The Functional Government Podcast

Embrase Business Consulting Inc.

Government doesn’t have to suck.Most Canadians have no idea how the rest of the world interacts with government. So we decided to find out. Join us as we learn why so many government services are slow, outdated, or just plain broken—and then travel the world talking to countries have made them awesome. Let’s make government functional again In a modern society, citizens use digital technology to complete everyday tasks like paying taxes, renewing passports, and claiming benefits. This is called Digital Government. In 2010, Canada was building these services pretty well—in fact, the U.N. ranked us third in the world. But in fifteen years, we’ve fallen to number 47. The Canadian Federal government alone has over 270 different digital services. You need 60 different usernames and passwords to access them all. There are more than 130 ways to claim benefits and grants, but none of them are connected. We sign into government services with banks, and send information to foreign-owned companies to file our taxes. Canada’s digital government is way behind. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Around the world, governments are letting citizens do things online quickly, easily, and securely. Join host Alistair Croll as he learns why building modern digital services is hard, how other countries have solved these problems, and what it will take to make Canada functional again.

  1. 2D AGO

    Digital ID, single-sign-on, and what government knows about you

    Digital ID is a spicy topic. Some view it as a slippery slope to the surveillance state, invoking images of Big Brother. Others claim that digital identity will magically unlock government services. The truth, as is often the case, is more nuanced. The government already knows plenty about you, and much of that information is outdated or wrong. Signing into government services is inconsistent and messy. And finding out what data the government has is complex, time-consuming, and often impossible. There are ancient laws that prevent us from fixing this—some created long before the Internet existed and we had apps on our phones. Some departments, consultants, and even political parties actively want to preserve those laws, and spread plenty of misinformation to keep things complicated. Meanwhile, countries that streamline digital ID and single-sign-on reap huge benefits: 1-2% of GDP, and days of bureaucracy saved by citizens. Ukraine tackled this problem and fixed it during a war. But getting this right in Canada continues to elude us. We like spicy. We’ve talked to dozens of countries about how they tackled these issues, and what they learned. Whether you think digital ID is the worst idea in the world, or long overdue, you'll want to listen to this.

    11 min

  2. APR 27

    Quand la paperasse fait craquer le système

    On tient parfois le transport pour acquis. Quand on peut toucher un écran et recevoir, une semaine plus tard, un produit venant de l’autre bout du monde, c’est facile d’oublier l’incroyable logistique qui se trouve entre les deux. Transports Canada est au cœur du transport aérien, terrestre et maritime, et bon nombre de ses services permettent à ces livraisons de continuer à circuler.   L’une des responsabilités de Transports Canada est d’assurer la sécurité et la sûreté maritimes, ce qui comprend notamment l’immatriculation des embarcations, la certification des gens de mer et les examens médicaux pour les personnes qui passeront des mois en mer. Plusieurs de ces services sont assortis de frais et, depuis 2017, tout ministère fédéral qui exige des frais doit en rembourser une partie s’il ne respecte pas les délais de service.  On pourrait croire que lorsqu’une telle loi est adoptée, le gouvernement mettrait aussi en place les outils numériques nécessaires à son application. Mais ces deux éléments sont rarement synchronisés : la législation et sa mise en œuvre évoluent séparément. Il revient donc à chaque ministère d’interpréter la loi et de mettre en place ses propres processus.  (Dans un monde idéal, les lois et le code nécessaire à leur application seraient développés en parallèle. Cela favoriserait une bien plus grande réutilisation et modularité dans les applications gouvernementales — et ça amènerait peut-être aussi les législateurs à constater que certaines politiques ne sont tout simplement pas applicables telles quelles.)   Transports Canada a conçu son propre système de suivi des frais, désormais connecté à l’application de gestion de la charge de travail développée sous le leadership de Lucie Bergeron de sécurité et sûreté maritimes. Cette réussite repose en partie sur l’approche en trois phases qu’elle a mise en place pour moderniser les services maritimes et, surtout, sur sa capacité à mobiliser une équipe multidisciplinaire — incluant des spécialistes de la gestion du changement — pour concrétiser cette transformation.  Aussi, comme le Canada a deux langues officielles et que le français est la langue maternelle de Lucie, Alistair et Lucie ont enregistré cette entrevue deux fois — avec de légères différences — une en français et une en anglais !

    55 min

  3. APR 27

    When the paperwork breaks down the building

    We sometimes take transportation for granted. When you can tap a screen and have something from around the world show up a week later, it’s easy to overlook the incredible stack of logistics that’s in the middle. Transport Canada is at the center of air, land, and sea travel, and many of its services keep those deliveries coming. One of the tasks that Transport Canada handles is marine safety and security, which includes things like boat registration, seafarer certification, and health checks for people who will be at sea for months. Many of those services are fee-based, and as of 2017, any government department that charges a fee must refund a portion of it if it doesn’t deliver on time. You’d think that when such a law is passed, the government would also release the digital tools to implement it. But those two things are seldom in lock-step: legislation and the implementation are separate beasts, so it’s left to each department to interpret the law and implement its own processes. (In a better world, laws and the code to implement them would happen simultaneously. This would lead to much more re-use and modularity in government applications—but also to lawmakers realizing that many of their policies simply aren’t implementable as written.) Transport Canada designed its own fee-tracking system, which is now connected to the workload management application built under Lucie Bergeron's leadership in Marine Safety and Security. This worked, in part, because she fostered a three-phase approach to modernizing marine services and, more importantly, led a multidisciplinary team, including change managers, to make the transition happen. Also, since Canada has two official languages and Lucie’s native tongue is French, Alistair and Lucie recorded this interview twice—so they’re slightly different—once in French and once in English!

