Transcript
Transcript: Deputy Minister Leadership Reflections Series: Rob Fonberg
[00:00:00 Video opens with a montage of views of the CSPS building, the Deputy Minister's Office, and the crew setting up their equipment for the interview. Rob Fonberg takes a seat in an historic room. Text on screen: Deputy Minister Leadership Reflections, with Rob Fonberg. Inspiring music plays while the questions are being asked.]
[00:00:24 Overlaid text on screen: Rob Fonberg, served as Deputy Minister starting in the Privy Council Office, then at International Trade and at the Department of National Defence. He retired as a special advisor to the Clerk of the Privy Council in 2013.]
[00:00:33 Overlaid text on screen: Since 2013, Fonberg has been active in the academic and think-tank community as a Fellow with the Global Solution Networks, a Mentor with the Trudeau Foundation, and Executive Fellow at the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy.]
[00:00:46 Rob Fonberg appears full screen. Overlaid text on screen: Where did you grow up?]
Rob Fonberg: I grew up in Don Mills,
[00:00:50 Overlaid text on screen: Don Mills is a neighbourhood based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.]
Rob Fonberg: a very middle-class part of the city; hung out places like Edwards Gardens as a kid; built forts around the train tracks. I did my most of my primary school in Don Mills, a little bit of high school, and then moved to Ottawa to finish high school. I was in Toronto the other day and I was saying to somebody that I used to take the bus to the head of the subway, which was at Eglinton,
[00:01:22 Overlaid image of Eglinton Avenue subway station.]
Rob Fonberg: and then we would take the subway down to Union Station and take a bus to the CNE. That was our big thing.
[00:01:30 Overlaid text on screen: What was Canada, and more specifically Toronto, like for you when you were growing up?]
Rob Fonberg: As a pretty young kid, you're not thinking that much about what Canada was like, and Toronto was your neighbourhood. So, Toronto, for me, was very much a neighbourhood. I had family that lived downtown. My folks, parents, my grandparents, had a shop in Kensington Market. They were immigrants, so they had a fruit and vegetable store like many immigrants. And we would go down there and on weekends. And that was my world in Toronto.
[00:02:05 Overlaid text on screen: Did you have any heroes growing up?]
Rob Fonberg: My heroes were hockey players and football players. Frank Mahovlich was a hero; Eddie Schack was a hero – I'm dating myself – Bobby Bond and the great Bobby Bond broken ankle story. But I watched a lot of NFL football too. Russ Jackson for the Ottawa Rough Riders, those were heroes.
[00:02:28 Overlaid text on screen: What did you want to be when you grew up?]
Rob Fonberg: I never thought about it much, but with the advantage of hindsight, I thought either a left-handed major-league pitcher or a fighter pilot were the two things I thought I should have been. But that kind of came to me a little bit later in life.
[00:02:45 Overlaid text on screen: Where did you go to university?]
Rob Fonberg: I went to the University of Toronto.
[00:02:51 Overlaid images of the University of Toronto, and Queen's University.]
Rob Fonberg: I did an undergraduate degree in economics, and I went to Queens and did a master's degree in economics.
[00:02:57 Overlaid text on screen: What was your first job in the Government of Canada?]
Rob Fonberg: My first job in the Government of Canada was with a subsidiary of the Economic Council of Canada.
[00:03:08 Overlaid text on screen: From 1978 to 1979, Mr. Fonberg was an Officer at the Centre for the Study of Inflation and Productivity at the Economic Council of Canada.]
Rob Fonberg: It was called the Centre for the Study of Inflation and Productivity and it was the successor to the Anti-Inflation Board, so [it] had no teeth but it was monitoring wages and prices after that period where we actually had wage and price controls. That was my first job in the Government of Canada.
[00:03:25 Overlaid text on screen: What was your second job in the Government of Canada?]
Rob Fonberg: It was the Department of Finance,
[00:03:32 Overlaid text on screen: From 1979 to 1995, Mr. Fonberg held several roles in the Department of Finance, including executive positions, within the Fiscal and Economic Policy branches.]
Rob Fonberg: and I was the analyst writing the monthly memo to the Minister of Finance on the Consumer Price Index. And the very first memo I wrote on the Consumer Price Index was a page and a half. And my boss gave me back four pages of comments, mostly red lines, which is where I learned to write properly as a young analyst and where I learned to read improperly. Because to this day I'm looking for typos and I'm looking for grammar glitches. [The] first thing I look for in any document I read still to this day.
