I received a note from someone in a federal ministry in Ottawa a couple of weeks ago.  It asked, would I be interested in having dinner with Minister (name withheld)?  You know, look into new policy initiatives, want to talk to a few experts, break bread together etc.  Sounds like fun, I said.  But you know that, for my sins, I live in Toronto, right?  Not Ottawa. Would this dinner invitation come with an airline ticket attached, or was I being asked to come up with this myself?  To which the nice assistant eventually replied, no, constraints on federal spending being what they were, there was no way this could happen.  Regretfully, I declined.

Now I am not, as it happens, particularly dismayed at not getting a free flight to Ottawa; generally, the less time I spend there, the happier I am.  But it did strike me as symptomatic of the way federal government consultation works, which is that if you’re in Ottawa (or, more grandly, the “National Capital Region”) you can get heard relatively easily but if you’re not, forget it.

Part of this is natural laziness on the part of the public service and is hardly unique to Canada (try affecting French domestic policy from Toulouse, for instance).  I think it’s become worse over time as various governments have adopted various “anti-waste” penny-wise pound-foolish restrictions on travel, which reduce both the ability of governments to bring people to Ottawa and the ability to take public servants out of Ottawa to occasionally see the rest of the country. 

As a result, official Ottawa tends to end up listening to people based in Ottawa, and particularly representatives of “national associations” who, shall we say, are both less well-grounded in the day-to-day realities of their members in different parts of the country and more sympathetic to Ottawa-generated versions of reality than might be ideal (when your bread and butter comes from affecting policy decisions in Ottawa, it’s in your interest that as many decisions as possible get made in Ottawa).  No one asked me for, instance, if I would consider providing some policy insights outside the confines of a dinner with the minister, which I would have been happy to do.  Only if I was physically present in Ottawa were my insights deemed to be of value.

I think that the Future Skills Council, to which ESDC named fifteen members (with one third of members representing national organizations) exemplifies this Ottawa-centric problem. The Council is, of course, not to be confused with the Future Skills Centre, the award of which was finally announced last week (it was Ryerson, we’ve known it’s been Ryerson for months but the feds just decided not to tell anyone).  Nor is it the same as the Future Skills Office, which is some kind of new bureaucratic outpost within ESDC, both to advise the minister on hot new trends and keep an eye on what the Future Skills Centre is doing. 

In theory, the Council is meant to “advise the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour on national and regional skills development and training priorities”, which it is supposed to do by gathering perspectives on skills, developing a pan-Canadian strategy on skills, share promising practices, and so on.  And if the Council actually had a budget to do real consultations or research, I’m sure the various members of the committee, all of whom have a different lens on the issue, would be able to put something together (though many committee members have some pretty vested interests to defend, and one wonders how that will affect its work).  But my guess is they won’t be given much of a budget and in practice, most of whatever gets done will get done by the public servants at the Future Skills Office.  What we will be produced will no doubt to some degree reflect input from the committee but it will very likely reflect the result of the work of federal public servants, with their Ottawa-constructed views of reality. I really hope the Council can be more than this, but 25 years of watching this department up close does not leave me with a great deal of optimism.

(An aside: none of this would necessarily be so bad if the federal government grasped that skills is an area of policy where the policy levers are mainly under provincial control.  But, amazingly, they don’t.  They truly, truly don’t.  The sheer depth of the federal government’s determination to ignore reality on this point is something to behold).

Anyways, the point is: Ottawa is perfectly happy to consult provided you live or work in Ottawa, which is to say that in practice they prefer consultations with people who live within the Ottawa bubble and who absorb the Ottawa way of constructing both problems and solutions. 

Personally, I’d vote for any party that promised to go a year where the federal government listened to no one in Ottawa and only consulted with people living outside the National Capital Region.  Policy could only improve.