Download PDF - Robson Hall Faculty of Law

Interview with Donna Miller 269
entity, they’re down the street, and you actually see all these ministers. Was that a
big change
DJM: Absolutely, first of all, as you say, you are dealing more with the
minister, you are advising the minister, attending cabinet meetings. I think the
other important change for me in that role was the horizontality – as an associate
deputy you are considered part of the deputy minster community. You are sitting
on deputy committees and it gives you a glimpse into the whole Government of
Canada, so that was a transition for me, because clearly the other roles I’d had in
Justice Canada, even the role heading up the Prairie Region, you got a sense of
national dimension of your work, but not the whole of government that you saw
as an associate deputy.
BPS: It was my observation that very senior people in Ottawa, you can like
what they do, you can dislike what they do, you can question political sharp
elbows and anything else that goes in the culture, but they work extremely hard.
Part of that is connected with that complexity – the federal government is
extremely large, very bureaucratic, there are very formal accountability meetings.
You can spend a year on a project and somebody at the Treasury Board goes “no”
and that’s the end of it. Things have to be negotiated at a very high political level
and it’s not like you can just bump into somebody at Assiniboine Park and talk it
through. Did you find that the sheer hours of the work week were quite
formidable compared to the provincial experience
DJM: Absolutely. The associate deputy minister role is in many ways a 24-7
job. You are on call 24-7. So you are at the beck and call of the deputy and the
deputy’s at the beck and call of the minister. Ottawa is a 24-7 town. You start your
day with ideas of what you will be doing, but more days than not, the kind of day
you’ve had isn’t what you planned to have. So you have to be ready to deal with
the unknown. Your job is to try to anticipate the unknowns before the deputy
and the minister do. It’s hard to explain but how you described it, Bryan, comes
pretty close, it is a tight-knit community, it’s a professional community, it’s a hardhitting
community, and you get to know people relatively well because you get to
deal with them very closely on many different files across departments. But you
also have to be a quick study and a Supreme Court decision could come down at
9:45 AM and you might find yourself in cabinet in forty-five minutes advising
what the implications are.
BPS: My sense of Ottawa is that, while there is a “yes, minister” element as
there is in any kind of career politics, trying to get ahead to get the next
promotion, people actually take their policy quite seriously there. Sometimes you
can say, “Why is this person so passionate and giving us such a hard time” but
they actually believe there is a policy or principle here they are prepared to fight
for. It’s not always about careers and looking good in the distance, people actually
are very frequently quite committed to what they think is the best interest for the
department, country, or the Charter. Did you find that