Konrad Yakabuski is a columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Giddiness is not ever what one expects to witness inside Ottawa’s Lester B. Pearson Building, whose early 1970s Brutalist design evokes heavier emotions. The more than 3,000 federal public servants who work in the hulking Sussex Drive office complex, home to Global Affairs Canada, are a generally stern lot known for seriousness and straight faces.
Yet, when Justin Trudeau made his first appearance in the Pearson Building after being sworn in as Prime Minister in 2015, there was much giddiness, indeed. The hundreds of federal workers who had gathered in the building’s foyer to catch a glimpse of their new Liberal boss dropped any pretext of impartiality. They clapped, hooted and cheered. And they swooned to take selfies with Canada’s then-new rock star PM.
Gobsmacked experts in public administration could not believe their eyes. “What the heck was that? That’s not how public servants are supposed to react,” Stephen Van Dine, a former assistant deputy minister in the federal government, recalls thinking at the time. “What motivated that release?”
The public service was one of the wedge issues in 2015's contest between Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper, whose cuts inspired government employees to wear 'Harper hates me' buttons like these ones at a B.C. Federation of Labour conference.John Lehmann and Darryl Dyck/The Globe and Mail
The outpouring of enthusiasm had as much to do with Mr. Trudeau’s celebrity status as with the promise his election represented for government employees.
The bureaucracy was then still reeling from cuts implemented by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives that had led to the elimination of more than 20,000 public-service jobs. Mr. Harper’s Prime Minister’s Office had disparaged senior bureaucrats and routinely shut them out of the policy-making process. Some government employees had taken to wearing “Harper Hates Me” buttons to work. The new Liberal PM vowed to restore the bureaucracy to its rightful place in policy-making, and even to reverse the concentration of power in the PMO that began under another Trudeau.
“One of the things that we’ve seen throughout the past decades in government is the trend towards more control from the Prime Minister’s Office – actually it can be traced as far back as my father, who kicked it off in the first place,” Mr. Trudeau had told the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge during the campaign. “I actually quite like the symmetry of me being the one who’d end that.”
More than eight years later, those words ring hollow. Mr. Trudeau has centralized power and control in the PMO to an extent his father could never have dreamed of.
Back in Pierre Trudeau’s time, senior bureaucrats could still pull rank over political staffers, and cabinet ministers could still stand up to the PMO. That is no longer the case. The PMO is now almighty, while the role of the bureaucracy has been reduced to processing orders, and not always very effectively.
Despite growing seemingly uncontrollably under Mr. Trudeau – between 2015 and the first quarter of 2024, the ranks of the public service increased by more than 40 per cent to about 368,000 – the policy-making capacity of the bureaucracy has atrophied significantly. The role of outside consulting firms has exploded as in-house expertise withers and senior bureaucrats and departmental managers look to consultants for advice, in essence abdicating their own responsibility for formulating policy recommendations to their political bosses. The PMO’s obsession with communications wins means that the rigorous analysis once performed by the bureaucracy to assess the effectiveness, sustainability and affordability of new programs is skipped over.
In their April 16 budget, the Trudeau Liberals announced a slew of new measures and billions in new spending to boost housing construction and create national dental, pharmacare and school lunch programs. Notwithstanding their attractiveness to inflation-ravaged, house-poor voters, the new initiatives raise serious jurisdictional questions; most provinces already run similar programs of their own.
The launch of these new federal programs will lead to yet more bureaucracy at a time when the federal government is struggling to efficiently run existing programs. The budget forecast the federal public service will shrink by 5,000 full-time posts by 2028, but observers have cast doubt on that projection. After all, the public service grew by more than 10,000 in the first quarter of 2024 alone.
Ottawa’s newest programs appear to have been designed to generate favourable headlines for an unpopular government. They are eerily reminiscent of policy flops such as the First-Time Home Buyer Incentive or the Canada Digital Adoption Program, announced to great fanfare, only to be quietly scrapped this year.
