Transcript
Transcript: Deputy Minister Leadership Reflections Series: Daniel Quan-Watson
[00:00:03 The Deputy Minister/President's Office is shown.]
[00:00:11 Text appears onscreen that reads "Deputy Minister Leadership Reflections with Daniel Quan-Watson".]
[00:00:14 Daniel Quan-Watson sits down in a chair.]
[00:00:21 Text appears onscreen that reads "Daniel Quan-Watson is a proud public servant, passionate about the role public institutions play in shaping Canada and the lives of Canadians. He recently retired as Deputy Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, a position he held since October 2018."]
[00:00:30 Text appears onscreen that reads "Much of his career has focused on work with Indigenous Peoples and issues. He played a key role in the negotiation of modern treaties, specific claims and many other agreements and processes. He has worked with First Nations, Inuit and Métis governments, and communities and entities in every jurisdiction across Canada."]
[00:00:44 Text appears onscreen that reads "Where were you born?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: I was born in Regina, Saskatchewan.
[00:00:53 Text appears onscreen that reads "What did you want to be when you grow up?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: A soldier was the first thing I wanted to be. And then when I learned about airplanes, I wanted to be a pilot. And then when I learned how much lawyers made when I was about eight years old, or at least thought that, then I wanted to be a lawyer.
[00:01:13 Text appears onscreen that reads "Where did you go to university?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: I started university, an undergrad at the University of Western Ontario, and then finished undergrad at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and then went on to grad school at Laval University, and then later, while working, did further graduate studies at the University of Regina.
[00:01:36 Text appears onscreen that reads "What did you study?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: I studied French history and literature, and then later, political science. And what I found interesting over the years were the number of federal deputy ministers who had studied literature. And I often used to get comments about, well, how does that prepare you for learning to be a federal deputy minister? And my thought was always that literature is the study, as is history, of human existence. And I've always said that in the public service, we're in the people business. And the more you understand of the human experience, especially the human experience, over time, the better you're able to actually think through what's needed today.
[00:02:25 Text appears onscreen that reads "What was your fist job in the Government of Canada?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: Well, let me tell you about the first job that I didn't take, and where it happened, because I like to tell this story. The very first federal job offer I got was as a summer student at Parks Canada, working on the canals in Smiths Falls, Ontario. And the way I like to tell this story is I wanted a different type of experience, so I declined that. And then they came back and offered me CEO of Parks Canada, so I accepted. It's a true story. I just neglect the 32 or three years in between those two events.
[00:03:04 Text appears onscreen that reads "Daniel Quan-Watson was Chief Executive Officer of Parks Canada from 2015 to 2018."]
But Parks Canada was paying the princely sum of $8.39 an hour at the time, which was almost triple minimum wage. But I ended up working for the Ontario Public Service in what was then known as the Rideau Regional Center in Smiths Falls, Ontario. And as much as I loved my time at Parks Canada, 30 some odd years later, I'm really glad that I took that job with the Ontario Public Service because I learned some really important things about the very powerful ways in which governments can damage people, and families and communities. And if I hadn't had that experience, seeing firsthand some of the issues that came from government decisions about when it thought it knew better for families what to do with their children, I'm not sure that I would have been as well prepared later in life for a number of the things that I later took on. But the very first job that I did take was as a student placement officer of the Canada Employment Centre for Students in Vancouver, in 1985.
[00:04:14 Text appears onscreen that reads "When did you move to Ottawa?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: It was 2001 when I arrived in Ottawa. It was around September 5, 2001, and I was starting out at my new office, in my new role with the Department of Justice, after travelling from Yellowknife, where I worked with Aboriginal and Northern Affairs, as it was at the time. And I arrived just six days before the events of 9/11, as we call it, in 2001.
[00:04:49 Text appears onscreen that reads "The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on September 11, 2001."]
And it was quite a transition. I imagined I would spend the rest of my career here because I had become the director general.
[00:05:01 Text appears onscreen that reads "He was Director General in the Aboriginal Justice Directorate at Justice Canada from 2001 to 2003."]
