The wisdom to know the difference

Alberta's Fouad Jallouli on dragging title transfer into the digital age.In Alberta, $340 million in real estate every day moves through a system that, until recently, was built on paper, fax machines, and processes so old that some of them weren’t even documented anymore. When COVID hit, the province’s land titles system collapsed. By December 2022, a straightforward title transfer that should have taken a week was taking 84 days. Surveys took nearly three months. Sales couldn’t close. Developers couldn’t get financing.Half a trillion dollars in private property was stuck.The fix is a $60 million effort to replace decades-old infrastructure with the Alberta Registries for Land Online (ARLO). Fouad Jallouli leads service design for the Government of Alberta—a team of over 75 designers working to make government services actually work for citizens. In this conversation, he walks us through how his team maps out a system so complex that parts of it exist only in the heads of the people who’ve done it for decades; how they decide what to fix first; and how technology can help—but only if you start with the human experience.

Regulations.gov is a public feedback platform where citizens can comment on how laws affect them. It's democracy in action. But it's also drinking from a firehose, which Aaron Meyers was asked to fix.In the US, there’s a platform for public comment. Canada has one too: the Canada Gazette, “the official newspaper of the Government of Canada.” These platforms are how the government tells citizens how laws are turning into regulations. But they’re also online, which means they’re a target for special-interest groups, automated campaigns, and even impersonation.Comments aren’t votes. But that hasn’t stopped visible, coordinated feedback to controversial regulations from overwhelming the system. Aaron Meyers was part of a team brought in to modernize the feedback platform—and then told he couldn’t touch the data, or the process, since both were protected under the statutes.So the team had to get creative. In this episode, we learn how Aaron hardened a system that’s been online for decades, and what it might mean for Canada’s recently-online equivalent service.

There are hundreds of different ways to log into the government of Canada. A citizen has to use different systems for benefits claims, taxes, passport renewal, business registration, title transfer, and so on. How can it be so hard to just have one login we use to interact with government?Turns out, very hard. Canada's tried to fix this. There's even a system called GCKey that works across 30 departments, but the CRA—arguably the most important department for citizens—refuses to use it. We planned to roll out "Sign-In Canada" in the fall of 2019; it's now late 2025 and we're still waiting, and the closest thing we have to single-sign-on depends on our banking system (and almost 5% of Canadian households don't have bank accounts.)Elsewhere in the world, things are far better. Singapore's SingPass processes 41M transactions monthly across thousands of services and is estimated to save businesses $50 per customer onboarding. Estonian citizens save days a year through digital signatures. Canada's Auditor General says Canada has "no funding" for a national digital identity approach—but 2% of GDP, which is what Estonia claims it saves, would be around $45 Billion a year.Our guest on this episode is Tim Bouma, who worked for decades on digital identity within the government of Canada. He's the perfect person to untangle this complex issue and explain why we haven't been able to give Canadians a simple way to access all of their government services in one place.

When Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy ran for office, one of his campaign promises was "a simple government app." In 2019, the country launched a really simple first app: your driver's license and registration on your smartphone. At the time, Ukranian citizens had dozens of different versions of the same information scattered across many departments. But Diia, as the new app was called, served as a simple front end: It talked to all the departments for you, knew which to use for what data, and assembled all of this information in one place on your phone.When Russia invaded Ukraine, Diia became more than a convenience. It was a crucial part of the country's national security infrastructure. It authenticated citizens reporting spies and saboteurs, and even delivered radio and TV programming when attackers took over regular broadcast networks. Six years in, Diia isn't just a source of national pride—it's become a technology the country is actively exporting to other nations who want to modernize government themselves. We caught up with Tania Vakhrycheva, who was the lead for the DIA e-services team, to hear about this project straight from the source.

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.

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!

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 ! 

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.

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.

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..