PD Newsletter #95: Canada's general election

👋🏽👋🏻👋🏾 Hello, welcome.

Today Canada goes to the polls.

At Public Digital, we’ve been a trusted partner to provincial and federal governments in Canada for many years. In this edition we explore today’s election as a catalyst for change.

Caitlin and Rosemary

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✨ Introducing our guest editor

Caitlin Evans is a Principal Consultant who started working with Public Digital as a member of the North America Network in late 2023. Originally from the UK, Caitlin is now based in Toronto, Canada.

As part of the network, Caitlin worked with the Nova Scotia government on several engagements with their Department of Cyber Security and Digital Services. She’s continued to work with Nova Scotia since joining PD permanently in late 2024.

“At PD I am confident that the work I am involved with makes a real difference to everyday people. The bonus for me is that I am surrounded by and get to collaborate with brilliant, curious teams made up of some of the most talented people I’ve met. ”

Learn more about our Network

Latest from Public Digital

Register for Data Bites #55: hear about the exceptional work being done by government and public sector institutions in harnessing data for public good.
📅 When: 7 May 18:00-19:30 BST
📍 Where: Broadway House, London or via YouTube livestream.
Watch the recording of Data Bites #54, exploring the theme of sustainability. Special shout out to gov.uk’s design team, who added sustainability to the government design principles this month.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 We’re delighted to be co-organising GovCamp Scotland - the first of its kind for 12 years. Stay tuned for updates and reflections from the event on June 19.

🇳🇬 Watch a sneak preview of our film about PD's work in Edo State in Nigeria, where we’ve been working with the government to build their digital capability.

🇨🇦 Canada's general election 🇨🇦

Canada’s election comes at a critical time in global politics, with the country facing economic pressure under Trump’s tariffs.
➡️ Read about who’s who in the election, compare the election promises of Canada’s major parties, and check out the CBC poll tracker.
➡️ The country saw a record turnout in advance voting, with Mark Carney in the lead in advance polls. Impossible to ignore is the impact of Trump, and this moment as one of national unity for Canada.

Canada recently announced a new AI strategy, part of the country’s wider Digital Ambition. The desire for sovereignty from the US is one of many factors forcing the country to rethink its approach to technology and policy, such as its use of US-made fighter jets.

Change can be hard. But in our work with Canada, we’ve seen how it can also be a catalyst for progress:

• We saw the Nova Scotia Digital Service transform from a 30-person innovation team to an 800-person service-led ministry. We also supported Nova Scotia to establish its Department of Cyber Security and Digital Solutions.

• Since 2021, we have been supporting the large-scale modernisation of Nova Scotia’s Registry of Motor Vehicles to build the foundations for long term sustainable digital delivery as they start to scale.

• We helped the British Columbia Energy Regulator hire a new Chief Digital Officer to lead its transformation journey.

• We worked with the Ontario One Call service to advance its digital maturity and adapt its culture to become a user-centred digital service.

Whatever happens today, this election is a chance for Canada to embrace new ways of working in government which deliver more value, increase resilience, and make change easier.

Ways of working

🌐 Accessibility specialists AAArdvark have published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in plain English, for “anyone trying to make the web more accessible - without having to be a senior-level developer”. For more guidance on writing accessible and inclusive content, particularly for neurodivergent readers, Considerate Content, by our Network Member Rebekah Barry, is out now.

🔥 We love this essay from Matt Edgar at NHS England on how a position of ‘ambitious pragmatism’ can help us think about transformation in a structured way. One of Matt’s recommended tools is pace layering, which Alistair Ruff has explored in relation to strategy and user needs.

⛔ Time to shut down a service? Julia Harrison tells us how to overcome the obstacles. As well as support for clients and teams, it’s essential to have a confident narrative: “Shutting something down when it is no longer viable is a rational choice, not a decision that represents defeat.”

✏️ Why design is maturing, not dying, in the era of AI, according to design leader Marzia Aricò: “In an AI-driven world, the most urgent design task is not polishing pixels—it’s structuring agency… This is where design must step in—not as decoration but as governance.”

