Transcript
Transcript: Reflections by Mel Cappe
Narration: Public servants, thought leaders and experts from across Canada are reflecting on the ideas shaping public service – leadership, policy, governance, innovation and beyond.
[00:00:10 The words "Leadership", "Policy", "Governance", and "Innovation" appear on the screen in sequence, followed by the words "Review and Reflection".]
[00:00:20 The logo of the Canada School of Public Service is shown.]
This is the Review and Reflection Series produced by the Canada School of Public Service.
[00:00:25 An image of Mel Cappe is shown next to text that reads:
"Mel Cappe joined the Public Service of Canada in 1975 and held senior roles in the Treasury Board, Finance, and Consumer and Corporate Affairs. He later served as Deputy Minister at Environment Canada and Human Resources Development Canada. From 1999 to 2002, he was Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet. He then served as Canadian High Commissioner to the UK and became President of the Institute for Research on Public Policy in 2006."]
Mel Cappe joined the Public Service of Canada in 1975 and held senior roles in the Treasury Board, Finance, and Consumer and Corporate Affairs. He later served as Deputy Minister at Environment Canada and Human Resources Development Canada. From 1999 to 2002, he was Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet. He then served as Canadian High Commissioner to the UK and became President of the Institute for Research on Public Policy in 2006.
[00:00:59 Mel Cappe is shown sitting in a chair.]
Taki Sarantakis (President, Canada School of Public Service): I am here with Mr. Mel Cappe, who was a long-time senior Deputy Minister in the Government of Canada. So, we're going to explore a bunch of things around crisis and what to do in a crisis, and we're going to do that mostly through one big crisis, but maybe we'll talk about a few others. So, before we start on the one big crisis, where were you born?
Mel Cappe (Former Clerk of the Privy Council, Secretary to Cabinet and Head of the Public Service): I was born and raised, grew up in Toronto, was an undergrad for the University of Toronto, went to Western for my master's, came back to Toronto for my doctorate – which I never finished!
[00:01:32 An photo of the University of Toronto is shown followed by a photo of Western University.]
And I'm very careful to not mislead people.
Taki Sarantakis: What did you want to be when you grew up?
Mel Cappe: That's interesting. I guess my parents didn't want me to be a public servant, particularly. I went into a commerce program and left it to become an economist and studied economics, and I wanted to be an academic. And I mean, that wasn't something I had when I was a kid, but I had two job offers from mediocre universities, that I won't name, and thought I could do better. And so, I would come to Ottawa for a year. I negotiated with the Treasury Board Secretariat to get a year with 30 days to finish my dissertation, and I got so turned on by the quality of the work and the people I was working with that when I left the government 30 years later, they still owed me those 30 days.
Taki Sarantakis: It's quite remarkable. When you're growing up in Toronto, a public official or bureaucrat is not something you ever think about, but here it's almost in the water. We're going to fast forward to a beautiful day in September 2001 to remember what the day was like before the events of the day began.
Mel Cappe: Very, very firmly, I remember.
[00:03:10 A photo of Jim Carr is shown next to the text "© US Embassy Canada, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons".]
I was in a meeting at 8 a.m. with Jim Carr, who at the time was the head of the Manitoba Business Council, and went on to be a minister in the first Trudeau, fils, government, and he was Minister of Natural Resources. But he was a lovely man and I got to know him a bit. We had a meeting, and about 8:30, the door swings open and my executive assistant Ariel Delouya, storms in and says, "You've got to come and see this!" And I thought, Ariel, this is rude! You can't just storm in, like, in the middle of a meeting. What's… what's going on? And I went out and saw he was right, he should have stormed in. I watched part of the video and I came back in – or not the video, but the television – and I came back in and said, "Jim, I'm afraid the meeting's over."
Taki Sarantakis: And so, like the rest of us, you saw it on TV first.
Mel Cappe: Yes.
Taki Sarantakis: And tell the crowd what your job was that day.
Mel Cappe: Well, I was Clerk of the Privy Council Secretariat of Canada and the head of the public service. You know, being head of the public service is written in statute, being clerk of the Privy Council is cited in statute, and it turns out there are no authorities. And there's a big lever in the middle of the office, and you push it in the morning and you pull it in the afternoon. And it-… was by the time I finished, I realized it was connected to nothing. So that's what my job was, but I realized that this was something of great moment.
