for the Crown, work for the state, work for the government, which is the source of so much unfortunate history and relationships. And for an Indigenous public servant working for the Crown is, is a tough, tough road. Uh, it really is, particularly when there are major crises in, in politics and events around the issues. Um, and I think, uh, that there\u2014that&#8217;s a particular issue which, which, uh, you know, bears some discussion in the Canadian context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think, um, recent episodes, um, have revealed a sort of recurrent theme around the role of government scientists, uh, you know, scientists working in government labs for government programs, for government departments, and so on. And they seem to always chafe and feel somewhat constrained that evidence is either being ignored, sometimes feeling that it&#8217;s been suppressed\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That lines of inquiry are being discouraged, and so on, uh, and that sometimes they&#8217;re working for governments that, to flip the phrase over, are looking for policy-based evidence and not evidence-based policy. And so, that relationship has flared from time to time, and I&#8217;ll come back to that, and it&#8217;s still a live issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Just a quick recap on the sort of Canadian architecture in this area, which I hope is familiar to Canadian public servants and maybe of interest to others. The seminal, foundational piece of work in this area, that some of you will remember, is something called the Tate Report from 1996. It&#8217;s called &#8220;A Strong Foundation&#8221; as its working title. I would commend it to anybody\u2014any Canadian public servant should have read it from cover to cover and thought about it. It was released in 1996 and created a framework around ethics and values issues for public servants, much along the lines that Claire began to explore: democratic, professional, ethical people sort of values. And a rich harvest of reviews, seminars, conferences, and papers, it became the benchmark against which we evaluate how we are living up to the Tate Report, which is kind of the Canadian construct for a lot of these debates. It&#8217;s forgotten by anybody who&#8217;s younger than me that it was actually released in the maelstrom of Canadian history when national unity had just gone through a near-death experience in the Quebec referendum and the most severe downsizing of the public service in Canadian history, with tens of thousands of layoffs, and a lively debate about what public service is for. Then John Tate ran towards the fire and, with a group of colleagues, put out this report on values and ethics, which really is the foundational piece in Canada. It led to a formal code of values and ethics, which has been updated a couple of times. The most recent version I found on the internet dates from 2012, so it hasn&#8217;t really been updated for the age of social media yet. That&#8217;s an interesting question\u2014whether it needs to be and what issues the social media environment pops up. I can think of a few.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Canadian architecture, in broad brush, will be very quick. I mean, there&#8217;s an important internal guardrail often, which is legal advice\u2014a monopoly of legal advice from our Attorney General and Department of Justice, which actually will give advice under solicitor-client privilege, saying that thing you&#8217;re going to do is outside the coloring book of regulations, laws, or international conventions, and so on. It&#8217;s often not quite that black and white. If you&#8217;ve ever read government legal opinions, there&#8217;s a lot of &#8220;on the one hand, on the other hand,&#8221; risk assessment kinds of things, and ultimately, I think governments do have the right to make decisions about what to do with that advice. But it is a very important function in terms of a lot of the ethics issues I&#8217;ll come to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We have built a very heavy infrastructure of oversight and recourse. We have about a dozen officers and agents of Parliament; thousands of people work for them; tens of millions of dollars are spent on them. The ones that are relevant here, I think, in particular, include what&#8217;s shorthand as the Whistleblower Commission, which is the Public Servants Disclosure Act created by the Harper government in 2007. It created a Public Service Integrity Commissioner. I&#8217;m sure the mandates vary from place to place, but that&#8217;s become a fairly important mechanism for addressing things that meet a test of wrongdoing by public servants or politicians. There is, of course, recourse through the unions and bargaining units; often issues that arise can be brought to your union reps, who can look into them. There&#8217;s quite a network in Canada of ombudspersons, centers of informal conflict resolution, internal disclosure offices, and that sort of thing. On paper, at least, there is quite an interesting infrastructure, all of which is probably less than 20 years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The other big bet has been on transparency\u2014the idea that, in a more open environment, sunshine is a cleanser and a deterrent to bad behavior. The working assumption that &#8220;it will out and you will be caught&#8221; is a very powerful force on ministers&#8217; attempts to bend advice and inputs, and so on. We have proactive disclosure of all contracts, proactive disclosure of all government grants, a structure of registration of lobbyists, rules around what MPs, ministers, and public servants can do in their interactions with outside people. We have an annual survey of public servants that should detect hot spots; I&#8217;ll come back to that in terms of if people felt they were working in a dodgy environment, it would show up in the annual survey results down to a fairly detailed level. And, as I said, the flap about scientific integrity led to a formal agreement in 2017 with the main bargaining unit that represents government scientists, and that is now entrenched in collective agreements that were just renewed. This agreement clarifies and embeds in collective bargaining agreements principles, guidelines, and practices around the rights of government scientists to publish and participate in scientific inquiry, and so on. I wouldn&#8217;t