In this two-part episode of The Path of Public Service, we feature Arthur “Art” Daniels, retired Assistant Deputy Minister (Ontario Public Service Excellence and Innovation Office, Centre for Leadership, Ontario Public Service Restructuring Secretariat, and Cabinet Office). Art dedicated 40 years in Ontario Public Service, and years since volunteering to causes and organizations like Applaud (formerly QCC) where he served as member of its Board of Directors. In this episode, Art warmly reminiscences, tracing a career defined by practical reform, inclusion, and trust in public service.
In Part One of Art Daniels’ conversation with Katie Jensen, Art Daniels reflects on his personal journey and the experiences that shaped his career and contributions in Ontario Public Service. From working alongside Lithuanian refugees in his father’s construction company to challenging outdated hiring rules in corrections, Art describes public service grounded in fairness, inclusion, and practical reform. Championing others in breaking down barriers, and striving toward a greater good, he traces his early leadership lessons, his role in opening prison jobs to Indigenous people and women, and his shift toward community-based corrections, victim services, and deinstitutionalization. The episode also introduces Art’s broader philosophy of citizen-centred government, moving beyond rigid bureaucracy to focus on people, outcomes, and trust.
[00:03:00] The influence of Art’s personal history
[00:05:00] How Art joined the public service
[00:10:00] The start of change in the Ministry of Reform
[00:15:00] Reform through community
[00:21:00] Community group homes
[00:23:00] The beginning of Service Ontario
Disclaimer:
Any statistics, facts or data references mentioned in this episode have not been independently verified and may not reflect the most accurate, complete, or current data. Please consult reliable sources for up-to-date and authoritative information.
[00:00:00] Katie Jensen: Applaud is proud to showcase the dedication of those who make decisions for the greater good and strive to leave the world a better place, for all Canadians. All personal views expressed by guests and our host are their own. Applaud will continue to recognize those in public service, offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives, and operate in good faith to build trust with Applaud members and all public citizens.
Katie Jensen: If you ask a kid what they want to do when they grow up, the classic response is, "Make the world a better place." But for some, that actually ends up happening.
Art Daniels: My job was to travel the world and to try to end corrupt governments, make governments transparent, trustworthy. My name is Art Daniels. I'm a former civil servant with the Ontario Public Service, and now I'm a retiree living in Toronto.
Katie Jensen: That's Art Daniels, government reformer, excellent storyteller, and the man behind Applaud. Before his career making the OPS better from the inside, he was working for his father, who made a practice of hiring Lithuanians who had been displaced by the Second World War.
Art Daniels: And my dad's family came from Lithuania at the turn of the century.
Katie Jensen: In the early 1900s, Lithuanians fled oppression and conscription to the Imperial Russian Army. For decades, they had faced a press ban, university closures, religious persecution, stripped of their language and barred from teaching or publishing literature in Lithuania. Art's family was among thousands that emigrated to Canada.
Katie Jensen: Many became coal miners, factory workers, or farmers, and started families here.
[00:02:00] Art Daniels: My mom and dad were both born in Toronto. My dad owned a construction company. He had inherited it from his father, who started it when he came to Canada at the turn of the century.
Katie Jensen: After the Soviet Union reoccupied Lithuania in 1944, thousands fled to Germany and Austria. Some were already there as prisoners of war and forced laborers working in brutal conditions.
Art Daniels: They had been moved by the Germans from Lithuania into Europe.
Katie Jensen: They called themselves Dievo Paukščiai, or The Little Birds.
Art Daniels: They used to be unfortunately called DPs, displaced persons, and were prejudiced against. And after the war, a lot of Lithuanians came to Canada.
Katie Jensen: 8,000 skilled refugees, academics, artists, craftspeople, and farmers arrived here.
Art Daniels: But a lot of them, unfortunately, their families were still back in the Soviet Union.
[00:03:00] Katie Jensen: Going back to Soviet-occupied Lithuania wasn't an option for The Little Birds, because going back meant imprisonment, exile to Siberia, or execution. So they stayed to make a new home for themselves, and part of that meant finding new community.
