Transcript
Transcript: Reflections by David Eaves
Narration: Public servants, thought leaders and experts from across Canada are reflecting on the ideas shaping public service – leadership, policy, governance, innovation and beyond.
[00:00:10 The words "Leadership", "Policy", "Governance", and "Innovation" appear on the screen in sequence, followed by the words "Review and Reflection".]
[00:00:20 The logo of the Canada School of Public Service is shown.]
This is the Review and Reflection Series produced by the Canada School of Public Service.
[00:00:25 David Eaves is shown sitting in a chair.]
Taki Sarantakis (Canada School of Public Service): David Eaves, welcome.
David Eaves (Public Policy Entrepreneur | Open Government Advocate | Associate Professor of Digital Government, University College London): Thank you for having me.
Taki Sarantakis: So, we're here, we're going to talk a little bit about digital, we're going to talk a little bit about technology, we're going to talk a lot about government. But before we get into that, where were you born?
[00:00:45 An image of Vancouver is shown.]
David Eaves: In Vancouver, British Columbia.
Taki Sarantakis: So, you're a Canuck.
David Eaves: I am.
Taki Sarantakis: And somehow, some way you ended up… we're going to fast forward to Harvard. You ended up at Harvard. How did you do that?
[00:00:55 An image of Harvard University is shown.]
David Eaves: In fact, I always tell my students, actually, I started writing about… so, my best friend from college got hired by Mozilla to be the UX lead for Firefox.
Taki Sarantakis: Mozilla. Tell our younger audience members what Mozilla is.
[00:01:10 The Mozilla Firefox logo is shown next to the text: "Credit: © Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla Public License Version 1.1, via Wikimedia Commons".]
David Eaves: These are the people who make the Firefox web browser, which is an open source web browser, which was really designed to prevent Microsoft from cornering the market on web browsers and then owning then web standards, and it's an open source project so lots of people contribute, some who work for the foundation and company and some who are just volunteers. And he was like, "Everybody's fighting." And I had a negotiation background, so I was like, this is a big negotiation problem. So, I started to work with him. And so, one thing I observed was public servants and open source software developers are really interesting. They're both creating what are effectively public goods, like the code for an open source project is not owned by anyone. It's kind of a public good.
And so, public servants are trying to build public goods and serve people, but you couldn't imagine two organizations that work more differently and have different cultures than an open source project and the public service. And so, I was like, that's so interesting. So, I started to write about what I thought they could learn from each other, and then that became a kind of policy blog, and that actually got a lot of traction and that led to Jen Pahlka reaching out, and I worked with Code for America and then a few other organizations.
[00:02:12 An image of the Kennedy School at Harvard University is shown.]
And so, then, the Kennedy School at some point decided they needed someone to teach on this, and I ended up on a shortlist, and so they reached out.
Taki Sarantakis: That's amazing. And so, this is like early 2000.
David Eaves: This would be… I started there in 2015, 2016. I think I actually started in 2015 but I taught my first class in January of 2016.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, you're a trailblazer in the digital government world, and this is interesting, you're a bridge maker too, because you've also had private sector success. Tell us a little bit about your private sector success before we go on to the main thing that we're going to talk about today.
David Eaves: Yeah, so back in the mid-2000s, as part of my blog, I started to become very interested in this notion. I was like, well, if open code can make for better software, maybe open data might make for better public policy. So, that led me into kind of the open data path and I became relatively well-known in that world and helped a lot of governments, starting with the City of Vancouver.
[00:03:13 An image of the Gregor Robertson is shown next to the text: "Credit: © PearGurl, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons".]
In fact, Gregor Robertson was mayor at the time, and now he's a minister. And so, I helped. I wrote the motion with another gentleman that led to Vancouver doing open data, which was kind of like the first or second open data portal in the country, depending on how you want to count. And then, to kind of talk about that, to explain to people why it'd be interesting, on my blog, I wrote a piece about… so, in Vancouver, the garbage schedule is very complicated.
When there's a holiday, your schedule shifts, and then I always have to explain this, I have to really explain it slowly, it does not shift back. So, your Tuesday schedule becomes a Wednesday, and then it's Wednesday until the next holiday, and then it's Thursday. And so, we just wrote a little friendly community app that would send you an e-mail to remind you to take your garbage out, and that became just the kernel of something that turned into a much bigger project to help cities think about managing waste and recycling, encouraging more recycling, and me and two co-founders grew that to a staff of about 50, serving several hundred mostly municipalities but also large private haulers like Waste Connections and some states and other types of entities, covering about 100 million residents who live… and maybe slightly north of that. And then, we exited that in like 2021.