Taki Sarantakis: And as Clerk of the Privy Council, you are – for those who don't know these things – you are kind of the number one public servant in the federal government. You are the one who, not only the other deputy ministers report to, but also, you have a special relationship with the Prime Minister of Canada, of the day. Tell us a little bit about what the relationship is like between a clerk and a prime minister.
Mel Cappe: Right.
[00:05:26 A photo of Mel Cappe and former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien is shown.]
I had an accountability to the full Cabinet as Secretary of the Cabinet, but I had an accountability directly to the Prime Minister as the deputy minister to the Prime Minister, and the Privy Council Office acts as his department. That day, I knew the Prime Minister was having breakfast with Lorne Calvert, the then-Premier of Saskatchewan.
[00:05:43 A photo of Lorne Calvert is shown next to the text "© Daniel Paquet, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons".]
And I thought this was important enough that I'd better bother him. I phoned 24 Sussex, which at the time was the residence of the Prime Minister, and Bruce Hartley, his executive assistant answered the phone. And I said, "Bruce, I need to speak to the Prime Minister immediately." And Bruce knew that I didn't ever do that, and so he said, "Right away." And he brought the Prime Minister out; I told the Prime Minister what had happened. This is about 9:00, 8:30, 9:00 in the morning. We still hadn't seen the building collapse yet. And the PM was to have finished breakfast and then head out to Halifax to meet with the Premier of Nova Scotia. And I said, "Prime Minister, I think it's really valuable for you to carry on and show that business as usual, go do that meeting." And the Prime Minister said, "I think you're wrong now, I'm going to-… this is too big, I'm going to stay here." He was right, I was wrong, and it's a good thing that he stayed in Ottawa.
Taki Sarantakis: And so, start walking us through the first, what did you-… what was kind of your initial reaction? Is it like, this is an accident?
[00:07:02 A photo of the Twin Towers collapsing is shown next to the text "© Cyril A., CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, via Flickr".]
Mel Cappe: Well, the first plane into the building is an accident – maybe.
[00:07:08 Another photo of the Twin Towers collapsing is shown next to the text "© Robert Levine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons".]
By the time the second plane goes in, it's not an accident.
[00:07:11 A photo of the U.S. Pentagon building destroyed is shown next to the text "© North Dakota National Guard, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, via Flickr".]
And when the third plane hits, the Pentagon is certainly not an accident. So therefore, I immediately call a meeting of deputy ministers for 2 p.m. that day. And at first, I was thinking, should I just get the Deputy Minister of National Defence, the Deputy Minister of Public Safety, et cetera, or is this going to touch everyone? And the answer was clear, that it was going to touch everyone. If you were responsible for Agriculture and you're worrying about exports, the border is going to get closed; everybody has to be in the room. And so, we had a full deputy ministers' meeting at 2 p.m. that day.
Taki Sarantakis: And tell us, between kind of like 9:00 and 14:00, like, are you on the phone with the head of National Defence? Are you on the phone with the head of Transport Canada? Are you on the head of-… are you on the phone with the Deputy Minister of Foreign affairs?
Mel Cappe: So it's-… remember that the House is not sitting, ministers are not in town. The Minister of National Defence and the Chief of Defence Staff are at a NATO meeting in Bulgaria, in Sofia. I go get the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff to come to my office, and this is maybe 10:00 in the morning, and the VCDS, George MacDonald at the time. One of the lessons, Taki, is that you need the right person at the right time, and MacDonald was the right person. He had just come back from being the Deputy Commander of NORAD. So when you're going to close the airspace for all of North America, you want George MacDonald in your office, and he knows how to manage this stuff and what's going on in Cheyenne Mountain, in NORAD headquarters. And so, that was enormously valuable to have him there.
Taki Sarantakis: So, you're not only dealing with Canadians, though, presumably at this point, our neighbours to the south are having a pretty amazing day in terms of what's going on, what do we do. Tell us a little bit about maybe a Canada-U.S. interface?
