Red team the red team

How would you act if you wanted this government to thrive? And why can't this government act like that?

In July 2012, the prime minister of Canada was a year past the last election and three years from the next, making small adjustments while Canadians’ frustration with his government grew large. Stephen Harper was his name, and he began the month by adjusting his cabinet in ways that seemed almost to advertise his team’s weakness (Oda out, Fantino and Valcourt up. The names alone conjure an era long vanished, don’t they?).

In a ski village in Quebec, the instrument of the prime minister’s eventual undoing was meeting with friends to plan the incumbent’s defeat.

Justin Trudeau was his name. “We got together at the end of July in Mont Tremblant,” Trudeau wrote later in his memoir. “My family met with a team of people from across the country, whom we had carefully selected for their talent, energy and experience.”

The details of the Mont Tremblant session that laid the groundwork for Trudeau’s candidacy for Liberal leader are interesting. I’ve long thought Trudeau’s memoir should actually be read by more people who own a copy. But the gist of it is that much of the Trudeau group’s reflection was based on keen understanding of Harper’s weakness. That’s how such gatherings go. You enter any fight with strong beliefs. But you deploy your strengths in a way designed to highlight and exploit your opponent’s weakness.

In July 2022, the prime minister of Canada is a year past the last election and three years from the next. He seems trapped inside a tiny vocabulary of thought and action. We’ll get to his ludicrous response to the passport and airport backlogs, which seems as ineffectual as it is entirely characteristic.

Surely by now, somewhere in Canada, there have already been meetings like the Mont Tremblant strategy weekend, in which people with talent and energy imagine a Canadian government without Justin Trudeau. And for how much longer will such meetings be convened only by Conservatives?

Six months ago I speculated about whether Trudeau would still be prime minister at the end of 2022. It was precocious speculation even then, and I couched it in 90 layers of what-if and to-be-sure. In 2012, after all, Stephen Harper didn’t quit, he stuck around and ran again three years later. That’s still a path that’s easy to imagine for Trudeau.

But it’s funny how time slips away from you, and whether Trudeau plans to quit or stay, he needs to be making big decisions right about now.

If he’s going to quit he should quit. Paul Martin, Kim Campbell and John Turner had their flaws, but they also faced electorates too quickly because their predecessors waited until very late to leave the field. Of the three only Martin eked out an initial election victory, and it left him weakened for the rematch.

If Trudeau is going to stay, he needs to start thinking about how to face voters with something more than exhaustion, risk aversion and denial.

Of course the Liberal plan is to face voters with exhaustion, risk aversion, denial and yet another referendum on Canadian values. Trudeau has been running against Donald Trump since Trump was elected. And it kind of works! Warning voters against a regressive apocalypse has kept Trudeau in — sorry, near — 24 Sussex Drive through two re-elections. But the returns on the strategy are diminishing. The Liberals’ share of the popular vote declined in 2019 and 2021. The only leader since Confederation to hold power with a smaller share of the popular vote than Trudeau in 2019 was Trudeau in 2021. He remains the legitimate prime minister, but the trend line isn’t great. And the last time Liberal parties fell out of power in a big theatre in Canada — in the Quebec and Ontario elections of 2018 — they fell to historic lows.

All of these thoughts occured to me when Trudeau wrote to Canadians from Kigali on Saturday to announce he is adjusting his cabinet in ways that seemed almost to advertise his team’s weakness.

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This newsletter is subscriber-supported. In the rest of today’s post, I discuss the latest symptoms of a pretty deep malaise in the Trudeau government, and I wonder what would happen if somebody from outside, with a mandate to speak truth to power, got a look inside this government.

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Who’s the intended audience for an announcement about improving government services, delivered on a Saturday morning while the prime minister is traveling? Whom is this government seeking to convince? I’m going to guess it’s people who are open to voting Liberal but are currently unnerved and need reassuring. People who’ve written the Liberals off are not worth much marketing effort, though in theory they still deserve to be governed well. People who think the government is always heroic, and that the only people upset about passports are rich snobs who didn’t plan ahead, don’t need any effort, and besides they’re all on Twitter. The Goldilocks zone, neither too hot nor too cold, might be characterized as worried but gettable.

Who in this target audience would be reassured by the news that Trudeau plans to “improve government services” by forming a new cabinet committee?

Say hello to the Task Force on Services to Canadians. This 10-member cabinet committee is co-chaired by a TV journalist who, on entering politics, was spared the indignity of having to campaign for her nomination as the party’s candidate. Its members include the architect of this government’s appointments system, and, well, Harjit Sajjan.

Two names on the list seem solid to me; I won’t wreck their currency in Liberal circles by saying which two. But so what? Who believes this group has the mandate to make any surprising suggestion, or the clout to get such a suggestion implemented if they made it? Does anyone doubt the group will finish every meeting agreeing unanimously to do things that won’t actually change anything? How often will this committee meet? Will we eventually learn that it never met? Will it work more closely with cabinet climate committee ‘A’ or with cabinet climate committee ‘B’? When I ask how, precisely, this new thing is not the same as an Incident Response Group, why do readers across Ottawa suddenly bark out an involuntary bitter laugh? How will this new group coordinate with the “strategic policy review,” already announced, whose goal is to find $6 billion in savings “based in part on key lessons taken from how the government adapted during the pandemic”? When I say the two groups will certainly ignore each other completely and produce work with overlapping contradictory effect, is that the sort of thing that gets me called a cynic? Even though I’m just trying to stop this government from acting like this?

