The government already knows plenty about you, and much of that information is outdated or wrong.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.

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 !

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!

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 hopeful that modernization is coming.

Atoms are not bits.

Bits are free to create and destroy. You can make perfect copies of them. You can transmit them instantaneously. We take these things for granted in the modern world, but their impact is astonishing: they make things like the undo button and real-time collaboration possible.

Many government leaders still treat bits like atoms, and their modernization initiatives fail as a result.

Let’s look at just two of the ways that digital services made from bits are different: software is separate from hardware; and software can be constantly updated.

Software is separate from hardware

A Canadian citizen has to log into different portals for tax, benefits, passports, grants, and dozens of other government services (largely due to the Privacy Act of 1983 that prohibits departments from sharing data—which is why you need to update your address in dozens of places if you move.)

But if you think a citizen has it bad, spare a moment for government employees. In one department, an inspector needs to log into 20 different tools to do their job. That’s because when the government built these 20 systems, each tool was monolithic. That meant 20 separate computers, 20 separate operating systems, 20 different applications, and 20 different logins.

30 years ago, if you were packing for a trip, you might bring a camera, a flashlight, an alarm clock, a map, a walkman, a GPS, a voice recorder, a measuring tape, a wallet, some envelopes and stamps, and a calendar.

Today, you pack your phone.

This is the magic of digital: The separation of hardware from software lets one system (your smartphone) perform many functions.

It’s more than just convenience, however. These functions build atop one another: Your phone lets a map and GPS work together, so you know where you are. Your camera and email work together, so you can send your friend a photo. Your alarm clock and calendar work together so you don’t miss a meeting.

The separation of hardware and software reduces the complexity of the systems and increases convenience but also makes new things possible.

Imagine going on vacation with ten phones: One takes photos; one has a GPS; one has a calendar; and so on. That seems absurd, but thanks to how government procurement works, it’s the reality for many public servants. The government tends to buy whole, turnkey systems rather than extending existing ones, which makes their tools complex, inconvenient, and limiting.

Software can be constantly updated

If you’re building a bridge, it’s hard to deliver half a product. You have to finish the whole thing before it’s useful. That means defining the entire bridge up front, testing and validating the engineering, hiring the construction team, buying the materials, diverting traffic, and spending years building it. This is known as waterfall project management: Each step logically flows into the next, like a series of waterfalls.

This model makes sense when there’s no useful partially-built version. It also works when there’s no way to update what you’re building: If you launch a ship, you can’t really update the hull once it’s afloat. Atoms are hard to change once they’re in place.

Bits, on the other hand, are easy to alter. As I write this, Google Maps is at version 25.46.1.8304747750. That means there have been 25 major releases on the iPhone alone.

The first version of Google Maps was simply a draggable map. It was already useful. Since that time, Google has added navigation, street view, favorites, congestion reporting, and hundreds of other features.

There’s another important lesson here: humility. Google couldn’t anticipate that we’d have easy access to satellites on our phones, or that it would have a fleet of cars able to photograph every street. If you can’t be sure what the future holds, the best strategy is to learn by doing.

Bridge and ship builders don’t have this luxury: they can’t afford to get it wrong, so they have long, cautious, safety-laden plans and extensive testing. But because bits are easy to change, software is built iteratively. It gets updated. In software, we learn by doing.

This also means that the updates are never done: Google will constantly be updating Maps. Unlike a bridge or a battleship, there won’t be a day when the engineers and builders end their work.

Now imagine you’re trying to convince the public that they should support a project. “We don’t know what it will be like when we’re done and it will never actually be finished,” is a horrible pitch for any politician. Citizens want predictability and closure, not constant learning and adjustment.

Yet that’s the reality of software, and the government modernization initiatives that do work recognize it. They deliver the smallest possible valuable thing (something startups call the Minimum Viable Product) and then learn from it. Leaders need to have the courage to explain this to voters, and then quickly deliver results.

Software can adapt to you

A paper form must contain every possible answer. That’s why a tax document or passport application says things like, “to be completed if you were born in Canada” and “if Yes, go to section 5.”

It’s impossible to rewrite a paper form as a user is filling it out. But doing that with an online form is trivial. This means less wasted time, fewer errors, and a simpler process. That’s why Lisa Fast made getting the form right a priority when her team tried to modernize passports in 2013.

Done right, this means everyone gets a government app that’s tailored to their specific circumstances: a grant application that tells you what grants to apply for; a license renewal that describes what documents you need;

Digital government is a new way of working

Digital systems aren’t replacing atoms with bits—they’re changing how they work because atoms aren’t bits.