Taki Sarantakis: And I wanted to bring that up before we kind of get into the main part of our discussion because it gives you some credibility that you're not just a talker. There are a lot of kind of talking heads in this area, and one of the things I really like about you is you're not just a talking head. You really actually have done the thing. And not only have you done the thing, you've been thinking about digital government and data long before most people. Why did you start? Why did you kind of look at the state and kind of look at what was going on around the non-state art world and just kind of go, yeah, something's going on here?
David Eaves: So, maybe two things. So first, let me just talk about, it's kind of, like you say, the doing and executing because I actually think that that's super important. And in fact, even back in the open data days, nobody will remember this but I launched a website called opendatagc.ca.
[00:05:17 An screenshot of the datadotgc.ca webpage is shown onscreen. A separate text box is also shown which reads: "datadotgc.ca was an unofficial citizen-led open data portal for Canadian federal government data."]
David Eaves: So, I can't own a gc.ca but at the time, we had a government that was very opposed federally to doing open data, and so I crowdsourced all of the open data across all of the federal ministries' websites.
[00:05:32 An screenshot of the Drupal webpage is shown next to the text: "Credit: © Dries Buytaert, GPL, via Wikimedia Commons". A separate text box is also shown which reads: "Drupal website – Drupal is an open-source software that helps build and manage websites. It's a flexible content management system used by many organizations to organize, publish, and update their online content easily."]
David Eaves: We built a custom Drupal website to do that just so that every single time someone said we can't do this, I would be like, point the media to the website, which kind of looked like a government website but it really wasn't. And I'd say, "Well, they say they can't but they already do, like there's clearly policy in place to enable this, and so why can't we just do more? We have the rails to go launch more data on." And the same with ReCollect, the company, and maybe for your listeners because a lot of them are Ottawa-based, but if you get a garbage day reminder, especially in Ottawa but in many cities across the country, that's all running on our infrastructure and the stuff that we built, right?
Taki Sarantakis: All these years later.
David Eaves: All these years later, right. And so, that's a small part of what the org did, but the one that people really… it's personal and so people really… like when I did the presentation with the DMs, I asked that and like half the DMs were like, yeah, I do. And so, those things, they're very, very real and you have to manifest things. I'm a big fan of the kind of Tom Loosemore view of digital government, which is you have to be basically constantly working to meet the rising expectations that citizens have. And for me, the digital was driven, going all the way back to 2005, in part because coming out of kind of new deal, post-World War II, we built all of these amazing institutions. And in fact, my friend Taylor and I wrote this piece about how if you look across…
Taki Sarantakis: Taylor Owen.
David Eaves: Taylor Owen, yeah, at the Max Bell School, really, really old friend. We've probably written 50 articles together. And so, we wrote this piece about how if you look across the political spectrum, there's a group of people who want to tear all of those institutions down because they don't think they're fit for purpose. And then, there's a whole bunch of people who really want to preserve them no matter what and keep them, like protect them because any change will threaten them, and the really interesting thing is, so you have change agents and, effectively, conservatives, except for the conservatives are on the left side of the spectrum and the change agents are all on the right side of the spectrum. It's like completely inversed.
And I was like, I agree that we need change, we can't be stuck in stasis, but I don't want to just burn things down. I want to make them better, and we need to meet the expectations of where people are going, and where people are going is they're going to be intermediated through technology in the way that they're engaging all these services. And even if they're dealing with a human, that human is going to be intermediated in the service via technology. So, I was like, it's not just enough that we re-think the services. That is a starting point, but I became very interested in the notion that we may need to re-think the way that government is structured and the way that it works, in the same way that the private sector has been torn apart and had to re-build itself as a result of this technology.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, this was roughly 20 years ago.
David Eaves: Yeah, this was like 2006, 2007.
Taki Sarantakis: Following the math. Tell us where Canada was in the public sector, 2005, 2006. Were we leaders? Were we laggards? Were we innovative? Were we adopters?
David Eaves: So, I think that was a complex period because it was very early days and we were definitely perceived as being leaders.
[00:08:41 The United Nations E-Government Survey 2010 is shown above the text: "Credit: © United Nations", displaying the top 20 countries in e-government development. Canada is ranked third with an e-government development index value of 0.8448 behind Republic of Korea and United States.]
