Hard to disagree with these comments by Kevin Page, former Parliamentary Budget Officer and currently attached to University of Ottawa, and Donald Savoie of Université de Moncton:
“I don’t see a vision and I have been very critical of the Blueprint 2020, but there is a context for change,” said Page.
“Where is the state of policy and financial analysis in government and its capacity to deliver services? We should be true to our values and no one can say we have been true to accountability and transparency in the past five years, moving on big initiatives with no supporting analysis.
“The public service is accountable to the executive but it is also accountable to Parliament and they have dropped the ball on that, and that comes with the price of lost public trust.”
Donald Savoie, the Canada Research chair in administration and governance at the Universite de Moncton, is also pushing for reform but argues the problem lies with the public service’s relationship with ministers, cabinet and Parliament….
He said all the chatter and discussions generated by Blueprint 2020 may be invigorating, especially for young public servants eager to harness technology and open up government, but it won’t work unless that relationship with politicians changes.
“I can’t figure out Blueprint 2020. It’s like grabbing smoke. I don’t understand where it is going. Maybe something fundamental or important is taking shape in the system and if that’s the case, good luck, but for someone from the outside looking in, there’s nothing there. It seems vapid … and until you deal with the role of ministers, Parliament and their relationship with public servants … the vision is only sentences in a report and will not have any legs.”
Kevin Page dismisses Privy Council’s Blueprint 2020 as ‘empty vessel’.
And the official government and bureaucratic view, predictably more rose-coloured:
Public servants waiting to see which vision for the bureaucracy will prevail in 2014
Lawrence Martin in the Globe takes a similarly hard-hitting approach, highlighting the relationship issue between the government and the public service. He goes too far in asserting the independence of the public service, given its role to serve the government of the day. Codifying a “moral contract” as suggested by Ralph Heintzman beyond the general understanding of “fearless advice and loyal implementation” is unlikely to happen, and would likely be too rigid. As always, finding the right balance is a challenge:
In the face of all the problems, top bureaucrat Wayne Wouters, Clerk of the Privy Council, has unveiled Blueprint 2020, a vision for a reformed world-class public service. Many such reform and modernization schemes have been tried in the past with scant results. This one, which follows a commendable consultation process within the service, is full of fine-sounding stuff like citizen engagement, smart use of new technologies and a whole-of-government approach to improve service delivery and value for money…
But not much in Mr. Wouters’s plan appears aimed at restoring the degree of independence the public service has traditionally exercised. Its politicization, a most serious example being that of the Privy Council Office, must be stopped. The public service should be accountable not only to the executive branch but also to Parliament. On the latter, says Mr. Page, it has dropped the ball, at the price of a loss in public trust.
Meaningful reform would entail something like what’s been proposed by former Treasury Board executive Ralph Heintzman. What is needed, he says, is a “moral contract,” a charter that sets well-defined boundaries between ministers, public servants and Parliament.
Time to renew Canada’s cowed, bloated bureaucracy
In fairness to all, the challenge in any such PS renewal initiative is high, there are no formal evaluations of previous efforts at PS renewal that I am aware (some informal reflections, however), the fundamental limits of what can be done given bureaucratic and political heirarchies (government works top down, not bottom up), not to mention the particular context of the current government-public service relations.
Multicultural Meanderings 