say the issue has been completely resolved, but that was an important step forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, what are the kinds of issues that recur in Canada these days? Just a survey around\u2014I\u2019m sure the audience can add to this list or reinforce it. I would say, just anticipating my next colleague, there&#8217;s a noticeable issue around the weaponization of ethics complaints. Because the scope covers both politicians and senior public servants, the same mechanism is basically used as a political weapon. Whoever is the opposition\u2014red, blue, or purple\u2014will ask for an ethics investigation into something that a minister or the Prime Minister has done, and frankly, the commissioner can hardly turn it away and refuse to look into it. So then, you have several weeks of the government or the minister being under investigation, and that&#8217;s a useful political weapon, and so on. It could be months or even a year later before the findings are resolved, by which time the caravan has usually moved on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There are allegations, certainly, about the politicization of policy advice, allegations that political appointments have created tame watchdogs who are too compliant or too obedient to the government. These are things that are very difficult to prove the contrary of; it&#8217;s a little bit of &#8220;prove you&#8217;re not a witch&#8221; kind of logic to some of these allegations. They&#8217;re usually made by people that don&#8217;t work inside government and don&#8217;t see what actually happens, but that&#8217;s one of my usual reactions to these things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think the boundaries of government science are always a live issue. We will have that for sure if we have a government where more climate deniers and climate ditherers come face to face with government scientists on issues around climate policy. And then I would say, moving away from the politics of it, there&#8217;s a constant policing of the boundary around political interference in operations\u2014the attempts by ministers, and usually their staffers, to nudge staffing and procurement by the public service. Those boundaries must always be policed and defended. I don&#8217;t think we have a bad record with that, but vigilance is the price of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is the disinformation issue and the question of how far public servants get drawn into contesting disinformation, speaking up for truth, science, research, and evidence, which makes people squeamish because doing so and being more proactive leaves you open to the argument that you&#8217;re being politicized, defending the government of the day as opposed to defending evidence. So, it is a lively debate in Canada right now. I think social media has brought an ongoing debate about the rights of public servants as voters and citizens themselves to free expression and political participation. It&#8217;s one thing to say that a deputy minister should be politically neutral, but can a relatively transactional and operational staffer out in a regional office make snarky comments about the government on Twitter or Facebook? We find this especially with younger public servants who are used to being on these social media platforms all the time; they chafe at acceptable use codes and guidelines. I think that is an ongoing challenge because it&#8217;s very important to preserve a brand, a reputation, and a reality that the public service is politically neutral and impartial. That&#8217;s not easy to do if a lot of public servants are chirping on social media and taking sides on issues of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There are some issues that we just can&#8217;t blame on the politicians. A lot of ethical issues that come up are self-inflicted\u2014they&#8217;re public service-on-public service issues: internal management, bad bosses, favoritism in hiring, manipulation of evidence going up the chain to bosses, overly compliant public servants becoming, as Claire said, proponents of a policy without doing enough work on due diligence, and so on. These are issues within the public service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I guess I\u2019d close on the thing that&#8217;s most troubling, because I&#8217;d like to give advice on what individuals should do. Well, use the tools that are there\u2014we have so many of them. Talk to people in your organization; they can&#8217;t fix things they don&#8217;t know about, and so on. But what we find is there is a persistent lack of trust and confidence in these mechanisms. People still feel, in Canada, far too often, that going to these recourse mechanisms is either futile\u2014nothing will be done\u2014or risky\u2014it will leave them open to reprisal. No matter how many safeguards around anonymity are brought in, how much promotion is done, or how many senior officials say the right things, there is this residual distrust of the internal mechanisms. This is still a very big problem in Canada. I wish I had an easy answer to suggest for that because I would rather fix existing mechanisms than create yet more and add to the proliferation of mechanisms\u2014that&#8217;s the last thing I would say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Once you&#8217;re in reasonably senior positions, treat your signature as gold. Don&#8217;t give it away cheaply; refuse to sign things you don&#8217;t agree with or don&#8217;t believe in. Don&#8217;t just initial something and pass it on. I don&#8217;t know how you can prove this, but I can tell you several examples where I simply refused to sign off on something. There was a proposal going into cabinet affecting my department when I was in Indigenous Affairs that had basically been created by people at the Treasury and Finance Department, and they wanted us to propose it to cabinet. I just refused\u2014I would not. It was bad policy; it was harmful, and I wouldn&#8217;t sign it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It got to the Cabinet table anyway, um, and, but my, you know, my obstinacy on it was noted, I&#8217;m sure. But it didn&#8217;t seem to harm my career because I went on from there. But, you know, I think, um, you know, when you are asked to sign something, it means something. It is your name; it is your brand; it is your reputation. And, uh, and, uh, and treat it