Public Service Day 2023

“They used to call us ‘crown wards’.”

For a long time — and more recently than you’d expect — that was the term Canada used to describe children growing up in care.

Amanda was one of them.

She knows the lingering stigma attached to the system: “No matter what degree you obtain or profession you work in, you still feel it,” she says.

Amanda is purposefully very open about acknowledging that part of her identity to help break down the stigma. Living with such integrity is an act of service in itself, yet it’s only a small part of the way Amanda works to improve the lives of children who have to grow up away from their parents.

At university, she studied social work and joined government in 2014, where she now works on child protection policy and operations. Her job focuses on assessing the safety and wellbeing of children in care.

Since becoming a public servant, Amanda has focused on gathering and using data to better understand the experiences of children in care.

That work culminated in 2018, when she led the overhaul of a survey first introduced in 1969.

Her working group wanted more than just to ask the children about what they liked and disliked; they wanted to capture a glimpse of who they are as people, not just as service users. That meant exploring “their aspirations and their identity demographics, so we can look at the different experiences and outcomes of children.”

The data they are gathering now doesn’t just tell them how well the care system is doing. It provides a deeper understanding of how well the children themselves are doing — outcomes, not outputs.

“We identified through the survey that the kids who are most at-risk of harming themselves or others are the kids who are most likely to want to give back to their community, wanting to volunteer and wanting to make a change in the system.”

You can imagine how such insights could inform positive, person-centred policies toward supporting the most vulnerable children.

Nine years in, Amanda is still excited about the future of her work. While mindful of its limitations and risks, she sees data as an essential tool to help push the work of her team forward.

“I'm really happy that we're starting to really collect data in a meaningful way — so that's what drives me, being able to analyse that data and continuously learn from it.”

Personal passion and lived experience can produce dedicated and highly impactful public service. Amanda’s career so far is an example of what’s possible when public servants are able to bring their whole selves to work.

If you were embarking on a 40-year career in government, where would you plan on starting out?

Probably not the Census Bureau.

Well, neither did Mark Otto in 1983. He backed his way into a job with no real plans of staying but, as he quickly discovered, working for an agency whose mission is to ‘serve as the nation's leading provider of quality data about its people and economy’ is a pretty thrilling ride for a statistical scientist.

Mark took that mission to heart as he set about one of his early projects with an appropriately obscure name: X13ARIMA-SEATS.

He describes the work he did in a low-key way: dense with detail and little elaboration but don’t let that kid you, this was heady stuff.

His work contributed to statistical modelling that helps distinguish seasonal fluctuations from deeper, long-term trends. More than 40 years later, Mark’s work helps underpin statistical programmes which governments around the world use to monitor and report economic activity trends accurately. How’s that for impact?

As you’d expect, accuracy matters to Mark. Not just for professional pride, but from a deeper-seated sense of public purpose. He understood early on that public policy is all about trade-offs, and those decisions can be better framed and understood with better data and analysis.

Mark's work helped better target $32 billion of education funding

His work helped better target $32 billion of education funding with the development of small area income and poverty estimates; he helped model eagle populations across the U.S. to identify permissible sites for new wind farms.

In an era when public leaders are demanding more data to inform decisions that shape our lives, it’s worth stopping to recognise the public servants who work hard to ensure the integrity of that information.

In the twelves years since she’s been in Ottawa’s municipal government, Tamatha has noticed that the challenges they’re tackling just keep getting bigger.

Whether it’s social issues like housing and homelessness, or trying to address a climate emergency which the city has declared, it’s all hard stuff.

She has a better vantage point than most on these issues: she works as a data analytics strategist within the strategic planning group, which supports the city’s political and administrative leadership with their development of key priorities to tackle.

But if the challenges keep getting bigger, so does the appetite to tackle them.

“What I've noticed in the last 12 years — and what I actually think is great — is that both politically and administratively people really have an appetite to tackle these things. It's not just, let's do the minimum and keep people happy. There are big issues and we want to impact them.”

The instinct to innovate and act is a big part of the reason why Tamatha loves working in city government. It provides the perfect mix of being small enough to move quickly and big enough to make an impact.

“We can organize how our garbage is collected and impact the recycling so that more waste goes to organics instead of landfill. We can work with our nonprofits. We can work with our local developers to try to create more affordable housing to impact the lives of our residents. So we get to have those on the ground conversations to change things and meanwhile, you know, keeping people's water running!”

Tamatha’s energy and passion for government is infectious but, as she tells it, it’s her colleagues that energise and inspire her everyday.

“I'm incredibly impressed every day by my colleagues — incredibly impressed. It doesn't matter what department or role I've been in or what title I've had, I've always been so impressed by their dedication and their passion. Their mentality is always, ‘How is this going to impact our residents?’ Truly caring about the services we provide and the things that we do.”

It’s a sight she wishes the rest of society could get to see more often, to change perceptions.

“I think that a lot of people outside of public service would be very surprised if they spent a few days in my job and saw the incredible dedication, passion and hard work of my colleagues.”

A fitting reminder of why Public Service Day matters.

“Well, where to start?”

Where do you start when reflecting on thirty-two years of public service spent helping vulnerable people and families access social security?

Through that frontline service, Wendy knows better than most what a social safety net looks like and what it can mean to people’s lives. It was a realisation that came to millions more families during the pandemic, when the number of households claiming government support nearly doubled: from 2.7 to 5.1 million between March 2020 and March 2021.

Wendy was classed as a key worker throughout the pandemic and reassigned from her normal job to help families navigate the social security system for the very first time.

“The feeling of camaraderie and pride in being a civil servant was really, really high,” she recalls of that period.

But moments of pride and fulfilment are also contrasted with feelings of frustration when the system just doesn’t move fast enough to help people in their moment of need.

“We speak to a lot of desperate people, and we do take a lot of quite difficult and challenging calls where people are really very distressed. That’s not easy to deal with, I have to say — I’m not made of stone and it does affect me.”

Wendy doesn’t let frustration turn to apathy, though.

“It might sound a bit weird to you… but I’m a firelighter. Basically, I’m a communicator: from my level right to the top — a conduit for messages, especially when there are changes coming in.”

With three decades of experience, Wendy knows a thing or two that each new iteration of management would do well to listen to. Her story is a reminder that some of the best insights into how government works don’t come from wonks and consultants but from dedicated staff working on the frontline.