How is Carney’s government filling high-level jobs?

2026/02/03 Leave a comment

Interesting change. The test will come when we see the annual reports on GiC and judicial appointments that have included diversity data under the Trudeau government. While presented as “transparent and merit-based,” considerable latitude for the government to develop and encourage nominations and thus influence results:

…Since March 2025, only one position — parliamentary budget officer — has been advertised on the government’s appointments website or in the Canada Gazette. For months, the website said it was not accepting applications for any positions. Currently, it says “appointment opportunities will be posted in due course.”

At the same time, the Carney government has made 122 governor-in-council appointments. Some of the openings filled were last advertised years ago. Government insiders say previous postings resulted in pools of qualified applicants that can still be tapped for positions.

Some openings, like chief public health officer and official languages commissioner, were publicly advertised before Trudeau left power. The government has still not named a permanent successor to former public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam, who retired in June. Officials won’t say if Canada’s new official languages commissioner Kelly Burke, who was named last week, was selected through the 2024 open application process.

On March 19, 2025, the governor-in-council (GIC) appointment website advertised 23 job opportunities — some to fill multiple positions.

Ten months later, many are still vacant.

Last week, cabinet approved nine appointments to the new Employment Insurance Board of Appeals. While openings were advertised, they were posted on the board’s own website — not the government’s GIC appointments page.

While the number can fluctuate from day to day as appointments are made and mandates expire, currently, there are around 251 vacant GIC positions.

In the Senate, seven of 105 seats are vacant and eight more senators are scheduled to retire over the course of 2026. However, the website set up under the Trudeau government to open up Senate appointments and allow Canadians to apply to be a senator has said for months that “new applications, nominations or the creation of new profiles for Senate appointments are not being accepted at this time.”

By Tuesday, 24 of the 29 seats on the board Trudeau set up to advise the prime minister on potential senator appointments will be vacant. Only three federal representatives and the two representatives for Nova Scotia will remain.

‘Transparent and merit-based’ process

Carney’s office says that the government is using a “transparent and merit-based selection process” to make appointments….

Source: How is Carney’s government filling high-level jobs?

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May: The Executive Cuts

2026/01/26 1 Comment

The latest overview of the approach in considerable detail:

Too many layers. Everyone knew it.

The executive ranks have been climbing for decades despite warnings about bloat and slow decision-making. Now a 12-per-cent cut is coming: about 1,120 executive jobs disappearing across 90 or so departments.

The cuts will ensure Canada’s executive hierarchy is “a pyramid, not a cylinder,” says one senior bureaucrat. The big driver is saving money. But it’s also about speed. Fewer layers, faster decisions. That’s the plan, anyway.

There are 9,155 bureaucrats who occupy five levels of executives (EX-1 to EX-5) between directors and assistant deputy ministers. But it’s not just them.

Many expect PCO clerk Michael Sabia to also trim the deputy minister ranks, too, as he reshapes the senior bench of public service leaders. He started with a pre-Christmas shuffle — bigger than any seen in years — and promised another. No one at the top is safe, it seems.

“The cuts are a shock to the system, like a taser,” says one senior official. But can cutting layers fix the public service and speed up decision-making like the Carney government expects?…

Source: May: EXs, cuts and layers

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Usher: Farewell Cakeism, Welcome Trade-offs, Effectiveness and Efficiencies

2026/01/21 Leave a comment

While focused on the education sector, applies more broadly as Carney’s Davos speech makes clear (with the hard trade-offs to come):

… But look, cakeism is everywhere. I mean, just look at the last federal election, where every party competed to cut taxes/increase spending in the midst of threats from the US that were going to slow economic growth and require increases in national security spending. Nary a trade-off in sight. Politicians in Canada and many other countries have come to the conclusion – perhaps erroneously, perhaps not – that voters simply dislike trade-offs so it’s better not to make any. Once upon a time – in the mid-late 1990s when we finally got our fiscal house in order – Canada was pretty good at thinking about trade-offs. But it’s basically all been downhill since the turn of the century.

Now, if you wanted to put the shoe on the other foot, you could say that all politics is a bit cakeist. After all, loads of people ask for government money to fund their favourite cause or institution and never think too hard about where the money is coming from. So is it cakeist to ask for more money for universities and student aid? Well, sort of. But one expects stakeholder groups to be cakeist/selfish – they are pushing their set of priorities, and it’s not really their job to think through trade-offs. It’s the job of governments. And increasingly over the past decade or two, governments just forgot how to do that and started saying yes to more and more people. 