David Eaves: So, the UN e-government survey had us ranked as third. I'm trying remember the exact year. That was about 20 years ago, and I actually remember being invited circa 2005, 2006, there was a meeting where the OCIO gets all the CIOs together, and a large consulting firm used to have an annual report where they ranked governments as well, and we had just moved from first place to second place after Singapore, and there was some sadness but everybody was kind of patting each other on the back that we're okay, and I remember I grabbed a copy of the report, I tore up my talk and I went to the front of the room and I said, "Why do we do peer comparisons? Why do we compare ourselves to peers?" And it's often because there's competitive pressure and you don't want to fall behind them.
And I was like, I will never get a service from the Government of Singapore. I'm not moving to Singapore. No Canadian is comparing their experience to the Government of Singapore. They're comparing their experience to Google and to Kayak and to whatever online services you want. That's who's setting expectations. And so, why are we benchmarking ourselves? There isn't no value to benchmark ourselves against private companies, but from a citizen's perspective, or I guess of a government's, but from a citizen's perspective, the benchmark is their experience. And so, it's like we are benchmarking ourselves against the wrong people.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, the benchmarking, even though you don't like it, let's just close on, where are we roughly now as we're sitting here talking?
David Eaves: Yeah, I believe we fell to 47th.
[00:10:08 The United Nations E-Government Survey 2024 is shown above the text: "Credit: © United Nations". Canada is ranked 47th with a rating class of V2, an OSI of 0.8552, an HCI of 0.8725, a TII of 0.8078, a 2024 EGDI of 0.8452, and a 2022 EGDI of 0.8511.]
Taki Sarantakis: 47th from 1, 2, kind of 3.
David Eaves: And the curve is not a friendly curve. The curve, it's not a curve where it's a constant rate of decline or even kind of a bumpy along and you go up and down. It's a kind of accelerating decline.
Taki Sarantakis: It's kind of a falling off the cliff kind of curve.
David Eaves: Yeah.
Taki Sarantakis: What happened?
David Eaves: I think a few things happened. One is, I think there might have been some, hey, we've got this, this is a solved problem.
Taki Sarantakis: We've PDF'd everything. We've put everything on the web.
David Eaves: Yeah, a bunch of systems have been moved online, we've been ranked well.
Taki Sarantakis: All the forms are on the website.
David Eaves: And so, it's actually less clear to me that we got worse or that everybody else got a lot better, and I think it's probably more the latter than the former.
Taki Sarantakis: So, would one kind of plausible interpretation be we declared victory early on the internet, on digital, on data?
David Eaves: Yeah, I think there's a combination. There's two things in my mind that maybe we've struggled with, and we know struggle. This struggle is not one that we have alone. We share it with many, many other actors. One is, I think we kind of declared victory, and others have done more work, and we have struggled to figure out how to make that work happen, and that's despite a number of, I think, very interesting innovations that have happened. I think of it broadly in Canada, but the advent of Service Canada is actually super interesting, very, very innovative, built around kind of the era of the 1-800 number, but we never really pivoted that into the digital age, but we had this incredible head start and really, I think, very interesting thinking about being citizen-centric but never moved it in the way other countries, I feel, have been able to. That's Service Canada. Shared Services Canada, I think, has had a challenging go, but as a model for thinking about how to build out infrastructure and thinking about digital as infrastructure and how to support across the entire enterprise, is actually a worthwhile way of thinking about things, and the Americans have GSA but that's kind of historical, but the Brits don't have anything and I think they're struggling with that. They're looking at us (inaudible), is that something we need to do? And a lot of other countries have taken diverse ways of going at that, like the Brazilians have a couple of state-owned enterprises. The Italians have created a state-owned enterprise. So, some people are doing kind of Crown corps, others are doing… that's another place where I think actually there was momentum that we could have maybe capitalized on, but I think the other challenge is, and my friend Jen Pahlka writes a lot about that and she deserves to be read by everybody on this, and I've talked about this a lot as well, which is we're policy obsessed as opposed to being operations obsessed, and there's a lot of governments around the world where the desire is to be the person who whispers in the minister's ear, and that having the right idea is the thing that matters. Having the idea of ReCollect was nice, I wrote a blog post about it, but the value and the opportunity generated through the execution, it was the making it happen that mattered.