I was with the Department of Justice and thought my future positions would all be in Ottawa. I spent two and a half years here at the time, then I had another position, still with the federal government but in Saskatchewan, at that point. But that was the first time I lived in the National Capital Region. I returned a few years later, but the first time was with the Department of Justice.
[00:05:29 Text appears onscreen that reads "How did you become an executive?"]
[00:05:36 Text appears onscreen that reads "He was Director for Implementation and Settlement Legislation in the former Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs for the Government of British Columbia from 1994 to 1999."]
Daniel Quan-Watson: I was working for the Government of British Columbia at the time and it was the period where I had spent an enormous amount of time away from home working on a particularly significant project. And I decided that I needed to reinvent myself. And I asked myself a question: Do I think I can reinvent myself where I was at the time, or do I need to start somewhere new to do that? And so, I saw, very unusually, an executive position offered with what was then known as Indian Affairs and Northern Development in Yellowknife. I'd always wanted to live north of 60. I had been working in Indigenous issues with the Government of British Columbia and it was an excellent opportunity. And so, I applied. It took forever and a day. I assumed that they had just moved on and gone on without me. And so, one day when I got a call from Micheline Thibault (ph) from the Public Service Commission, asking if I was still interested, and my thought was, I'll do this job for minimum wage if it gets me to stay home. And so, I ended up getting hired. My family and I moved up to Yellowknife.
[00:06:51 Text appears onscreen that reads "In 1999, Daniel became Director of Aboriginal and Territorial Relations at the former Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, a position he held until 2001."]
We had an absolutely fantastic time. It was an enormous privilege to live north of 60 and in the territories. Made friendships that I still have to this day and have a perspective on this country that I would never otherwise have had if I hadn't had that opportunity to live in the Northwest Territories.
[00:07:12 Text appears onscreen that reads "How did you become an assistant deputy minister?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: Becoming an ADM was very nerve wracking in many ways, but perhaps not for the ways that you might have imagined.
And I had a fairly large mental hurdle to overcome, partly because at the time—and not just at that time—assistant deputy ministers were seen almost as superhuman, and I was very conscious of the fact that I was simply human, a mere mortal. But I read the posting, I talked to my friends, I talked to colleagues, and I said, "Well look, I think I meet the criteria.
[00:08:02 Text appears onscreen that reads "He worked as Senior Policy Advisor in the Department of Education for Training and Employment at the Government of Saskatchewan from 1990 to 1993. In 1993, he was promoted to Director of Policy and Research."]
I've lived in Saskatchewan before; I've worked for the Government of Saskatchewan. I have all the connections. Considering what they're looking for there, it seems I fit the bill."
[00:08:13 Text appears onscreen that reads "And then in 1994, he became a Special Advisor for Aboriginal and Intergovernmental Affairs for the Government of Saskatchewan."]
And this is one of those cases where the math doesn't add up, where two plus two doesn't equal four. Yes, I have this, yes, I have that, yes, that's what they're asking for, but no, I can't possibly be qualified for this position. So I submitted my application. I was fully prepared to receive more calls from Micheline Thibault (ph) from the Public Service Commission or someone else saying, can you imagine, Daniel, we're just going to remove your application so that no one makes fun of you because you're really not the person we're expecting to see in such a competition. Far from it, I was granted an interview. Far from it, they went on to check my references, and even farther from it still, I was offered the job.
[00:09:00 Text appears onscreen that reads "In 2003, Daniel was appointed Deputy Minister for the Saskatchewan Region of Western Economic Diversification, a position he held until 2006."]
I was 38 at the time, which was very young to be an assistant deputy minister.
[00:09:09 Text appears onscreen that reads "He was then promoted to Senior Assistant Deputy Minister for Policy and Strategic Direction at Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, a position he held until 2009."]
And we had these analyses that we did over time, which presented assistant deputy ministers by age group, and the vast majority were between 50 and 55. There were quite a few from 55 to 60. There weren't many between 45 and 49. There were one or two who were between 40 and 44, and there was only one under 40, which was me. So I asked them to make the list on the last day I was 39 years old. I kept that, because there is only one assistant deputy minister who was under 40, and that was me. But that was how I applied; I simply submitted my application and then continued through the process. But it was after having been in an excellent program offered by the school, I should note, the Accelerated Executive Development Program.
