Canadians have clearly begun to notice that the Government of Canada doesn’t seem to be able to get things done. The government’s critics go on at length about how the current government is great at theatrical gestures, but remarkably less good at delivering effects, and this is largely true. Performative activities make great news, and then either nothing happens, or the predicted actions do (sort of) happen, but after such long delays as to verge upon being irrelevant by the time they occur.
The languid, awkward and incomplete delivery of effects seems to be widespread in most operations of government, with some of the most commented-upon examples being the delayed and ineffective efforts to increase the stock of housing, the dithering, delays and excessive politicisation of all aspects of defence procurement, the egregious delays in adjudicating refugee claims, and the unbelievably slow progress in getting clean drinking water into Indigenous communities. In all cases there were encouraging announcements followed by abysmal implementation.
While it is popular to blame the current Liberal regime for this, with commentators gleefully pointing to the PM’s prior history as a drama teacher as an explanation for the showy bits, the stasis that I am describing also greatly afflicted the Harper government, so we’ve seen this phenomenon for more than a decade and a half. And even before that there was a tendency towards stasis, going back at least another decade. That being said, the problem is now clearly more severe than at various times in the past. There are a number of reasons for this, and some of them are so deeply ingrained that a government would need to be quite courageous to correct the condition.
Of the many causes of this tendency to stasis, some of them are not within the control of the government. But some are, and I will focus on those.
To begin, I should like to focus on the cabinet, the roles of ministers, and the concept of ministerial responsibility. It is my contention that, today, most ministers do not act in the same way that better ministers did in the past. They do not energize their departments, they are not effective in driving outcomes, and they do not take responsibility for failures. And the reasons for this trend are not entirely within the control of the ministers themselves.
It is not my intention to idealize the past. In the past there were, as today, good ministers and less good ministers. But my view of how things were in most of the second half of the 20th century is as follows.
Ministers varied from very good to bloody terrible. The less good ministers only wanted to be in cabinet for the cachet of sitting around the important table where power resided. The better ministers, however, took a lively interest in the workings of their home department and the intimate details of its operation and remit. They fully understood that the civil servants who worked for them were normally focussed on process, rather than product, because huge opprobrium could attach to failing some element of the officially sanctioned process. Thus, if a very good minister who was steeped in the mission and details of a department saw the need for speed, that minister would give top cover to the bureaucracy by providing an instruction that the minister needed such-and-such to be completed or resolved or solved by some given date. This top cover could be given by memo, or even just by being recorded as having said it. And, once it was given, miracles could happen, because many of our civil servants are actually very good, and can be hugely efficient and effective when given that top cover. They will get it done, knowing that the urgency, as dictated by their minister, would legitimize a few administrative shortcuts.
Today, that is much less likely to happen than in the past, for some obvious reasons.
First, there has been a huge centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office. This has been a feature of the tenure of both Harper and Trudeau. Huge risk aversion seems to be the source of this diminution of the power of ministers. Some of that risk aversion is, of course, related to the personalities of those two prime ministers, but I suspect that some of it can be attributed to the profound communications revolution that we have experienced. Today, any embarrassing or negative news about a sitting government is disseminated and hugely amplified in a twinkling of an eye. Any small misstep can go viral, and the blurring of news and entertainment makes contextualizing it impossible. It is not surprising that governments want tighter control of the news flow, but the centralization used to achieve that cripples the role of ministers.
Thus, ministers have come to understand that they do not have the range of independent action or the authority that they once had. This is also toxic to the notion of ministerial responsibility. I remember the striking example of The Hon Monique Bégin, the former Minister of Health, then no longer in politics, deciding that she would waive her immunity and testify before the Krever Commission (the Royal Commission of Inquiry on the Blood System in Canada). That, to me, was a shining example. But I have profound doubts that today’s crop of ministers would feel so empowered.
The centralization of power in the PMO and PCO is not the only reason why the members of cabinet have become rather puppet-like. Another reason is that cabinet is just too damned big. Today, Mr. Trudeau’s cabinet has 37 members. In 1994, our cabinet had 23 members, and some of the identifiable subsets of responsibility were assigned to members of parliament called parliamentary secretaries, who were a sort of almost junior minister, but were not in the cabinet. (Shockingly, despite the vast size of today’s cabinet, there are also 39 parliamentary secretaries, with roles much narrower than parliamentary secretaries of old). There is a substantial body of research on how large a committee or council can be and still have thorough and useful discussions, and there is a widely held view that anything over a couple of dozen creates a body that rubber stamps rather than creates. My surmise is that our recent prime ministers seem to have had cabinets for show, creating new “meaningful” portfolios to appear to be doing something about an area of concern. But the size of recent cabinets has certainly struck a blow against any concept of collective decision making.
If cabinet expansion has harmed its function as a source of timely and effective decision-making, what can be said of the House of Commons itself? It is my view that the House of Commons is no longer a true legislative assembly, and no real debate is possible. I will concede that some good work is done in committees, but the House of Commons itself is a victim of the communications revolution. Once a place for debating legislation, the decision to televise its proceedings has made it into a permanent platform for electoral campaigning. It is now merely an adjunct to the hustings.
But you may ask, don’t the people have a right to know what is said in the House of Commons? Of course they do, and Hansard, which is available to all, is a precise text record of every word said in that chamber. If you can read, you can know everything said there. Consequently, there is no need to turn it into a perpetual nightly 30-second theatrical skit with political overtones. Just let it do its damned work, and check on it by actually reading what has been spoken.
