Nick Charney Op-Ed: Finding a Path to Sustainability

Nick Charney was — and remains — one of the most-read writers about Canadian public-sector renewal. His blog, CPSRenewal.ca, ran during the late 2000s and early 2010s out of a public-service insider's vantage point, and his e-book Scheming Virtuously: A Handbook for Public Servants (2009, with Etienne Laliberté) circulated widely as the canonical mid-career-public-servant change-the-system manual. His writing during this period emphasised institutional plumbing — what hierarchical, risk-averse public organisations actually allow under their existing rules, and how to get useful work done within those constraints rather than waiting for top-down permission.

The 'sustainability' framing in this February 2012 op-ed reflects a recurring theme in Charney's writing during the 2010–2013 period: that the Government 2.0 movement's first wave had produced a lot of pilot projects, hackathons, and demonstration deployments, but very few of them survived the transition from one fiscal year to the next, and even fewer survived a change in director or minister. The question 'what would make this work last past the launch news cycle' is one civic-tech literature has continued to grapple with, and Charney's writing was one of the early sustained takes on it.

His later trajectory — leaving CPSRenewal as a daily blog around the mid-2010s, continuing to write occasionally on Substack and elsewhere, and remaining a presence in Canadian public-service-modernisation conversations — has kept the throughline alive. The 2012 op-ed sits at the start of a now-decade-long argument that institutional sustainability, not project virtuosity, is the actual constraint on public-sector innovation.