[00:04:09 Overlaid text on screen: What was it like working as a junior officer in the Department of Finance during that period?]
Rob Fonberg: We were kids in many ways still, so work was not a passion at that time. Work was a job, and it was a healthy work and life balance. But you walked among what turned out to be public service giants at that time, guys like Fred Gorbet, who became the Deputy Minister of Finance. You would see an ADM because it was a relatively small department, and you would think, oh, my goodness, here he is right in front of me. But you did your work and you learned. And the more you wanted to take on, the more space there was to take things on. It was a fantastic growing and learning opportunity. But I didn't have passion at that point. It was a job.
[00:05:02 Overlaid text on screen: When did you begin to develop a genuine passion for public service?]
Rob Fonberg: I think it became about policy first and public service by default, because I was always a policy person. I was never an operational person. And it built over time, but I never articulated it until I actually left government in 1995.
[00:05:26 Overlaid text on screen: From 1995 to 1997, Mr. Fonberg spent time in the private sector as a principal in the public sector transformation practice of the consulting firm Ernst and Young.]
Rob Fonberg: So, I did a variety of things. I did fiscal policy work, and then I did economic policy work. I worked on the Charlottetown Accord of all things, on economic union.
[00:05:37 Overlaid text on screen: From 1997 to 1998, he was the senior vice-president of corporate planning and systems and technology at the Business Development Bank of Canada.]
Rob Fonberg: Jocelyn had set up a committee on economic – I had the opportunity to learn amazing things, but actually to not just learn them, but to be part of a conversation about how to advance them. And that was all about public policy and learning and understanding; internalizing, but not really articulating.
[00:06:01 Overlaid text on screen: Can you describe your experience during the 1995 program review?]
Rob Fonberg: The 90s, as you know, program review. We had been running large deficits; really built up a lot of debt in the country. And I guess the Wall Street Journal began to refer to us as a little bit of a Third World kind of country in that sense. And the Chrétien government found – I guess they decided it was time to take that on. Large numbers of cuts in public service, large program cuts, really a reorientation of a lot of programming. And again, I was kind of in the middle of that. I worked half time in the Department of Finance, half time the Privy Council Office, with the folks who were running program review from there. And it was a really interesting time and a really challenging time after years of various attempts at minor expenditure reduction exercises. So, there was a lot of tension in the system in 95.
[00:07:04 Overlaid text on screen: Can you explain the circumstances that led to your decision to leave the public sector?]
Rob Fonberg: The job that I was in was actually eliminated. I don't think I had the full support of my senior leadership at the time to move up. And there was a bit of a pull from the other side because I'd always wanted to try the private sector. So, things came together, and it was an opportunity to leave. And I really pretty much jumped into the first thing that opened for me, which was a job with one of the professional services firms.
[00:07:37 Overlaid text on screen: When you first started in the private sector, was there anything that made you regret leaving the public sector?]
Rob Fonberg: So, this was when [my] interest in public policy turned into passion. I walk in the door of this professional services firm, and I meet a very senior partner. And the partner introduces himself to me and says, welcome, and what do you do? He says, I do business process, re-engineering. And I'm thinking, well, I don't know what that is. And he says, what do you do? And I say, well, I do public policy. And he says, yes, we don't do that here. And he turns on his heels and walks away. And I realized what I had walked away from, but I wasn't ready to turn around and go back. I wanted to explore, which is what I did for the next three years.
[00:08:23 Overlaid text on screen: What was it like returning to the public sector, especially after your time in the private sector?]
Rob Fonberg: So, just to step back a little bit. My career was really very much a series of fortunate accidents. Timing just happened to be there and supply and demand kind of came together.
So, I came back. I left government as a DG, as an EX3.
[00:08:48 Overlaid image of the Parliament buildings. Overlaid text on screen: In 1998, he returned to public service as the Assistant Secretary of the Liaison Secretariat for Macroeconomic Policy at the Privy Council Office.]