Announcing new programs is, of course, the easy part. But the Trudeau Liberals have a poor record on execution. What was most telling about reaction to the budget largesse, which also included multibillion-dollar investments in artificial intelligence and defence, was how little enthusiasm the announcements generated among the stakeholders most affected by them. Given the Liberals’ failure to fulfill earlier promises on innovation and defence, they simply do not buy the hype any more.
The budget also introduced a surprise increase in the capital-gains tax inclusion rate, set to take effect in June, without providing technical details on the new rules. The move smacked of tax-policy improvisation, undertaken without significant prior analysis of its effect on investment decisions and economic competitiveness.
“Good public policy is the result of a process that includes due diligence, research and federal-provincial consultation. This government doesn’t seem to have a lot of patience for that,” Mr. Van Dine says. “The homework isn’t being done any more and a lot of these new initiatives are being launched through an issues-management perspective rather than an evidence-based policy perspective.”
The latest federal budget, unveiled by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland on April 16, expanded social programs and housing construction funds, financed in part by changes to capital-gains tax.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Where senior bureaucrats once ran interference or warned unschooled politicians off their half-baked ideas, they now know better than to provide contrarian advice. The old Yes Minister trope about the wily bureaucrat pulling his political master’s strings has been turned on its head. Now, senior bureaucrats obey the PMO, period, as a matter of self-preservation. The millennials and Generation Zedders who now dominate the public service – more than half of all federal workers are under 45 – have known nothing else.
Parliamentary hearings into the ArriveCan fiasco have yielded an astonishing spectacle as senior bureaucrats publicly accuse each other of lying to deflect blame. The era when public servants worked anonymously and ministers were held accountable for mistakes or scandals that occurred in their departments is over. The ArriveCan hearings portray a rudderless and cutthroat public service – the image of a Hunger Games sequel – albeit one without consequences, since almost no one in the public service ever ends up getting fired.
“The notion that the public service has no constitutional personality distinct from the government of the day, and which has underpinned our parliamentary system, just does not work any more,” says Donald Savoie, the Canada Research Chair in public administration and governance at the University of Moncton, and expert on the federal public service. “You now have public servants appearing before parliamentary committees throwing one another under the bus and ministers are nowhere to be seen to accept responsibility.”
Public servants Cameron MacDonald and Antonio Utano prepare to testify at the ArriveCan hearings, where they allege they were suspended and faced 'Kafkaesque' reprisals for criticizing superiors.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
This is not how parliamentary government based on the Westminster model is supposed to work. In Canada’s political system, inherited from Britain, a professional, permanent and non-partisan public service has traditionally been a bulwark against bad policy. Public servants “serve” the government of the day by providing “fearless advice” to cabinet ministers, who are often dilettantes with no prior expertise within the remit of their portfolios. Senior bureaucrats present the range of policy options available to address a given problem or issue, drawing on extensive research, cost-benefit analysis and data. Ideally, cabinet ministers choose the best course of action; but even when they do not, civil servants are expected to loyally implement whatever policy is chosen. Only, when things do go wrong, ministers are not supposed to pass the buck.
Fearless advice and loyal implementation were long the touchstones of the federal public service. The 1918 Civil Service Act was the result of Conservative prime minister Robert Borden’s election promise to “destroy every vestige of patronage” with the adoption of a merit-based appointments system in the public service. Senior bureaucrats worked in near-anonymity but wielded significant influence, if not power. Unlike cabinet ministers, public servants possessed institutional memory and knowledge built up over years or decades in government. Smart ministers generally placed their unbridled trust in their unelected deputies. The latter returned the favour by speaking truth to power and saving unskilled ministers from scoring own-goals.