Mel Cappe: So, remember that George W. Bush had been elected in-…or taken office in January of 2001. Most of his nominees had not had Senate approval yet. The head of the Border Patrol, which was the Customs Service in the U.S., happened to be in Vancouver. He was stranded in Vancouver. And the head of Customs and Excise for Canada was stranded in the United States, and we've closed the airspace, so you're not getting back. This was part of the problem, having the right people in the right place at the right time. The FBI director had not yet been approved by Senate. So, yes, we had a huge problem of these were not well-established relationships. Relationships are one of those key elements. If I think there's a lesson here, it's that we had our deputy minister community and the operational actors had very good interpersonal relations with each other, but they didn't have as good relations with the U.S., and we needed it. And when we sent-… later on, we sent the Director of CSIS and the Commissioner of the RCM Police to Washington, and they were to meet with the FBI and the Head of CIA, and they had never met before. That's not a good thing.
[00:10:59 Mel Cappe picks up a glass of water and takes a sip before putting it back down.]
Taki Sarantakis: Now, at some point during the day, there started to be murmurs about, we think these people crossed in from Canada.
[00:11:10 An excerpt an article from The Washington Post is shown with the headline "Canada Fights Myth It Was 9/11 Conduit" and highlighted text that reads: "Canadian officials are vexed that 3 ½ years later, they have not dispelled the groundless claim that Canada was a route for the Sept. 11 hijackers."]
People all of a sudden became experts on different languages, and what they heard and what they didn't hear. Talk to us about that, because you've got the actual thing that you're dealing with, but you're also dealing with a narrative that is starting to take place in certain circles.
Mel Cappe: So, let me talk about languages for just a minute. It turns out the NSA is unequivocally – the National Security Agency of the U.S. – unequivocally the most important signals intelligence agency in the world. The Communications Security Establishment has many more language experts, and we became a translator of NSA intercepts. And that was an important relationship, and that was a Canadian strength, so, for what it's worth. Your point, though, about the rumour mill – and it would be much worse now with social media – but that was huge.
[00:12:17 A photo of Hillary Clinton is shown next to the text "© Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons".]
So, Hillary Clinton in the Senate, Senator Clinton, made a point that these must-… these people had come in from Canada. Michael Kergin is our ambassador in Washington, and he goes to visit with Senator Clinton and he says, "Look, these people were admitted by your country from Saudi Arabia, they did not come from Canada." Her answer was, "But they could have." That was a dreadful moment because she continued to blame Canada, almost like South Park.
Taki Sarantakis: So, at some point, kind of the initial fog of war ends. And tell us, like, what time do you go to sleep that night? Like what was the… when did you finally say, all right, tomorrow's another day?
Mel Cappe: So, two elements of that. The first is I mentioned that ministers are not in Ottawa.
[00:13:18 A photo of John Manley is shown next to the text "© World Economic Forum, Public Domain, via Flickr".]
The Deputy Prime Minister, John Manley, is actually on an aircraft coming in from London over the Atlantic, and is about to be turned back to Heathrow. We want Manley in Ottawa, how do we get him in-… to have that one plane, one plane continue to fly to Ottawa, and not get blown out of the sky by an F-18 in the United States? And we did that. Manley-… the pilot, knows that he's got the Deputy Prime Minister in business class, and he goes back and invites him into the cockpit and says, I want you to listen to this. And so Manley listens to air traffic control talking about grounding all the aircraft. And the plane continues and lands in Ottawa. It was actually a flight to Toronto; it gets diverted to Ottawa and Manley is there. So, it was very important that we had the ability to do that. And again, George MacDonald, General MacDonald, was valuable in giving us a judgment that, yes, we can do that.
Taki Sarantakis: Now you wake up the next day, kind of the September 11th is over, but there's a September 12th and onward dynamic to this, and maybe talk to us about what you remember about kind of the border closing.
