Empowering the elephant in the room
‘It is impossible to consider public service reform as purely a question of management or process improvement. Politics determines whether any program of reform can succeed. And the relationship between politics and the civil service is inherently unstable,’ writes Ken Polk. / ISTOCK PHOTO
One could almost sense the collective eye rolling across Ottawa late last month when the Task Force on Modernizing Government was announced by its executive director David McLaughlin.
I have written in this space before about the long and undistinguished history of initiatives intended to reform the public service. Suffice it to say that they have collectively yielded almost no measurable results. So the resort to cynicism is understandable.
Cynicism, of course, can be the reflex of the lazy. So we should be at least willing to allow some suspension of disbelief as regards the task force.
The crisis of bureaucratic legitimacy
Its mandate focuses on a very real problem: the chronic inability of a hidebound, blob-like federal bureaucracy to deliver results for Canadians; or as McLaughlin put it: “The name of the game is execution or, more simply, getting things done.”
His diagnosis is a familiar one: “Government is unnecessarily complex. Major priorities move slowly through burdensome approval processes. Decisions are made, but implementation stalls. Programs are created, but the systems required to deliver them are outdated or fragmented. Responsibilities are divided, and accountability for the final result has no clear home.”
McLaughlin also readily concedes that “these weaknesses have existed for decades. But the consequences have become more acute.”
Acute, indeed. Something of a crisis of legitimacy is plaguing bureaucracies across the Western democratic world, founded on a seeming helplessness in the face of daunting global challenges from productivity to economic competitiveness, from sustained growth to job creation, from migration to climate change.
Public frustration with these failures has fueled the rise of President Donald Trump, the success of Brexit in the U.K. and the broad trend to toss incumbent governments over the side in search of leaders who promise simple, obvious solutions that amorphous technocratic bureaucracies simply lack the will to implement. The fact that the U.K. has had seven prime ministers in the past 10 years is the purest expression of Western voter frustration.
Canada seemed on course to join this trend with the populist agenda of Pierre Poilievre, before swerving at the last political minute to elect Prime Minister Mark Carney.
In this reading, the federal bureaucracy received a stay of execution in Carney. The work of the Task Force seems to be an attempt to help the bureaucracy make the most of it.
The ironies abound
The ironies in the task force mandate abound.
Having identified a lack of clear accountability for the results as a fundamental problem of government, there is no sense of accountability for the task force. It is independent of the government and funded by private foundations. It may be accountable in some sense to those foundations, whose agendas, seen and unseen, may shape its findings and recommendations. We just don't know.
The task force’s independence may be a good thing. Fresh eyes can yield novel solutions. But independence also frees the government from taking the task force’s recommendations seriously. After all, if the raft of reform initiatives driven over the years by successive clerks of the Privy Council — the central agency to which all public servants are in fact accountable — have failed, how likely is it that an independent task force is going to get the job done?
The task force promises practical solutions. But there is no indication of how it will consult the public service. Practical solutions have to be based on experience. To be useful, task force recommendations must pass the “we’ve already tried this” test. Otherwise, it would amount to a somewhat glorified talking shop.
McLaughlin says the task force is “not meant to figure out how to transform, reform the whole public service.” But his diagnosis is a comprehensive indictment of how the civil service does its job. Solutions that do not address these fundamental problems would be the equivalent of applying administrative duct tape — something, I assure you, civil servants already do on virtually a daily basis.
Empowering the political elephant in the room
Perhaps the oddest part of McLaughlin's explanation of the task force’s work is the claim that: “This isn’t about public servants but the system they operate in. … The problem is that even highly capable people struggle when authority is unclear, information is trapped in organizational silos, decisions take too long and the work culture rewards caution more than results.”
First of all, civil servants know that any promise by independent task forces not to blame them means precisely the opposite.
More fundamentally, it suggests that the current structures and dysfunctions of the public service have been imposed on civil servants by some unknown third party; as though extra-terrestrials came down to earth and handed down the Treasury Board guidelines and policies.
And this gets to the political elephant in the room: Parliament acting through Cabinet bestows every authority and rule that governs every federal public servant in Canada. Elected politicians, be they MPs or Cabinet Ministers, tend to be, well, political.
So it is impossible to consider public service reform as purely a question of management or process improvement. Politics determines whether any program of reform can succeed. And the relationship between politics and the civil service is inherently unstable.
Elections, cabinet shuffles, changing ministerial priorities, or scandals — real and apparent — can upend or redirect the best-intentioned reform programs. Large modernization projects can take years to show results. And they inevitably encounter often highly critical scrutiny from Parliament; scrutiny that is fueled by auditors general, interest groups and the media.
It is not for nothing that a time honoured rule among public servants is to ask themselves whether they would stick to a decision if it were to become the top story on the Globe and Mail website. Can it be any wonder, then, that civil servants are risk averse?
Prime Minister Carney seems to get this. That is why he is trying to cut the Gordian civil service knot by empowering ministers responsible for priority projects to order public servants to short-circuit existing rules and regulations to speed a project along. He is lashing the administration of big projects more directly to the directions and management of democratically elected authority.
In this context, the Task Force on Modernizing Government is not so much inadequate — though it is — but irrelevant. Carney has moved beyond civil service management and process reform in which politics has always been the unacknowledged elephant in the room. He doesn't have the time to wait.
Instead he is not only acknowledging the “elephant,” he is putting it in the driver's seat. It is a gamble that may blow up in the prime minister’s face. But it is far more likely to deliver results than waiting to hear the distilled wisdom of the Task Force.