By the 1930s, the federal public service had assembled what sociologist John Porter called “an outstanding group of expert administrators who were to be the architects of the economic and social policies required by the post-war construction.” In his groundbreaking 1965 study of power structures in Canada, The Vertical Mosaic, Porter pointed to Conservative prime minister R.B. Bennett’s 1932 recruitment of Queen’s University economics professor William Clifford Clark as deputy of minister of finance as the beginning of “the golden age of Canadian public administration.” Clark, who spent two decades as finance deputy, oversaw the 1935 creation of the Bank of Canada and laid the groundwork for a postwar social safety net under Liberal prime minister Mackenzie King. By the 1950s, Mr. Porter wrote, the upper levels of the federal public service constituted “what is probably the most highly trained group of people to be found anywhere in Canada.”
James Calbert Best, leader of the Civil Service Association of Canada, worked in the tumultuous era of John Diefenbaker, known for his political battles with bureaucrats.Globe magazine
The 1957 election of John Diefenbaker’s Conservatives put the principle of public-service neutrality to the test. Though Mr. Diefenbaker and his ministers were deeply suspicious of the senior bureaucracy, which had climbed the ranks during more than two decades of Liberal government, there was no purging. After his defeat in 1963, however, Mr. Diefenbaker blamed top bureaucrats for having plotted to undermine his government. His comments conditioned Tory attitudes toward the public service for decades.
Under Pierre Trudeau, the public service saw its leading role in policy development increasingly usurped by political appointees in the Prime Minister’s Office. The PMO staff grew from a handful of aides to dozens of political operatives. Under Canada’s 15th prime minister, cabinet also moved from being a collegial decision-making body into more of a focus group. The PMO began to act as a political counterweight to the influence of top bureaucrats on their ministers. It also engaged in less savoury activities outside the legal purview of the bureaucracy. In 1971, Mr. Trudeau’s principal secretary Marc Lalonde set up a special operation within the PMO to conduct surveillance of and political action against the Quebec separatist movement.
When Mr. Trudeau left office, the PMO and Privy Council Office, which oversaw the public service, sat atop the federal government pyramid. Mr. Trudeau’s first PCO clerk, Gordon Robertson, described the PMO as “partisan, politically oriented, yet operationally sensitive,” and the PCO as “non-partisan, operationally oriented, yet politically sensitive.” But after two decades of Liberal government – save for Joe Clark’s nine-month interregnum in 1979 – the public service had again come to be closely associated with Liberal policies.
At a first ministers' meeting in 1968, Gordon Robertson, in glasses second from right, sits between then prime minister Lester Pearson, far right, and Mr. Pearson's successor, Pierre Trudeau. Mr. Robertson would be a key player in Mr. Trudeau's efforts to rebalance decision-making in Ottawa.John McNeill/The Globe and Mail
Campaigning for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party in 1983, Brian Mulroney vowed to hand out a “pink slip and a pair of running shoes” to civil servants who failed to perform. Once in power, Mr. Mulroney massively increased the staff of the PMO. He also created politically attuned chief-of-staff positions in ministerial offices to prevent ministers from being “captured” by their top bureaucrats.
The relationship between the Mulroney PMO and the public service did not turn out to be nearly as toxic as expected. After naming Paul Tellier as PCO clerk in 1985, Mr. Mulroney came to respect and rely on his policy advice and that of his deputy ministers. This was evident in the decision to implement a politically unpopular value-added tax on goods and services to replace an existing levy on manufacturers that had penalized Canadian exports. Jean Chrétien’s Liberals campaigned in 1993 on a pledge to scrap the GST, though they soon abandoned it. Why? Because they recognized it was a sound policy that improved Canada’s economic competitiveness and helped the Chrétien Liberals restore federal public finances to health.
Marcel Massé and Paul Martin, left and second left in the back row, were part of a cabinet committee to overhaul government operations under prime minister Jean Chrétien, front middle.Peter Jones/Reuters
The Grits had promised to do away with ministerial chiefs-of-staff – “these new Clark Kents of government,” in the words of then Liberal candidate and former PCO clerk Marcel Massé – and restore the public service to its pre-eminent role in the policy process. However, the promise of a new golden age for public servants ran up against the much larger imperative of deficit control. Then finance minister Paul Martin and his deputy David Dodge, along with Mr. Massé as chairman of a pivotal program-review cabinet committee, presided over a top-to-bottom overhaul of government operations that led to 50,000 public-service job cuts. Every program was scrutinized. Departmental spending was slashed by more than 20 per cent.