Art Daniels: What my dad did, I think this influenced me a lot 'cause people say, you know, "What things influence you?" Because he had his construction company, was able to employ all these people who were displaced. And so as a kid, I worked for my dad doing summer jobs in construction, working alongside these people that had come from the war, survived the war, survived labor camps, survived concentration camps, survived religious prejudice.
[00:04:00] Art Daniels: So I think that influenced me when I started working, the fact that people came from different backgrounds with different stories to tell, and, uh, we shouldn't hold any kind of preconceived notions about people and their backgrounds or where they came from or who their parents were or what their religion was, et cetera. These things shouldn't matter, and they don't. It's being part of humanity. And the, uh, connection to Lithuania became later quite important to me when I began to work in Lithuania to help the country join the European Union.
Katie Jensen: But decades before Lithuania would join the EU in 2004, Art left the construction site and went off to Western University, where he studied history. He loved it. He was good at it. And so he planned to teach it. But not everyone thought that was a good idea.
Art Daniels: I was gonna be a teacher. The guy from teacher's college said, "We don't need history teachers." I thought, "Oh my God, I picked the wrong career." I thought, "What should I do differently, then? Now that it looks like this door is gonna close."
[00:05:00] Art Daniels: And then I went to a kind of a career day briefing. They had an on-college recruiter for the Ontario Public Service. So I went, and the guy said to me, he said, "How would you like to have a job like this?" And I thought, "What? You mean, go around Ontario and go to universities and interview people for jobs?"
Art Daniels: And I said, "That sounds like a fun kind of thing." Said I'd meet women, too, you know? It turned out it was quite different than I thought, but it was an interesting thing to join the public service in the '60s. I had to go to a mass interview, a big interview, but I also had to write a civil service exam. Back then, you just didn't go to public service. You just didn't go to an interview. You actually wrote exams for a whole day. And then you were interviewed by a psychologist. Because I was in scouts, I kept thinking, "I'd like to go to the Ministry of Natural Resources. That would be really fun. I'd be outdoors.
Art Daniels: I'd be, like, scouting, you know, with animals and trees and-
[00:06:00] Katie Jensen: Did they have badges back then?
Art Daniels: Oh, yeah. I was unfortunately, what I was called was a badge monger by some of the kids. But I was actually super highly motivated to be successful. I don't know how you get that kind of gene, but when I was in cubs, I was the leader. I was the sixer, the head of the group of six boys. And when I was a b- boy scout, I was a patrol leader, so I was always in the leadership role, even though I was a kid. There's another example. Back then, when I was in cubs, there was a young disabled boy, developmentally handicapped, that was in my six.
Art Daniels: And they only put him in my six 'cause they knew, I guess, I was an okay person to understand to keep him from being teased about his disability and to make sure he was treated equally and had fun. So it was all good. And as you asked, well, did I have a lot of badges, I think I had about 60 merit badges.
[00:07:00] Art Daniels: I was kind of loaded up on my whole arm. You know, I had a Bushman's Fang and Queen's Scout and all that, those things. And MNR seemed like a, Natural Resources seemed like a really good job, so I was hoping they would pick me. But there was a guy, a military guy with a toothpick like Captain Queeg in the Caine Mutiny, if you know movies, just always twisting his toothpick in his mouth, and he was a retired sergeant major.
Art Daniels: And I thought, "Well- Didn't really impress me as the guy would be my first boss, but ended up getting a call and he said, "Art, you're gonna join the Department of Reform Institutions," which is prisons. And I thought, "What? That's a long way from the idea of me working in the woods."
Katie Jensen: Yeah, it's kind of like the most indoors you can get.
[00:08:00] Art Daniels: Yeah, the, yeah, inside a prison. And all of a sudden I'm now in the Ministry of Reform Institution, which later became Corrections and Solicitor General, et cetera. But it was a good first job, and the guy that was this military guy was probably a good person for somebody coming straight out of school, not disciplined about work or what work meant.