Taki Sarantakis: Yeah, and there's kind of a military expression that says amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk the logistics, which is exactly what you're talking about. It's not the articulation of the thing that is the end. In fact, the articulation of the thing is the beginning, because then you've got to go through and make it happen. One of the things that I've been hearing over the years is I've been trying to convince colleagues of the importance of this issue, and I'm old, so I'm about a decade into this now with very, very little traction. Recently, there's traction but that has nothing to do with me, it's just kind of that the crisis is starting to bubble over. A lot of people would say, "Stop comparing. Why are you comparing us with Google, with Facebook, with Amazon? We're the government, we don't have competitors. Yes, we're a little slow but it's more important that the government get it right than that the government get something done quickly." What would you say to that?
David Eaves: I'm actually not opposed to that view at all. And in fact, I have that very message in that I like my government to generally be a fast follower, right? I don't know that I want us burning tens or hundreds of millions of dollars trying to figure out where the blockchain might be useful in government or even where A.I. might be useful in government. I actually don't mind the private sector taking a lead and de-risking, helping build practices, understand where it's best applied. And then, our work is figuring out how to translate that into the public sector, but I want us to do that translation work within a few years of once the practice moves from emergent to kind of a good or a best practice in the private sector, I'd like us to be then being like, "Okay, great, how do we adapt into the public sector?", almost immediately. I feel like sometimes it's more like decades go by before that shift happens, and I don't think that we have to have the proficiency of a Google or of an AWS but our citizens are still going to interact with our services and they should expect a world class experience, and we're now two decades into delivering governments services online and we're kind of three decades into doing private sector services online. This stuff has become standardized enough that this is no longer bleeding edge and we should be proficient at it.
Taki Sarantakis: Right, and I think what you're saying, and I'm putting words in your mouth but take them out of your mouth if they're wrong, kind of the risk of standing still now is far, far, far greater than the risk of moving forward. In fact, kind of the status quo is something, in government terms, something that's far, far riskier than actually now adopting rather than inventing new technologies. Is that?
David Eaves: Yeah, and for me, there's a few things on this. One is, I sometimes talk about this idea of kind of the broken windows theory of government, which is that if you don't deliver small services well, people don't trust you with the big things. So, if it takes six to 12 months for me to get a passport, why am I going to trust you to manage a pipeline? And I think that actually these small interactions that citizens have with their government say a lot and leave a huge impression on them.
Taki Sarantakis: So, one of the things you indirectly touched upon there is capabilities, and it seems to me… whether it's true or not is another issue but it looks like the private sector now has leapfrogged most governments in terms of capabilities.
David Eaves: So, it's so important to not be unfair to public servants and the institution that I think is working actually quite hard. I do struggle with, while I think citizens are holding to this bar and I do want us to have that comparison, I want to be a little cautious about how much we compare ourselves to the private sector. One big advantage the private sector has is the people who don't get it and don't figure it out go bust, and people who have green fields and can start from scratch come in and build totally different organizations that can fulfill those services but in new and better and modern ways, and the capital gets re-deployed and people find new jobs and the world kind of… that's capitalism.
Taki Sarantakis: Dynamism.
David Eaves: And that's not an option, it generally should not be an option in government. I don't want people to lose faith and have the government collapse and then we'll just build a new government with better… that's not the way we can do things.
Taki Sarantakis: But isn't that potentially something that looks like it might be happening around the world?
David Eaves: Yes. I mean, the fear I have about, say, DOGE in the U.S. is there's two axes you could think of.
[00:19:08 A sign for the United States Department of Government Efficiency is shown next to the text: "Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is a U.S. federal initiative established by Donald J. Trump on January 20, 2025 via executive order, with the goal of modernizing federal information technology, maximizing productivity, and cutting excess regulations and spending across the government."]
David Eaves: There's my government is ineffective versus my government is effective, and then there's an axis of my government is expensive and my government is cheap, and what I fear has happened in the narrative with DOGE is there's all sorts of people who have just accepted kind of the terrible Reagan line of, "I'm from the government, I'm here to help", is the worst things you could possibly hear, and they just don't think the government can be effective. So, they've actually just ruled out that side of the axis altogether and they're like, the default assumption is it's filled with corruption, there's all sorts of problems, they feel like it's just not effective. And so, what's fascinating, if you look at people who support DOGE, there's also people who are the recipients of benefits and whose lives are made significantly better by government who are still supporting it because they don't find those services delivered in a modern way or an effective way, or it's the administrative burdens are very high. And so, then, they're just like, well, if my only choice is bad government, and I have to choose between an expensive, bad government or a cheap, bad government, I'm going to go cheap, and that's where you get the social license. I think it's surprising how much social license DOGE still has today with a huge part of the U.S. electorate.