Rob Fonberg: I came back as an Assistant Secretary in the Privy Council Office, the Liaison Secretariat for Macro Policy, so basically Chief Economist to the Prime Minister. A big interface with the Department of Finance. So, I knew the Department of Finance and I knew the Privy Council Office somewhat from having worked on program review. And if public policy had been a great interest and public service had become a passion, then the centre was sort of where I belonged.
[00:09:14 Overlaid text on screen: How does working in central agencies differ from working in other government departments?]
Rob Fonberg: I must have spent 22 years in central agencies between Finance and Privy Council Office and Treasury Board. And they suit me better than they might suit other people because I tend to look at issues from a framing and a strategy perspective. The ability for those organisations to convene and to collaborate. There's a certain authority that goes with those central agencies that allows for that.
And that was really where I found that nexus of interests around policymaking and providing advice was being able to convene those groups.
[00:10:11 Overlaid text on screen: Could you explain the difference between policy and advice?]
Rob Fonberg: Yes, I think policy is the solution to a particular problem. So, there's not a lot of point in developing a policy if you're not trying to fix a problem. Although I think there have been times in our past where we've actually developed solutions that aren't really looking for problems.
And advice is if there's really a core function of the public service on the policy side, it is providing advice to decision makers, to our political decision makers.
[00:10:50 Overlaid text on screen: How did you become a deputy minister?]
Rob Fonberg: It was pretty straightforward for me. The Clerk of the Privy Council at the time walked down that long hallway from his office to my office, shook my hand and said, congratulations, you're the new Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet Plans.
[00:11:11 Overlaid text on screen: Mr. Fonberg was Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet at the Privy Council Office from 2000 to 2004.]
Rob Fonberg: And I looked up and said, me? Are you talking to me?
[00:11:16 Overlaid text on screen: He then held the position of Deputy Minister of International Trade from 2004 to 2006, before becoming Associate Deputy Minister at the Treasury Board Secretariat from 2006 to 2007.]
Rob Fonberg: And so that cost me a very large box of Smarties and a bottle of Scotch. And I was sort of – it was nothing I ever anticipated or expected, but that's how it happened. It wasn't a phone call. It was the actual Clerk came down and said, you're the one.
[00:11:33 Overlaid text on screen: What was it like stepping into a new organisation as deputy minister?]
Rob Fonberg: Yes. Well, first things first. That position was not really a deputy head, not in the context of the FAA. That belonged to the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.
I brought a central agency perspective on solutions and framing and strategy to the job. And I think I also brought a perspective around speed because the central agencies were often about speed. So, you not only had to be right, but you had to be fast. And I wouldn't say that that sat perfectly well with my new organisation, but they were a really capable, smart group of people. We had a mandate from Paul Martin to put together an international commerce strategy. And I think we really stretched the parameters of that exercise. So, we had a lot of fun. I thought we put together a fantastic document, but I was only in the department for about two years, so we didn't really see the implementation side of that.
[00:12:42 Overlaid text on screen: You took a timeout during your career. Can you tell us more about that experience?]
Rob Fonberg: Timeout was, I won't say that it was life changing, but it was a real wake up call. Because sometimes we don't really know ourselves very well. And sometimes you need somebody else to tell you who you are in the context of the world that you're actually working in. And that's what happened to me. So, I'd made it a long way through my career until somebody finally kind of said, you know, you have to fix these parts of who you are or how you behave in the public service. That was a really difficult time.
[00:13:24 Overlaid image of 18 September 2007 news release. Prime Minister Stephen Harper announces changes in the senior ranks of the public service: Robert Fonberg, currently Senior Associate Secretary of the Treasury Board, becomes Deputy Minister of National Defence.]
[00:13:27 Overlaid text on screen: Following his tenure at the Treasury Board Secretariat, Mr. Fonberg served as the Deputy Minister of the Department of National Defence from 2007 to 2013.]
Rob Fonberg: I went off to the Treasury Board Secretariat for a year and a half. I thought that would be a great way to end my career. I was comfortable in the central agency. And that lasted a year and a half. And then came the next chapter.
[00:13:39 Overlaid text on screen: Reflecting on your deputy minister role, what aspects did you bring from your timeout that you believe were crucial for that position?]