Art Daniels: He would have daily standing orders for us. Everything was very regimented, rules-based, but he also had a sense of fairness. He said, "Do not ask the young girls to get you coffee. Do not treat anybody inappropriately or go out on dates and, you know, separate work and business." And I thought, "Oh." So we had good rules, and he taught us the regulations really around employment and labor and all that was all very good. He was a good first boss, and a man I enjoyed working with for many years, actually. And in terms of inspiring me, he told me, he said, "You know, Art..." You know, at that time I started, I got paid $100 a week, 5,200 a year. He said, "You know that if you keep your nose clean and work hard, you could have a five-figure income in less than 10 years." I thought, "Five figures?" You know, like-
Katie Jensen: That's like being a millionaire today.
Art Daniels: Yeah, $10,000. I thought, "Wow, I'm gonna be rich." I worked in Toronto for the first couple of years as a trainee and learning about the job, and then he had the very good idea of regionalizing human resources. And so he sent me to work in a prison in Eastern Ontario, Millbrook, Ontario.
[00:10:00] Art Daniels: It was a maximum security prison, and I was in charge of recruitment. But at the time, to be a prison guard, there were lots of rules. You had to be over 5'10", you had to be over 25, you had to be male. So there's a lot of kind of rules about it. Now I'm out there in Millbrook and looking after what was Eastern Ontario, and eventually involved about 30 prisons in Eastern, from Ottawa to Toronto, that part of Ontario.
Art Daniels: So in every community there was a prison. Kingston, Brockville, Cornwall, Ottawa, Pembroke, Peterborough, Lindsay, Whitby. They all had their own little jail. And I began to hire people. One of the very first people I hired was an indigenous person from the Hiawatha Reserve outside of Peterborough. I hired his cousin, too.
Katie Jensen: Sometime after, Art got a phone call from a colleague who was concerned about his hiring practices.
[00:11:00] Art Daniels: All of a sudden, I'm driving to work, and he said, "Art, do you know you hired an Indian?" You know, because of course we didn't call them Indigenous or First Nations, things like that. They were called Indians. I said, "Yeah, and he's very qualified, and he'll do great." Years later, I'm in the Ministry of COMSOC, Community and Social Services, and part of my program were for indigenous women, special housing for women, single parents, et cetera. And the head of that association, the Native Women's Association, was the cousin of the guy I hired, which I didn't know.
[00:12:00] Art Daniels: But my staff said, "Art, oh, she's a real terror. She'll eat you up and spit you out and treat you like dirt." I said, "Oh, okay. Well, I'm ready for the interview," and we met. And she said, "Art Daniels, you hired my cousin Lorne." And back in the early '60s, I said, "Yeah," I said, "I remember Lorne, a very wonderful guy." And then from then on, every meeting I went to, she treated me really well, gave me little gifts, and told all her people. Art isn't just talking. He followed his own instincts and hired somebody.
Katie Jensen: And obviously, he was tremendously qualified.
Art Daniels: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. It was always right. But I also was able to bring young people in, people with university degrees, and actually one of the earlier kind of experiments that worked really well was women into maximum security prisons, and the introduction of women into the prison system.
Katie Jensen: 'Cause what was the fear that was preventing that? Was it just that they thought that-
Art Daniels: That women were gonna be weak-
Katie Jensen: Yeah ...
Art Daniels: and would, of course, fall prey to men, and have to be fired for sexual inappropriateness. And I said to the regional manager who told me that, "Art, we can't hire women, they're weak," da, da, da, da, da.
[00:13:00] Art Daniels: And I said, "Wait a second," I said, "I bet you $5 that at the end of this year we will have fired more men for being inappropriate with other men than we will of any women." And at the end of the year, I collected my five bucks easily, that no women were fired, and several men were fired. So the manager who told me it was gonna be a big mistake was wrong.
Art Daniels: There are now women in every prison in Canada. And across the world, it's quite common for women to work in maximum security prisons. But back then, I had been, as a director of HR, part of the affirmative action program. It was assigned to my human resources group, and I had a coordinator that had to put through that idea of women working in men's prisons.The same thing was true, though, about men working in women's prisons. It worked both ways, by the way. All of these things you know, happened over time, but during my time, which was great for it to happen, and it was an important change, actually.
[00:14:00] Katie Jensen: As you were living in Millbrook, were you traveling all around the Kawarthas?