very, very carefully. Um, and I think, you know, I think there are situations\u2014maybe it&#8217;s Brexit, maybe it&#8217;s Quebec separation or Scottish independence, or climate policy, or things\u2014there are a couple of things where I came very close to the brink of saying: if your personal values or politics are fundamentally incompatible with where the government&#8217;s going, maybe you should work somewhere else. You should work for a think tank, or a university, or an NGO, or an advocacy group, and you can make contributions to, you know, to a better country in other ways. They have their own issues and constraints. I still think the public service is one of the best ways to do that, and when the relationship between the public service and democratically elected politicians works, um, then that&#8217;s in our best interests. And so, my kind of theme these days is keeping our democracy healthy. And in that democracy, there&#8217;s ample room for democratically elected politicians and for public servants to work together. I&#8217;ll stop there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Great. Thank you, Michael. Really, uh, a great contribution to many things to pick up on. That, I mean, just the phrase &#8220;rage farming,&#8221; uh, is a lovely summary of my experience of social media\u2014one of the many reasons I&#8217;m trying to wean myself off it. You feel the algorithm, and they&#8217;re trying to, uh, induce emotions in you. Um, just, um, to provide a little bit of context, as luck would have it, I was, um, uh, reading the, uh, 2022 Public Service Employee Survey that was published by the Government of Canada, I think at the end of May. Um, and just to give you a couple of the answers to the ethical questions from that, just for context: one of the questions asked the public servants whether they agreed or disagreed with a statement, &#8220;If I&#8217;m faced with an ethical dilemma or conflict between values in the workplace, I know where I can go for help in resolving the situation.&#8221; So, strongly or somewhat agreeing with that statement was at 70% of respondents, but down slightly\u2014down three percentage points\u2014from the last time the survey was conducted in 2020. Um, and then there was a second statement: &#8220;My department or agency does a good job of promoting values and ethics in the workplace.&#8221; Again, uh, strongly or somewhat agreeing with that statement was 72% of respondents, again slightly down from the last time the survey was conducted in 2020\u2014down two percentage points from 2020. So, that&#8217;s just, uh, I thought that was a useful, uh, little aid-memoir to what you were saying, Michael. Obviously, then there&#8217;s the issue around trust that comes alongside that, whether people know where to go and whether they trust the result of the process that results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s really interesting, and now we&#8217;re going to hear from Angela, perhaps a little bit more practically, on how we can enforce the kind of ethical standards in public service roles. Angela?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Thank you, Richard. Um, thank you all for having me. It&#8217;s really an honor. Um, and you&#8217;re absolutely right, we&#8217;re coming from the angle as the enforcer. Um, I recognize that this is a hugely international audience, so I thought it would be helpful to first start off with a brief background of the Ethical Standards Commissioner for Scotland as an office and what we do, and then I will turn to the opening comments for today&#8217;s topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, the Ethical Standards Commissioner for Scotland, or the Commissioner, is an independent officeholder appointed by the Scottish Parliament. Our current Commissioner is Mr. Ian Bruce, who would have loved to be here today, um, if not for a prior commitment. The Commissioner has two hands. So, firstly, we, as an office, regulate ministerial appointments to public body boards and publish and enforce a code of practice for appointments. On the other hand, we receive, assess, investigate, and report on complaints about local authority elected members, board members of Scottish public bodies, and members of the Scottish Parliament. I&#8217;ll call them MSPs for short. We do not cover complaints about Scottish ministers or their conduct; there is a separate ministerial code of conduct, which is enforced by the Office of the First Minister for Scotland. We refer our reports about investigations and findings on misconduct about councillors and board members to the Standards Commission for Scotland, or SCS for short. We refer reports and findings on complaints about MSPs to the Scottish Parliament&#8217;s Standards, Procedures, and Public Appointments Committee, which is the SPPA committee. So, between the SCS, our office, and the SPPA committee, we are an integral part of the ethical standards framework that&#8217;s been established to promote integrity in public life in Scotland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Commissioner&#8217;s role and functions are all set out in primary legislation. He is not subject to the direction or control of any member of the Parliament, any member of the Scottish Government, or the Parliamentary Corporation in the exercise of his statutory functions. He is also what is termed a &#8220;prescribed person,&#8221; such as staff complaining about a breach of an applicable code of conduct, and are afforded whistleblower protection and status in certain circumstances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, on my part, I am one of the managers of the team which handles, investigates, and reports on complaints about alleged breaches of a code of conduct. Each code of conduct for councillors, board members, and MSPs covers broadly similar themes. They&#8217;re all based on the key principles of public life\u2014some of which were mentioned earlier\u2014and they all follow a kind of general format. They cover general conduct, not just disrespect, uh, bullying, and harassment; nowadays it&#8217;s extended to cover sexual harassment. We also have a section covering declaration of interests\u2014this is financial interests or non-financial interests. And lastly, there&#8217;s always a section that covers conduct in quasi-judicial settings. As a team, we have observed a consistent trend across the last five years. The vast majority