[00:10:11 Text appears onscreen that reads "How does one become a deputy minister?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: It's one of the great mysteries. And I've been able to watch it from both sides of the fence now, and it is a very interesting process. So, I was selected to be on something called the Advanced Leadership Program, and it was a program that was taking a bunch of ADMs who have been recognized as being particularly promising, and it added a series of learnings to them to help them make them better leaders. I got this strange call one day to go and meet this person, Patricia Hassard. No idea who she was. Apparently worked somewhere at PCO, and when I asked people, they said they're the people who choose the deputies. And so, I was immediately very nervous. It was a conversation that really knocked me off my socks and sent me for a loop because they said, "Listen, we do a mapping here of who might be able to fill what types of positions. And we need to be very clear with you here. We're not offering anything. This may never come to anything at all, but we just want to be able to fill in some blanks."
And then, nothing happened. I was completely fine with that. Until one morning I realized that at 5:16 a.m. an invitation came in to meet the Associate Clerk at the time. And so, I was in touch with my deputy and I said, "What role is this new Associate Clerk taking on?" He said, "Well, very much the same one as the previous one, one of which is personnel." And I said, "Well, I've got a meeting that I have been called to and it looks like it's just me." And he said, "Well, there's a good chance that they're going to ask if you want to take on a role in the deputy community." And so, I went and sat down and felt very much like I was in the principal's office, and sat, and wait, and went in, started having this very pleasant conversation about nothing in particular. And then, she said to me, "So, I suppose you're wondering why you're here." And inside I was thinking, "Yeah, kind of." And I think I came out with something less obvious than that in my response.
[00:12:50 Text appears onscreen that reads "He became Associate Deputy Minister at Western Economic Diversification in 2009. Later that year, he was promoted to Deputy Minister."]
But I was asked if I would be prepared to become an Associate Deputy Minister had Western Economic Diversification. And so, at one level it came entirely out of the blue.
[00:12:58 Text appears onscreen that reads "From 2012 to 2015, he was the Chief Human Resources Officer at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat."]
At another level, there were signals and signs along the way that it might be possible.
[00:13:06 Text appears onscreen that reads "He then was Chief Executive Officer of Parks Canada from 2015 to 2018, which led to his most recent role as Deputy Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada."]
But it is a very opaque process and I think anybody that is thinking about whether or not they're going to be in the deputy community, you'll never know until you're asked. You can't apply somewhere. There's no sort of leaderboard which you're getting X number of points and you can now see that you're in the top three or something like that. It is very much a mystery.
[00:13:35 Text appears onscreen that reads ""COSO" stands for "Committee of Senior Officials", which is the senior talent management table for the Clerk of the Privy Council and Senior Deputy Ministers."]
What I will say, having sat on COSO and having seen an awful lot of people get appointed over the years, I can say this: An enormous amount of thought goes into it, an enormous amount of watching the community of assistant deputy ministers, an enormous amount of conversation about, from a lot of very dedicated people. It's never just sort of a spur of the moment decision that some clerk takes at the last minute based on who they had lunch with or something like that. It is about many years of having watched somebody's performance. It's about many conversations about what the community needs, and it's probably about a whole host of other things that I haven't been a part of. But having watched that from both sides for many years, I can tell you that it's not something that ever happens lightly.
[00:14:29 Text appears onscreen that reads "What did you learn working in the Government of Canada?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: I think anybody in the public service, in any leadership position learns about scale. It is the single most powerful institution in the country. It touches more Canadians' lives than any other institution in the country. By the time somebody gets to work on Monday morning at 8:30 a.m., they've had more contact with the federal public service than any other institution is going to have with them for the rest of the month. And when you understand the importance of scale, and the significance of scale and what it takes to manage scale, I think that's a set of learnings that you get in the federal government, but you just won't get anywhere else at all. Another thing that I learned is how tenuous societies are. And we think of institutions as being powerful, and they are, and we think of the government that we have, and we assume that these things are stable, and that they'll last and they will simply go on. But I had an opportunity to visit an awful lot of countries around the world that used to have stable societies, that used to have stable institutions, that stopped being so stable or that were extraordinarily difficult to maintain. I think we have this sense of comfort when we look at big institutions that are stable, assuming that very little could possibly go wrong. But I think if you occupy any leadership position, particularly in the federal public service, you come to understand at different points in time, the genius and the extraordinary outcomes that come from so many people for so many generations working so hard to instill not just the institutions, but to instill values in those institutions. So, it's one thing to simply rely on institutions. It's another thing to learn what it takes to keep them going the way you want them to go.
