Roberts: Fixing the public service means an independent review

Article content

The following essay is drawn from Alasdair Roberts’ new book,  The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century:

We can say three things about the federal public service. It is filled with good people dedicated to serving their country. Our country is worse off when it doesn’t work well. And it is a control-ridden body in desperate need of a thorough and independent review.

Article content

Four out of five Canadians were not yet born when the last comprehensive review of the public service was completed in 1963. The Glassco Royal Commission, which had been established three years earlier by Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker, found that public servants were tangled in excessive controls that drove up costs and undermined performance.

Many more controls have been layered on the public service since the 1960s, for several reasons. One is the desire to establish the federal public service as a model employer, and also to use it as a symbol of commitment to important national values. Since Glassco, governments have established stricter rules about collective bargaining, official languages, non-discrimination, diversity and inclusion, pay equity, accessibility, respect for sustainable development, and other important considerations.

There is another reason for the layering of controls. Trust in government has declined, and as a result the demand for public service accountability has increased.

The Federal Accountability Act of 2006 is the most notorious example of the drive to prevent misconduct and waste. It might be the single most dramatic escalation of controls in the service’s history. But the FAA was preceded by other oversight measures like the expansion of Auditor General powers in 1977, and the Access to Information Act of 1983. And then there are controls established in response to specific controversies like the Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC) scandal of 2000.

Article content

Often, new rules for the public service are accompanied by new independent watchdogs, ranging from the Privacy Commissioner (1977) to the Integrity Commissioner (2007). This watchdog model of accountability is really a post-Glassco innovation. Few countries have created independent watchdogs as enthusiastically as Canada has over the last half-century.

The watchdog model has reshaped political conversation in important ways. Watchdogs sometimes define their job as “shaming and blaming,” as a representative of the Public Service Commission explained in 2003. Journalists and parliamentarians, looking for news or controversy, take their cue from watchdog reports. The end result, perhaps unintended, is that bad news is amplified while good news is dampened. Citizens receive a steady stream of stories about misconduct in Ottawa. This corrodes trust and builds support for even more controls.

There is a third reason for the accretion of controls over the public service. Since the 1980s, ministers have become more suspicious of bureaucrats, and as a result they have hired more political staff as a “countervailing force.” The Canadian government now has a full-blown political service, a new institution comparable in size to the Department of Finance, although it is not recognized by that name. One senior official observed in 2018 that interventions by political staffers create an atmosphere of “short-termism and unpredictability” throughout the bureaucracy.

Article content

The Canadian government now has a full-blown political service, a new institution comparable in size to the Department of Finance, although it is not recognized by that name.

A 2022 study of the public service found that risk aversion had become “a core feature of the system.” This is hardly a surprise. For decades, politicians have loaded the system with controls and watchdogs. Many controls have been proposed in good faith. But no one has looked at the cumulative effect of the entire control regime. No one has tallied how much it costs for bureaucrats to comply with all these rules, or considered how it affects culture and performance, or calculated whether the costs of compliance exceed the benefits.

Governments have periodically tried to do a Marie Kondo-style housekeeping of controls on the public service, but these efforts have had limited success. This is mainly because of the methods that government have chosen to use. Royal commissions such as the broad-ranging Glassco review have been dismissed as slow and clunky. Moreover, royal commissions do not work under thumb of prime ministers, and sometimes they produce politically awkward recommendations.

Instead, governments have given the job of housekeeping to internal bureaucratic task forces. But these lack political weight and credibility, and usually sidestep difficult questions about changes to legislation. Alternatively, reviews have narrowed on one aspect of the control regime — one law or another — so that the politics of reform can be carefully managed. But these narrow reviews have neglected the big picture: the stultifying effect of the control regime as a whole.

Article content

The next federal government will be tempted to look for its own quick fixes for the public service. But what is really needed is a comprehensive and independent review, like the Glassco exercise, updated for the digital age. This review ought to look at the role of the political service (all those political staffers) as well as the public service. And it ought to focus especially on the thickening web of controls. This is the only way to build a public service that is ready to meet the challenges of the next half-century.

***

Alasdair Roberts is a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His latest book, The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in September.

Article content