Matt Gurney: We should do something about Canada's paperwork problem
I want to live in a country where noting areas where improvement is possible is taken as helpful feedback, not something akin to sedition.
By: Matt Gurney
My colleague Jen Gerson has been on a tear lately, writing about weighty, important issues of major public concern. It’s a bit heavy, though, and we’ve had enough heavy with the election having so recently consumed our lives. I do have a heavy column to write, and I’ll be inflicting it on all of you shortly, but I want to slow it down a bit first. We’ve all earned a break.
So let me tell you a little story about one of those rare but delightful opportunities to conduct an actual A-B test of how your government performs compared to others when providing a comparable service. Life recently handed me one of those on a platter. And friends, it did not go well for the Canadians.
Or, specifically, the Ontarians.
Over the last month and a bit, I’ve been working on gathering some essential personal documents. So have members of my extended family. The goal is to get organized packages of all that we’ll need for immigration/passport purposes, validating our identity for business transactions, and, ultimately and sadly, for managing estates when our time inevitably comes. I’m still reasonably young and healthy, and all my elder relatives seem in good health, too, but as the years go on, you hear more and more horror stories of someone dropping suddenly, leaving their loved ones with not only the emotional trauma and loss, but a hell of a lot of paperwork. It’s an awful insult added to injury, and though I obviously wish to stick around for many more decades, I don’t like the idea of leaving a burden. Having all my key documents gathered in one secure place is a gift to my future survivors.
You’re welcome, kids.
My documents are pretty straightforward, to be honest, and that’s true of most members of my family. There’s just one small wrinkle. One of my parents, though Canadian born and a Canadian citizen and a lifelong Canadian resident (with no plans to leave!), is technically a dual citizen from birth. And gathering all of their documents therefore required us to deal with a foreign government — specifically, His Majesty’s British government.
Last month, I sat down to spend a few hours ordering a bunch of these documents. One I needed for myself was my long-form birth certificate — I have a short-form that shows my birth details, but not one that shows my parents’ details. And as the helpful son and nephew that I aspire to be, I also had volunteered to order one of those long-form certificates for my British-born grandfather. He was born 98 years ago, and died 15 years ago. I figured this was going to be a hassle, but was relieved that at least getting my own Ontario birth certificate would be a breeze.
Well. A funny thing happened.
Both documents could be ordered online. The process for both was basically the same. I had to provide the key identifying particulars for both applications, details about the mother, whatever was known about the time and place of birth, and, if possible, other corroborating info. I ordered both documents on the same day — April 2nd. The British offered me the choice of paying a few extra pounds for expedited service; I happily did so. That wasn’t an option with Ontario, but I assumed it would still come out a wash. There was no way it was going to take the Ontario government longer to send a living Ontarian’s birth record from an office in Ontario to his home in Ontario than the British would need to send a dead man’s birth record from almost a century ago to someone across the Atlantic Ocean.
Right?
Wrong.
I got confirmation from the British the next day that they’d found my grandfather’s documents. They arrived in my mailbox four days after that. So that’s five days total — not business days, just days. I ordered my grandfather’s documents on Wednesday the 2nd. I had them in hand on Monday the 7th.
Ontario, for its part, was quick to confirm … that they’d received my order. An online tracking number was provided so I could check in on the progress. And for a month, every few days, I’d do exactly that. And the info never changed: they were still processing my order and I should check back in a few business days. So I would. And nothing would have changed.
Until it did. On Monday May 12th, just a few days ago, the online tracker informed me the documents had been located and would arrive soon. And they did! That afternoon, in fact. So either Ontario has a teleporter or the online tracker was lagging behind the actual status — there’s no way they were able to print the document and mail it to me in just a few hours.
Final score? The British could send a dead man’s papers across the ocean in five days. Ontario needed five weeks to send me my own documents from Ontario to Ontario.
Is this the most important issue plaguing the world or country right now? No. I want a break from writing about those things. I suspect readers may enjoy one, too.
But this isn’t a totally frivolous issue, either. It fits a broader pattern of Canadian governments being bad at basic service delivery. The federal government has been struggling for years: passports, payroll, long-gun registries — tracking any personal information in a database is a weird weakness for Ottawa. Ontario, in my experience, has actually improved in recent years. Most of my interactions with Service Ontario for basic paperwork have been, if you can believe it, good and entirely satisfactory. But I’ve had bizarre billing issues with OHIP that required shockingly high levels of intervention to fix. I don’t even want to open the box of despair that are all my paperwork requests with the city of Toronto. Abandon all hope, ye who need a permit.
The big problem here, as I see it, isn’t just the irritation and aggravation of waiting for paperwork, or living in a country that is habitually bad at basic service delivery and tracking things in databases (recall how bad our statistics were during COVID — not our deaths and illnesses, but literally our statistics tracking those). The big problem is that Canadians seem to tolerate and normalize lousy service delivery. I know for a fact that the A-B example I posted above, wherein the British absolutely kicked Ontario’s ass, is going to be reflexively dismissed by some depressingly large portion of the readership. They’ll wonder why anyone would bother caring about such a little thing in a country and a province that gets so much else right. There’s also a decent chance that I’ll get told some version of what I’m often told when I ever dare note that there are things Canada could do better: I can leave if I hate it so much here.
That’s true! I can. But I don’t want to. I just want to live in a country that is as good at basic service delivery, whether it’s birth records or medical specialist appointments, as many of our comparable peer countries. I want to live in a country where noting areas where improvement is possible and warranted is taken as helpful feedback worth considering, not something akin to sedition. I want to live in a country where the public writ large, when shown an example of a Canadian state capacity failure, immediately defaults to thinking “We should correct that so that our lives will be slightly better” instead of “My national pride compels me to downplay this issue because to admit to any failure risks collapsing my fragile sense of self.”
Right now, I don’t live in that country. I’d like to! And I think a lot of you would, too. Can we try?
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To deliver on big things you need to be able to deliver on small things. Big projects are made up of many smaller projects and tasks. To ignore an inability to deliver on basic or small things explains much of why big projects don’t meet their goals or happen at all. Maybe it’s time we need to focus on basic competencies so we have the expertise that will allow the big things (infrastructure, military procurement, etc.) to get done.
Having worked in both Fed and a Prov govts as a worker and as a director, it is very clear to me that the unions in their attempts to protect workers have facilitated incompetence and some of that is of a serious nature. The unions facilitate a lower level of discipline, attention to detail, timeliness and so many other aspects for which folks in the near past would have been fired or at least told off. I suspect there are other nations like this where the purpose of govt unions is to protect their clients often at the expense of those who workers are meant to serve. That is, the public. It has been so widely incorporated for such a long period of time, I have no idea how one would adjust this mentality as any attempt is met with severe resistance including from the media.