[00:16:42 Text appears onscreen that reads "What does leadership mean to you?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: Leadership is the ability to get people to do the things that they need to do when they might not otherwise do them, might not otherwise do them because they don't want to, they might not otherwise do them because they don't know how to do them, they might not otherwise do them because they don't have the tools or resources to do them. And leadership to me is filling in the gaps of those things. You'd see filling in of the gap about, "What is it that we're trying to do again here?" It's the filling in of the gap, "Why is it that we want to do that?" It's the filling in of the gap, "But I don't know if I can do that." And I think if you can start answering questions like those, and those are some of the most important ones, and people understand, okay, I understand why we're doing this. In some way, it's important. Might not even agree with it, but I understand why it's important. I understand what we're doing, I understand what we're supposed to get here, and okay, I didn't think I could do this, but now that I look around and now that we've had this conversation, okay, I'm going to be able to do it. To me, that's leadership. I also think that leadership is helping people believe in themselves in a different way.
[00:18:04 Text appears onscreen that reads "What challenges did you face as a deputy minister?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: I mentioned earlier that I always felt a bit of an outsider to begin with, having joined the federal public service from the outside, having done it as I became an executive and then having done my first ADM job as a, in a region in Saskatchewan in particular. And so, it was a relatively short time after that that I got named Associate Deputy Minister and then Deputy Minister in quick succession, a long time ago. I remember Munir Sheikh was the Chief Statistician of Canada at that point in time, and he was the only other deputy minister of colour at the time. And any time you're the only person who represents sort of a segment of Canadian society in an otherwise large and established group, it makes it more difficult to have certain conversations than if you have other people who have shared experience and background. But what I find extraordinary now, leaving the public service, is the group of people that I can call together who have very similar experiences, who come from a really broad range of backgrounds. And that is probably the most profound change that I have seen in the public service. We have a different range of views and perspectives in that deputy minister room when we're having those conversations than we did before. And to be better connected to Canada and Canadians, to better understand Canada and Canadians, and to better know what they need and is important to them, means we're better public servants. And that to me has made one of the biggest differences that I've seen.
[00:20:01 Text appears onscreen that reads "What has changed about Canada's relationship with First Nations?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: So, I'm like an awful lot of Canadians of my generation. If you looked at my primary school, if you looked at my secondary school, if you looked at my undergraduate, if you looked at my graduate studies, you wouldn't find a total of 15 minutes of education on Indigenous in that entire time frame. And of that 15 minutes, if it's that, not one second of it would have been taught from an Indigenous perspective. And so, I started my career like just about every other Canadian would have started their career when I started, and in fact much later as well, with no knowledge of Indigenous issues at all, nothing. And so, Indigenous issues were nowhere on my radar when I started my career. And in fact I got involved because I was working in a provincial department of education when it became clear that the human rights act recently passed in the province was going to stop the process that the province used, without exception, that simply denied to every single status Indian in the province, student financial assistance. It simply said, if you are a status Indian, we do not care if you live off reserve, we do not care if you pay the same taxes as everybody else, we do not care what your circumstance are, we do not care where you're going to school, we'll give your neighbour student financial assistance, but not you, period. And this is during my career. And so, when they asked for somebody to look at the impacts on that, I was 26, 27 years old, and I thought, "This doesn't seem right." So, I put up my hand when nobody else would and I took a look at it and I was disturbed deeply by what I found. If you look at the work that the Government of Canada did on land claims up until the beginning of my career, I'm not taking any credit for this, but just the confluence of time, there are no such things as Indigenous governments. Because at that point in time, the idea that Indigenous people could have a government was almost literally a laughable idea in the minds of so much of provincial governments and the federal government. They could have settlement corporations.