Art Daniels: Yeah, all over the, uh, all over, uh, Eastern Ontario.
Katie Jensen: Yeah.
Art Daniels: I drove to Ottawa, to Pembroke, to a little village in, uh, called Lorneville. We had a prison in Lorneville.
Katie Jensen: Well, as a wide Ontario traveler, where is the best butter tart that you've ever eaten?
Art Daniels: The best butter tart was actually near my cottage in Parry Sound, a place called McKellar.
Katie Jensen: Interesting. Okay, what's so special about that particular butter tart? Was it the crust?
Art Daniels: Yeah, it was, it was the gooey kind.
Katie Jensen: Oh, yeah, I like that kind.
Art Daniels: A good- It had lots of pecans, so that was important.
Katie Jensen: So you were driving around a lot.
Art Daniels: Always. Everywhere you drove.
Katie Jensen: Yeah, 'cause there was really no public transit.
Art Daniels: And I enjoyed going to each of the small jails and meeting the staff and working with the superintendent of the jail. Back, then they were called governors.
Katie Jensen: And then what happened next? Is that when you started to build your family or...?
Art Daniels: Yeah, my first kids were in Peterborough.
Katie Jensen: So you're traveling all over, but you're starting to have kids.
[00:15:00] Art Daniels: Yeah, and build a family, a house, the whole bit.
Katie Jensen: Yeah.
Art Daniels: And then I get called back to Toronto to be the Assistant Director of human resources in charge of labor relations. Shortly thereafter, I became the director. Before I was 30, I was the director of human resources for this ministry of 5,000 or 6,000 people.
Katie Jensen: And were you making five figures? That's what I'm dying to know.
Art Daniels: Yeah, I did. I finally got- I crashed the $10,000 barrier.
Katie Jensen: Just enough to buy a house in Toronto back then.
[00:16:00] Art Daniels: Yeah, it was hard. I lived in- Well, actually, we ended up buying in Oakville. The closest I could get to the city and have a house. And then even before I'm 30, the job opens up as the Assistant Deputy Minister of Community Corrections, which I won. It was a competition, and you're interviewed. And I ended up going from the director of human resources to looking after community programs. I had probation and parole, what they called aftercare. I had group homes. And I was able to start a number of programs, 'cause people began to realize locking people up isn't the best thing, and you don't change people by taking things away from people.
Art Daniels: You change people by giving them things, education, knowledge, a job, a place to live. Not by putting them in an institution, making them live by a rigid standard and following orders, et cetera. So I was the kind of anti part of prison system, the whole community side. Uh, very successful. We introduced things like, which is new in Canada and new to our correction system, community service, letting people give back to their community by doing good works in the community, like shoveling snow for the elderly or reading to kids who are deaf and blind or something.
[00:17:00] Art Daniels: Things that help society, at the same time allowed the person who is breaking the law to give back to society, not to take by being in a... like, when you think about it, prison, they pay for your room and board your meals. But if you stay in the community, you gotta keep working. You gotta give back to your community. And if we put community service on top of that, you're giving through volunteerism back to your community, and you can become much more part of society, and less likely to commit crime again, and less likely to be around people who commit crime all the time. And like, it made no sense. So when the government was looking at ways of saving money, we would say, "It costs $2 a day to keep somebody in the community.
[00:18:00] Art Daniels: It costs $200 a day to keep somebody in a prison." Does this make sense for the economy? Does it make sense for society? No. Does it make sense for retribution? Yes. So I was able to start this community service program, and from that I developed another one, and it was from working with the Mennonites in Kitchener. And Mennonites believed in reconciliation between the victim and the offender, and they had developed a program through the government called Victim Offender Reconciliation, where the Mennonite people would bring together people who have committed crime and the victim, and try to work a deal of restitution, or just to say you're sorry.
[00:19:00] Art Daniels: And so I was able to start a whole program on victim services. Jean Chretien, who was the Prime Minister of Canada, had a special task force across Canada, which I was part of, on services to victims of crime, which is now all over Canada. Victim witness assistance programs to help people get restitution. People would fill victim impact statements. They didn't before. You know, so that the offender would begin to understand the effect of the crime on the victim.