• They’re less complicated, because they can perform many functions (like your phone) instead of requiring separate systems for everything.

• They’re more convenient. Just as Google Maps can remember your address, and Uber Eats can remember your favorite foods, a digital system can store information so you don’t have to enter it every time, and guide you through a process that’s tailored to you.

• Perhaps most importantly, they make new things possible. Ukraine’s digital government app became an important national security took in the face of Russian aggression; Estonian businesses save several days a year because the country’s services are online; a UK citizen living abroad can verify their identity by touching their phone to the biometric chip in their passport.

If you want to understand how digital changes the world, consider how people meet their partners today: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1908630116 or that the average human born in 2000 will spend 17 years of their lives in a world of bits, not atoms.

Despite this, most government leaders treat digital projects and physical projects the same way. We build software the way we build bridges: everything defined up front, budgets set, schedules and deadlines promised. No software company would ever build this way, and yet it’s how government builds software.

Building software is a well-understood skill. There are plenty of proven techniques for delivering small, iterative improvements quickly and learning as you go. There are hundreds of books on Lean Startup, Agile project management, continuous deployment, and more.

Digital approaches mean different things matter more:

• A desire to learn instead of a comprehensive plan.

• Humble curiosity rather than expert confidence.

• Defining the smallest, simplest new thing you can deliver instead of shipping the final projects.

• Measuring what you’ve improved instead of the total cost.

• Making cheap prototypes you can throw away instead of worrying about mistakes from the start.

• Describing the budget as “what it will cost to understand” rather than “how much it will cost to build.”

This thinking has yet to truly find their way into government. From budgeting to procurement to management to delivery, we don’t know how to think digitally. Across all the conversations I’ve had in the last decade, this is the consistent, central truth: Atoms aren’t bits, and until our leaders understand the difference, modernization will fail.

Joel Burke, who is currently an advisor to the US Senate on AI policy, worked on Estonia’s “digital resident” program. He lived in Taalin, Estonia’s capital, and on his return, wrote Rebooting a Nation, a book that chronicles the country’s journey from breakaway Soviet republic to digital pioneer.

If you work in public sector modernization, you’ve probably heard of Estonia’s digital services. Citizens can perform everything online, from changing addresses and paying taxes to getting married and getting permits. Data is centralized—but in a good way, where the citizen can see what the government knows, and who’s looking at it.

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.

For the final episode of 2025, we turn towards the iconic example of digital services: Estonia.

The form.

It’s where most mistakes are made, and the thing that consumes the most time. There are so many ways to get it wrong: Different people need to complete different parts of the form depending on where they were born, where they live, whether their last name has changed, and more.

If you want to build an online passport system, you need people to fill out the form correctly. It’s not the exciting part. It’s not a website. It’s not code. But it’s absolutely, definitely, the biggest obstacle to streamlining an application process.

So a decade ago, a small team tackled the boring, essential part of the process. For six months, they tweaked an online form every week, testing it on citizens until nearly everyone could complete it correctly.

And then the whole thing got shut down.

In the third part of our series on Canada’s passport modernization story, we talked with Lisa Fast, a designer who specializes in human-computer interaction. She was there for the whole thing, and her story is as inspiring as it is frustrating.

If you want to understand service delivery, passports are the perfect case study. They’re complex, self-contained, fundamental to national security, and packed with sensitive information.

Honestly, after completing these three episodes, I feel like every public servant and every elected leader needs to invest the time to watch them back-to-back, to make sure we learn how we can do better:

• Part 1: The problem with passports.

• Part 2: How Ireland reformed passport applications, with John Savage.

• Part 3: Canada tried to fix passports a decade ago, with Lisa Fast.

You see, Ireland was once plagued by a slow, bureaucratic passport system. Everything was physical, and if you wanted to travel, you had to stand in queues that sometimes wrapped around the block. To make the queueing fair, the government gave out numbers on a first-come, first-served basis that reserved your place in line.

Entrepreneurial Dubliners saw their chance, and would arrive early at the offices, grabbing low numbers for the queue. Then they’d sell these to people who arrived later, letting them skip the line.

Today, those jobs are gone. Thanks to a successful modernization effort, Ireland now has one of the best passport systems in the world. Renewals for adults and children can be completed entirely online; even first-time passport applicants can enlist the local police department to testify to their identity.

This took a lot of work. A reform team began with the lineups, replacing them with online reservation systems that freed up passport workers to reduce the huge backlog. Then they worked with policymakers and designers to build a renewal process that leverages biometrics and smartphones to make the whole process easier.

