You can’t have an innovative economy without an innnovative government.

So says Senator Colin Deacon, in this wide-ranging conversation about entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and public sector modernization.

In Canada, there are 134 ways to apply for federal grants and loans.

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.