Fear of Reprisal

Background:

In 2019, in an effort to improve the culture in the Agency I work in, I built a Web App that compared Public Service Employee Survey (PSES) results on key questions across different divisions of the organization. One of those key questions was the Fear of Reprisal. With the help of this Web App, my colleagues and I were able to demonstrate to our upper management at the VP level which divisions required specific attention. These were the divisions where Confidence in Senior Management was the lowest (PSES 2018 Question 30) and where Fear of Reprisal (Question 36 in PSES 2018) was the highest. As a result, it was then possible to improve the situation in those divisions that required special attention. See White Paper "Analyzing and improving the CBSA performance using PSES data: Data Science Way" for the details. 

Later,  in 2020 when I've started the Government of Canada R4GC data science community of practice in GCCollab  to assist colleagues in learning new data visualization tools, some of them confessed that they experienced similar problems. We then applied the same approach to find the divisions/units where Fear of Reprisal was high in other government departments, and why it was high there (in other words, what it correlated with and did not correlate with). The outcome of this analysis is provided in the White Paper "Where is the highest Fear of Reprisal and Why?"  and summarized below. The main two questions answered in this analysis are the following:

- Question 1: Where in the Public Service is the Fear of Reprisal the Highest?

- Question 2: Why is the Fear of Reprisal High in These Divisions/Units?

Note that this analysis was conducted before the start of the pandemic and before all pandemic-related measures and policies were introduced by the government. Knowing that these measures and policies were approved exactly in the departments where the Fear of Reprisal is among the highest in the Public Service should be of major concern to all Canadians, particularly for the Union, which has the mandate to protect the professionals working in those departments.

I believe this analysis provides the Union with an excellent opportunity to address the problem before it becomes worse. Canadians rely on the unbiased, interference-free expert work of our professionals who develop policies for all Canadians. The Union must do everything possible to ensure this is the case. And if it is not the case, the Union should be very vocal about it so that all Canadians know about it too.