Government is constantly changing, and public servants are required to keep track - and keep on top - of those changes. In this new series, we ask members of the Apolitical community how their government has changed since they started work.

The goal is to see how governments have advanced - or declined - over the years.

Here, we ask Canada’s public servants how they’ve seen the world evolve.

Is it more innovative? How has the culture changed? Are the pain points different?

It's less innovative, more restrictive and politically-driven at provincial level. Everything hinges on announceables and re-election, and therefore everything needs multiple levels of approval before anything moves. - Anonymous

Is it more innovative? How has the culture changed? Are the pain points different?

I work for the Ontario Provincial Government. As in any organisation, you have innovators and administrators and everybody in between. My area of work is regional economic development. So we work with programme areas and regional economic development agencies. The aim is to ensure that programmes which were designed many years ago are keeping up with regional needs.

As much as any other period I have come across, regional needs for government programming have changed dramatically. I am therefore on the front line in attempting to encourage change. It is a slow process, but the will to change does exist, and is formalised. As Peter Drucker has said, "culture eats strategy for breakfast". And when risk-aversion is associated with advancement, introducing innovation is a difficult sell.

One very interesting part of government is the Ontario Digital Services. They introduced an "agile" culture complete with mobile work-from-home before the pandemic. They helped programme areas improve efficiency, online design and user experience in order to move many services away from Service Ontario physical offices. Many of the programmes which were resistant to moving to continuous improvement were willing to give it a go when online numbers exploded. I'm happy to chat if you have an interest. - Nicholas Wedgwood, Team Lead, Strategy Development Unit, Regional Economic Development Branch

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