of persons engaging with our service, complaining to our office, are members of the public. As of just last year, um, in 2022\u20132023, which is our last financial year, complaints from members of the public accounted for about 80% of the total number of complaints we received. The second-largest group of complainers are local authority elected members complaining about other elected members\u2014so, in a way, that&#8217;s politicians complaining about politicians. And this is followed by the third-largest group, which is local authority officials complaining about elected members. We also observe an increasing trend over the last five years where complaints we receive relate to allegedly disrespectful behavior. This includes bullying and harassment. There&#8217;s also an increasing number of complaints citing comments or posts that are made on social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, as evidence of alleged misconduct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now, against that background, today&#8217;s topic sets out to explore, in part, how public and civil service structures can maintain integrity under political attack, and how to be transparent in our role. We are also exploring how we, either as public servants or as regulators like myself, could raise concerns over honesty, objectivity, and impartiality of government requests. I&#8217;m sure we will be unpacking this in much more detail throughout the webinar, but just to start off with my initial thoughts as an ethics watchdog: how do we maintain our office&#8217;s integrity in a political context? I think broadly there are at least two key foundations. The first being a commitment to our own values. This expressly includes the values of honesty and transparency. As an office, we follow a set of published values that were subject to extensive public consultation, and we always operate under the guiding question of: What is the right thing to do? And, Claire, what you were saying about having our moral core being well exercised\u2014that is our day-to-day work. That is how we respond every day, uh, with the, uh, cases that we come up with, complaints that we receive. Um, values are the guide in our day-to-day work and a fundamental element to our recruitment, induction, and training of staff\u2014everything that we do. They are reflected in our own codes of conduct, and we translate that to the work that we do. For instance, uh, how do we reflect, uh, how do we reflect openness and honesty and transparency in our work? We do it by publishing all of our processes, policies, and procedures. Uh, in March this year, we published, for the first time in our history as an office, an investigations manual, which covers all of the processes that we have in logging, assessing, investigating, and reporting on complaints. And all of our templates have also been published as an appendix, so that would include internal forms that we use to assess and report. Everyone will be able to access this, and anyone who has reason to engage with us will know what to expect and can be assured that we are handling their complaints in a consistent process and using consistent approaches. We also consulted extensively on adopting a new approach where the complaints we receive are shared with the person who&#8217;s being complained about\u2014so, that&#8217;s the counselor, the board member, and the MSP\u2014and this is done regardless of whether the complaint is accepted for investigation or not. The complainer will also know that the respondent has been informed of that complaint against them, and in our view, that shows and is us demonstrating in real life what it is like to be honest and transparent in our work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think the second foundation to what we do is a commitment to maintaining neutrality. Our published strategic plan states that we investigate and report on complaints without fear or favor, and I think that is the\u2014it&#8217;s not anywhere published or official\u2014but I think it is our unofficial motto as an office: without fear or favor. We do not provide any advice on making a complaint, nor do we comment on speculative or potential complaints. All staff are required to maintain their own register of interests, which is updated regularly, at least annually as a minimum. We declare any conflicts; we work in adherence to our own internal code of conduct, and all staff are recruited on the basis of merit and their demonstration primarily of how they fit our values and our approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We know that politicians can and do complain about each other. The second highest category of complainers are politicians, and it is entirely possible that this system of ours is being used, and the complaint enlarged, with our office as a way of undermining or attacking political opponents. In particular, if there&#8217;s been a finding of a breach of the code and a sanction is being applied, that is definitely political ammo. However, because of the nature of our role, we do not consider political motivation behind complaints as a factor in whether or not we&#8217;d accept them for investigation, or whether there&#8217;s a breach, or whether we&#8217;d report. Ultimately, the criterion is whether the alleged conduct could amount to a breach of the code. If it does, the complaint is investigated, and if substantiated, it is considered against that code, and a referral is made to the appropriate adjudicative body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We acknowledge that our office can be used as that kind of political scoring system, so we maintain our objectivity, neutrality, and integrity even where we function in a highly politicized context by not considering political reasons behind each complaint. Of course, we do seek to understand the background of the complaint, which could contain political discourse, but it is not a reason for us to close the complaint, nor is it in itself enough for us to make a breach or no breach finding. Notwithstanding all of this, we&#8217;re also mindful of the impact of our investigatory work, and we are committed to treating everyone who comes into contact with us with empathy, kindness, and respect, and that is set out in our values as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I can only speak fairly knowledgeably about the ethical standards framework in Scotland. Given