Taki Sarantakis: It's that notion that governments, a lot of governments, have moved into the wrong quadrant of what you were talking about, where they become ineffective and expensive.
David Eaves: That's right. And on the political spectrum, we're so worried about the erosion of what I think genuinely are critical and important services that we're nervous politically to reform and change and to really think about re-imagining them out of the fear that that will cause them to get picked apart and get changed.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, more so than most countries, because we're a very large geographic country, we have relied on infrastructure over the course of our federation confederation to bind us together, whether that is airports, highways, the original was railways. Well, maybe the original was the canoe going down rivers, but infrastructure has bounded us as Canadians. And for some historians and academics, it actually made us Canadians. You've been spending a lot of your time talking about a different kind of infrastructure the last couple of years. You've been talking about digital public infrastructure. Tell us a little bit about digital public infrastructure.
David Eaves: Yeah, so there's a lot to unpack in each one of those words but maybe the short way to try to explain it is, not to make things more complicated, there's also kind of two competing definitions, a lot of conversation going on around the world about this, but I think one definition which I'm more of a fan of is there are certain critical pieces of infrastructure you need to have in order to run a modern state and a modern government and a modern society which are actually rooted in deeply historical notions of what the government does. So, you need to be able to authenticate who you are. Nandan Nilekani from India has had a huge amount of influence in this space. He's like, "There are no property rights until there's identity rights." And so, when you grew up in an OECD country, it's so the air around you, like the notion that you would not have an identity and be able to prove yourself is so foreign to so many people, but you can't own capital, you can't have a bank account, like so many things you can't do if you don't have property rights, and one of the jobs of the state is to assert, at the most fundamental level, who is a citizen and asserts that my birth certificate is issued by the state to assert that I am me.
Taki Sarantakis: There are two ways in Canada that you get an identity, one you just mentioned, which is the birth certificate. Do you know the second?
David Eaves: Well, if you immigrate here, you get the card, and then yeah.
Taki Sarantakis: Yeah, so that's kind of your identity. Keep going.
David Eaves: So, this is a historical, but what's that look like in a digital era? How do I assert who I am online?
Taki Sarantakis: Is it a blockchain signature or is it a photo? Is it a thumb print? What is it?
David Eaves: And if we're going to have trusted services online, you need to be able to trust that the person you're interacting with is the person who they claim they are. The second is the exchange of value. The state has always greased the wheels of commerce, typically by providing coinage as a way to allow us to not have to barter and has been the guarantor.
Taki Sarantakis: The legal tender.
David Eaves: Legal tender, but that really was like, how do we enable the exchange of value? Okay, well, I have been to an ATM machine three times in the last five years. My life is entirely payments online, right? So, the currency is still there but what are the rails and who owns those rails and who has the capacity to turn those rails on and off and to shape those rails? That matters a lot.
Taki Sarantakis: Last couple hundred years has been the state.
David Eaves: That's right, it's been the state. Now, they're still there at a core level, that infrastructure, but there's a lot of levels on top of them that disintermediate them away from the citizen and create all sorts of opportunities for rent extraction and even disruption, and I don't mean disruption in the good, positive, technology way. I mean disruption in the kind of geopolitical, you-can't-make-payments way. And then, the third is the exchange of information.
En ce pays, on a deux langues ; français et puis anglais. C'est l'état qui dit ça, comme…
Taki Sarantakis: Oui, oui, si vous voulez.
And so, in some ways the states played this role in determining what standards are for measurement, what the official languages are. And so, this is like, how do you exchange data? Well, in a digital world, now we're doing ones and zeros. What are the rails for us to exchange data if this is central to a modern economy? Because if you don't have those three things, it's really hard to run a modern economy.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, one of the things you've said over the years that I think more people really need to understand this, especially people in government, is you say your website is not the internet. Can you expand a little bit on that?
David Eaves: Yeah, there are layers, right? And so, the internet is the network that allows the TCP/IP packets, the kind of ones and zeros, to move around and to move the information around.
[00:25:59 An image of a binary data is shown next to the text: "A TCP/IP packet is a small unit of data sent over the internet. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) makes sure the data arrives safely and in order, while IP (Internet Protocol) ensures it gets to the right device."]