The Chrétien-era program review redefined the role of the federal government and the public service with it. Both emerged significantly smaller, though arguably more focused and efficient. Unfortunately, the Liberal record was tainted by the sponsorship scandal, which arose after lucrative contracts had been awarded to Liberal-friendly advertising firms in Quebec to boost support for federalism after the 1995 referendum. Senior public servants ended up being implicated in a politically driven scheme after it was revealed that some ad firms had provided kickbacks to the Liberal Party in exchange for contracts. The scandal led to a public inquiry headed by Quebec judge John Gomery that called for wholesale checks on the way that top public servants performed their jobs to prevent them from being drawn into such political exercises in the future.
Stephen Harper and his family celebrate a successful election night in 2006, after the Gomery inquiry helped the Tories win power with promises to clean up the public service.J.P. Moczulski/Reuters
Conservative leader Stephen Harper rode the sponsorship scandal to power in 2006 by promising tough measures to make public servants more accountable. The Federal Accountability Act made deputy ministers accounting officers for their departments, emphasizing their responsibility for efficiently managing the departments and de-emphasizing their role in formulating public policy. By making deputy ministers directly answerable to Parliament, the act also undermined the principle of ministerial accountability. It became easier for ministers to shirk responsibility for departmental failures that occurred on their watch.
But overburdening public servants with ever more stringent reporting requirements did not make government more efficient. “In reality, the changes made the government operations thicker, adding new management layers, increasing the cost of overhead; made morale problems in the federal public service worse; and muddied accountability requirements,” Prof. Savoie wrote on the 10th anniversary of the Federal Accountability Act’s adoption in 2016. “It is not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that it has done little more than keep public servants and consultants busy turning a crank that is not attached to anything.”
The Trudeau Liberals could have changed this. They did not. Indeed, they added to the bureaucratic burden by requiring departments to appoint “delivery officers” responsible for tracking progress on the realization of Liberal campaign promises. Making ministerial mandate letters public was touted as an example of the Liberal commitment to running a more “open and accountable” government. But the Liberal mandate letters amounted to an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink list of priorities rather than a focused or realistic agenda. Most federal departments already had their own mandates, spelled out in the legislation that created them, which they had a legal obligation to perform. The Liberals’ “deliverology” exercise forced public servants to focus on fulfilling the party’s election promises, regardless of whether they made for good policy.
'Deliverology' was a mantra of Mr. Trudeau's first few years in power, when his top aides Katie Telford and Gerald Butts were the PMO's most familiar faces. Ms. Telford still works in the PMO; Mr. Butts does not.Chris Wattie/Reuters
Luckily, the deliverology experiment petered out before the end of Mr. Trudeau’s first term. Fulfilling election promises, beyond the low-hanging fruit, turned out to be hard work. (See: eliminating long-term water advisories on Indigenous reserves by 2021.) In the end, deliverology will be remembered as mostly as a failed communications exercise rather than a substantive effort to make government operations more results-driven. No government could have delivered on the hundreds of tasks Mr. Trudeau’s PMO gave cabinet ministers in their mandate letters, many of which defied measurement. As Prof. Savoie quipped in a 2019 book: “One can ask how one can possibly assess, in any meaningful fashion, Justin Trudeau’s efforts to promote ‘international engagement that makes a difference in the world.’ ”
The deliverology exercise also contributed to a serious decline in public-service morale. A survey of both senior and rank-and-file public servants published by the Ottawa-based Institute on Governance and the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University found deep disenchantment with the Trudeau government. “[T]he strong undercurrent is that the public service has lost an element of independence and is now expected to deliver on platform commitments rather than offering objective policy advice on the feasibility of the commitment or alternate ways to achieve the objective of the platform commitment,” said the 2022 report, which was co-authored by Mr. Van Dine, an Institute on Governance senior vice-president at the time. “Speaking truth to power, though important, seems less achievable to many participants.”
