New $50M fund aims to encourage Manitoba civil servants to make government more efficient

Manitoba's Progressive Conservative government hopes a new $50-million fund will encourage public servants to come up with innovative ideas to make government more efficient.

Members of the civil service can pitch their ideas to the new Transformation Capital Fund. Ideas that demonstrate an expected return on investment within four years will be be eligible for the funding.

Premier Brian Pallister, Fred Meier — the head of Manitoba's public service — and Finance Minister Cameron Friesen made the announcement on Wednesday.

"Our model of government puts an emphasis on annual budgets that create short-term options, which leaves very little room to invest in innovation for longer-term results," said Meier, the clerk of the executive council.

"This fund, on the other hand, has no relationship to individual department budgets, other than the savings they generate."

As part of their submissions, civil servants must identify any risk factors and include a risk-mitigation plan.

"Along the way, there'll probably some things that don't work out, and we need to be not afraid to say 'this one didn't work out.' We need to create the culture that will invite failure, fail fast, go on, re-embrace on risk," said Friesen.

Meier said business consultants from outside government will help civil servants focus their ideas.

"It's in fact the training of our public service as well, to help build businesses cases and make them successful. So that's the role of those external business consultants — to help them write those business cases," he said.

The fund is part of the PC government's strategy to reform and modernize the civil service. The outline of that strategy was announced in February with the release of the Transforming the Manitoba Public Service document.

The plan also includes an online database that will allow public servants to load information that will feed an ongoing scorecard. This will allow internal measurements of performance and progress, as well as monitoring of funding as it's spent.

Projects that receive funding under the Transformation Capital Fund will be announced publicly.