Mel Cappe: So, I want to ramble a bit. The first is Alain Jolicoeur was the head of Customs and Excise, and was responsible for the border. The worst thing that ever happened to Canada and the Canadian economy was a very little small image in the Economist, which showed a line of lorries, trucks, backed up at the Canadian border, and the sign said. U.S. border – 26 kilometers. If you're looking to invest in Canada for export to the United States – which may never happen again, as we're here on-… after tariffs – but that was a very damaging image. Alain came in to brief deputies continuously for the next two or three months, having the wait times at every border crossing. And he didn't ordinarily have that, but he had to institute a new arrangement so that he could be informed where the borders were open and where the borders were backed up. So, that was really, really important to have that kind of information, which we had not been able to get before. The other thing was trying to keep the border open when the… you've got to also put this in the context of Y2K. Preparation for 9/11, nobody plans for the World Trade Center to fall, but we had just finished planning for Y2K, and we were ready, we had a continuation of government program, a COG plan. I mean, when you've got an acronym, you know it's really important. So, we had a COG plan, Continuity of Government, and we had run exercises to plan for crisis. That helped a huge amount.
The Prime Minister, I go to the 24 Sussex sometime in August, and the Prime Minister gets called out to take a call from the Chief of the Defence Staff, and he comes back in the room and he says, "I just gave the order to blow a plane out of the sky." I said, "I know what that's about. This is the exercise, it's a live exercise." It lasted a week and the CDS had to get the Prime Minister to give that order. And the PM had practiced that. At another moment, KA-… on that day of 9/11, KAL85 is flying from Seoul to Anchorage and gets diverted to Whitehorse. And it says, it issues a hijack warning. So the question is should we blow it out of the sky or not? And the answer is no. But it landed at Whitehorse, I call the Commissioner of the RCM Police, and I've got MacDonald with me and we're explaining what's going on. I said, "Get your guys in Whitehorse to saddle up and get out to the airport." And he says, "No, we have an emergency response team in Whitehorse." "That's great, Will, this is all planned. They've exercised this." Don't underestimate the value of exercise and planning, even though that plan will never have to be exercised. But you'll have-… you'll be prepared for the unexpected.
Taki Sarantakis: So, number one is the border, talk to us a little bit… our American cousins, neighbours started getting very concerned about security, started getting very concerned about, you know, bad actors. And we also had those conversations here, too, like changes to the Criminal Code, changes to potentially-… or at least debates about, you know, where do rights end and where do security considerations begin. So, talk to us a little bit about that.
Mel Cappe: So in the aftermath, we forget Benni Norris, Ahmed Ressam – that's one person – and he was intercepted at the B.C.-Washington border, and he was a terrorist going to blow up LAX. And just a wise, smart border officer for the U.S, didn't like the sweat on his brow, and took him aside and found the explosives in his car. The Americans wanted to close the border. What we wanted to do was assure the border. So, I had been advocating long before 9/11, as had my predecessor, Jocelyne Bourgon, an international committee of Cabinet. The Prime Minister said, "I'm the International Committee of Cabinet." And what we did was this event convinced him that he needed an international committee of Cabinet, and he asked the Deputy Prime Minister, John Manley, to chair it. (Coughs) Pardon me. And so, Manley chairs that and introduces the whole idea of a smart border. And can we assure the Americans – and, by the way, in the process, facilitate trade between Canada and the U.S. – by smoothing transfers where you pre-clear people? So, I carry a NEXUS card, and that's the result of 9/11. And it is that smart border that helped us figure that out.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, you mentioned the Deputy Prime Minister Manley. So when did Minister Manley become kind of the counterpart to Homeland Security, as Homeland security…?
Mel Cappe: But he, because he chaired the committee, he was the majordomo who was looking after all of this. And indeed, what he did was – and you raised the issue of rights – he chaired the committee. So remember, 9/11 happens, October 7th is when the United States and Canada are active in Afghanistan. What happens from through that period is the preparation of the Anti-terrorism Act. And it took one month – the bill was tabled October 15th – one month to prepare the Anti-terrorism Act. The bill was passed and given Royal Assent on December 15th. It's extraordinary how fast that went. And did we make mistakes would be your next question, I hope. And the answer is, not very many. And the reason was Morris Rosenberg was the Deputy Attorney General, and John Sims was the associate. Anne McLellan was the minister. Her job was, as a member of that committee, was to ensure that rights were going to be protected. And the only officials sitting at the table in the Cabinet committee-… the clerk has a little table in the corner, I sat at my table, Dick Fadden, who went on to be director of CSIS and National Security Advisor, was the coordinator of security and Intelligence, and sitting next to Manley. And the only other official at the table was Morris Rosenberg or John Sims, the Deputy Attorney general. And their job was to say, no, you can't do that, rights are going to be affected. And as a result, I think the ATA – C-36 in that year – was very successful, and we were quite well protected and we have been since.