But times are changing. Neither our federal nor our provincial governments are in particularly sound financial footing. Thanks to the Cheeto Chaos Agent in the White House, we are in for an extended period of economic dislocation and lowered growth prospects, not to mention a massive re-orientation of fiscal spending priorities to advantage national security. For the next half-decade at least, public resources are going to be much scarcer than they have been at any point before. We as a country, therefore, need to re-learn how to talk about trade-offs, and perhaps more importantly, how to talk in terms of efficiencies.

To take our own sector as an example: when asking the public for money, institutions are going to need to be a lot more explicit both about what immediate obvious benefits will accrue to the public or the government if the money arrives, as well as about immediate specific costs which will occur if the money does not arrive. That means “asks” are going to have to get a lot more specific: not “we would like $50 million please”, but “we would like $50 million please, which we will spend on X, Y and Z, and if we don’t get it we will need to cut A, B and C in order to fund these priorities, which means the community will lose L, M and N”. This may sound simple, but institutions going in this direction would be the biggest tonal shift in university government relations in my lifetime, because universities choke on the idea of doing less or being seen to do less. But this is what the language of trade-offs requires….

Source: Farewell Cakeism, Welcome Trade-offs, Effectiveness and Efficiencies

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ICYMI: The government is still not hiring enough disabled people: PSC report

2026/01/13 Leave a comment

Of note (I await the EE report to assess the impact of the cuts on EE groups):

…The report found that public servants with disabilities “were consistently under-represented in acting appointments in comparison to their representation in the public service.”

In comparison, all other equity groups (Indigenous people, women and visible minorities) were represented on par or exceeded their representation in acting appointments….

The report also found gaps in other equity groups, particularly with the upkeep of Indigenous applicants, who had been applying to public service jobs in numbers that were lower than their overall workforce availability.

Around 2.8 per cent of applicants to the public service in 2024 to 2025 identified as Indigenous, while their workforce availability was 4.1 per cent….

Source: The government is still not hiring enough disabled people: report

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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

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How productive is the public service? We’ll never know | Denley

2026/01/09 Leave a comment

Some things easier to measure than others but productivity in service delivery, HR, finance and property management should be doable and are needed:

…One need be only moderately cynical to identify the reason for rejecting productivity measurement. There’s a big clue in the task force’s report. The advisory group states, “Without reliable data, it is difficult to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of government services or identify areas for improvement.”

That might seem like a problem to concerned taxpayers, but for those in government, it’s an ideal situation.

The problem with assessing performance is a political downside. If you set a goal and don’t meet it, that’s a visible failure. Better to keep it vague and talk only about the volume of money spent. Easier, too. It saves all the thinking about how to actually accomplish things, as opposed to just promising them.

What little reporting the federal government does on its own effectiveness illustrates the pitfalls of telling people how you are doing. A recent report by the Treasury Board showed that government departments that deliver high-volume services fell woefully short of expectations in 2024-25.

It’s pretty obvious that effective digital service delivery is critical to productivity and expanding output per worker, but in 2024-25, only 52 per cent of those high-volume departments met digital service standards, down from 55 per cent the year before. The target is 80 per cent, in itself a pretty modest number.

The Treasury Board report says the 80 per cent target “reflects Canadians’ expectations of simple, secure and efficient delivery of services and benefits.” If so, those expectations would be dramatically less than the ones we have of Amazon.

The underlying problem can be seen in the percentage of government business applications “assessed as healthy.” That number was only 38 per cent in 2024-25 and the target is a mere 40 per cent. Not exactly a recipe for efficient and effective service delivery.

Let’s put all of this in a broader context. In Canada, the federal, provincial and municipal governments combined employ more than 20 per cent of the population, and their spending equals 40 per cent of gross domestic product.

If those governments don’t use money productively, they are a drag on the whole economy, wasting people and money that could be more effectively deployed in the private sector.

Instead of spending so much time on the issue of where public servants work, the Carney government should focus on the far more important problem of what they do and whether it’s done effectively. The public service is too big, expensive and important to be run by guesswork.