That is an astonishing indictment of a government that promised to let public servants speak their mind. But Prof. Savoie partly blames the reticence to speak up on enhanced media scrutiny of the public service. “The notion that you could provide fearless advice in private no longer applies,” he said. “Public servants are afraid that they will provide advice and the next day The Globe and Mail will have an article saying public servants disagree with their minister.” Mr. Van Dine goes even further: “Deputy ministers would appear to have lost the ability to provide advice in part because the systems that support them are rewarded for responsiveness to political demands versus medium- and longer-term stewardship of departmental mandates.”
Ottawa's buses were all but empty during the pandemic, when many public servants shifted to work-from-home. As of this fall, the Treasury Board says government employees must be in-office at least three days a week, and many of those workers are not happy to resume long commutes across town.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
This is hardly the only sign of deep malaise in the public service. A deepening dispute over remote work – public-service unions have promised a “summer of discontent” over a Treasury Board edict that government employees go into the office at least three days a week starting in September – is just the tip of the iceberg. Younger public servants, in particular, are challenging long-standing rules about remaining neutral on the job.
As one of his first moves after being named Privy Council Clerk by Mr. Trudeau last year, John Hannaford struck a “task team” of five deputy ministers to undertake a “conversation” on values and ethics with public servants. The current Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector was released in 2003 and updated in 2012. Since then, the pervasive influence of social media and proliferation of disinformation has undermined trust in government. And a new generation of public servants who grew up in the internet age holds vastly different attitudes about freedom of expression. This is creating conflict in the federal workplace.
“Some participants noted that serving the government of the day can feel like censorship or a loss of one’s own voice … This includes having to have a social media presence that is aligned with values and ethics principles – including the need to respect non-partisanship as part of demonstrating respect for democracy,” the Deputy Ministers’ Task Team on Values and Ethics Report said. “Yet individuals also have an expectation of a right to express their own opinions.”
The picture that emerges from the report is that of a stifling work environment, with many public servants unclear about where to draw the line between their own political opinions and beliefs and their obligation to remain neutral on the job. It found the public service struggling to navigate hot-button issues such as diversity, racism, colonialism and gender bias in the workplace. “Participants discussed how personal and cultural values are deeply ingrained and can significantly influence individual decision-making. These values are shaped by one’s upbringing, beliefs and societal norms, and while they can be a source of moral guidance, there must also be a harmonization to our common values and ethics,” the report said, noting it is now common for public servants “to be vocal advocates for specific social justice causes, and that challenges can arise when trying to align outside interests with public service values and ethics.”
It is easy to see how, in such a climate, the public service would cease to be an attractive career choice for the country’s best minds. “People who are ambitious are going to say: ‘I’m not going to waste my time here.’ That is the risk,” Prof. Savoie warns. The federal public service still counts thousands of bright and dedicated people. But John Porter’s 1965 description of the senior bureaucracy as “probably the most highly trained group of people to be found anywhere in Canada” hardly rings true now. Attracting talent is an issue.
Wait times for passports got frustratingly long in 2022, when these Ottawans lined up at a Service Canada office to obtain their travel documents.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
The federal public service has nevertheless continued to grow rapidly under Mr. Trudeau, seemingly without justification. While the scope of government activity has expanded under the Liberals, especially during the pandemic, the range or quality of services it provides has not increased at the same pace as employment. Growth of the federal work force has far outpaced population increases since 2015, and that is despite Liberal immigration policy that has led to the fastest population growth in more than six decades.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has been cracking under the stress. An early 2023 report prepared by former deputy immigration minister Neil Yeates – commissioned in the wake of a disastrous 2022 that saw long lines at passport offices, ballooning backlogs in processing asylum claims, and the flawed rollout of special programs for Afghans and Ukrainians – described the department’s current organizational model as “broken” and “being held together by the hard work and dedication of staff.” It deemed the current structure ill-adapted to a department whose head count grew by 144 per cent in the decade to 2023 to more than 12,000 employees and called for major structural, cultural and governance reforms.
