Federal executives lack training, flexibility, Hubbard and Paquet

Ruth Hubbard and Gilles Paquet on the public service:

Hubbard draws her conclusions from a series of confidential discussions she and University of Ottawa Prof. Gilles Paquet held with more than 100 executives between 2006 and 2009 about thorny topics the public service doesn’t like to publicly air or even acknowledge – from disloyalty, security and ethics to in-house operational and institutional challenges.

“In our view, the state of mind of senior executives has come to be tainted by a multitude of bad habits: creeping cognitive dissonance and political correctness, erosion of critical thinking. These bad habits of the mind have unwittingly led to reprehensible behavior; rewarding failure, punishing success; failure to confront, disloyalty,” the pair wrote in a recently released book.

They argue this state of mind, coupled with the lack of capabilities, could, if left unchecked, lead to the further “deterioration” or “fading away” of the public service.

Federal executives lack training, flexibility, expert says | Ottawa Citizen.

Her direct reply to Ralph Heintzman (Public service needs ‘moral contract’ to keep it neutral, study says | Ottawa Citizen):

Only a very bizarre and unfit public servant would suggest

(1) that the technocracy should always oppose the political, and would conclude that, when there is accord, there must have been promiscuity; and

(2) that a senior bureaucrat should not work collaboratively with his minister unless the minister has a notion of the public interest aligned completely with his own.

Such would appear to be Heintzman’s views, and they are unreasonable.

While Hubbard and Paquet are correct to point out some of the failings of the public service, they largely ignore or dismiss the failings on the Government side.

Of course, the public service must adapt to the government of the day, but the Conservative government came from a very different space in terms of values and ideologies, combined with a high level of distrust that made this more challenging. Its dismissal of evidence and expertise, rather than merely challenging public service advice,  its unwillingness to listen to alternate views and its systematic attempt to weaken independent bodies are also part of the picture.

Just as Heintzman goes to far in his view of the independence of the public service, Hubbard and Paquet go too far in the other direction (readers may recall that in the end, the divergence between Paquet’s and my views was too great to publish with his private press – see my earlier post Gilles Paquet’s Critique of Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias).

Ruth Hubbard: The real problem with the public service