Transcript
Transcript: Navigating Strategic Policy Decisions
[00:00:01 Text appears onscreen: "Navigating Strategic Policy Decisions – With Jennifer Miller, Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet, Privy Council Office"]
[00:00:09 Jennifer Miller appears onscreen.]
Jennifer Miller: My name is Jennifer Miller, and I'm the Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet for Social Development Policy at the Privy Council Office.
[00:00:15 Text appears onscreen: "What are some of the key elements of decision making in the Government of Canada?"]
I think the key elements of decision making in the Government of Canada can be broken down into two categories, basically. You have your formal decision-making moments, and that's things like requesting the minister's signature on a formal briefing note, maybe decisions around what happens in the budget, or decisions of Cabinet around memoranda to Cabinet.
And then there's the informal decision making, and that's the part that I think is equally interesting – I was going to say more, but I think it's… I think it's equally interesting. The informal decision making is everything, every time you have the opportunity to have influence on the way conversation unfolds, and that's really how I think of it in the policy process.
The policy process is a conversation. It's a conversation between, if you're in a policy leadership position, perhaps between you and your DG, or you and your ADM, you and your deputy minister. It could be with the minister and the minister's office. And sometimes the conversation is external as well. So you, as a representative of the Government of Canada externally to Canadians or to stakeholders. And I think the magic in the decision-making process is when you find ways to bridge the two, the informal part and the formal part.
So how do you, you know, take every moment of influence that you've had or you've experienced in the informal part, kind of the constant briefings, the exchanges of stakeholders, and really use that to inform the advice you provide in the moment on the formal transactions? I think it's equally important to remember that policy, whatever your role is in the policy process, whether you're a policy analyst, whether you're in a policy leadership position, you have equal opportunities to have influence. Your job may be different, but the ultimate goal that you're trying to achieve is the same.
So, when I think about files where I might not be the lead, I'm still thinking about, well, which of my colleagues do I need to talk to? How do I share what I've learned? How do I express the opinion that I have? And I think it's the same thing whether you're an analyst or whether you're a director, a manager, or a deputy minister, you're trying to put all of those opinions and pieces of research together in a way that helps influence the outcome of the file you're working on.
[00:02:31 Text appears onscreen: "How does the Government's policy agenda get articulated and communicated with the public service?"]
The government's policy agenda is, I think, one of those things that sometimes needs a bit of demystifying, right? Because there's policy… there's a lot of different kinds of policy. There's policy with a capital P, which might be something that Treasury Board releases or it might be a formal statement of the government in a budget or in the context of an economic update, something like that. And then there's a policy that gets articulated in a lot of… a lot of less formal ways.
So sometimes, the way that a minister chooses to express themselves repeatedly, it gives you a sense of what… how they express their policy direction, how they express their North Star. It could be the way that the government answers questions in the House of Commons or at parliamentary committees. All of these things kind of give you a sense of the way that the government is articulating what it wants to accomplish, and the types of things that are important to them.
[00:03:33 Text appears onscreen: "What are the key elements of the Government of Canada's decision-making process that policy analysts need to understand and navigate?"]
I'm going to talk about two examples, kind of one at either end of the spectrum. So I think when it comes to decision-making moments that you need to pay attention to, the first of them, I would say as an analyst, is pay attention to the decisions that you are making every day. Because I bet you find that 90% of the decisions that you encounter in a day, you make by yourself. So, how to respond to someone in a meeting, how to respond to an email, what words you're going to choose in a briefing note, every one of those choices contributes to government policy. And it's so important to remember that because I think that's what makes every one of our jobs really meaningful, no matter what kind of job you have.
The second is on the opposite end of the spectrum, and I'd say probably the Cabinet decision-making process is another one that's really important to kind of get a handle on. It can be tough because obviously, in order for Cabinet to be able to have frank discussions, Cabinet discussions are protected and you can't wander in as an analyst to kind of find out what's going on.
I think the biggest thing that I learned when I first started supporting Cabinet as an analyst at the Privy Council Office was when you go through the effort to create an MC, to do the perfect cabinet deck, and then you wonder what happens, like how do they discuss it? And I think the most important thing that I took away from that experience was Cabinet is a group of elected officials, elected by Canadians, all with different backgrounds, different experiences, different levels of expertise on different topics. And they are brought together by the Prime Minister in various configurations to consider important questions because of who they are and because of their points of view.
So when you watch a Cabinet discussion, I think you need to remember that these are all people applying that expertise to the information that you, as an analyst, provide. And that's why it's critically important that the information be thorough, that the information be correct, that the information really express your best advice on the options that your minister is presenting, because that's the information that the government uses to make decisions.
And so, at the end of the day, the two kind of processes, I think are the same, whether you're making your own decision as an analyst or whether you're supporting Cabinet, it really comes down to the quality and the excellence of the advice that you are providing in any given moment, because that's really what makes the government run.
[00:05:59 Text appears onscreen: "What concrete advice would you offer to aspiring policy leaders hoping to increase their awareness of what drives their work?"]
I would say the number one piece of advice I would have for an analyst is be curious. Be curious about your file, be curious about who you're dealing with, how their minds work, what you can do to support their decision making, influence their decisions, help them understand a topic. Really pay attention to all of that and think about it, because that's what allows you to bring your own personal expertise to the work.
I think at the end of the day, having a really excellent policy function in a team or in a department, it really depends on people who are committed to their files, on people who are committed to working together as a team. It's a key part of values and ethics, too, right? Like I think when we talk about values and ethics, a lot of times people think about how do you stop people from doing something wrong? And I think that's part of it, right, is knowing what's right and what's wrong, and knowing how to distinguish between the two.
But I think a large part of it for me is about the commitment to excellence and the respect for democracy, right, which only gets expressed if I'm ready to do my best job every single day. And you only get there by practicing, right, and you only get there with the help of your colleagues and ideally, your bosses and the people who support you, to help you know when that's happening. Right? In policy, it can be really hard to tell because a lot of people say there's no such thing as a bad idea. I think sometimes that's true, sometimes that's not!
But I think policy is always a team sport, right, and no one person's idea is going to be good enough on their own; you have to work with others and you have to be, I think, really committed to bringing forward that best advice with other people in order to actually express that part of values and ethics. You can't be excellent by yourself in the Public Service, you have to be excellent together. And for policy, it's really, really critical.
