Salgo: What if Canada’s public service is too accountable?

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Canada’s auditor general recently reported major oversight problems with the government’s business-loan program during COVID. The responsible agency evidently outsourced important parts of the program “without strong checks and balances in place,” with the result that some $3.5 billion in loans went to companies that weren’t eligible for them.

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In the wake of this finding, it may sound foolhardy to ask whether there’s such a thing as too much accountability in the federal public service.

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But yes, Virginia, such a thing exists, and it hurts the interests of Canadians.

To be clear, I’m not arguing with the AG. Accountability is a core tenet of good governance. Oversight and controls are essential, and when things go wrong, someone has to explain, take corrective action — and face the consequences.

What’s more, the public sector has a unique responsibility to be accountable. Citizens who feel ill-served can’t just take their business elsewhere, and last time I looked, paying for government services wasn’t voluntary. Still, when it comes to ensuring accountability, more is often less.

How so? First, more rules do not necessarily translate into better outcomes; the opposite is sometimes true. Many public sector controls are aimed at demonstrating good conduct rather than getting better results, as anyone who’s dealt with government procurement or staffing knows. Piling on rules doesn’t improve performance, and beyond a certain point it doesn’t improve public trust.

Second, rules are a lot more costly than people tend to realize – not just the cost of people who run accountability systems but the time of people who comply with them, who could be doing something more productive instead. Such costs are particularly onerous for small agencies. No one in the government of Canada knows the full measure of these costs and no one seems to want to.

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More rules do not necessarily translate into better outcomes; the opposite is sometimes true.

Third, and perhaps most damaging, is the impact too much accountability can have on public service behaviour and culture. People who say there’s no accountability in government typically mean that heads don’t roll (or don’t seem to) when things go wrong. But when most of the rules are either proscriptions or exercises in box-ticking, and real-world outcomes aren’t your responsibility, avoiding blame gets easier, while innovation looks more risky and less urgent than it actually is. When your briefing note to a senior manager goes through 17 sign-offs (as I recently heard one deputy minister acknowledge) it’s a little hard to take full ownership of any slipups.

As Exhibit A, I offer the Federal Accountability Act, which I once described as “the definitive legislative monument to risk-averse, blame-avoiding institutional rigidity in the government of Canada.”

Enacted in the early days of the Harper government, the act did some good or semi-good things to hold public servants to account. Unfortunately, it also included a host of dubious measures such as redundant anti-fraud penalties, the judicialization of ethical regimes, and a series of increasingly detailed behavioral constraints.

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But what was remarkable was how little connection the act had with the reality on the ground. We usually require any expenditure of public resources to address a demonstrated need. But in the case of the Accountability Act, there was often no evidence that the problems it was meant to address actually existed, or that the purported solutions would help.

The government talks a lot about risk but no risk assessment was conducted here.

This worst thing about the Accountability Act and its ilk is the missed opportunity to help modernize the public service: to streamline decision-making, encourage collaboration and innovation, and recast accountability in terms of achieving results for Canadians.

To-date, there has been no systematic assessment of the act, and the rules remain in place, as such rules usually do. Yet an underlying takeaway from COVID is actually that bureaucrats can be nimble when they are focused on outcomes and the political leadership seems to have their back. That may seem odd to say given the AG’s findings, but the scale of COVID payouts ($360 billion) was extraordinary and the government’s express goal was to get money out the door asap and ask questions later. The tolerance for error quickly snapped back, and rightly so, but the basic lesson holds.

So, yes, public servants are subject to too much of the wrong kind of accountability, and this isn’t likely to change through purely internal processes. We need an independent, public review of our accountability rules and of the opportunities to build a public service that will better serve a new and differently minded generation.

Karl Salgo is a former senior public servant and is currently executive adviser at the Ottawa-based Institute on Governance.

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