Machinery-of-government changes often create the appearance of reform while leaving the rules, contracts, and leadership of the old institutions intact.
In The Hill Times, I argue that if the recently launched Digital Transformation Canada is going to succeed at finally modernizing the federal government for the digital age, it must be treated not as a merger of existing organizations, but as the founding of a new institution with a mandate to drop the rules, processes, practices, and importantly, the custodians, of the old order.
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Digital Transformation Canada Needs to Start Fresh
September 16, 2026
The Government of Canada has launched Digital Transformation Canada, merging teams from five departments under former Google executive Patrick Pichette to change how government develops, buys and uses technology.
This is both a significant opportunity and a dangerous moment. Machinery-of-government changes can create the appearance of reform while leaving the rules, contracts, incentives and leadership of the old institutions intact. The result is a new organization that behaves exactly like its predecessors, one more costly reform confirming fears that government cannot improve.
To avoid this risk, Pichette should treat Digital Transformation Canada as the founding of a new institution with a mandate for deep public administration reform.
Begin with subtraction
Most transformations prioritize additions: strategies, governance bodies, executive roles and, ini the case of Digital Transformation Canada, a fellowship program. Less attention goes to what should end. Pichette should start there. Rules that generate paperwork without reducing risk, and reviews that repeat decisions made elsewhere, should go. So should executive layers that separate decision-makers from delivery, and briefing practices that leave leaders exhaustively informed yet unable to act. Every inherited function, process and executive position must earn its place.
Digital Transformation Canada will fail if Pichette simply divides responsibilities among the inherited leaders, who will default to what they know. Begin instead with the mandate, set the operating model, then choose the people equipped to lead. Follow the State of Colorado’s example: they published their strategy and let go of people who no longer fit the model.
Pichette’s initial calendar will be telling. If the next three months go to inherited executives defending their functions and competing for dominance, the old organization has already won.
Take big swings, especially on procurement
Reopen supposedly immovable decisions: exit contracts that no longer deliver, consolidate duplicative platforms, replace document-based controls with automated guardrails. Change carries risk, but so does the status quo.
Procurement belongs at the centre of the new organizational mandate. My co-authors and I have shown, using the government’s own data, that federal IT contracting routinely violates best practice: lengthy procurements that favour incumbents, bundled work that shuts out smaller firms, vendor-owned intellectual property that locks in products that no longer serve the public, and eroded expertise that leaves government unable to hold suppliers accountable. Parliament, the Auditor General and every Phoenix and ArriveCAN post-mortem agree. And yet, these bad habits persist.
Modular contracting should replace enormous, long-term agreements. Automatic extensions should end and IT spend controls begin. Open standards and reuse should be defaults; publicly funded technology should stay public. Every inherited contract faces one test: knowing what we know now, would we sign it today?
Recruit nationally and bring back the doers
Over the past decade, government recruited people with strong digital skills who challenged administrative policy and delivery norms in the name of better services. The institution frustrated and lost them. That they struggled in the old model is exactly what makes them valuable to the new one. Pichette should find them and ask what happened. Their answers are worth more than another briefing from those who inherited the system.
He should also look beyond Ottawa. Canada’s digital talent is spread across the country; a digital organization built around “in person in the capital” excludes most of it. Government competing for scarce skills must meet talent where it is.
Leaders will need real fluency in modern delivery practices, and fellows should be judged by the public capacity they leave behind. Otherwise government will again rent the expertise it has repeatedly failed to keep.
Use this founding moment
There will be a natural tendency to measure Digital Transformation Canada by what it announces: strategies, partnerships, shiny products and uses of artificial intelligence. Doing these will be easier than confronting the organization’s inheritance. Pointing new technology at old government problems is a fool’s errand; real transformation attacks the conditions that produced those problems in the first place.
We should measure this organization first by what it stops. Which rules disappear? Which approvals go? Which contracts are exited? Which leaders are asked to seek a new mission because the institution they sustained is the one being replaced?
The federal government has tried digital transformation before. This time, it has created an organization with transformation in its name. Earning that name will require the courage to leave parts of the old model, and some of its custodians, behind.