Yakabuski: The federal public service is broken. Is it too late to fix it?

Good long if dispiriting read with no easy or quick fixes:

…Canada is hardly the only parliamentary democracy to witness the degradation of its public service and concentration of power in the prime minister’s office, with a resultant decline in the quality and effectiveness of public policy. Britain’s Commission on the Centre of Government recently released its own report on deleterious impact of this phenomenon. “The centre [of government] in recent years has become far too dominant yet far too ineffective. It has scooped out initiative and all but emasculated Whitehall departments, which alternately try to second-guess what the flip-flop centre thinks and are micromanaged by it,” the commission’s deputy chairman, historian Sir Anthony Seldon, wrote in The Sunday Times. (Whitehall is British shorthand for the public service.)

More than ever, in our darkening age of political polarization, we need a neutral and non-partisan public service to guide major policy decisions. And we need competent public servants to implement them without fear or favour. The Trudeau Liberals have done themselves and Canadians a disservice by failing to recognize that a policy-capable and operationally efficient public service is any government’s best asset. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who speaks disparagingly of “gatekeepers” of all sorts, has given no indication he understands that either.

What future does that suggest for a country that faces chronic (and related) budget and productivity deficits and desperately needs to develop sustainable, affordable and equitable policies to address them both? We cannot expect them to come out of the PMO. Its dominance is partly what got us into this mess.

Source: The federal public service is broken. Is it too late to fix it?