🤯 Which framework is best for your delivery? Oli Lovell explains why it’s hard to know. “Few, if any of the approaches or frameworks signpost what they aren’t good for. Or indeed, signpost how, and when to choose between them.” He also explores how ‘projects’ have created a methodology monoculture - echoing some of Audree Fletcher’s piece from 2023 about the UK public sector’s reliance on programmes.

Technology in focus

⚡ The CEO of Shopify has ruffled feathers with a controversial memo, advocating for reflexive AI usage as a baseline expectation. While we agree that using AI is the best way to understand AI, we also think organisations must be intentional about its use. As our Network Member Francine Bennett tells the Business Leader’s Voice podcast, businesses must have a clear understanding of the problem they want to solve before they adopt AI .

🔎 A long read on what went wrong for the Alan Turing Institute (ATI), according to Alex Chalmers. He reflects that “the story of the ATI is, in many ways, the story of the UK’s approach to technology”: changing priorities, too many goals, and a fatal ‘everythingism’ approach. Future work on the ATI might benefit from learnings in TIAL’s playbook on designing new institutions.

🙌 A grounded vision of AI as ‘normal technology’ from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Positioning AI as a tool that humans “can and should control”, this essay offers practical considerations around its impacts. Some more healthy skepticism to be found in Steven Sinofsky’s piece on the middleware problem: why Anthropic’s open source Model Context Protocol, designed to connect LLMs with other software to empower AI agents, won’t be a silver bullet. Plus some great recs in this reading list on AI and software engineering, compiled by LeadDev.

📱 Interesting read from Semafor on the role of group chats in shaping America’s rightwing elite, particularly its alliance with Silicon Valley: “The group chats aren’t always primarily a political space, but they are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated”. Plus an interesting piece from the Verge on the politics of ChatGPT’s Ghibli filter, recently used on the White House X account, and how it functions as the aesthetic of the Trump administration.

🎨 While copyright laws don’t currently protect against AI copying art, as this piece by Creative Commons explains, it’s encouraging to see that Nvidia will embed digital watermarks directly onto AI generated content using the SynthID tool, developed by DeepMind. It’s also a much needed measure in the age of AI slop.

Digital government

🇪🇺 The French and German governments have produced a home-grown version of Google Docs. The open source software is designed for EU professionals as an alternative to US-made products, and forms part of a wider ambition for Europe to build its own digital future.

🌟 Hillary Hartley writes about digital service resilience in the wake of 18F’s closure and major restructures in the Ontario Digital Service: “The true resilience of digital government isn’t in organisational structures but in the people, practices, and cultural shifts that outlive any single team.” As well as a friend of PD, Hillary has been a key figure in FWD50, Canada’s annual digital government conference, who are introducing a new programme for 2025.

🍎 Brilliant work from Dave Guarino on building an eval for testing the capabilities of different LLMs in informing users about US food benefits programme, SNAP. Sharing the test as an open source resource, he invites AI researchers and other benefits-focused organisations to build on this work.

🏘️ A great overview from FF Studio of the problems faced by UK local government in improving services, looking at the example of foster care. Local councils are one of several UK authorities and departments now working with US firm Palantir, as Louis Mosley discusses in his first interview since becoming the company’s UK head.

✨ Lessons from Universal Credit: the Department for Work and Pensions have published their final lessons learned from the 15 years of the programme, which underwent a radical reset in 2013, and which is set to complete this year. Hear Tom Loosemore and others discuss those lessons at an Institute for Government panel next Tuesday 6 May.

👏 Excellent stuff from HealthLink British Columbia on how they developed the new version of the HealthLink website, providing public health services and information for the province. Their account of the process for its design and testing also serves as a fab example of working in the open.

Something fun

“You can’t lick a badger twice.” We have thoroughly enjoyed the work of Greg Jenner and others in this Bluesky thread who have drawn attention to Google AI’s habit of inventing meanings for any made-up idiom. Fair play to Claude, who errs on the side of caution: