The Functional Government Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

It's easy to criticize government, but making public services functional is hard. Nobody set out to build cumbersome, confusing processes. Bureaucracy happened for what were, at the time, good reasons. But they became gradually, inexorably complex. Why haven't other countries fallen into this trap? To help me understand how we got here—and how to move forward—I sit down with Ryan Androsoff. His Think Digital podcast has chronicled Canada's service modernization for years. 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. 

Your host, Alistair Croll kicks off what promises to be a deep dive into the rabbit hole of government inefficiency in the hopes of getting to the bottom of how we can make Canadian government functional again.

There's no government service that touches every citizen the way taxes do. Every April, millions of Canadians lose a weekend preparing their taxes, often with the help of paid software tools. Yet elsewhere in the world, there's no tax season—or you simply approve the pre-filled return the government sends you.

There are plenty of reasons why it is this way. Taxes are the easiest way for the government to turn policy into outcomes through credits and fees. The tax code is complex, and confederation means citizens file taxes with the province and the nation. And for many independent-minded Canadians, telling the government what you earn, rather than having it tell you, is a rebuke of tyranny. But the current tax system is also broken. It's not just expensive and time-consuming: The CBC estimates that because of a difficult filing system, between $1.3 and $1.6B of the most vulnerable Canadians don't claim the benefits to which they're entitled. And it's the one part of government where, if you're accused of breaking the law, you're presumed guilty and must pay to defend yourself.

The Federal government has tried to fix this on multiple occasions. It's even built free-to-file software tools. But none of them has seen the light of day. Since taxation is such a broad, ubiquitous topic, it's going to take more than one episode to understand the issues, so we started by inviting Alexandra MacEachern and Paul Craig to discuss their work trying to tackle these problems from within government.

After learning about Canada's attempts to modernize the tax system, it was time to see how the rest of the world does it. In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Fabrizio Santoro, an expert on taxation who helps countries around the world design and implement taxation. We dive into a number of countries' systems, including Uganda's complete overhaul of registration, data collection, and filing. The conclusion? Nobody would do it the way Canada does.

You can learn more about Fabrizio’s work at: https://www.ids.ac.uk/