Will Carney play ‘chicken’ with the federal bureaucracy?
‘With Budget 2025, we’re making big investments to empower Canadians with new opportunities, better careers, and a lower cost of living,’ Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote on social media. / TWITTER PHOTO
The faux political drama over the budget is over. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s game of budget “chicken” with the opposition had the predictable result. The Conservatives, NDP and Green Party Leader Elizabeth May each found a way, separately and without too much overt embarrassment, to avoid an election against a popular prime minister.
That was the easy part. The prime minister must now confront, perhaps, his toughest potential obstacle: the federal bureaucracy. This is not to suggest there is a Q-Anon-inspired “deep state” conspiracy to resist and defeat the plans of Canada’s elected government. Far from it.
The Values and Ethics Code of the Public Sector names respect for Canadian democracy and democratic institutions as the paramount value in public service. As a former federal civil servant myself, I observed that colleagues at all levels did their best to deliver what elected governments asked of us, utilizing the legislative and regulatory tools at our disposal.
Where friction is inevitably likely to arise between the prime minister and the bureaucracy is over its demonstrable lack of administrative flexibility, project management skills, cultural nimbleness and technological capacity to deliver on its game-changing nation-building agenda.
A risk-averse process-obsessed bureaucracy
The shortcomings of the public service on this score are not a state secret. Over the past 30 years, clerks of the Privy Council have serially launched internal reform initiatives aimed, among other things, at reducing administrative inertia, promoting risk-taking, and shifting the bureaucracy’s focus away from its ingrained obsession with process toward delivering results. That none of these reform efforts have, themselves, delivered results is a fitting indictment.
The prime minister may be a political rookie, but he is steeped in the study of and management of large organizations. He understands that among the biggest bets he has made in his risky economic plan is on the bureaucracy’s capacity to deliver.
Carney’s initial legislative and administrative steps as prime minister sought to anticipate and short-circuit potential bureaucratic inertia. The Build Canada Act and the creation of the Major Projects Office (MPO) established a pilot project, of sorts, which could demonstrate to the rest of the bureaucracy what he expects of them: firm, results-oriented leadership, focused project management and a clear bias toward faster approval. Carney’s selection of Dawn Farrell, who had no public service experience, to lead the MPO could not have been a clearer shot across the public service bow.
Elsewhere, Carney has launched the Defence Investment Agency (DIA) to, among other priorities, streamline Canada's wildly inefficient defence procurement processes. The DIA CEO is another private sector recruit, Doug Guzman. To accelerate the use of AI and other digital technologies in government service delivery, the prime minister created a Ministry of AI and Digital Transformation as well as an Office of Digital Transformation. In Build Homes Canada (BHC), Carney has made a multi-billion-dollar bet that the federal government can both incentivize affordable housing and catalyze the development of a wholly new modular home-building industry. All are big bets to be sure.
Yet any prime minister’s scope for driving reform and change in the bureaucracy is finite. The public service is like a gigantic cruise ship; it cannot turn on a dime. You can recruit as many private sector leaders as you want, but at the end of the day, they will have to rely on public servants to succeed. And these public servants will bring with them the procedures, habits and reflexes required of them by the very same public service culture that Carney clearly feels is not fit for his purposes.
Remaking the public service in the prime minister’s image
Which brings us to the long-promised, or threatened, major shuffle of senior public servants. For months, Carney has tasked his chosen Clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Sabia, with conducting a rigorous review of the performance of deputy and assistant deputy ministers to weed out dead wood, promote promising talent and recruit from outside the public service where necessary.
In a sense, the prime minister seems to want to remake the public service leadership in his own image. Rumours that a shuffle is imminent have surfaced almost weekly since the summer. The fact that it has taken this long suggests that Sabia’s review could be tectonic and that it is taking him a long time to figure out how to pull it off.
Regardless of the scope of the shuffle, it will only change the personnel on the bridge, as it were. The extent to which their reform spirit filters down to the working level is, at best, a dicey proposition.
The prime minister laid out an agenda for economic and governmental transformation in the spring election, crystallized in his oft-repeated statement that “it is high time to build things that we never imagined, and to build them at a speed that we have never seen.” Budget 2025 laid out a fiscal plan for delivering that agenda. He was duly able to bluff the opposition into bending to his will and allowing passage of the budget.
His success will depend on smart, swift implementation. This will depend on public service, which, in the main, has been trained not to be imaginative or to do anything quickly, let alone faster than ever before.
This may come down to another game of “chicken” between the prime minister and the bureaucracy. But unlike Parliament, this would be a game in which the bureaucracy has home-field advantage.
Prime ministers come and go, but the bureaucracy goes on and on.