Taki Sarantakis: So let's do one more kind of factual thing before we get into a little bit of the lessons more overtly, and the philosophical things and the things for the people watching this video. There was also kind of a-… I'm not sure it was called a budget at the time, but there was a pretty big economic statement that I think in retrospect the government called a budget, and that was December-… December 10th, something like that, and there was a lot of spending there. Talk to us a little bit about what you remember about that time.
Mel Cappe: Sure. So, when I was deputy secretary in the Treasury Board, Paul Tellier was clerk. And Paul had this line that he gave to deputy ministers. "You all have in your bottom drawers your ideas about what the government should do. Now is the time to pull them out," And Rob Wright was the deputy secretary of plans, and Kevin Lynch was the AMD fiscal, and Mel was the dep-sec of Programs in Treasury Board. And the three of us… And so, Tellier tells everyone, all, every deputy minister, "This weekend, you're going to come in and give these three guys your best ideas of where to cut." All the deputies come in and they say, oh, you know, you should cut that guy's budget. And it was always telling you another department's budget. Anyway! But I remember Paul's line, "You have these ideas in the bottom of your drawer, your bottom drawer." And I used that line with the deputies, and I said you've all been working and preparing ideas and doing some policy development, this is the opportunity to get stuff done. And everybody pulled that out. Dick Fadden became the coordinator-… was the coordinator, became the developer of this, and working very closely, obviously with finance, it was going to be a budget item. And so, Finance and PCO and Treasury Board pull together a very comprehensive security budget. There were two objectives. One was to improve the security of Canadians, and the other was to convince the Americans that we were improving their security as well.
Taki Sarantakis: So now, let's talk a little bit about kind of lessons, I think one we've already touched about. In a crisis, it's really important kind of to be prepared before the crisis. What are some other kind of things that you've learned over your time?
[00:25:13 Mel Cappe pulls some folded up notes from out of his jacket pocket and unfolds them.]
Because this was… I'm sure this was the biggest one, but you've probably dealt with a multiplicity of crises as a clerk and as a senior deputy minister.
Mel Cappe: So, I would say another one of those lessons, if you will, is finding the right people and getting the right people in the right job at the right time.
[00:25:34 Mel Cappe flips to the second page of his notes.]
And so that's why – and I've prepared some notes and I'm going to go back through them. One of the consequences of 9/11 was Islamophobia became a very big issue, and what we needed to do was valorize – valoriser, as we say in French – the existence of Islamic Canadians distinguished from a few people who happened to be Islamic and they were terrorists. And there was a lot of work being done by CSIS already with community involvement, and that was-… again, having established those relationships, they could go and press on them, and that was important. I've mentioned the promoting investment and how you do that, and I think that has been important.
[00:26:30 Mel Cappe flips to the third page of his notes.]
How do you prepare for a disaster is… we've talked about the planning that's required, we've talked about the personal relationships. I mean, I think that really is important. But as you note, you have to have those relationships before, you can't establish them during the crisis.
[00:26:48 Mel Cappe flips to the fourth page of his notes.]
The other thing I would say is that process matters. And I know that this is one of those issues that I think is… you know, I could minimize the importance of my job by saying I was the chief donut and coffee person for the Government of Canada, because all I was interested in was process, or I could tell you that it actually mattered. And I'm going to tell you it actually matters.
[00:27:20 Mel Cappe folds up his notes and puts them back in his jacket pocket.]
Taki Sarantakis: Well, that's really interesting because I think a lot of people intuitively say, well, it's a crisis; you throw away process. That's the exact opposite of what you're saying.