Contrast that with Canada: While Ireland launched online renewals in 2017, Canada is rolling out a trial in 2025 for a limited number of applicants—and when you use the online renewal, your old passport stops working. We’re on the right track, but we have a lot of work left to do. (If you haven’t already, you should watch this earlier episode on Canadian passports first; it’s short, and will give you a lot of context.)

To continue our deep dive into the passport service, we caught up with John Savage, who is a Professor of Practice at the University of Limerick and one of the people who brought Ireland’s passports into the Internet age.

What began as a hall pass from the Governor General asking politely for countries to let Canadians visit has become an instrument of national security. Modern technology is powerful: the phone in our pocket includes biometrics, fingerprinting, a depth-sensing camera, GPS, passkeys, an on-chip vault, PKI, and any number of other security features to prove who we are.

The passport is long overdue for an update. Canada’s rolling out online renewals in 2025—eight years after the UK launched their online renewals. Meanwhile, we’re still relying on a couple of photos signed by people who’ve known you.

Passports are a perfect window into how governments are modernizing digital services. They’re time-sensitive, contain personal information, have serious security requirements, and touch almost every Canadian. So today we’re kicking off the first of three episodes that dive deep into the history and modernization of passports.

This episode took a lot of work. It’s pretty short, hopefully entertaining, and a big departure from the usual back-and-forth conversations. We’d love to know what you think.

They aren’t connected.

Instead of entering your information once and seeing what you qualify for, you have to try them all, like whack-a-mole.

If you don’t qualify for one, you have no idea why another might be perfect. And the service you’re using won’t suggest what else might work for you.

Using a service like this isn’t easy, either: the Federal government has 270 separate online services, which you sign into with 60 unique usernames and passwords you have to keep track of, administered by 33 federal departments.

There are so many different logins, there’s a page to list them all (which was created to nudge the government into streamlining logins—but just became a lookup page for frustrated citizens. We’ll be interviewing its creator soon.)

When we decided to launch this podcast, there was one person we knew we needed to speak with. He’s an independent Senator from Nova Scotia. When he was appointed, he was given a simple mandate: Challenge government. He’s a sensible, plainspoken, advocate for simplifying the government. He has a background as an entrepreneur, and a good understanding of technology. He’s driven by data, and he’s not afraid to ask questions—often publicly.

This is the first of two conversations with Senator Colin Deacon, recorded months before the current administration proposed an infrastructure-heavy budget and started enlisting Canadian tech giants to fix broken systems. We figured we’d start by discussing how to (gently) break our own rules to fix the dysfunctional systems they’ve created.

Launched in 2017, this nonprofit works alongside government to build better services. They’ve done this with over 50 governments at various levels, so I wanted to learn more from CEO Dorothy Eng about the structural and cultural challenges that stop government from delivering.

Despite antiquated systems, “that’s not how we do it” attitudes, and the challenges of hiring and retaining talent, Dorothy still believes that we can have nice things. All it takes is political will, an understanding of technology, and senior managers who take the risk of doing things differently.

Learn more about Code for Canada on their website.

(You can listen on all major podcast platforms using the links at the top of this page.)

Alexandra chimed in with her own take on the issue once the podcast launched:

So I chatted with Dr. Fabrizio Santoro, an economist who’s the research lead for the Institute of Development Studies’ DPI and Tax Research Programme. He’s literally the person countries call to understand how to build tax systems that work. What I learned was as frustrating as it was surprising: Canada (and the US) are the exception.

Here’s the second part of our dive into personal tax filing. You can learn more about Fabrizio’s work at:

https://www.ids.ac.uk/

(You can listen on all major podcast platforms using the links at the top of this page.)

We sat down with two people who’ve tried to fix it, in the first of two episodes about income tax and modernization. If you’re one of millions of Canadians who wastes a weekend doing their taxes—and pays a private company for the privilege of doing so—you’ll want to hear this.

Thanks to Alex and Paul for their candor and work trying to fix this. Stay tuned for our next update, when we learn how other countries handle this.

A founding member of the Canadian Digital Service and graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School, Ryan knows that building functional government is hard, not because of technology, but because of the structures and incentives in the public sector.

While we’ve had a hard time finding folks in Canada willing (or able) to speak about the state of services here at home, recent news about tax modernization from the current administration made us realize it was time to share what we have.

Here’s a brief explanation of why we’re doing this, and what we hope to cover this season—shot at the last minute in Berlin!

We’re starting work on a podcast called Functional Government. It explores what it takes to build efficient, effective, digital-first governments—and what it costs us when we don’t.