the topic of today&#8217;s webinar, I&#8217;d really encourage everyone to become familiar with the ethical standards framework that applies to your own countries. I anticipate that each of you will be subject to your own codes of conduct, and that the politicians with whom you work will, in turn, be subject to their own. Become familiar with these in order to understand what your respective responsibilities are, particularly in cases in which conduct appears to be of concern and should be reported. It is not enough for ethical frameworks to be in place; people need to use them if good conduct in public life is to be maintained at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s my initial observation. I think the floor will now be open for questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Great, thank you, Angela. Yes, please do get your questions coming in. We are now moving into the question and answer portion of our webinar. That was really interesting, Angela, particularly the issue around how you deal with complaints that come from politicians about other politicians. In response to Michael&#8217;s comments about the weaponization of ethics complaints, you have to judge it on the basis of the code and not the originator of the complaint, which I think is a really interesting point and probably a sensible way to go about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m going to use the chair&#8217;s prerogative briefly to touch on a couple of points from the conversation that came up. Particularly, I was going to put this to Claire in the first instance. Something Michael said really caught my ear about having had moments when public servants you were working with were speaking about concerns on policy, and you were advising them whether they would be better off working in another area of public policy, whether a think tank or something like that, where perhaps they&#8217;re not as closely bound by some of the strictures in public service itself. How much, in your experience, Claire, are civil servants dealing with that calculation in their head, that there are other ways to do public good that perhaps would allow them more freedom to express their own views and perhaps take an ethical stand? Or are the people you speak to committed to the idea of public service and want to make it work within the existing ethical framework that they&#8217;ve entered into?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The civil servants with whom I worked, on the whole, tend to be at quite a senior level, and my experience is that it&#8217;s extremely well understood that this is a particular way of doing public service, which is politically impartial and enacts the democratic will, regardless of the color of the government. The real concern is to get clear in their own minds where the things that they&#8217;re concerned about need to be things that they should be concerned about as civil servants\u2014speaking to the minister about it or asking for instruction or taking the various steps that can be taken according to the civil service code\u2014and where it is simply a difference of opinion that can be safely set aside. That&#8217;s where their concern is. I think the understanding that it&#8217;s a different kind of energy, a different kind of way of being of service, is very much tied to your own temperament, in my observation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I know I couldn&#8217;t be a civil servant, for example\u2014I have the wrong energy for it. I would be arguing too much, and I lack the kind of patience, which I have such admiration for, that you need to deal with people who don&#8217;t necessarily understand the issues as well as you do and don&#8217;t see them as you feel they should. So, it&#8217;s a particular kind of energy that you need. As I say, I think it&#8217;s the politicians who don&#8217;t necessarily understand this, in my experience. They don&#8217;t necessarily understand that this is absolutely a way of serving the public that&#8217;s not political, but patient and quite self-sacrificial, actually, on the part of civil servants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Great, thank you. Just to allow you to come back on that, Michael, were those kinds of conversations frequent with public servants, where they were considering the right kind of element of public life in which to work? Would you say that this is something that might be increasing in frequency or magnitude?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, let me sort of narrow the scope of this a little bit. I think this is a conversation and a tension largely found in Westminster systems, which assume a certain continuity of public service as institutional support. Am I, can you hear me? Okay. You could do it another way. In the American system, 50,000 public servants change if there&#8217;s a change of regime, and it&#8217;s totally normal to expect the senior layers of the public service to be aligned with the administration of the day. When the administration changes, you leave. The American system compensates for that with a whole reservoir of foundations, think tanks, and other places where the team goes when they&#8217;re out of government, and that system can be made to work. German senior civil service is very politicized, as is the French one, obviously, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, I think we&#8217;re talking a little bit about the Westminster system. The usual thing I say is that there are 320,000 public servants in Canada, most of whom come in every day and work on services, operations, transactions, and internal services. Ministers and policy are a very distant thing. Every once in a while, a law or program will get turned over by the government, and they have to implement it, but I think this is largely an issue for people who work in the very small space of the policy development community. It comes up, and I always get into trouble when I talk about this because you risk being seen as too obedient\u2014the attack of being too complacent and too obedient to the government of the day. I always try to explain it as supporting democratic politics; that whoever comes in, team red, team blue, whatever, there are suspicions and experiences from being outside government or in opposition. There&#8217;s this initial six to 12 months of enormous mutual suspicion. One of the things you have to do in the first year