    46 min

  4. APR 13

    The wisdom to know the difference

    Michael Wernick worked as a public servant for decades. His career culminated in a term as the Clerk of the Privvy Council—the most senior public servant in Canada. But before that, he had a front-row seat to Canada’s constitutional negotiations, and the crisis that almost tore the country apart. So when he says you have to accept what won’t change, and work with what will, he speaks from experience. We’ve long wanted to talk with Michael about his time in office, and now that he’s retired—and writing about governing the nation—he’s able to speak more freely about the challenges to modernization. It’s a candid conversation on why change is hard, some of the misconceptions people have about the Federal government, and why he’s hopefuly that modernization is coming.

    51 min

  5. 12/22/2025

    Is it Canada's Estonia moment?

    If you spend more than five minutes talking to governments about modernization, someone will inevitably mention Estonia. The country's vast sprawl and relatively small population made it a natural fit for digital government, because it was prohibitively expensive to deliver services to tiny towns and far-off citizens. Now you can complete virtually any government task, from paying taxes to registering a business to filing for divorce, via an app or a website. Estonians trust their government's services, and the country estimates that it saves 2% of GDP every year because of them. Ironically, this happened because of a lack of trust. When Estonia declared independence from Russia, there was a deep-seated mistrust of bureaucracy and the public sector. Estonians demanded transparency, and built for it from the outset. By law, every time the government interacts with a citizen's data, the citizen sees that interaction in their government app. Every politician's spending—down to the hotel they stayed in last night—is visible to anyone. Joel Burke has lived in Estonia, working on some of their government services. And he wrote a book about the country's remarkable rise. We talked with Joel about what Estonia built, how it got there, and the benefits it reaps as one of the world's leading digital governments.

    44 min

  6. 12/15/2025

    Canada tried to fix passports a decade ago. Here's what happened.

    Canada's been trying to fix the passport system for a long time. Back in 2013, a small team of designers, developers, and policy experts got together to modernize the application process. They took a lean, iterative approach, focusing on the simplest fixes to the biggest problems first. This meant addressing boring things that offered huge improvements: they spent six months tweaking and testing the application form—which is where most applicants got stuck. And then the government shut down the program, and rolled it into IRCC's massive Global Case Management System, where it ran into multi-year delays and huge budget overruns. If you wonder why Canadians can't have good government services, Lisa Fast is the right person to ask. A career designer with a degree in computer psychology, she explains how the initiative launched, what it got right, and why short, iterative test-and-learn approaches trigger the immune system of big government..

    46 min

  7. 12/08/2025

    How Ireland reformed passport applications

    A decade ago, Ireland's passport service was in the same place as Canada: long queues, paper processes, and spiking delays. And then they decided to fix it. The country started small: a reservation tool to book time in the office freed up workers, letting them tackle the backlog. Then online renewals for adults, then children. Eventually, online applications with your identity certified by your local police station. It wasn't easy. It took political support, a willingness to experiment, careful design—and a willingness to rewrite outdated laws for the modern world. In the second of our series on passport modernization, we talk to Professor of Practice at the University of Limerick, John Savage, who worked on the modernization effort, to find out how it happened—and what Canada can learn about modernizing every government service.

    42 min

  8. 11/24/2025

    The problem with passports

    Before 1970, if you asked for a passport, the government just believed you. But after 9/11, Passport Canada—a small, self-funding department that printed little blue booklets—found itself at the forefront of international security. After multiple failed attempts at modernization, and two entirely predictable backlogs that delayed hundreds of thousands of passports, Canada is finally launching a limited trial of online passport renewals. Passports are a perfect lens through which to analyze a country's digital readiness: 70% of Canadians has one, they involve security and personal information, and we can analyze their cost and delivery cleanly. To kick off our three-part series on passport modernization, we dive into the tangled history of Passport Canada, and what it says about our country's ability to deliver modern government services.

    10 min
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About

Government doesn’t have to suck.Most Canadians have no idea how the rest of the world interacts with government. So we decided to find out. Join us as we learn why so many government services are slow, outdated, or just plain broken—and then travel the world talking to countries have made them awesome. Let’s make government functional again In a modern society, citizens use digital technology to complete everyday tasks like paying taxes, renewing passports, and claiming benefits. This is called Digital Government. In 2010, Canada was building these services pretty well—in fact, the U.N. ranked us third in the world. But in fifteen years, we’ve fallen to number 47. The Canadian Federal government alone has over 270 different digital services. You need 60 different usernames and passwords to access them all. There are more than 130 ways to claim benefits and grants, but none of them are connected. We sign into government services with banks, and send information to foreign-owned companies to file our taxes. Canada’s digital government is way behind. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Around the world, governments are letting citizens do things online quickly, easily, and securely. Join host Alistair Croll as he learns why building modern digital services is hard, how other countries have solved these problems, and what it will take to make Canada functional again.

Information

  • Creator
    Embrase Business Consulting Inc.
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    14
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Functional Government Podcast
  • Show Website
    The Functional Government Podcast

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