Katie Jensen: So I guess that kind of brings us to the '90s, I guess, timeline-wise?
[00:20:00] Art Daniels: Yeah. Yeah, I went from corrections to social services. I became the ADM of operations there. It was a huge organization, 13,000 people. As an ADM of operations, I had 13,000 employees, 500,000 clients. That was people on welfare, in old age homes. It was a huge ministry. It's now divided up quite differently. There are senior services, children's services, but it was all one. So it was quite a breadth of jobs, but again, I enjoyed it very much, and it put me in contact with lots of good people who cared about people and community.
[00:21:00] Art Daniels: And again, one of the things I was responsible for was getting out of institutional care. Just like prisons, locking up people with developmental handicap or people just because they were blind by their families, 'cause they didn't know what to do, they didn't know how to cope, and locked away from society and not part of society. So one of the things that I was part of at COMSOC was closing those institutions and moving people to group homes so that kids and adults with disabilities are now in the community and integrated. And it turns out my wife and I have a disabled daughter. Who lives in a group home, but would have been, because of her severe autism, would have been locked away for years, away from society, because she still suffers from trauma and tantrums and stuff, but able to cope with it in a community living environment.
Art Daniels: So again, when I was in prisons, I was trying to get people out of prison. When I was in social services, getting people into the community, keeping them out of institutional care. So kind of a theme for me anyway, kind of an interesting theme that ran through my whole career. Working in boundaries isn't important, but working outside the box is important, and doing things differently than the way they've always done.
[00:22:00] Art Daniels: And being bureaucratic, being regimented isn't the answer. Later in my career, I ended up in other ministries that were quite different, but my favorite ministry is Consumer and Commercial Relations. It was called CCR back then. Still around, I think it's Consumer and Business Services. But I was in charge of registries, which is a kind of an interesting thing, you know, a registry of land, a registry of companies, registry of property like cars, register of your birth and death and life and marriage and all these things. So I had all these very, very paper-driven, rules-driven organization. Everybody was a lawyer, so everything was regulated. Everybody was called an officer. Oh, and you know, I always kid them. I said, "You know, a derivative officer is officious." I said, "We're just being bureaucrats. Why don't we become customer services?"
[00:23:00] Art Daniels: So I was able, in that job, to switch it from a regulatory, focused on themselves, their rules, and saying no rather than saying yes, to customer services focused on the outcome, not the input of the rule, but the outcome of getting a driver's license, getting a birth certificate, getting a health card, getting services. That's the beginning of Service Ontario.
Katie Jensen: Basically, you invented Service Ontario?
[00:24:00] Art Daniels: Well, parts of it. Yeah, There's a Ministry of Transportation. I don't know. We all worked together, and that became the important thing. We were used to being bureaucrat in your own ministry and never crossing boundaries. And I remember doing this. I actually decided I would work across Canada, so we created national program. It still exists today. It's called the Institute for Citizen Centered Services, and it's in Toronto, but it involves every province and the federal government, and it still involves giving services, integrating things from Service Canada to Service Ontario, Service New Brunswick. It's all over Canada. And that's how I ended up going around the world, getting other countries to stop focusing on rules, stop focusing on bureaucracy, stop focusing on hierarchy, stop focusing on structure, and focus on the customer, focus on the citizen. Focus on results.
Katie Jensen: That was part one of my conversation with Art Daniels. In part two, Art bets his whole career.
Art Daniels: One of my fellow ADMs said, "Art, you either get a gold medal or you'll get fired."
Katie Jensen: He takes the fight against corruption worldwide.
[00:25:00] Art Daniels: And a lot of those countries now have really first-class public servants.
Katie Jensen: And he lands on the one thing he'd tell his younger self.
Art Daniels: You can't have a vision without a story.
Katie Jensen: Thanks for listening. Applaud is proud to showcase the dedication of those who make decisions for the greater good and strive to leave the world a better place for all Canadians. All personal views expressed by guests and our host are their own. Applaud will continue to recognize those in public service, offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives, and operate in good faith to build trust with Applaud members and all public citizens. You can share feedback on this episode by visiting applaudpublicservice.ca.