is break that down, form working relationships, and, as quickly as possible, create trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">With some ministers, that&#8217;s never possible\u2014they are so partisan in their mindset that they cannot grasp how you could have been working for the other side just 12 months ago. They never grasp it. But the clever ministers realize that they can mobilize the strengths of the public service in terms of analysis and delivery, get things done, and help kick things off the list the prime minister had given them to do. Mostly, it works; sometimes it doesn&#8217;t. I think it&#8217;s a relatively small set of issues where, if the government shifts, you get a major change in focus. Criminal justice has been one in Canada; climate change has been one here and in Australia, where there&#8217;s been a lot of zigzagging. The next government may just tear down carbon pricing schemes and energy regulation, which public servants have just spent the last six or seven years building. There were changes in child support policies, and so on. But in other areas, there&#8217;s just continuity. You work on something like legislation on disability accessibility, it carried on to the next government. You worked on cannabis legalization, the next government didn&#8217;t repeal it, and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, I think this is not to belittle the importance of it, but it&#8217;s a relatively compact area of the public service that works in the policy space in contested areas where this comes up a lot<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s where I had conversations, and, uh, you know, it&#8217;s just that you can tell. I like the phrase that Claire uses of the energy and the, you know, the mindset that comes with that. Some people come into government passionate in the best sense of the word\u2014they&#8217;re going to change things: environment, social justice, indigenous peoples, or whatever\u2014and they have trouble, uh, under, you know, accepting or coming to terms with the fact that Team Red or Team Blue may have a different set of priorities. They may have very different solutions, uh, and I guess my last point\u2014because I was trying to squeeze this in\u2014is the public service has to be humble about its own limitations and biases. I really don&#8217;t like the &#8220;truth to power&#8221; metaphor because it assumes that the public service has the truth. Uh, yes, it has support, analysis, advice, and things that are important, but the public service has its own biases and go-to behavior. So, yes, absolutely, it&#8217;s a very good phrase\u2014truth to power\u2014but I think, um, that it perhaps encapsulates something different from what is truly useful. Um, not that I could come up with a better one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Question: Skills\u2014yes. Um, we&#8217;ve had a question in, um, from, uh, Ken Moshi, um, which is directed at Angela. So I&#8217;ll put it to Angela, um, uh, which is: Can I ask\u2014I imagine all complaints need some initial investigation\u2014does your office have an issue with a high number of politically motivated complaints that clog up the system? If so, how do you approach this issue? It&#8217;s kind of asking to expand on the point you made, Angela, about the kind of, uh, elements of the complaints, and perhaps not only from other, uh, council members, um, but kind of political motivation overall. Do you, uh, have to investigate a high number of politically motivated complaints that you need to weed out of the system?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Um, I think that&#8217;s a very good question, and it recognizes one of the big challenges that we experience on a day-to-day basis. So, I think it might be helpful to cover kind of our process. With the initial investigations, yes, there would be an initial investigation. It depends on which legislation we&#8217;re talking about. If it&#8217;s councillors and, uh, board members of the public bodies, uh, the legislation is quite clear that before an actual investigation, you could have an assessment. And the assessment stage, or we call that also Stage One, is an exercise where we go through, kind of, &#8220;Is this a complaint about, uh, about a local authority?&#8221; Uh, remember, which council is just a very, kind of, general question that we go through. But at its core, it&#8217;s always going to be, &#8220;Is there a code?&#8221; Um, &#8220;Is the conduct that&#8217;s being complained of actually covered by the code?&#8221; Um, &#8220;Is it within a certain timeframe?&#8221; Or, &#8220;If it isn&#8217;t within a timeframe, are there overriding reasons that we should take it forward?&#8221; And that&#8217;s it. If it takes\u2014I don&#8217;t like using &#8220;tick boxes&#8221; as a phrase, but it matches all of that criteria, and it does progress into Stage Two investigation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, on the MSP side, every complaint that we get under the legislation begins as an initial investigation. So, um, we are required to investigate every MSP complaint that we receive. The question of volumes, complaint volumes\u2014the number is high. We do get a lot of complaints, um, but as I said, the vast majority of them are from members of the public. So, of that number, they would not be politically motivated. It would really be a smaller number that we&#8217;re looking at, that are really kind of tit-for-tat complaints, like: &#8220;You complained about me in order to say that you could complain about me and that I&#8217;m being investigated. Therefore, I will complain about you, and you have to say that you&#8217;re being investigated.&#8221; Um, but yeah, it really touches on a very live issue in our office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All right, just again on terminology: Just because it&#8217;s politically motivated doesn&#8217;t mean it isn&#8217;t found good. You know, they may be onto something, and the typical cycle of one of these things, in my experience, is it&#8217;s actually something that pops up in a news story\u2014a journalist is onto something\u2014that gets raised in Question Time, and then the opposition critic files a complaint with every conceivable recourse body so that the minister will be under investigation. But, uh, sometimes where there&#8217;s smoke, there&#8217;s fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Um, I&#8217;ll turn this question to Claire, um, in a second or two. It&#8217;s from Phil Miller. I&#8217;ll just provide a little bit of context first. Phil asks, &#8220;Who, if anyone, polices failures to comply with the UK Civil Service code, rules, regulations, and legislation?