So, if you look at the treaties up until 1998, they have settlement corporations, sort of like a bowling club in terms of things that are being established under societies acts and the rest. But 50 cottages, of course, could have a local hamlet, a government, but not 6000 Indigenous people running schools, and hospitals and whatever else. They had to have settlement corporations. And if you look at what we did in the federal government in the 1990s, we made a massive shift and we got to a point where we recognize that we needed to get beyond the idea of simple land claims. And so, we had a policy that actually recognized governments, and I got to be part of the process that recognized the first First Nation government, properly and formally stated in the Nisga'a Final Agreement, when I worked for the province of British Columbia, and then got to work on other agreements since then, since I've been here. We have changed in some other important ways too. When we made that massive shift, we more or less made that massive shift without a single Indigenous person in the public service making any of those key decisions. There were a couple of Indigenous people in senior roles, but very, very, very few, and we didn't feel the need particularly to go out and talk to Indigenous people about that. In fact, we were of the view, often, that in order to be objective we had to stay far away from anything that they might have that might sully our otherwise unbiased decision making of what was good for them.
And so, even in that first generation of negotiations on that front, we made sure that we went into the room as unsullied as possible by anything that they had to tell us about what might actually help. We are in a world today where we use a process called co-development, and while co-development is very different and we're still getting comfortable with it, it starts with the fundamentals that we use everywhere else in the public service. We don't go regulate the railroads without ever having talked to the railroads. We don't change EI policy and surprise people at 9 a.m. one morning and say that EI is fundamentally changed. Of course, we didn't talk to you about it because that would have biased us in our decision making. No, we engaged with people deeply and in advance. And we're still getting used to that in the federal public service in 2023, 2024, and we're getting better at it. But it is an enormous difference when it used to be a badge of honour for us that we had done objective work without people interfering in our objective thinking away from the fray, and so when we entered the room with federal positions, that we could be clear that somehow or other they were very unbiased.
[00:25:48 Text appears onscreen that reads "What is the hardest thing you've ever done in the Government of Canada?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: I think one of the hardest things that I ever did was help Canada respond to the discovery of the human remains in Kamloops.
[00:26:07 Text appears onscreen that reads "On May 27 2021, the Tkʼemlúps te Secwepemc announced the finding of over 200 potential unmarked graves of Indigenous children at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School."]
And that was very hard because of the enormity of the situation, the enormity of the pain, the enormity of the desire to do something in response.
[00:26:18 Text appears onscreen that reads "A month later, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced an estimated 751 unmarked graves at the former Marieval Indian Residential School."]
[00:26:25 Text appears onscreen that reads "Since then, countless Indigenous communities across the country have undertaken their own searches and made similar findings of potential unmarked burial sites."]
But the forgetting that it was the federal government's fault that those children were there. And when I say our fault, we had settled claims that said we are the ones who took those children away, we are the ones who didn't actually protect children throughout that system as we should, we are the ones who had a duty of better care. That was what the entire settlement was about and that that had an impact on how we responded. But what we needed to remember is that the presence of those children there was the result of that exact set of sentiments, where people thought they were doing best, where people thought in government that we see a problem, we think we know what that problem is, and we think we have that solution and we don't need to ask you about what that is. We'll just go and do it. And to try and stop an entire system from doing the very natural human thing of saying, "Well, then we need to go in and do X, Y, Z," was something that was very, very, very difficult because it risked being seen as being uncaring, it risks being seen as an obstacle to process. If you look at what was going on in the media at the time, there were demands to do a whole range of things. But what was not present was a clear and considered path by an awful lot of those communities that were reeling in ways that none of the rest of us can really understand, because it wasn't in our backyards, it wasn't our children, it wasn't our losses that had taken those children out of our families, and put them there and then not told people.
