PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: THE GLOBE AND MAIL. SOURCE PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
Donald J. Savoie is the author of Speaking Truth to Canadians About Their Public Service.
The debate over the federal public service has mostly centred on its size – and that’s certainly an issue that calls out for attention, given its recent growth. In 1998, there were 187,000 federal public servants; today, there are 367,772. The federal public service has grown by 40 per cent since 2015, representing more than 50 per cent of the cost of government operations.
This growth has yet to be fully explained to Canadians or Parliament, but in recent years, Ottawa has launched initiatives for the environment, First Nations, infrastructure, COVID-19 and dental care. These and other initiatives require staff, though it appears that no effort was made to look at reallocating staff from low-priority areas. The problem with government budgeting may have less to do with the introduction of new measures and more with its inability to move on from activities that have long passed their best-by date.
The approximately 300 federal departments and agencies do not easily allow moves to other departments for high-priority programs, and it is easier to hire in the federal public service than it is to fire. Only a handful of federal public servants are terminated for incompetence every year because it is difficult to prove, and public-sector unions will strongly oppose any attempt to terminate one of its members. The easier solution is to shuffle a non-performing employee to where they will do the least damage, making the federal government larger and less efficient.
Still, the prevailing bias in the public service – to come up with new measures, not downsize operations – remains a problem. Government bureaucracies, no matter which political setting they serve, tend to overstaff and expand their operations. Cuts in the bureaucracy do happen from time to time, as was the case in the late-1970s, the mid-90s and in 2012. But cuts always come from above, often in reaction to pressure from financial markets, the media or unforeseen developments in the global economy – never from inside the bureaucracy.
But the issue of size alone does not tell the whole story of the challenges that the public service faces. The bigger problem is that it has lost the plot, becoming more about passing the buck than delivering on programs. Canadians, their politicians and public servants need to decide what they want the public service to be, if it is to attract the best and brightest to serve.
The growth of the public service’s management class is illustrative of the problem. About 40 years ago, the Treasury Board decided that reducing management levels would “improve government operations and morale.” It expressed concerns that the senior-management category had grown to 2,562 members and insisted that “if you take a whole layer out of the management pyramid, then the managers below automatically gain greater control over their operations.” But nothing came of this commitment. Stephen Harper’s government also vowed to eliminate management levels as part of its 2012 program-review exercise, as the category had grown to 6,784 – but again, nothing came of this commitment. Today there are 9,155 members, well over three times what it was in the 1980s, even after Ottawa downloaded the management of airports and ports to the municipalities in the mid-90s, which eliminated a number of executive positions.
Despite investments in IT and digital service delivery, a top-heavy Ottawa-centric management cadre explains why the government has not been able to improve the productivity and quality of the public service, or to reduce staff to the degree expected. The IT challenges go beyond the high-profile failures of the Phoenix pay system and the ArriveCan app. Ottawa has still not decided how best to manage IT services – whether responsibility should rest with a single service or with a loose collection of 300 organizations. No decision on this file means thicker government, more executives and blurred lines of accountability, all while efficiency, savings and easily accessible services are left wanting.
Strong managers want to own what they say, own what they do and own their mistakes. But in Ottawa, leaving aside prime ministers and their staff, everyone is responsible for everything and no one is responsible for anything. There are limits to how much public servants can own what they do, given the requirements of our parliamentary system. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that in the federal government, only prime ministers can own what they say and do and own their mistakes. Instead, government officials, from politicians to career officials, have had to learn to be skilled at shifting responsibility up or down the line as they deal with new oversight bodies, added transparency requirements and the media.
Public-service managers increasingly embrace shifting responsibility by delegating upward: moving up what is important and, at times, what is unimportant but controversial. Upward delegation also creates a crippling overload problem. Prime ministers, the PMO and the Privy Council Office can only deal with a limited number of issues on top of the requirements of the day. As a result, too many issues and decisions are left unattended, and a nondecision too often constitutes a decision, in the eyes of those waiting for one.
Having managers own what they do is what’s needed, and that requires creating room to allow them to make decisions. The federal government is actually providing the opposite by building several management levels between front-line managers and departmental heads – and that doesn’t even take into account the ever-increasing number of “associate” or “senior” titles attached to many management-level positions. The more management levels you add, the less ownership that managers have.
Ultimately, a top-heavy management cadre slows down decision-making, adds costs, dilutes accountability and disempowers managers and their staff. Public servants owning what they do now matters less than having the skills to manage the blame game.
I do not think that politicians on the government side are solely responsible for the growth in management levels and in the public service any more than public servants are responsible for the remarkable growth in the number of partisan political staffers in ministerial offices. In the 1980s, a ministerial office had between three and five partisan assistants; today, they have between 20 and 25 partisan staffers, including a high-level chief of staff, a director of policy, senior policy advisers and media advisers. This, in turn, requires departmental staff to respond to demands for information or advice.
Central agencies have also seen their numbers grow in recent years. Two of them serve the prime minister – the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office – while two others, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat and the Department of Finance, look after Ottawa’s budget and management practices. These agencies have added more than 1,400 employees over the past nine years, representing 45-per-cent growth. The Privy Council Office alone has expanded by nearly 70 per cent since 2015. Departments have had to add staff in their Ottawa offices to deal with bigger, stronger, more intrusive and more demanding central agencies.
These increased demands explain, at least in part, why delivering services such as passport processing, immigration applications and veterans’ benefits to Canadians is the Achilles’ heel of the federal government. Ottawa values public servants who are well-versed in providing superiors with what they need and who can serve the prime minister, ministers and the political process. Public servants who occupy the most senior executive positions have earned their way to the top by working on policy or in central agencies; rare is the public servant who advances in their career by managing programs and services.
Managing the blame game dominates this work to the point that actual accountability in government is like trying to grab smoke. Parliament has allowed its most vital responsibility – the power of the purse – to become a dead letter, and its supply and estimates process has become an empty ritual. Parliament is now about political theatre and little else. It does not have the resources to do much else, and this suits both the government of the day and the public service.
So what can be done? The government could start by eliminating two management levels, as well as the “associate” and “senior” positions, and scale back the size of central agencies. But much more is needed, including a need for a fundamental review of accountability requirements, with the goal of clarifying who is responsible for what. We must reconsider the working relationship between politicians and career officials, the role of public-sector unions in the management of government operations, and the ways in which the government incentivizes front-line managers and their staff to deliver programs and services to Canadians.
Unless we address these challenges, we run the risk of seeing the best and the brightest avoid public service. After all, other sectors offer what the public service no longer does: room to own what people do, and opportunities to make a tangible contribution. Talented Canadians look for fulfilling jobs; they don’t want to be just a part of a large machine that places a premium on generating announceable initiatives, kicking decisions upstairs and managing the blame game. The public service will continue to miss out on these Canadians if it doesn’t establish that it’s looking for more.