Liberals should beware ‘deliverology’ guru: Rick Salutin

2016/04/30 2 Comments

Rick Salutin’s contrary note to deliverology, not without merit for the caution it brings (similar note to David Reevely’s: Ontario’s experience shows serious flaws in ‘deliverology’ governance):

For me, the scariest signal yet sent by the Trudeau government was bringing English “deliverologist” Sir Michael Barber, to their Alberta cabinet retreat, to tell them how they’re doing. They imported a British con man who was a perfect accessory during the Blair years, and — now that slippery Tony is gone, replaced by the rawer, more authentic Jeremy Corbyn — he moves on to the colonies. Barber has delivered his spiel in Australia, the Punjab and Maryland. Are we impressed to be in that company?

It’s an early warning sign that the Trudeau folk are starting to believe their own BS. I’m not particularly against BS, everyone in power deploys it; the danger point comes when you start gulping it yourself and not just spooning it out to others. That’s when the vultures start swanning around the retreats.

CBC’s Terry Milewski interviewed colleague Rosie Barton, who was on site, re: the scam. Rosie seemed dubious but said the Brit told his marks they were doing rawther well. Terry, sounding like a true rube, i.e., someone who has no idea that’s what he is — or a candidate for Private Eye’s pseuds corner — said he counts on Rosie for hip terms like deliverology. It’s about as fresh as the 500 channel universe. I happen to own a copy of Barber’s Deliverology 101, from 2011. I won’t say I read it, it’s not really meant for that, but I sort of flapped through it once. It’s loaded with charts, checklists, bullet points: nobody reads these things but they’re meant to make you feel like a practical, can-do type, not someone who wastes time on books — a profile rife in the upper regions of education administrators, who happen to be Barber’s natural habitat.

I’ve avoided defining deliverology because it doesn’t actually exist. It’s just mouthfuls of verbiage. Barber told Paul Wells of Maclean’s, at an earlier cabinet retreat, that he’d been recruited to “the prime minister’s delivery unit” in order to rescue Blair’s government. “It’s not tremendously exciting, but it’s really important, getting the priorities, the definitions of success, the trajectories, the data” — I should’ve said gobfuls of verbiage. You could do a close analysis of his language to show how vacuousness is literarily constructed but it seems to hypnotize people like Wells, who views himself as deeply skeptical. If a Canadian talked in such vapours, Wells would shred him. What is it — the accent?

But of course, as Donald Savoie notes extensively, a lot of what government is good at is “mouthfuls of verbiage.”

Source: Liberals should beware ‘deliverology’ guru: Salutin | Toronto Star

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Reevely: Sticking up for the public service a tricky line for Ottawa politicians

2015/08/07 Leave a comment

On the public service and political level relationship, picking up some of the themes of my book, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism:

They [the Conservatives] fired the head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission for being too meticulous about nuclear safety, forced the head of Statistics Canada to resign on principle, went to war with Parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page and Elections Canada boss Marc Mayrand. Ombudsmen for veterans and victims of crime lost faith in the Tories and said so publicly, then got frozen out.

That the Conservatives would be suspicious of the public service is understandable: A small-government party isn’t naturally friends with people who work in the government, who’ll tend toward statist solutions to public problems. And there’s a real divide between public-sector workers with stable employment and private-sector ones in Canada’s growing precariat (some of whom actually work for the government as temps, creating a shadow public service that began under the Liberals).

The Tories’ approach to the genuine challenges they have with the public service has, in the main, been to dump on public servants generally and get rid of specific senior ones who get too uppity. That might be satisfying for certain elements of the Conservative base but does not actually get Canada a better government. After nine years in power, they’ve likely effected about as much genuine reform as we can hope for.

But it says a great deal about how low the relationship between the politicians and the public service has gotten that “we would listen to the advice of professionals even if we don’t always take it” counts as a meaningful change from the way the Canadian government works now.

Reevely: Sticking up for the public service a tricky line for Ottawa politicians | Ottawa Citizen.

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