Rob Fonberg: I think patience, providing space for people to come to the right conclusions. It was a very complicated organisation. It's a shared space, as you know, with the Chief of Defence staff. It's a massive department. And I really had to step back. You have to trust your ADMs and your generals in that organisation. So, I would say patience and calm and letting people figure out the right solutions. Keeping them inside guardrails or helping them stay inside guardrails. Really tricky space, but I loved the job. It was a fantastic job.
[00:14:39 Overlaid text on screen: What does leadership mean to you?]
Rob Fonberg: That's a great question. I think I'd probably break away a little bit from what my colleagues or former colleagues would say. And I never questioned myself about leadership. I never thought about who I was as leader until I was stood up and sort of given a timeout.
I always felt I had what I needed to be a leader, no matter what level I was at, from the time I was an EC5 to the time I was a deputy. And all the way through, it was a question of taking the space that was provided to you and working in that space to bring people together to find solutions to problems. And for me, that was leadership.
[00:15:25 Overlaid text on screen: How does leading within the public service differ from leading in the private sector, based on your experience?]
Rob Fonberg: Well, let me just take you back a second to when I left government, because the learning that went on in the private sector allowed me to come back and put some of that thinking on the table in the public service in a way that most of my colleagues couldn't because they didn't have the experience.
I think there is a big difference in leadership between public sector and private sector. And I think that's because of what you are mandated to do, what you are responsible for in the public sector. Private sector companies, bad leadership, stock prices fall, private sector companies go bankrupt, resources get reallocated. Public sector, they don't go bankrupt, per se. Countries fail. And so, the responsibilities of leadership in the public sector are much more profound, in my view, than in the private sector.
[00:16:30 Overlaid text on screen: Do you think it's beneficial for senior public service leaders to have experience outside the public service?]
Rob Fonberg: Would it be better if they had jobs outside the public service? I would say probably yes. It's just a diversity in terms of how they think. It doesn't have to be private sector. [It] could be academic; could be private sector. It could be not for profit.
But I think the bigger issue is we talk about recruiting the best and the brightest. So, we recruit the best and the brightest and then we put them in chairs, and we say, we'll see you in 10 years. And we pour water on them and watch them sort of grow over time, but we don't proactively grow them. And so, I've talked about that in the past, and I'm away from the system now, so maybe it's happening in a more deliberate way, but it wasn't when I was there.
[00:17:21 Overlaid text on screen: What do you think your colleagues and team members took away from working with you?]
Rob Fonberg: Oh, boy. I get a lot of "you were really frank", which meant I came across, I think, as often fairly aggressive. I think people thought that I was able to frame things. I had a pretty good sense of where I thought the centre of the road was, but I didn't necessarily give everybody time and space to get them to the centre of the road. So, I was probably a little too anxious to get there. And that can be hard on people. And I think a lot of people would say that I was kind of hard on them in terms of pushing towards a solution.
[00:18:12 Overlaid text on screen: Can you share where you were on 9/11?]
Rob Fonberg: So, at the moment of the tragedy, I was in my office in the Privy Council Office. I was Deputy Secretary of the Cabinet Plans. The Clerk called the DepSec to his office and we watched in horror, really,
[00:18:12 Overlaid images of the tragic events of 9/11: the second plane, as it's about to strike the South Tower of the World Trade Centre; both towers engulfed in flames and smoke; dozens of aircraft parked on a runway.]
Rob Fonberg: as those airplanes, over and over, watching them hit those towers.
We had a crisis on our hands of enormous proportions, almost undefinable. You know the story of the landing of the planes and the closing of the airspace. We had borders that were basically shut in 14-hour lineups at the Windsor-Detroit border. And the Americans had gone 100% onto security. And we were still in this world of a balance between economic and security.
So that became the challenge of the moment.
[00:19:10 Overlaid text on screen: Can you explain the additional role you took on after 9/11 and what responsibilities it entailed?]
Rob Fonberg: So, I took on an added title, an added job. Mr. Chrétien asked Mr. Manley to be the counterpart to Tom Ridge, in the United States, to negotiate a border agreement, which was a multifaceted agreement. And Deputy Prime Minister, and Minister of Finance I think at the time, Manly, asked me or asked the Prime Minister if I would also be his deputy. So, I was the deputy on the Smart Border Accords, which meant working across 15 different organisations; working with the White House; pulling together an agenda; negotiating the details of that agenda.
