You’re gonna need a bigger boat
Patrick Pichette was appointed CEO of Digital Transformation Canada. ‘Recruiting the former CFO of Google takes a page out of what has become the Sabia/Carney playbook when confronted with public service leadership that has been judged not up to snuff in priority files: when in doubt, bring in a private sector heavyweight with a proven record to get the job done,’ writes Ken Polk. / LINKEDIN PHOTO
Once upon a time, I was a public service communications executive.
When members of my teams were preparing to join a project requiring cross-departmental or cross-government coordination, I tried to prepare them for the challenges ahead by asking them to imagine what it would be like to move their bodies if their arms and legs had separate brains.
As you might expect, this didn’t exactly make me an ambassador for departmental collaboration. But I felt I had a duty to my teams to manage their expectations and cover their backs. I felt this was especially prudent for government communications teams because, as I have written before, they are usually the last to be invited to hop on the “project bus” and the first to be thrown under it if things go wrong.
Which brings us to the Prime Minister’s announcement this week of Digital Transformation Canada (DTC).
Let me begin by noting that the announcement marks the untimely and evidently unlamented demise of the Office of Digital Transformation (ODT), which was announced with the 2025 budget. Of course, the fact that very little work had been done to constitute the ODT prior to this week’s announcement means that, as a practical matter, it never really existed in the first place.
At heart, the decision to launch DTC amounts to an admission by Privy Council Clerk Michael Sabia to the Prime Minister that fixing federal digital service delivery means: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
Imagine 30 ministers of finance
As has been said about many other forms of government activity gone wrong, calling the way the Government of Canada manages digital services disorganized suggests that it was ever organized in the first place.
While, from the perspective of 2026, it is self-evident that the advent of the internet was a world-changing moment, that was not the case in the 1990s, when it first broke. That was a time of primitive dial-up connections and time-consuming data downloads, seemingly one pixel at a time. Back then, it was such a low priority that the federal government decided to leave what we now call digital service delivery to individual departments to manage and to spend the funds allocated by successive governments as they saw best.
What made sense then seems ridiculous now. But there it is. And this inherently balkanized foundation remains in place to this day, despite numerous well-intentioned attempts to bring order from chaos. Imagine that the 30 or so major federal departments each had their own Minister of Finance, and you get an idea of the granite roadblocks that have hampered federal digital policymaking and implementation.
This is not meant to be an indictment of the thousands of civil servants who work at the digital coal face, so to speak. Indeed, the extent to which the federal government’s digital presence has been modernized in recent years is thanks to the imagination, persistence, and patience of working-level staff, managers, and executives who simply refused to give up.
But the sheer herculean effort required to get everyone moving in the same direction has always been the problem. For example, it took until 2013 to finalize Canada.ca, the first true digital “front door” through which Canadians could access government services without first navigating a departmental website. And the first formal Treasury Board Secretariat guidance to departments on digital service design and delivery was not delivered until 2014.
In a space that puts a premium on ability and nimbleness, such triumphs of the will over inertia should be the exception, not the rule.
Another vote of ‘no confidence’ in the public service
Judging by what we know so far about DTC, it will for sure be a bigger boat. According to the Prime Minister’s news release, “it will bring together Shared Services Canada and selected functions from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Public Services and Procurement Canada, and Employment and Social Development Canada – specifically the Canadian Digital Service.”
And its mandate is comprehensive, encompassing everything from scaling solutions across government, equipping public servants with more modern, secure tools, and harnessing digital procurement to help Canadian digital companies test and scale their operations.
As an administrative concept, this is all to the good and long overdue. I have often expressed cynicism about such governmental re-wiring. But at least this reorganization makes sense.
But underlying the move to DTC is Sabia's stinging vote of “no confidence” in the public service's senior digital leadership. He gave them a year to establish the ODT, and little was accomplished beyond the budget announcement itself.
True, you could argue that the very idea of the ODT was always doomed to failure because it lacked the authorities needed to have any hope of succeeding. For that, the Clerk must take some responsibility. But you could also argue that the ODT represented a “last chance” for the public service to get digital service right.
There is no clearer sign that the latter is the case than in the naming of Patrick Pichette as the DTC’s chief executive officer. Recruiting the former CFO of Google takes a page out of what has become the Sabia/Carney playbook when confronted with public service leadership that has been judged not up to snuff in priority files: when in doubt, bring in a private sector heavyweight with a proven record to get the job done.
The news release also fired a warning shot across the bow of digital service managers further down the chain of command by adding that the DTC “will also establish a fellowship model to bring specialized private-sector expertise into government [to help] build the public service's own technical capacity, commercial expertise, and ability to evaluate, procure, and deploy new technologies responsibly.”
A more comprehensive indictment is hard to imagine.
Of course, the creation of the DTC will be welcome news to civil servants who have been held back for too long under an utterly outdated service model.
Those feeling threatened by this news should reflect on this well-known corporate saying: “If you hate change, you’re going to love irrelevance.”