Probably I am underrating at least some of these committee members’ personal capacities. You meet almost any MP, let alone any cabinet minister, and you discover someone who’s done fascinating things, thinks hard about the issues, cares deeply for a great country. It’s just that when you put them together, they come up with things like a national infrastructure assessment that, a year and a half after it was announced, is not yet assessing any infrastructure.

Eventually it becomes impossible to escape the conclusion that it’s the putting them together that’s the problem. That after six years of standing behind Trudeau, staring in the same direction and nodding, they’re a little too comfortable staring in the same direction and nodding. That, far from multiplying human capability, this government now reliably divides it.

How could people inside the government think a committee of cabinet ministers with no deadline, a vague mandate and no hint of real clout would help? The answer is that they’re inside the government. They’ve come to believe anything it does helps. Their problem is that most people are outside the government and they are starting to feel very far outside it indeed.

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“An astonishing number of senior leaders are systemically incapable of identifying their organization’s most glaring and dangerous shortcomings,” Micah Zenko writes in his 2015 book Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy.

Zenko is a political scientist and former Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who now consults with large organizations on “red-teaming” — the practice of setting up internal critiquing processes to guard against fatal weakness. Usually the process is embodied in an actual team, independent from regular staff but familiar with the workplace, and reporting directly to the leader. The red team acts like the regular staff’s worst nightmare, probing for weakness and ineffectiveness, trying to find flaws, not just errors of detail but of conception and imagination. Zenko says the practice came from the US military, which learned early that it would prefer to simulate, and learn from, catastrophic failure than to experience it in the battlefield.

Red-teaming can be done in all sorts of contexts. Businesses test whether their production or marketing strategies make sense. A plot in the Aaron Sorkin HBO series The Newsroom focussed on a “red team” testing the assumptions and reporting in a big story. In the tremendously entertaining 1992 Phil Alden Robinson caper movie Sneakers, Robert Redford red-teams bank security systems for a living.

The idea behind red-teaming, Zenko writes, is that “you can’t grade your own homework.” Put less succinctly,

“The dilemma for any institution operating in a competitive environment characterized by incomplete information and rapid change is how to determine when its standard processes and strategies are resulting in a suboptimal outcome, or, more seriously, leading to a potential catastrophe.”

Leaders always tell themselves they have the fortitude to listen to internal critiques, Zenko writes. Unfortunately they’re probably flattering both themselves and their regular staff. Trusting ordinary workplace give-and-take

“wrongly assumes that the people who work for these leaders have the skills to identify emerging problems (highly unlikely), that they will tell their bosses about these problems (potentially career damaging), and that they will face no negative consequences for bringing such issues to their leaders’ attention (rare, since it disrupts the conventional wisdom.”

You probably see where I’m going with this. I don’t run into anyone who, having left the near orbit of Justin Trudeau’s PMO, describes it as a place where dissent is welcome, people feel free to report problems up the ladder, and questions aren’t punished. It’s noteworthy that when Trudeau parted company with Bill Morneau, the preliminary news leaks all portrayed Morneau as the kind of guy who dissented from monolithic consensus. You really need to be inside a bubble to think it will hurt somebody’s reputation to be thought of as somebody who questioned herd instincts. “Insufficiently lemming-esque” is normally viewed in healthy workplaces as a quality, not a defect.

A few times Trudeau has seemed to seek advice from outside Trudeau-land on improving the government’s functioning. There was the whole deliverology business, which just kind of faded away. There was the surprising extended second transition exercise, after the difficult 2019 election. Anne McLellan, a former deputy prime minister, and Quebec Inc. business personality Isabelle Hudon spent weeks considering directions for a second-term Trudeau government. But the second Trudeau government turned out to be substantially the same as the first, because McLellan and Hudon left and the usual suspects stayed. Now McLellan works full-time for an organization whose message to the Trudeau government could be summed up as, “I didn’t mean like that.”

What would an empowered, fearless Trudeau red team tell the boss? Basically all the stuff I’ve been trying to tell him since 2018, I like to think. That when he believes he knows what will happen next he is always wrong, so he needs a government that multitasks better and plans for contingencies. That he is over-announcing by multiples of ten times too many, and under-delivering in similar ratio. That there is nobody left in Canada who mistakes an announcement for a result, so it’s long past time for Trudeau to fall out of love with announcements. That it is corrosive of public trust in government to have decision-making power so closely held by so few people who are so bad at making decisions.

How will Trudeau know it’s time to rethink his government? Perhaps he will notice at some point that his government has long since become incapable of delivering useful surprise, even as the world becomes a giant random-event generator. That’s the sort of big blinking yellow light a leader is free to ignore, of course. But electorates have a way of delivering these messages with shocking firmness when they get a chance. As Kathleen Wynne and Philippe Couillard learned. And somebody has to lead the Liberal Party of Canada into the next election. When that election is over, will that person be in a mood to thank Justin Trudeau?