Taki Sarantakis: It's the highway.
David Eaves: Yeah, the highway, whereas you almost think if the web is like an application on top of that. So, the web is a set of standards for how that data should be structured so that it appears in a legible way on your screen.
Taki Sarantakis: And at the beginning, for governments, did that mean it was a publication platform?
David Eaves: Yeah. So, I always have to remind my students that the history of digital government is actually fairly modern, especially when compared to the history of the state. So, we've only been using computers in government since like the 1950s. We started with census and then back office systems and payments and HR, payroll, things like that, and what we've been building are these big vertically-integrated technology systems that do kind of single-purpose things that automated back office and brought a huge amount of efficiency, and that's kind of the journey of government from 1950 to kind of 2000.
Taki Sarantakis: From the IBM punch cards.
David Eaves: Yeah, yeah, and that journey is still going on, right? That's still happening, but with the web, the web starts earlier but it really starts to become more… I went to Queen's University.
[00:27:29 An image of Queen's University is shown.]
David Eaves: And my first year was 1994, and I had to go to Stauffer Library and go to the basement, to the IT team, to have TCP/IP installed on my computer as a custom file, because it wasn't default, so that I could surf the web and watch and get connect scores from my dorm using the web. So, even in 1994, this was not a default application on your computer, right? So, you have to understand from 1990 to 2005, the web starts to take off. And for most governments, it's just a publication platform. It's a place where you just say, "We exist, maybe here's a photo of our minister or here's our responsibilities and what we do." Maybe you start to get people being like, "Here's some PDFs you could download and print out so you could fill them out at home so that when you come into the Service Canada bureau, your time is shortened." But the notion of actually transacting with your government online is really a 2005 onward phenomena. So, we're like 20 years in.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, one of the things that you explain better than anybody that I've ever encountered is you talk about how governments need to have a horizontal stack and then something on top, and the something on top is kind of, let's call it the specificity of the organization. What's the stuff on the bottom before we get to the stuff on top?
David Eaves: Yeah, so you should really think about our society as being composed as a stack, and you can think of a lot of traditional infrastructure as a fundamental layer, which brings us back to talking about, actually, digital public infrastructures. You think of water, electricity, roads, these are basic, and there's two things in my mind that really make them infrastructure. There's a lot of other things that people think that are and this is a very contested term, but one is we align around a set of standards that are optimal, optimal enough that everybody basically crowds in and says, "I could go do my own thing that may be marginally more efficient but it's actually just cheaper for me to use this thing."
Taki Sarantakis: So, the voltage is X, I'll agree that the voltage is X.
David Eaves: Right.
Taki Sarantakis: We all agree that sizes of containers are Y.
David Eaves: And road widths, right? So, if you build a custom road in a mine, it's not infrastructure in my mind because it's a bespoke-sized road to deal with giant mining trucks, and those mining trucks can't go on like the main roads and my car probably can't go on those. These standards are what we align around. The second thing is we have made choices about… the opportunity for rent extraction is so high if one owns these particular pieces of infrastructure that we layer a public element on it, which doesn't always necessarily mean public ownership but we make bargains where we say, hey, you can be a private electrical provider and we're going to basically, effectively, agree to guarantee a certain level of profit, but when someone doesn't pay their bill, you can't kick them off right away and you have to kind of wire up people in these remote communities. So, we make these trade-offs to make it inclusive and we actually remove market forces to try to suppress the price because we know there's so much more value to be built on top. If we're paying money for water, it means we're not paying money for all of the amazing things we do that water enables us to do, right? So, how do we drive down the competition, make it very, very low cost inputs to all the other things we want.
Taki Sarantakis: And that's what we think of as regulation.
David Eaves: Yeah.
Taki Sarantakis: Which is like, in exchange for letting you use the airwaves, you will do the following.
David Eaves: That's right. There's a digital set of stacks as well, and let me just talk about inside government. There's a bigger conversation we could have, but I think of government, the core function of government… I was just doing a training session for the National Archives in the U.K., and really one of the core functions of government is to serve as the source of truth. It's the government that asserts this is the territory that makes up Canada. It's the government that asserts these are the people who are citizens of this country and these are people who are visitors and these are the people who are immigrants, and those registries, those are the sources of truth and they've never mattered more than they matter today. And so, a core function of government is just actually as the holders of data that say this is what we assert to be true in Canada, and that's everything from all of our laws to the list of who is a citizen to what are all the property parcels in the country and the registry of who owns them. All of commerce is built on top of that source of truth. If it collapsed tomorrow, our economy would collapse, everything would fall apart. So, the core function of government, you think of the base layer of government is actually as the keepers of truth of a whole range of pieces of data. Now, you want to use that data to create policy and build public goods and to deliver services.