I would say as a deputy, though, one of the most difficult things is when you realize that you have given your minister advice that has turned out very poorly. And it might have been the best available advice at the time, but going into a minister to report that the advice that you personally gave as a deputy minister has failed spectacularly. And a couple of times where it happened to me, it was a panel of judges that wrote down all the very specific reasons that they thought that the advice that I had given was spectacularly bad, and they sort of struck it down. And I think taking ownership of your failures, taking ownership of the things that you were pretty sure, or very certain were the right things to do, that imploded spectacularly. And sometimes, you may be convinced that they imploded for all the wrong reasons, but the fact is they imploded and you put your minister in that difficult position. That is very difficult because you still have an obligation. Like, part of you just want to run and hide, part of you wants to just rail and scream about how they made the wrong decision. But what you have to do is you have to get back up on your feet, you have to take ownership of your failure there, and you have to assess whether or not your minister is going to continue trusting you, and you have to make sure that you continue to earn and re-earn that trust as well you can, and you know that you are behind on that. You're starting from a deficit position. It's no fun. It's messy, it is something that I wouldn't particularly care to go through again. But I also think you understand too, as a deputy minister, that if you're going to occupy those positions, you're going to be there some day and you better be ready for it. And the most important thing, I think, is integrity. It's owning up to the fact that even if you thought you were right, you were in fact wrong and that there is no trying to explain it away. You need to own it and then you need to step forward, not as if it didn't happen, but you need to step forward and start re-earning trust from that moment on.
[00:31:05 Text appears onscreen that reads "What advice would you give to a junior public servant just starting out their career?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: If anybody tells you that you can plan your career out to the end, walk away from the conversation. If you had told me at the beginning when I was a PM-01 in the downtown east side of Vancouver, that I was going to finish my career as a PM-03, I would have thought, "Okay, you know, that's just the way it is and let's have a great time doing it." And I would have. If you had told me that I'd make a director one day, I wouldn't have believed you. If you had talked to me about being a director general, I would have walked away and not listened to anything else. And if you had said I was going to be an ADM or a deputy, I probably would have wondered what you had had for lunch. But a lot of that came from taking on the unexpected, just being in a position where there was something interesting that came up, and followed it, and just taking it where it went, not because I thought it was going to lead to some promotion or whatever else, because it was inherently interesting work. I think if you follow the work that is interesting, that is different, that other people aren't necessarily trying to do, you will by definition have a very successful career. Whether or not you get a promotion out of it, I don't know.
But to me, a successful career was doing something that was interesting, being able to have an impact on that thing. It wasn't about getting a promotion or not. I don't think there's a single point in time where I actively went out and looked for a promotion for the sake of a promotion. I'll be very clear. I was always interested if you wanted to pay me more money to show up for work from Monday to Friday, probably Monday to Sunday. But in any event, I was always prepared to have a raise. Don't get me wrong. I always liked the challenge of having more responsibilities. But that was never the reason that I did anything. And I think if you follow an approach like that and don't get caught up in classifications, don't get caught up on promotions, that can be a positive thing. I just want to add a piece of that. That's not to say that they're unimportant, promotions. And if you notice other people are getting promotions for doing the same types of things, yes, you should be paying attention to that, but it should never be the driver. Never take something simply because it is a promotion. Take something because it's a useful way to contribute, because it's interesting and because you can have an impact on it.
[00:33:41 Text appears onscreen that reads "Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?"]
Daniel Quan-Watson: It goes by quickly. I remember that these people, then I was starting out, I was 23, 24, they were in their 50's, late 50's, 60's, and they said, "You'll be surprised at how quickly it goes." And naively, I thought to myself, "You know, what do these people know about this? All they did was actually do what they're talking about." And enjoy it. Enjoy the hard parts. I come back to the hard parts of my career much more than I come back to the happy parts when I'm trying to figure out what to do. Any given day in the last five years of my career, when I'm trying to figure out how to solve something I don't know how to solve, I can tell you, I'm thinking back to the hard parts. It wouldn't be a career of doing anything worth doing if there weren't some really difficult moments in it. The federal public service, at the end, sees all of Canada's most difficult issues in some way, shape or form. And if you want to be a part of that public service, you're going to be a part of those biggest problems and challenges that Canada has at some point in time. And embrace that, because there isn't a plan B somewhere out there in Canada that says, "Well, if the federal public service gets this wrong, fortunately, we have this plan B to pick things up." We're it. And there are lots of other contributors or lots of other institutions in the country that do wonderful things. There's no other institution that does what the federal public service does.
[00:35:30 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]
[00:35:36 The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