&#8221; Um, as many civil servants have no faith in the Civil Service or the Civil Service Commission to police itself, you can half answer the question there, Phil. The Civil Service Commission is, um, the body that is, um, entrusted with the policing of the code. Um, we don&#8217;t have anyone from the Commission on this call, so I don&#8217;t really want to, um, speak for them. But they, again, publish an annual report that sets out, um, the, uh, extent of, uh, civil service code investigations, um, and also does some survey work in terms of the extent to which UK civil servants are aware of the code and kind of know how to access it, similar to, uh, accessing the work of the Commission, similar to the statistics I provided earlier on, uh, on Canada. Um, but, but, I mean, you may be right, Phil, in saying that, um, civil servants themselves don&#8217;t have faith in, um, in the Commission, or indeed the internal, uh, elements of the Civil Service to do, uh, policing of rules and regulations. And we&#8217;ve seen certainly around ministerial code breaches, um, under, um, Boris Johnson&#8217;s time as Prime Minister, where many ministerial code breaches were, um, found to be proven by the independent investigator, but, um, the Prime Minister kept the minister in place. So that caused a lot of, uh, disquiet, I know, amongst civil servants, that there could be breaches by ministers, and yet they would not lose their job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Um, Claire, I, I said I wanted to put it to you in terms of your thoughts on the code and its effectiveness and whether that is a good kind of mechanism to help at least some of these moral quandaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Uh, I can&#8217;t really add any more facts than what you said, uh, Richard. I suppose I have an inherent concern that if we do just rely on codes, we&#8217;re going to miss important issues, and that there isn&#8217;t enough ink in the world or bandwidth to write the rules we need if that&#8217;s the thing that&#8217;s going to make us good. And actually, my greater interest is in doing what it takes to generate cultures of high standards and norms of high standards. And more than that, a real wish\u2014not, you know, it&#8217;s really interesting to talk about this stuff. It&#8217;s really interesting to think about it. There&#8217;s something really attractive about, uh, about, or, or I think, good moral thinking. It&#8217;s an attractive thing. It&#8217;s something to attract people to, to make them want to think about, um, how best, how best to behave, and, and not an atmosphere of fear or indeed confusion. If you start to write too many rules, people stop having any faith in their own moral sense and think, &#8220;Well, I&#8217;ve just got to obey the rules, and I don&#8217;t know if I agree with them or not.&#8221; And I&#8217;m simply\u2014to go back to my analogy\u2014not using this moral muscle myself at all. Nevertheless, codes are important, and it&#8217;s been fantastic to hear Angela&#8217;s explication of how that&#8217;s done in her office in Scotland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Uh, Michael, do you have any thoughts on the effectiveness of codes as a mechanism for, um, dealing with ethics in government?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, I think they&#8217;re useful in clarifying expectations on all parties. They&#8217;re useful in the relationship to the public, um, you know, that, uh, the less that government is a black box, an impenetrable, you know, the better, frankly, um, in dealing with sort of the attacks on government and the state as this sort of black box of elite that&#8217;s out of touch, and so on. Anyway, that goes back to the populism with which we started the whole session. Um, but I totally endorse where Claire was going, which is you cannot rely on just compliance with rules and procedures. Uh, you know, &#8220;Follow the manual, and you will stay out of trouble&#8221; is not enough. That&#8217;s the old approach. You have to develop values and organizational culture at the level of the organization and the individual. And so there is training and development, and, you know, what matters\u2014what&#8217;s the most corrosive, I think, was sort of in your comments as well\u2014is people have to see proof points in the consequences and the sanctions and the revealed behaviors. It&#8217;s not the elegant sort of speeches from the Deputy Secretary, you know, Permanent Secretary, or whatever. It&#8217;s, it&#8217;s, uh, people are very, very clever at picking up the signals of, uh, what, what is really going on here. And so you have to provide proof points from time to time that these things are being used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All right, thanks, Michael. Um, apologies to Michaela Brady. Um, her question was in terms of populism: &#8220;Do you believe that transparency and neutrality are enough to combat mistrust?&#8221; Um, I, I think we&#8217;ve just answered that, Michaela, without me quite, um, putting your question to the panel. I hope that that&#8217;s sufficient. Um, I just\u2014we are almost up against time\u2014it&#8217;s been a fantastic conversation. Uh, I just want to give, um, the panel a chance for any, uh, closing thoughts, perhaps framed by, um, the last couple of responses, uh, starting with Claire on the kind of culture and creating the kind of ethos in an organization of ethical behavior and using that moral muscle. I mean, very, uh, blunt question from a, from a journalist with, uh, five minutes to go in a session, but how do you create that culture? What, um, what\u2014what would your kind of tips be to people who are, who are watching along about the things that they should be thinking in their own organization to, to create that culture? Pay attention to it; it&#8217;s the first thing. Too much attention is paid to procedures and processes as a response to problems and things that have gone wrong. I think it&#8217;s, well, it&#8217;s the work that we do at Westminster Valley Institution. There&#8217;s all too little of it. I wish, incidentally, the electorate would write to their politicians and say, &#8216;We really want you to spend a bit of time on moral character because we think this will make you lead to\u2026&#8217; Because it doesn&#8217;t really work with the ballot box, and that makes it very difficult for politicians to give time to this kind of work. But it really, it really is like going to a regular Pilates class; it&#8217;s something you have to attend to and make time for. And do really interesting work around that. We can die over words like &#8216;training.