Source: How productive is the public service? We’ll never know | Opinion

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Government rejects call to measure productivity across public service

2025/12/18 2 Comments

Sigh… While some areas intrinsically hard to measure such as policy processes and communications, operational areas are more straightforward such as application and benefit processing, HR, finance and accommodation. Good quotes from Wernick:

The federal government is rejecting a call from a working group to measure productivity across Canada’s public sector, arguing that doing so would not “readily align” with its priorities.

A working group tasked with measuring productivity in the federal public service recommends in a recent report that Statistics Canada explore, test and report publicly on the development of a productivity measurement program for the public sector.

The group says accurate and transparent measurement of public service productivity is “essential to improving outcomes” and that without reliable data, it’s “difficult to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of government services or identify areas for improvement.”

…Former clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick says he’s disappointed the government rejected the call to put more effort into measurement, noting it could be included in departments’ annual results reports. 

“It would have been a relatively easy give for them to say they’ll keep working and try to do better,” Wernick said. “It surprised me.”

He said government transformation and efficiency is one of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government’s “signature themes.”

“They should be receptive to it,” Wernick said.

He said there’s “nothing surprising” in the recommendations but questioned whether anything more concrete will be decided in the months to come.

“There’s a lot of specifics missing,” he said.

Source: Government rejects call to measure productivity across public service

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ICYMI: A Future Government Blueprint or Return to Yesteryear? [Lynch & Mitchell]

2025/12/17 Leave a comment

Good critique by David McLaughlin. As usual, most of these types of articles are strong in the diagnostique but weak on the how:

This might hold the bitter truth of whether our relentlessly mediocre system of governance will ever be changed. The authors note the importance of leadership in actually changing anything. Their first recommendation for implementing renewal is for the PM “to release a public statement (via a Speech from the Throne) committing the government to a major program of reform and renewal”. The reality is that unless the PM and Clerk of the Privy Council, Cabinet Secretary, and Head of the Public Service invest serious political capital in such an initiative, big necessary change will not occur. 

The authors plant their flag firmly in the terrain of big change, now. “Incrementalism is Not the Answer”, they write in their final chapter heading. “Business-as-usual is not a viable strategy for success in a world of rampant change”. No disagreement here. But good stewardship is grounded in guardian institutions with a guardian mindset. Incrementalism is a feature, not a bug, of such a system and culture. This is what governance reformers are up against as much as anything else. Incrementalism may be the only means to regime change on offer. 

If so, then this governance blueprint, or any other, requires a second layer of engineering and technical schematics as to how to get there. Credit to Lynch and Mitchell for erecting the scaffolding.

Here’s how the book’s two dozen recommendations stack up:

  • Restore Cabinet Government – 4 recommendations
    • make Cabinet the central place for collective decision-making
    • reduce the size of Cabinet by at least a third
    • return authority and accountability to ministers
    • reintroduce an operations committee to manage key files and keep government on track
  • Reverse the Centralization of Power in the PMO – 5 recommendations
    • counter the creeping ‘presidentialization’ of our Westminster system of government
    • restore the proper role and accountability between public servants and political staff
    • empower parliamentary committee with more independence, staff, and resources and fewer committees with broad mandates
    • right-size government with less spending, fewer agencies, fewer small departments, and simpler governmental organization. 
    • create an appropriate rules and accountability regime for political staff
  • Modernize Core Government Institutions – 11 recommendations
    • modernize and strengthen the public service for tomorrow
    • downsize federal employment by about 17 percent to unwind excessive growth
    • re-mandate the Treasury Board and the Public Service Commission 
    • Establish forward-looking, sophisticated planning and risk management capacity in the public service
    • rebuild a cutlure of purpose, pride, and accomplishment for results in the public service
    • simplify, reduce, and refocus government oversight mechanisms 
    • transform the RCMP into a modern national police force
    • resource, rebuild, and re-equip the Canadian Armed Forces
    • set out focused, longer-term priorities for foreign policy with the resources and capacity to execute
    • establish clear protocols for the distribution and use of intelligence
    • Focus on improving productivity, both in the private and public sectors
  • Implement the Reforms – 4 recommendations
    • release a public statement by the PM committing the government to a major program of reform and renewal
    • create a National Productivity Commission
    • Create a PM’s Advisory Council on the Public Service
    • Create an expert panel on public sector productivity

Source: A Future Government Blueprint or Return to Yesteryear?

