Interchange Canada And Embedded Corruption
Interchange Canada is a little-known program in which corporations embed employees in the federal government while they stay on their sponsor’s payroll. There is precious little public information about who has participated in this program whose very existence raises serious ethical questions.
The government is updating and renaming Interchange Canada under pressure from a group known as Build Canada. The program’s soon-to-be new name? “Build Canada Exchange,” an unsubtle nod to the corporate group that suggested it. Natasha Bulowski at Canada’s National Observer is raising an alarm that should not be ignored. The change is mentioned in a single paragraph on page 219 of the federal budget:
Attracting Private Sector Expertise to the Public Service
There is a need to bring in talent and perspectives from outside the government into the public service at speed and scale. To this end, the government is announcing that the Interchange Canada program will be rebranded as the Build Canada Exchange, with an ambitious, immediate-term goal of integrating 50 external leaders in technology, finance, science, and other sectors into the public service.
The idea of embedding corporate leaders in the structures of government to “transfer knowledge and expertise” is not a net advantage for the country; it enables legalised corruption of the highest order. Nobody pays to insert their people into the public service’s decision-making structures out of the kindness of their heart.
If those people have something to offer the government, they should apply to work in the civil service and work without any actual or perceived conflict of interest.
And conflict of interest in a program like this is abundant as it is obvious.
Normally, a corporation wanting access to government officials would have to lobby them. Doing so legally, should any single employee spend more than 20% of their professional time on the task, involves the lobbyist registry and disclosure of who in the government was contacted, when, how, and very broadly what topics were discussed. There are almost 7,500 people legally registered to lobby the federal government today, with over 5,000 instances of registered lobbying taking place in the past 30 days alone.
That corporations already engage with the government on that scale should, in its own right, be a bit of a shock. Even the most well-meaning progressive government will break when overwhelmed with that much corporate lobbying activity, particularly since the general public’s only paid lobbyists are the 343 Members of Parliament we elect, most of whom don’t even realise that that is their role, and almost all of which spend a lot of time dealing with those same lobbyists. Part of the problem is that a significant portion of them know that the easiest way to make a living after leaving office is to become a lobbyist, resulting in a revolving door between politicians and the lobbying industry.
As far as attention space, the subset of the 343 MPs who genuinely understand their role in defending the public interest cannot compete with 7,500 professionals telling the government’s senior bureaucracy and the rest of the designated public office holders what to think and how to interpret or adjust policy in favour of particular corporations and organisations. The lobbyist register seeks to maintain at least a modicum of transparency and integrity to a system that does not inherently have much of either.
So with Interchange Canada, when corporations can simply insert their people into the highest levels of the federal government, what few safeguards there are against the impact of corporate lobbying are completely defeated. Members of the public service who are employed through Interchange and are paid by, and therefore answerable to, the corporations that sent them not only have direct access to the senior public service (and the government’s vast databases), that is explicitly why they are there to begin with — with the blessing and invitation of the government.
While the government wants outside advice on difficult questions around artificial intelligence, for example, bringing in corporate shills from the AI world to participate in the development of a national strategy directly within our government’s structure is probably not wise, unless the objective is to build government policy around private AI dependence rather than careful scrutiny and regulation. The direction that such corporate shills guide the government toward can only ever be accessed through Access to Information requests and, at that, only if they were in writing. They are being expressly invited to perform the act of lobbying without accountability, from within government itself.
Interchange Canada first came to my attention when I was in office, with its flaws presented to me by a former public servant who wanted me to be aware of the program. I had not heard of it to that point. The allegation was that, especially in the information technology space, corporations were creating shell companies which sponsored Interchange positions in the federal government in the procurement space, whose job it was to guide the government’s procurement toward the original corporation, with the shell company being used to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest. I tried probing internally and could never find proof of any such scheme, or for that matter much information at all about who was doing what within the program, but it is certainly plausible.
Renaming the program to the Build Canada Exchange when Build Canada itself is a corporate think-tank is to roll over in defeat straight out of the gate. Build Canada’s website lists the objectives clearly — and it is exactly what is in the budget:
Prime Minister Mark Carney has asserted that “We are at the start of an industrial transformation, a transformation of this economy”, calling it “the biggest transformation since the end of the Second World War.”1
To navigate this moment of crisis, Canadian corporate leaders, start-ups, scale-ups and large firms must do their part. By leveraging the structure of the existing Interchange Canada program, the government can seek out private sector perspectives and expertise and the private sector can loan their best technical talent and share cutting edge knowledge and approaches.
This collaboration will help improve the governments’ technical capabilities to accelerate AI adoption, strengthen defense capabilities, improve strategic procurement, negotiate optimal trade agreements and more. Canada is fortunate to already have a highly skilled public service; strengthening links with the private sector will further enrich and enhance its efforts.
Target: Within 60 days deploy 50 senior technical leaders from Canadian private sector companies into key public sector roles. Plan to scale the program to 500 depending on the initial results.
They do not need to have official roles and responsibilities within government to have this influence or participate in the dialog around improving our technical capabilities, unless their objective is to extract as much as to contribute. They are free to do so through the existing lobbying structure and registering their efforts, or by simply holding these policy discussions in public.
In these tech corporations wanting to get inside the machinery of government with virtually no accountability or records, one has to ask what is in it for them?
I might suggest we all take a step back and remember the American experiment with Elon Musk’s rapid takeover of government databases, systems, and funding programs under the “Department of Government Efficiency” that compromised US data security and ultimately saved the government nothing whatsoever. This is the most blatant, grotesque example, but is precisely what programs like Interchange Canada enable, if rather more subtly, regardless of whatever good intentions brought it into being.