Heintzman and MacQuarrie: Dialogue on public service more important than ever

Of note:

Given the state of the world these days, the recent announcement by Clerk of the Privy Council John Hannaford creating a “task team” of deputy ministers on the values and ethics of public service may seem frivolous. 

But we believe the clerk’s initiative is significant with the potential to influence the quality of our democracy for a generation.  

Canada’s public service is an important national institution, one of the key pillars of our parliamentary democracy. As we watch the erosion of democratic institutions elsewhere, the condition of our federal public service, and the quality of its democratic vocation, should concern all of us.

The clerk’s initiative recognizes that recent events show the federal public service faces some major performance challenges that call for a new effort of renewal. To make wise choices for renewal, you must know who you are, what a public service is for, and what it should be. Without this conscious awareness, a public service can easily fall short of its distinct standards of professionalism and service

The clerk’s initiative recognizes that recent events show the federal public service faces some major performance challenges that call for a new effort of renewal. To make wise choices for renewal, you must know who you are, what a public service is for, and what it should be. Without this conscious awareness, a public service can easily fall short of its distinct standards of professionalism and service.

Hannaford’s announcement comes exactly 30 years after the creation of a celebrated task force on public service and ethics under the leadership of John Tait, the former federal deputy minister of justice. The “Tait Report” set the agenda for public service values and ethics for a generation.

But times change. Every decade brings its own issues which challenge a public service to rediscover its distinctive identity as a “compass” (the clerk’s word) to guide direction for the future. He has asked the new task team to lead a “broad conversation” on how to bring the public service’s values and ethics “to life within a dynamic and increasingly complex environment.”

We think there are three conditions for the team’s success.

First, the “conversations” with public servants and others must take the form of what the Tait Report called “honest dialogue” about problems like these, among other things:

• Performance: the federal public service has recently lost its reputation for providing timely, citizen-centred service to Canadians;
• Trust: the civil service no longer enjoys the automatic trust and legitimacy that is essential to our democracy;
• Boundaries: the public service has not yet acquired or sought the tools for drawing a line between the values and accountability of elected and non-elected officials, as recommended by the Gomery Report and others;
• Accountability: public service leaders do not appear to take accountability for their own shortcomings, including the enormous expansion of the public service over the last decade and declining efficiency, and; 
• Technology: the civil service has notoriously mismanaged implementation of digital technology, and has not yet brought public service values seriously to bear on public servants’ use of social media and artificial intelligence.

These are the kinds of real problems the task team’s “conversations” with public servants and others should openly confront if its work is to have legitimacy. 

Second, this dialogue should not be rushed. Nothing will be accomplished by simply repeating the public service’s stated core values. To recover their motivating power and urgency, public service values must reemerge from honest dialogue, modelled by the task team itself, about the problems at hand.

Third, the “conversation” must go beyond the public service to include parliamentarians. This is the unfinished business from the Tait Report. Tait recommended a dialogue about public service values should engage ministers and MPs, leading to a new “moral contract between the public service, government and Parliament of Canada.” The state of the federal public service is not just a concern for the government of the day. The quality and honesty of its advice and its ability to deliver programs and service efficiently and effectively are important to us all.

The current federal political context makes this kind of dialogue—about the kind of public service we need to support our parliamentary democracy—more urgent than ever. Now is the time. And the Clerk of the Privy Council has just set the table.

Ralph Heintzman and Catherine MacQuarrie are former senior public servants, and both served as head of the federal government’s Office of Public Service Values and Ethics.

Source: Dialogue on public service more important than ever