An impatient Mark Carney would rather bypass the public service than reform it
2026/01/12 4 Comments
Public service reform is a thankless task politically and takes an inordinate amount of time, effort and political support. Needed but rarely executed given previous failures like UCS.
Former deputies need to share some of their concrete experiences with efforts in public service reform and lessons learned, rather than more general diagnostiques and recommendations. More on the how and less on the why:
…Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Sabia took over as Clerk of the Privy Council with decades of business experience under his belt. That makes him an oddity in Ottawa, where most senior bureaucrats have never worked outside the capital, much less outside government.
Therein lies the problem that Mr. Carney and Mr. Sabia face as they try to inject new dynamism into a public service that has long operated according to the principles of risk minimization and strict adherence to procedure. The senior bureaucracy is almost exclusively composed of individuals who climbed the ranks during an era of increasing centralization of power and policymaking in the Prime Minister’s Office. Their skill set revolves around keeping the dust down, rather than disrupting the status quo.
As in any organization, however, disruption is a necessary component of innovation. And the federal public service is desperately in need of it.
“[N]otwithstanding the massive increase in hiring over the last decade, too few public servants have been hired for the leading-edge skills required for modern government,” write former PCO clerk Kevin Lynch and ex-PCO official James Mitchell in their newly published book, A New Blueprint for Government. “When Amazon can deliver a package to almost anyone in Canada the next day, public expectations for government service standards increase accordingly. Yet those expectations are too often not being met.”
Source: An impatient Mark Carney would rather bypass the public service than reform it
About Andrew
Multicultural Meanderings 
Thanks, Andrew: It’s difficult to reform massive administrative structures and it earns few kudos, little or nothing in rewards in the polls and at election time, and can cause disruption and backlash – from those being reformed, and hence unpopularity with citizens and electors and the media, so there are lots of incentives to just let be or to make a few cosmetic retouches. That said, unless the instruments of government and governance are reformed, democracy will decay. It’s a bit like the unglamorous largely invisible work of repairing and updating water and sewage systems – no rewards for doing it so it doesn’t get done and the systems slowly rot and rust and fail to keep up with demand and with new climatological conditions – and then, suddenly, you have a crisis and collapse and a search for scapegoats. Having a Reform Tsar is probably a good idea, like C. D. Howe led Canada’s industrial WW2 effort. The PM and the Government can get on with strategy, long-term and short-term, while the Tsar fixes the machinery.
Fully agree. But hard to see this happening even if sorely needed. A reform tsar would need to have PM strong political support and Carney, Sabia and Blanchard, who all have the potential to push for reform, are too busy dealing with the short-term impact of Trump and initiating longer term strategies to make us less dependent on the usa.
I’m afraid you are right, Andrew. The great disturbance is going to occupy everyone’s attention. There is, I think, no end in sight, barring a major economic crisis – stock market crash and financial crisis and collapse of AI investment – in the US, and that would bring other emergency short-term concerns.
Wish I wasn’t…