&#8217; We can get really bored by being made to do stuff. But, in my experience, moral philosophy is really interesting and should be made attractive. It should be prevalent in public servants like public practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Michael, do you have any thoughts on times, perhaps in your career, where you&#8217;ve felt the organization you were working in has got that kind of culture embedded? And what were the key signifiers of that? I, you know, I would allege, and people will disagree with me, that the federal service in Canada is generally healthy. There are obviously going to be pockets, you know, &#8216;abscesses,&#8217; so to speak, that pop up in particular organizations from time to time. The important thing from the episodes is to learn from them. So, you know, I agree with everything Claire said, but I would say that there&#8217;s value in this kind of event, in seminars and the case study approach, and in making people work through the discussions in structured, animated group sessions, and do it early in their careers. You know, before\u2026 I think a lot of this happens to the middle manager, and by then it&#8217;s a bit late. You need to start making this an integral part. I have, in other contexts, called for a doubling or tripling of investment in training and leadership development in our service, and this is certainly part of the core &#8216;software&#8217; that we need to instill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Angela, any closing comments from you, perhaps framed by what happens after your investigations? I wonder if the investigations that the office undertakes are then used by the authorities or the public bodies to improve the culture, to embed more ethical approaches. Can we make it a positive feedback loop?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think, absolutely, I have every hope for that. And I was just writing down\u2026 I agree with Claire that codes are not enough\u2014codes\u2014and that&#8217;s a lot coming from me because codes are bread and butter for my team. But they are only as good as the engagement with them, with testing them, understanding them, really feeling and having the visibility of seeing how it lands. And that touches on what you were saying, Richard, about what happens after our cases go through. It works out to about less than 10 percent of the claims that we receive actually making it to a hearing. Then, at the hearing, there is a decision for a sanction. I don&#8217;t know what that number really represents; it is really open for interpretation. But a code, really, any ethical standards framework, is only as good as its engagement with it. So I would always encourage, if you see something, if something doesn&#8217;t sit right with you or makes you feel uncomfortable, there are regulatory bodies like ours. It&#8217;s our job, it is our duty, to look through, receive those complaints, consider them, and take them very seriously. In the spirit of that, I\u2019ve got nothing further to add.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Thank you very much, Angela, and thank you to everybody for joining us today. That is where I&#8217;m going to bring today&#8217;s session to a close. It\u2019s been an absolutely fascinating discussion; it&#8217;s really flown by. So yes, many thanks to all of our panel for joining us today, and to everybody for watching along too. And thank you for contributing your questions. You&#8217;ll be receiving a recording of this session when it is available in the next few days through email, and there will also be a report from this webinar in the next few weeks. Before that, though, there is a survey that will be in your inbox very shortly to get your thoughts on today&#8217;s webinar. It would really help me and the team here at Global Government Forum to make sure we&#8217;re providing the best possible content for you if you could complete that. Also, any ideas on topics you would like to see us explore in future webinars would be welcome. We run a wide range of webinars here at Global Government Forum, so please also keep an eye on our website, globalgovernmentforum.com, where you will find details of all our latest webinars, as well as the news and editorial coverage that public servants need to do their jobs well. We try to cover as many interesting government innovations as we possibly can, so please do visit globalgovernmentforum.com and sign up for our daily email news bulletin. So yes, thanks again to everybody for joining the session today, and we hope to see you at another one of our webinars soon. Wherever you are, enjoy the rest of your day!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Transcript Wherever you are joining us in the world today, welcome to this Global Government Forum webinar titled &#8220;The Moral Haze: How Civil Servants Can Maintain Legitimacy in an Era of Populism.&#8221; My name is Richard Johnston, and I&#8217;m the Executive Editor of Global Government Forum, which is a media and events company focused on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1071,"template":"wp-custom-template-video","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1989","video","type-video","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Moral Haze: How Civil Servants Can Maintain Legitimacy in an Era of Populism - Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/secteur-public-sector.ca\/en\/video\/maintain-legitimacy-in-populism\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Moral Haze: How Civil Servants Can Maintain Legitimacy in an Era of Populism - Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Transcript Wherever you are joining us in the world today, welcome to this Global Government Forum webinar titled &#8220;The Moral Haze: How Civil Servants Can Maintain Legitimacy in an Era of Populism.&#8221; 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