More Resources and Red Tape

What it takes to manage intergovernmental agreements with Ottawa

The Government of Alberta appears poised to introduce legislation requiring the Province to approve all federal-municipal agreements.

The measure was part of the Kenney Government’s “Fair Deal” package, which also proposes “emulating Quebec’s legal requirement that public bodies, including municipalities and school boards, obtain the approval of the provincial government before they can enter into agreements with the federal government.”

(This should put school boards and other agencies, boards, and commissions on notice: if this law is effective, you could be next.)

Unlike other elements of the Fair Deal package, like an Alberta Pension Plan, Equalization referendum, or Alberta Police Force, I’m actually in favour of this new measure, in principle.

I come by this opinion having dedicated a misspent youth in intergovernmental relations. I spent two years in IGR in Manitoba and 5+ here in Alberta. In that time, I saw the strategic benefits of coordination that come from channeling all federal-provincial-territorial agreements through one shop in the centre of government.

Briefly, flowing all agreements through a central agency offers the following benefits:

• Consistency and Compliance: A central agency ensures uniformity in the interpretation and application of agreements, reducing legal and procedural discrepancies and promoting adherence to overarching governmental policies.

• Strategic Coordination: Central approval facilitates the alignment of intergovernmental agreements with the province's broader strategic goals and priorities, enabling a more integrated and coherent approach to intergovernmental relations.

• Expertise in Negotiations: A central body can streamline negotiation processes, avoid duplication of efforts across different ministries, and leverage expertise in diplomacy. It can also allow for the sharing of best practices and “wins” from one part of government to others.

• Conflict Resolution: Many agreements cut across multiple ministries, even if only one is the principal party. A central agency can act as an arbiter or authority in cases of disputes or conflicts among ministries over the terms of the agreement.

• Risk Management: Centralized approval allows for comprehensive risk assessment and mitigation strategies, ensuring that agreements are scrutinized for potential financial, legal, and reputational risks before being finalized.

Achieving these benefits takes a lot of resources and comes at the expense of red tape.

I have my biases, no doubt. My public service career was spent in central agencies, not in line departments. My perspective on intergovernmental agreements was often at odds with those of my colleagues in other ministries like health, education, and justice. Discussed below, I was at odds more than not with legal and risk management folks about the content of many agreements, as well.

This said, I think there are real advantages to bringing the negotiation of federal agreements with municipalities under provincial oversight. This is particularly true in an era when both leading parties at the federal level are promising to flex their dollars in areas of provincial jurisdiction.

This support for the new law comes with a huge caveat, though: the new system needs to be properly resourced to prevent huge backlogs and noncompliance. Otherwise, the proposed law could well tie cities and towns up in red tape at a time they need federal resources the most.

Negotiating Intergovernmental Agreements

I don't think many appreciate the amount of resources required to negotiate intergovernmental agreements like the ones contemplated by this new law. Based on my own experience, let me walk you through what's involved in "approving" these sorts of agreements.

First, the new law must designate who has final authority over federal-municipal agreements. It might be the minister of municipal affairs, or it could be added to the responsibilities of the IGR unit of Executive Council. Given the high rate of turnover in the muni affairs portfolio over the past decade, I hope they don’t go that route. Intergovernmental negotiation is a craft that requires experience and instability is anathema to institutional memory and expertise.

Instead, I suspect and hope they make the minister of IGR (usually the premier) the ultimate approver.

In my time in IGR, most of the 400+ intergovernmental agreements that we reviewed each year arrived to us via Government of Alberta departments. They were not sent to us directly by Ottawa.

This means that a number of agreements were missed because departments either were unaware of or avoided the approvals process. We caught some of them later, and had to renegotiate. Expect municipalities to "miss" a few, too.

Ensuring compliance among departments was an important part of the job. That meant building awareness, skills, and trust with departmental officials across the GoA. Similar network-building and education will need to take place between the GoA and municipalities. Larger municipalities may well decide to create or bolster their own internal IGR shops to make this easier.

Once the agreement arrives in the IGR shop in Exec Council, a manager is assigned to the file based on their area of expertise. I worked on social and strategic policy files, for example, while my colleagues worked on econ/energy.

During my time, we had between 6 and 8 people whose primary responsibility it was to review agreements. That consumed more than half our time most months. At any given moment, my small team might be working on a dozen or so agreements.

When we first became aware of an agreement, we would meet with the department officials to discuss their objectives and review the “template” sent to them by the federal government. This is a crucial first step.

Like any good opening offer, the federal template serves to anchor the negotiations. Federal officials insist that "this is the deal everyone gets, so just sign." Most of our job involved convincing both our own departments and the feds that this isn't how it works.

We would go through the federal template and highlight inappropriate clauses that were unconstitutional, illegal, or in opposition to Alberta's overall IGR objectives. This is a detailed process consuming many hours of analysts’ and managers' time.

Typically offensive clauses would have binded Alberta ministries to enforce federal legislation (like the Official Languages Act), submit to reporting requirements imposed on private contractors, and so on.

At this stage, we would engage legal and risk management officials from Justice and Finance. They would examine each agreement for problematic clauses, as well, adding weeks of work (and numerous person-hours) to the process.

Armed with all the necessary edits in tracked-changes, we then took the agreement back to the department and worked with them to negotiate changes with the federal government.

The back-and-forth within the Government of Alberta on each agreement (IGR, Justice, Finance, Department) was often the most resource- and time-consuming part of the process. It can take months.

I used to joke that 80% of intergovernmental relations is *intra*governmental relations.

Negotiations with the federal government are similarly costly, often involving discussions with their legal and Treasury Board officials. If we could get everyone from both sides on one teleconference, we were lucky. And that usually came only after months of frustration.

In the end, the agreement would need to be submitted to the Deputy Minister of IGR for their approval. In my experience, this was by no means a rubber stamp. The DMs I worked with were exceptionally diligent. I recall having to defend each minor concession to ensure it didn't become a precedent for other negotiations.

That's actually part of the value in having a single shop vet all intergovernmental agreements. It allows the Government of Alberta to speak with one voice and drive an IGR agenda. Slip-ups on minor agreements can come back to haunt you on bigger ones.

The DM of IGR had some delegated authority to approve smaller agreements, but some would need ministerial approval. The minister of IGR in Alberta is usually the premier, meaning a political lens is necessarily applied to those arrangements. This also adds time.

Once the agreement is approved, it needed to be inventoried and publicly disclosed as part of the annual review process. This may seem routine to anyone who's not responsible for tracking the status of hundreds of negotiations across government. Trust me: it's not.

Internal processes might have changed since I left the GoA back in 2017. Things might well be streamlined now.

However, the rigour with which the government is approaching this new municipal requirement -- and its comparison with Quebec's process -- suggests that they want a similar level of oversight as the steps I described.

This will mean staffing up not only in terms of IGR officials, but also legal and risk management folks who need to vet each agreement. Out of necessity, it will also likely mean delegating authority to public servants to approve minor agreements.

More than this, it will mean training and coordinating a legion of municipal officials on the processes and nuances involved in intergovernmental agreements. Without that, the new approvals process will be ignored or inefficient.

This is not to say imposing a new approvals process for federal-municipal agreements is undesirable. I think there are advantages. But it will take a lot of resources to pull off and result in a lot of red tape. We need to acknowledge that from the outset.