So, then, you're like, "Okay, well, what are the shared services that we could have that would enable us to be more effective in doing that?" And so, then he was like, "Well, I need to authenticate who I am every time I come to a government website. Why does every single ministry build its own authentication system and I have a different username and password across all these services? I want to be able to make payments. Why am I contracting a different vendor to accept my credit card or to send me money when I'm at a government website? I'd probably like to get a reminder or probably scheduling e-signatures." You could start to think about, what are common services that every service across the Canadian government likely needs in order to work. And so, now, you start thinking about that as a shared component, shared infrastructure layer. And then, on top of that are the bespoke things that you're trying to do, like certain types of benefits that you want to be able to customize. And so, right now, we build these really tightly, vertically-integrated systems that do all of this work. They collect all of their own data, they have all of their own service components in them, and we pay for it over and over and over again.
Taki Saranakis: And we call those departments.
David Eaves: Well, I wish we called them departments. It's much worse than that. It's not like departments have a single system. Usually each service has its own system. And so, the departments actually have silos within the departments and those may not even talk to each other or leverage each other's assets. And so, what's fascinating and what a lot of leading governments around the world have done is they've started to be like, "No, no, we're going to define sources of truth for data and we will pull from those sources of truth whenever interacting with you to pre-populate your forms and make it really easy. And if you move, then it propagates that move, like if you move address, it propagates across the entire system." And then, we have these shared components as well. So, anytime we want to open up a new service, we don't have to re-build all these things, we just go grab that, we grab that, we grab that, and we just have to build the piece that makes this service unique and special. And so, their ability to deploy and do things and adapt to, say, COVID has radically enhanced.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, this is starting to sound pretty serious. Now, we've long left the realm, it seems to me, of data and digital. We're now talking about the continuation of the state. If you kind of take what you've said, if we are not the source of truth, if we are not the entity where people are building things on top of our, let's call it a platform, it seems to me that others are, and we know who they are. They're kind of the big tech giants. And so, fundamentally, we've moved beyond the realm of, we have to modernize because citizens want a better experience. This is like, we have to modernize if we want to keep the notion of citizens. Otherwise, we're going to have the Republic of Facebook, the Republic of Google, the Republic of Amazon.
David Eaves: So, for very good reasons, there's people, when I use the word digital ID, there's a non-trivial number of people who get very nervous and very uncomfortable, and those people need to be listened to because their concerns are not invalid. The counter I'd have is I find it hard to imagine that you're going to leave the 21st century without a digital ID of some form.
Taki Sarantakis: And there are countries right now.
David Eaves: And there are. So, I run a project actually called the DPI map at dpimap.org.
[00:36:18 A webpage screenshot for The Digital Infrastructure Map is shown with text that reads: "DPI is far more prevalent than initially believed. 64 countries have a DPI-like digital ID system. 97 countries have a DPI-like digital payment system. 103 countries have a DPI-like data exchange system. This project aims to advance our understanding of digital public infrastructure and promote its inclusive and safe development. Read the report, download the data, and help improve it. Based on a minimal set of benchmarks for characteristics of DPI, we arrived at a count for DPI-like systems. The cards below show DPI information about every region researched so far. Click on them to show the details and click on that region name to see all the DPI information for that region."]
David Eaves: And we track all of the what we call public interest governed digital identity systems, payment rails, and data exchanges around the world that are run by national governments, and there's a lot more than people think.
Taki Sarantakis: India, Brazil.
David Eaves: Estonia.
Taki Sarantakis: Singapore, Estonia.
David Eaves: Mozambique, Madagascar.
Taki Sarantakis: Beyond the usual.
David Eaves: Yeah, and my experience is a lot of the most interesting work in this space is happening in emerging markets.
[00:36:57 An image of the OECD logo is shown next to the text: "The OECD is an international organization of 38 countries that works together to promote economic growth, trade, and better living standards worldwide, while providing data, research, and guidelines to help governments make informed decisions."]