“The department has been restructuring to modernize our programs and services to be more effective and efficient,” IRCC said in a reply to questions about the Yeates report. “We have been implementing a business-line model to better align with the demands and realities in order to be more responsive to our clients and Canadians … A governance review is underway, and the next steps will be determined in due course.”
The whack-a-mole approach to addressing departmental failures is unlikely to get to the root causes of the multiple malaises undermining the effectiveness of federal public service. Prof. Savoie calls for a royal commission to examine the state of the public service and recommend changes to its structure and mandate, with the aim of restoring its central role in the policy process, recalibrating the balance of power between the PMO and the bureaucracy and ensuring the public service is able to attract the talent needed to address public policy challenges in the 21st century.
It's been more than 40 years since Ottawa has seen a royal commission on the public service.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
A royal commission on the public service would not be without precedent. There have been several of them since Confederation, though the last one – the Royal Commission on Financial Management and Accountability – published its report in 1979. Paraphrasing a former U.S. secretary of state, it compared public service reform to “operating for an appendectomy on a man carrying a piano upstairs.” It nevertheless deemed reform an urgent necessity. “There is, in many public servants, a high degree of commitment to sound management. This commitment must be nurtured if we are to halt the decline in the image, morale, and effectiveness of the Canadian public service,” concluded the commission, headed by former Toronto-Dominion Bank chairman Allen Lambert.
Almost two decades earlier, the Royal Commission on Government Organization had made a similar observation. “Government in modern society is often burdensome and restrictive: Consequently, it will seldom be viewed as better than a necessary evil – it is a sign of national vigour that this should be so,” wrote the commission, headed by another giant of Canadian business, John Grant Glassco. “But the public does itself a disservice if it belittles the public servants by whom the affairs of government are administered. Excellence is nowhere more necessary today than among those charged with the management of public affairs, and excellence cannot be sustained indefinitely without public recognition.”
The challenges facing the federal public service are very different today than they were in the 1960s and 70s, and the reforms enacted in the wake of the Glassco and Lambert commissions ran their course long ago. Centralization of power in the PMO was not on the radar when the Glassco commission tabled its report in 1962. And the Lambert commission was principally concerned with making the public service more cost-effective at a time when the government was growing by leaps and bounds. While a future royal commission should also examine the cost and efficiency of the bureaucracy, its mandate should focus on ensuring the public service is “fit for purpose” to perform its critical policy-making functions. That is likely to require major organizational changes, new legislation and, possibly, the privatization of some government services. Why, for instance, must Ottawa run passport offices when private operators could do so more efficiently for less?
Canada is hardly the only parliamentary democracy to witness the degradation of its public service and concentration of power in the prime minister’s office, with a resultant decline in the quality and effectiveness of public policy. Britain’s Commission on the Centre of Government recently released its own report on deleterious impact of this phenomenon. “The centre [of government] in recent years has become far too dominant yet far too ineffective. It has scooped out initiative and all but emasculated Whitehall departments, which alternately try to second-guess what the flip-flop centre thinks and are micromanaged by it,” the commission’s deputy chairman, historian Sir Anthony Seldon, wrote in The Sunday Times. (Whitehall is British shorthand for the public service.)
More than ever, in our darkening age of political polarization, we need a neutral and non-partisan public service to guide major policy decisions. And we need competent public servants to implement them without fear or favour. The Trudeau Liberals have done themselves and Canadians a disservice by failing to recognize that a policy-capable and operationally efficient public service is any government’s best asset. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who speaks disparagingly of “gatekeepers” of all sorts, has given no indication he understands that either.
What future does that suggest for a country that faces chronic (and related) budget and productivity deficits and desperately needs to develop sustainable, affordable and equitable policies to address them both? We cannot expect them to come out of the PMO. Its dominance is partly what got us into this mess.