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MacDougall: The government of the future doesn’t need these departments | Opinion

2025/12/06 Leave a comment

Raises some valid questions but as we know, cuts to programs are hard to sell. The current expenditure review is not asking these fundamental questions; hopefully next year’s budget will be more ambitious in terms of asking these difficult questions and even more difficult decisions:

…But perhaps the prime minister should have a think about the proper role of government, because the direction of travel in the advanced western economies is for shrinking working-age populations and ballooning spending. Unless we act now, countries like Canada could soon be in a position where a harsh rationalization of government function is necessary.

Reframing the challenge: What does a federal government *need* to do (versus what might be *nice* for it to do)? Moreover, what if governments can’t maintain current borrowing levels, and central banks can’t serially print money and/or buy up private debt in an attempt to smother the markets’ booms and busts? What bits of government activity would we choose to keep in that more financially restrictive world? If humans have a ‘hierarchy of needs’ – as advanced by psychologist Abraham Maslow – what would our core needs be from a slimmed-down government?

Maslow famously articulated five human needs and ordered them into a pyramid. The base layer is physiological needs: food, water, warmth and sleep. Without these things, humans can’t thrive. This suggests the government should help to ensure a safe and secure supply of food, water, energy, and housing. Add to that the defence of the realm and the administration of justice, and the base layers of the pyramid are covered. And then we’d need the ability to collect the tax needed to fund it.

And this relatively narrow collection of tasks is just about what the federal government looked like in the pre-WW2, pre-Baby Boom era. There were a dozen or so ministries and a small civil service to deliver the work. A lot of the government that’s come since is the governmental equivalent of Maslow’s latter stages, i.e. geared toward societal self-expression. A lot of it could go without compromising the provision of core needs.

For example, the government of yesteryear didn’t have any regional economic development agencies. Nor did it have the CBC, Canadian Heritage, Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Commercial Corporation, or the Business Development Bank of Canada. All of this spending isn’t foundational. These bodies provide some value, but on a tighter budget, it is more Disney+ subscription than home heating bill.

Other bits of the expanded post-war state are essential. A society without a system of social support programs is a heartless one. We don’t want a return to the workhouse. The health system also needs to be there for people who need it. That said, we must acknowledge that social supports and health care systems designed decades ago face fresh challenges in an aging society in which people also live substantially longer. A country with nearly eight workers to every retiree (as Canada had in 1966) can afford to make different choices than one that will have a three-to-one ratio by 2030. Maslow’s government would benefit from a system of compulsory health insurance, as is done in Switzerland.

Ultimately, what would mitigate the need for a bare-minimum, Maslow-style government is the return of a vigorous civil society. Much of what families, friends, community groups and congregations used to provide is now delivered by the government. The atomization of society has left voids that governments have felt obliged to fill. And even if we now belatedly reclaim some of that territory, the bill for government will still have to go down….

Source: The government of the future doesn’t need these departments | Opinion

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Laroche: Should high-level managers bear the brunt of public service cuts? [on government transformation]

2025/12/02 Leave a comment

By former deputy minister Yasmine Laroche. Former deputies are always more “radical” when they retire and are no longer subject to bureaucratic and political restraints:

…But creating parallel organizations without fixing the underlying system? That’s not transformation, that’s a work-around. Now, no-one asked for my advice, but if they had, here’s some of what I would propose:

  • Dramatically reduce the number of departments and deputy ministers.
  • Flatten the executive hierarchy to three levels (director → director general → assistant deputy minister).
  • Eliminate any position with the title, “associate.”
  • Institute three-year contracts for executives, to reduce unnecessary churn and to hold people to account for delivery, not just intentions.
  • Eliminate “performance pay” – it has nothing to do with performance; it is a way to top up salaries or reward DM favourites. 

At the same time, take a hard look at compensation. Some positions and job categories are seriously underpaid compared to similar positions outside the public service, while others are overpaid.

But these are just one person’s ideas. What I would love to see is the government, through the clerk of the Privy Council, invite retired public servants — deeply experienced, battle-tested, with no vested interest — to return as advisers at a symbolic rate, like the “$1-a-day” men (yes, sadly, they were all men) of the post-war era, to design real, lasting reform.

By nature, I’m not a cynical person. I believe in the public service. I believe it can evolve. It can become leaner, more effective, more accountable and more mission-driven. But only if we call for change that goes beyond cuts in headcount.

We need change that reimagines and rebuilds structures because you are absolutely right: this isn’t just about today’s budget, it’s about whether the public service is built to meet 21st-century challenges.

Source: Should high-level managers bear the brunt of public service cuts?

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