Luciani: The rise of the progressive bureaucrat and the fall of the efficient state

A bit simplistic but the fundamental point, more public servants with experience in program delivery and client service than policy development.

And of course, previous generations of public servants reflected the attitudes of the day, whether respect to women, visible minorities, Indigenous, LGTBQ:

…Universities like to present policy training as politically neutral, but no school is neutral when its dominant assumptions are absorbed from the surrounding progressive culture in higher education.

Graduates with MPPs and MPAs are no different. They see the world through the values of their generation. They learn the language of inclusion and identity and bring those values to their work. When Statistics Canada asks in surveys what gender you were assigned at birth, you can be certain the department was influenced by a new generation of policy advisors. A public service staffed chiefly by people trained to think in slogans will inevitably produce a slogan-driven government.

Canada needs smart people less enamoured of theory and ideology, and more rooted in the unglamorous work of delivery. More importantly, we need to restore ministerial responsibility. MPs and ministers should be judged on what happens in their departments. And universities should stop imagining that another wave of credentialed policy analysts will repair what politics has allowed to decay.

Source: The rise of the progressive bureaucrat and the fall of the efficient state