And by December of that year, we actually were at a signing ceremony in Detroit with Prime Minister Chrétien and President Bush to sign off on, I think, a 36 item Smart Border Accord. We had a fantastic staff. Graham Flack, a former colleague of ours, was the lead for me on that. And we had a bunch of really smart, young team members. It was a tragedy, but it was an amazing opportunity to actually advance an agenda that badly needed advancing.
[00:20:36 Overlaid text on screen: Can you tell us the difference between the federal public service you joined and the one you left?]
Rob Fonberg: Yes, I think it's a really interesting – I've thought about this. I wrote a little bit about this – a really interesting trajectory. And knowing that I would be doing this, I thought about where did I end my thinking about this and where are we a little bit today?
I think the public service I entered was a very ordered, very structured place. Again, on policy issues, the public service didn't own the space, but had access to the resources required to do good, thoughtful policy, take the time to do it and manage the stakeholders, and get to advice giving, and get to decision making, get a decision, get to implementation. And if there was a problem or a mistake, it had come out in the print media a month later and by then, you'd be on to the next thing.
By the time I had left government, that had changed dramatically as a result of where information communications technologies had taken the world. Everybody with smartphones could do policy advice.
Government had to respond to many, many voices. The speed with which you had to do your work, your policy work; get to advice, get to a decision had collapsed in many ways; many, many more voices out there, because everybody had access to the resources they needed to do policy work. So, it was a very, very different world, and I think it put very different kinds of demands on the public service. I wondered whether the way that we practice Westminster Parliamentary or whether our institutions are actually fit to purpose today, given the sort of continuous evolution of that.
So, a very different world [from when] I left than when I started. [And] I suspect a very different world today than the one I left.
[00:22:41 Overlaid text on screen: How did you approach your interactions with ministers?]
Rob Fonberg: You know, there were some ministers I liked and some ministers I didn't like. I always treated my ministers with the utmost respect, it didn't matter who they were. Often, to this day, I have to catch myself calling former ministers, ministers, still, as opposed to by their first names. I was not good at managing my minister per se. I managed my minister like I managed my public service life. There was the answer, let's go, minister. But we would have debates.
Some, I think, appreciated that approach more than others. But ministers, for me, they deserved the utmost respect for the positions that they held and the decisions that they had to take, both collectively and individually.
[00:23:31 Overlaid text on screen: Can you share your experiences working with generals and the broader military community?]
Rob Fonberg: The entire uniformed community, the military, are remarkable people. The things they're trained to do, the way they're trained to do it, how they go through continuous training throughout their careers, they're a remarkable group of people. And I spent time with them around the world, including in Afghanistan a number of times, and they really put their lives on the line. And, as you know, 157 of them did during the Afghanistan war, which was tragic.
Generals are an interesting group of people. There are many of them over at National Defence Headquarters. And so, you don't realize just how much status they have, because there are many of them around. Extremely smart, engaged people, worried and concerned about the troops that they actually command and the commands that they actually have.
From time to time, I think they drift outside of their swim lanes a little bit and into kind of civilian swim lanes, and that's why that space is so complicated. Not just between the deputy and the Chief of Defence staff, and his or her staff, but also between the deputy and the Prime Minister's Office and the Privy Council Office, the Security Community, and the Canadian Armed Forces. Very, very complicated space. But there is no other way to learn about them the way I did, no other opportunity except to be with them. It was a great experience.
[00:25:09 Overlaid text on screen: What advice would you give to a junior public servant just starting out their career?]
Rob Fonberg: I think the first part of the answer to that question is, my wisdom is out of date. There's a different normal, and I still spend a lot of time with fairly young public servants and some aspiring public servants, including mentoring kids from university. Their normal is very different than the normal that I left with in 2014.
I think my answer would be, understand what the institution is fundamentally about and what it's responsible and accountable for. Whether you're doing operations, whether you're doing communications, whether you're doing policy work. Take as much of it as you can and internalize it and think about why you're doing it and whether you're passionate about it. Because if you're not, you may as well be somewhere else. I think that's probably what I would say. But we're living in a different normal than the one I grew up in.
[00:26:22 Video closes with the crew packing up their equipment from the interview.]
[00:26:28 The CSPS animated logo appears onscreen. Text on screen: canada.ca/school.]
[00:26:35 The Government of Canada wordmark appears, and fades to black.]