But will a loosening of the iron grip of the centre, restoring the role of cabinet, of individual ministers, and of the House of Commons itself, cure the stasis? Perhaps in part, but not fully. After decades of this stasis, the Government of Canada has developed such a spiderweb of rules and policies that even the most skilled and determined civil servants find it hard slogging to get much done. That being said, if we give them top cover and convey a sense of urgency, we will see noticeable improvement. But further radical reform is imaginable. As someone who worked for the Government of Canada in a fairly senior capacity for nine years, I did experience my own share of frustration at the 30,000 rules of government (just a guess on my part as to the number). Yes, we did find ways to get things done, but it often felt a bit like a rowing shell built for eight rowers, with two or three of the crew rowing backwards.
I certainly don’t know all of the 30,000 rules, but it’s nice to imagine that simplification might be possible. And, for all the rules that I’ve ever been exposed to, it seems to me as if they could all be replaced by perhaps five rules and an important reminder. And those imagined rules, plus the reminder, might be as follows:
Rule 1: Spend the money on what it was voted or appropriated for.
Rule 2: Do not engage in, or appear to engage in conflict of interest.
Rule 3: Treat staff and the general public fairly and with respect.
Rule 4: Allow free collective bargaining for civilian employees. (Note: while public servants can unionize, Treasury Board still arrogates to itself in its absolute discretion many areas that, in other sectors, would be addressed in collective agreements. The centralizing at TB of all policy matters related to hiring, firing, classification, promotion and demotion is hugely awkward.)
Rule 5: Accept and embrace the idea of individual initiative and the possibility of individual blame.
Reminder: The criminal code still applies.
I have yet to come up with any scenario in which the above rule set and the added reminder would not suffice. I do not doubt that I have oversimplified matters, but that does not mean that considerable simplification is impossible. A central feature of the vast extant rule set is that it is designed to obviate the need for the exercise of judgement, or to kick that exercise of judgement up to such a high level that choke points and excessive delays are unavoidable. Allow some decentralization of the exercise of judgement and things might speed up a lot. How often have I heard something like, “I think you are right, but my hands are tied”, or “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to send your request pretty far up my chain of command”. And most of these responses were not made in response to earth-shaking requests, but merely to unanticipated ones.
This is not to denigrate the public service. The vast majority of public servants want to do a good job, and want the system to work. No doubt the public service, like other bureaucracies, has its fair share of slackers, opportunists and drones looking for a sinecure, but there is no obvious reason to believe that the ratio is noticeably different than in the workforce of other large employers. The failures seem to be related to inadequate leadership and direction, plus arbitrary constraints, as noted above.
But certain commentators do constantly point out the recent rise in the numbers of employees of the Government of Canada, highlighting the dichotomy between turgid delivery of effects by government and an inflated cadre of folks expected to deliver those effects. But is the federal workforce really oversized, especially if better guidance and fewer hindrances could improve its ability to get things done? The answer appears to be that it might be somewhat oversized, but not by much.
It is hard to know what the appropriate size of the public service of Canada should be. Some commentators focus on the actual number of civil servants, while others tend to track the size of the civil service as a percentage of the population of the country. It is very likely that neither measure is perfect for understanding the “rightsizing” of the civil service. That is because some functions of government require work that is proportional to the national population, especially those that involve direct service to citizens and residents. Other activities of government, however, are little affected by population size, and therefore have some “economies of scale”. This is especially true of a lot of activities of government that start with the letter “P”, such as policy, procurement, planning, and public affairs. These areas of effort are not very sensitive at all to whether we are a nation of 26 million (1985) or 40 million (now).
But there have been some fairly dramatic swings in the size of the federal public service over the last four decades. Let us first examine the argument from the perspective of those who prefer the “percentage of population” approach.
One has to recognize that Canada in 2024 is not the Canada of the past. While it is true that the Government of Canada today employs about 100,000 more workers than it did 15 years ago, the population has also grown. Measuring the size of the public service as a percentage of the population of Canada shows surprising variation, in an odd zig-zag pattern for the last four decades. In 1985 it was about 0.99% of the population. It then fell steadily, reaching a low of about 0.68% in 1999. It then rose again, reaching a peak of about 0.83% in 2010, after which it declined again to about 0.72% in 2015. Since then, it has climbed back to 0.90% today.
It may well be that 0.9% is somewhat too high, but by how much? Even under the Harper Conservatives it averaged almost 0.8% and peaked at 0.83%. If we were to conclude (without a detailed examination of the shifts in federal government tasks) that roughly 0.8% ought to suffice, that would only imply a decline of about 40,000 in the appropriate size of the federal public service. A target of 0.75% would imply a decline of about 60,000.
If, as suggested above, some simplifications of process and some decentralization of some types of decision-making were to occur, such a reduction might well be possible. Furthermore, recalling the weakness of the “fixed percentage” approach, the fact that there are areas of government activity with economies of scale should also make these lower percentage targets relatively workable, given that the population has grown.
But, to some extent, adjusting the size of the public service is not as critical an issue as the steps needed to cure the stasis in government. Indeed, if the distortions of process which produced the stasis are rooted out, the secondary issue of the size of the public service will likely resolve itself naturally.
That brings us to the core question, which is, “What will induce the government to reduce centralization, simplify the operating ruleset, and give staff a bit more leeway to exercise judgement?” In a way, this question reminds me of this old joke: “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?” The answer: “Only one, but the lightbulb has to want to change.”
By this, I mean that any government could make these changes if it wanted to. And it will want to if the people place importance upon the government doing so. The people can signal this in many ways, including not only public comment, but also nominating and voting for candidates for parliament who support these notions. Short answer: the government (regardless of the party in power) will do these things if we, the citizenry, tell them they must.
So, let’s tell them. It is the only way we can get back to having a government that does things, instead of just engaging in theatrics.