Mel Cappe: So, on the contrary, I think really what's important is that you respect the process, that you've got process for a purpose. I mentioned the 2 p.m. meeting of deputy ministers. It could-… as I said, I agonized about whether to keep it to four or five people, it would be easier, but I needed everybody to be in the loop. They all needed to know, so… and they were going to deal with their ministers, and their ministers needed to know. So, process was to involve everyone, the continuity of government plan. Everybody knew what their job was and what to do about their job. That wasn't the case in the United States.
[00:28:13 A photo is shown of Andrew Card standing next to George W. Bush who is holding a piece of paper, with three other representatives surrounding him. Text above the photo reads "© The U.S. National Archives, Public Domain, via NARA & DVIDS Public Domain Archive".]
There's this famous image of Andrew Card, the Chief of Staff to President Bush, going and whispering in his ear when he's reading to these kids.
[00:28:22 A photo is shown of George W. Bush sitting in the Oval Office and holding a piece of paper, with Andrew Card and two other representatives standing by his desk. Text above the photo reads "© Unknown author, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons".]
Andy Card didn't have process, he didn't have – and I'd spoken to him about this at one point – but he didn't have the phone list of all the people responsible for all the jobs that were going to be impacted.
Taki Sarantakis: I'm just going to pause here for a moment, because a lot of people are surprised when we point this out: There is no counterpart to clerk of the Privy Council in the United States.
Mel Cappe: No, that's true. So, in Canada, I would say there are two people, two jobs that carry out that job of the chief of staff, and that is the clerk, and the chief of staff to the Prime Minister. And in my day, we had a daily meeting "as three".
[00:29:13 A photo of Mel Cappe, Jean Pelletier, and former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien is shown.]
It was the Prime Minister sitting behind his desk – I've got this in a picture that is in a book that has been published of this, showing me and Jean Pelletier, then the secretary of the Cabinet-… I was, I'm the secretary of Cabinet! – then the chief of staff to the Prime Minister, basically on the other side of the desk, and we met every day for a half hour. And at one point, I would go to Jean and say, when I first became clerk, I said, I hear the issues I'm going to raise. And Jean would say, "No, no, no, Mel, you don't tell me what you're going to raise. I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to raise, but you should feel free to intervene on those issues, and I'm going to feel free to intervene on yours." That process established a working relationship that was enormously valuable and helpful. So on 9/11, I didn't have to go through Jean Pelletier to get to the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister takes my calls. On the other hand, I needed to keep him and his staff informed so that they weren't going to go off on a tangent somewhere. That, that has become more important, of course, in the current environment with PMOs that are more powerful.
Taki Sarantakis: And it seems to me that your position or your former position, is kind of like at the nexus of a whole bunch of things. The political side interface, cabinet, deputy ministers, kind of the military, the civilian side, justice, economics. So, if you could maybe kind of close this off with are you kind of happy slash proud of the way the system kind of responded to 9/11? And if there are any things that you could recommend to people? Unfortunately, we will face other disasters, emergencies, whether they're climate-based or man-based or actor-less. Maybe give us a little bit of wisdom on how the system either works or could get better, or both.
Mel Cappe: Well, look, I've been out of government for 20-plus years, so far be it for me to give a judgment on the current status; however, that wouldn't stop me. I think I was very proud of how the system worked. I was proud of the community; I was proud of how ministers operated. The professionalism of the Canadian public service is an enormous asset to the country, which we take for granted, totally take for granted. As I mentioned, the U.S. system hadn't yet come to an equilibrium because they hadn't approved the director of the FBI at the moment when you need them! We had that. And the professionalism and the non-partisan nature of the federal public service is a huge asset to the country. And people know their job, they have been in the system by and large for a long time, or for a period, they've learned what their jobs are and they know what to do. So, I think we are served very well by our Canadian public service. Can it be improved? Of course! There are always going to be opportunities to make it better. But by and large, we're starting from a high-level.
Taki Sarantakis: Mel Cappe, retired clerk of the Privy Council, secretary to Cabinet, and amongst other things, senior deputy minister in a plethora of departments. Thank you for taking the time today to talk to us about a big crisis in Canadian history, and not only how we dealt with it, but maybe how… any lessons we can take away going forward from it. Thank you so much.
Mel Cappe: Terrific. Thank you.
[00:33:04 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]
[00:33:10 The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
