'Revolving door' of insiders, lobbyists behind government scandal a click away with new AI tool
OTTAWA — The new frontier of government accountability could be a colourful AI-generated image connecting the dots between all the different players in one of Canada’s messiest procurement controversies.
The Phoenix pay system, which was designed to centralize payroll for the federal government but quickly racked up a long list of issues including overpayments, underpayments and missed payments, is estimated to have cost nearly $5 billion. The replacement software is now estimated to cost more than $4 billion, putting the total price tag of the calamity at nearly $10 billion, according to Auditor General Karen Hogan last week .
Now, using the government’s lobbying registry, auditor general reports, media stories and government press releases, a new interactive website is drawing a vivid picture of the complicated and frenzied lobbying activity beneath the surface of big-money government contracts. And the code can be used to generate a similar map of any government contract or program.
For example, click on the “revolving door” button on the “Dayforce × Phoenix Pay System — Lobbying & Relationship Map” and you’ll find people who have moved from government work to related private sector employment. The website highlights Gianluca Cairo, the former chief of staff to the federal innovation minister, who was in government while the Phoenix fiasco played out. He then joined Ceridian HCM Holding Inc. which was then one of the leading bidders to replace the pay system. In the end, Ceridian’s Dayforce software won the contract and the federal ethics commissioner cleared Cairo’s move, as long as as he obeyed ethics rules around lobbying the government in his new role.
When Cairo was hired by Ceridian, the Globe and Mail wrote that it was part of the company’s “charm offensive in the past two years to make inroads in Ottawa.”
Also in the “revolving door” tab of the website is Regan Watts, a former Conservative government staffer who logged a series of entries in the lobbying registry for Dayforce. None of the players identified on the website are alleged to have broken any ethics rules.
In a written response to National Post, Watts said the website is “demonstrably inaccurate and lacks even basic context.” The tool “creates the illusion of insight while getting the fundamentals wrong. The reality is the organizations I work with see results and governments are better informed, making wiser choices as a consequence,” he wrote.
Cairo did not respond to a request for comment.
But the AI mapping earned rave reviews from government ethics specialist Ian Stedman, a York University professor who previously worked for the Integrity Commissioner of Ontario.
Tools like that can help ethics commissioners across the country explain complex reports in an easy-to-visualize format and helps Canadians better understand the connections between people, organizations and public contracts, he said.
“This mapping of the characters based on official documents and official reports is absolutely brilliant. It’s the kind of thing that commissioners ought to be doing with every one of these files for sure,” said Stedman.
“This visualization of the connections, and the justification and the sources… this should be released with every report about conflicts of interest… to make it interactive and digestible and visual,” he added.
In the case of the Phoenix pay system debacle, the web of players and their connections revealed by the AI-generated tool shows just how complex these networks are.
“Like this revolving door, the relationships, the fact that it’s one (jumping from one) company to the next, this shows you that it isn’t easy to just have a surface level understanding and pick up on how many close relationships there are,” he explained.
To promote transparency, government watchdogs need to ensure the data they publish are searchable, sortable and downloadable, so that the public and journalists can easily compile and parse the data, Stedman said.
The ethics specialist also said government watchdogs can and should adopt AI tools to help facilitate their compliance efforts, such as to verify a public office holder’s compliance with a conflict of ethics screen.
Already in 2018, well before large-language models such as ChatGPT and Claude revolutionized coding, then federal ethics commissioner Mario Dion also saw the potential for AI-driven tools to facilitate his office’s work.
Speaking at York University, Dion argued that artificial intelligence could help develop an “electronic oversight tool” that would catch compliance red flags faster and automatically.
That would allow his office to catch potential conflicts of interest before they happen, or address them immediately so they don’t become chronic.
“One day a system could be developed that contains data not only on public office holders and members, such as their assets and liabilities, but also on the official decisions they are making or have made. The system would be able to automatically generate red flags that would alert the public office holder or member as well as the commissioner,” he said at the time.
In a statement, Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner spokesperson Melanie Rushworth said the office is always looking at new technological tools to boost its work.
But she also said that the office deals in sensitive and private information that would need to be protected from third parties, such as AI platforms.
“This obligation necessarily limits the tools and technologies that could be considered by the Office with consideration of our legal obligations, mandate, and risk considerations,” Rushworth wrote.
In his 2018 speech, former commissioner Dion noted that although the privacy of MPs and public office holders was important, there would be ways to have them consent to their information being used by an in-house AI tool.
A key feature of the website is a button that highlights all the lobbying contacts associated with both of the government’s controversial pay-system contracts. Government officials are highlighted in green and lobbyists are red, illustrating the well-travelled path between the world of government relations and the ministers they’re trying to persuade.
And while the lobbying and relationship map displays the Phoenix pay scandal in technicolour, it’s only the first example of the engine powering it. The new tool, built on the AI platform Claude Code, can now find the same information for any government contract, lobbying relationship or interaction between a corporation and government department.
With some very basic coding knowledge, and using an AI model to do the heavy lifting, a user can launch an investigation with a simple command. The program will launch AI agents that dig through the lobbying registry, scan media reports, and investigate basic facts.
It means virtually any Canadian can find “revolving door” connections to virtually anything that government money is being used for. And it will build a website to display it for posterity — and potentially to get the attention of opposition MPs and journalists.
National Post
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