David Eaves: And in fact, actually, one of the big challenges, actually, I have when I'm dealing with kind of OECD countries is actually getting them to lift up their head and be willing to go and talk to emerging market countries where I think much more interesting work is happening, for reasons that I'm not always proud to talk about, but I find that they're reluctant to do so. But in some ways, because the need there is greater, they don't have identity rights and they want people to get banked, and so this is urgent for them.
Taki Sarantakis: And banked doesn't mean building branches everywhere. What does it mean?
David Eaves: Banked means, can I assert who I am and open up a digital bank account that I can use from anywhere, and it's amazing, like places where there's weak internet, no literacy? There are people who walk into these neighborhoods who are basically human tellers and they have a phone around their neck and people come up and some places are using biometric to identity, like I'm David Eaves, here's my thumb print to prove it, and now I have access to my bank account, I can't read or write but I tell the teller, I'd like you to move $200 from here to here, or $5 to pay for this bill, and I do all that, and there may not even be internet connection where we are. That transaction is all being logged within the device. And when the person gets back to connectivity, then all the transactions reconcile. So, they're really doing really creative work around last mile delivery and building this infrastructure out to try to pull people into the formal economy and into the formal sector and to give them access to government services.
Taki Sarantakis: Which is what government's supposed to do.
David Eaves: I think, just to circle back fully, I don't think you're going to leave the 21st century without a digital ID. And so, then, the question really becomes, what is the governance of that ID? And is it going to be run by a private company or is it going to be run by your government? And who is going to be the source of truth? And there's a lot of different ways that could play out.
Taki Sarantakis: Yeah, a lot of us are right now are authenticated by Apple, a lot of us are authenticated by Google, and that's a funny notion that we're getting authenticated by something that isn't.
David Eaves: And do they become choke points?
Taki Sarantakis: Yeah, what happens when Apple doesn't want to authenticate me anymore?
David Eaves: That's right. And if they control distribution and they control the means, it may be that your Apple ID is connected to your birth certificate. But at the end of the day, they're a gatekeeper.
Taki Sarantakis: Exactly. Now, we're going to close on this. You were probably about 20 years early, seeing a lot of what now seems obvious to people, whether we're fixing it or not is another issue, but at least some people now are starting to see that, yes, yes, it's obvious, we have to provide digital services. So, being 20 years early, let's see if you're good. If people are watching this 20 years from now, what do you see going forward in Canada, in the world, in the western world, the eastern world? What are some of the things that you see if you're looking forward?
David Eaves: So, I'm long-term… bullish is maybe the wrong word. I think the impact of A.I. long-term is going to be very real and very significant, short-term, much less clear, especially much less clear for government, and there's a lot of talk, I know, about A.I. is going to transform, and I'm like, the trust in government is so important that we need to do these… again, let's de-risk. Private sectors do something and they go bust because they violate public's trust, that's fine. Government does it, that's existential. So, let's just take our time, be fast followers. But over the long run, I look into the future and I am definitely worried about what is truth, like our ability to create anything. And from a creativity perspective, this can be amazing, but the ability to actually assert what is real and what is not real is already a major problem today. And if you think of governments, when you enter the military in the United States, you swear an oath to protect the Constitution of the United States, not to protect the physical boundaries. You're engaged in mean defence. The core responsibility is you're protecting an idea. You're protecting a truth that they hold to be self-evident, right?
That's going to be true of every government. Every government is a holder of a truth. In fact, governments fail when their truth deviates too far from some form of objective truth, but our truth is who is Canadian, what our boundaries are, who owns what land, what services people deserve, those are all truths, and what rules we believe are fair and unfair and who is eligible. Those are all our truths and we are going into a world where truth is going to be harder and harder to sustain. And so, I've always been a blockchain skeptic but I'm kind of sitting here going, "Man, I'm surprised to this day that The Globe and Mail and The New York Times don't put every image in every video they have against a ledger that they control so that you can go back and assert, yeah, okay, was this legitimately Globe and Mail or is it like someone made this up and trying to convince me? I think governments are going to have to double down in a very real way on their ability to be able to assert truth.
Taki Sarantakis: And very quickly, David Eaves, Canadian global pathfinder, Harvard, London College, what is it?
David Eaves: University College London.
Taki Sarantakis: University College London. Thank you so much for spending your time with us today. You have long been trying to help your home country behind the scenes, and I continue to thank you for all the efforts that you are making, almost like a volunteer coming to us to say, guys, thank you.
[00:43:27 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]
[00:43:33 The Government of Canada logo appears onscreen.]
