Lang: Ottawa’s bureaucracy has too many managers who are busy managing their own bloat

2025/11/01 Leave a comment

One of the interesting nuggets in this analysis is that the growth appears highest among ADMs as the overall growth since 2015 has been relatively stable, ranging from 2.9 to 3.0 percent of all public servants:

…Seventy years ago, British historian C. Northcote Parkinson coined “Parkinson’s Law,” which helps explain this staggering growth of the public service and its executive class. Observing the expansion of the British Colonial Office, which occurred alongside the decline of the British Empire, Parkinson pointed out that the ranks of the public service tend to grow regardless of the volume of work to be done. He attributed this to two claims: “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals” and “Officials make work for each other,” in other words, there is a natural tendency to multiply subordinates to sustain the rise of officials, which in turn creates demand for more and more officials. As Parkinson put it, “Far more people have taken far longer to produce the same result. No one has been idle. All have done their best.” 

Ottawa’s bureaucracy is well aware of the problem, even if it hasn’t done much to fix it. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, recent attempts at work-force reduction have targeted term and casual employees, while the share of permanent positions, such as those occupied by executives, has reached a decade high. 

A report by the Public Service Management Advisory Committee could have been lifted directly from Parkinson’s playbook: “New [executive] jobs at all levels are created, in many cases without a significant change in the organization’s mandate.” The result is “dilution and duplication” leading to “unnecessary layers of decision-making and unclear accountabilities. It slows down productivity and creates workplace conflicts.” Former clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick has raised concerns that Ottawa’s “pyramid of executives” are slowing decision making and impeding communication.

Businesspeople will recognize the pathology. When companies multiply vice-presidents, decisions slow, accountability blurs and egos multiply faster than outcomes. But in the private sector, profit and loss eventually impose discipline. In government, the taxpayer funds the experiment until someone yells “enough is enough.” …

Source: Ottawa’s bureaucracy has too many managers who are busy managing their own bloat

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Lang: Deconstructing Canada’s ballooning $67-billion federal bureaucracy

2024/12/16 Leave a comment

Good column by Lang (our paths crossed when I worked in PCO and he in PMO):

Forty-three per cent.

That is how much Canada’s “core” federal public administration — the civil service — has grown since Justin Trudeau’s government took office in 2015. The raw numbers are even more striking. There are 110,738 more federal public servants employed today than a decade ago.

Not surprisingly, this rate of bureaucratic growth has faced some scrutiny.

Some have claimed that the increase was necessary to keep pace with population growth, yet Canada’s population only expanded by about 17 per cent over this period.

The COVID pandemic, and the programs and initiatives that were created to deal with it, is also cited as a factor. To be sure, the federal bureaucracy increased by about 35,000 during the three COVID years. But that means the rest of the personnel growth — more than two-thirds of it — happened before and after the pandemic.

If service to Canadians during this time had improved meaningfully, that might justify the rise, but there is little evidence of that. For example, complaints to the federal Office of the Taxpayers’ Ombudsperson about excessive wait times with Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) call centres were up 45 per cent in 2023. And stories of long wait times at passport offices are legion.

Such scenarios support the conviction that the federal government is bloated and in need of radical surgery. At the very least, some of this swelling of public service ranks should be examined and questioned.

Growth is concentrated in the Big Six

Where has most of the surge occurred?

More than half of the increase – 60,000 positions – has taken place in just six out of some 115 federal departments and agencies. Let’s call these the Big Six.

The largest increase – by 19,000 employees – has occurred at the CRA, a 48-per-cent expansion of its total staff.

That’s impressive, but in percentage terms it pales in comparison to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, which more than doubled in size with 105 per cent growth during that decade, equal to 6,700 additional employees.

Also noteworthy is Employment and Social Development Canada, which grew by some 18,000 personnel, or 86 per cent.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans increased by 4,800 or 49 per cent, while Public Services and Procurement Canada is bigger by 6,900 people or 57 per cent.

Rounding out the Big Six is the Department of National Defence, whose civilian workforce expanded by about 6,100. Ironically this occurred at the same time the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) have been hemorrhaging military personnel and are now more than 15,000 people short of the enlistment target set in the government’s 2017 defence policy. The CAF — which is facing major demands on its services at home and abroad — is probably now at its lowest military head count since the end of the Second World War.

Some of the hiring binges appear to be indicators of the government’s priorities and modus operandi. 

The big hike at Citizenship, Immigration and Refugees, for example, is related to the Trudeau government’s aggressive (if not reckless) immigration policy, which in 2023 alone saw 469,000 new permanent residents admitted and over one million foreign student visas approved.

The staffing boom at Employment and Social Development Canada likely reflects the establishment of new social programs such as the Canada Child Benefit, Canada Dental Care Plan and various housing benefits.

For the CRA we can safely say that at least some of the expansion is owing to government efforts to track the underground economy and collect more tax revenue to pay for its agenda.

The increase at Public Services and Procurement Canada may have been caused by the urgent need during the pandemic to acquire mass quantities of everything from masks to vaccines. The rationale for the spike at Fisheries and Oceans is less obvious.

The peculiar case of the PCO 

Looking beyond the Big Six, however, it is worth pointing out that the Privy Council Office (PCO) – the prime minister’s department – has ballooned by three quarters since Trudeau came to office, from 727 employees in 2015 to nearly 1,300 today.

Historically the PCO – which runs no programs and delivers no public services to Canadians – has been a secretariat of a few hundred people. Today it is 27 per cent larger than the Department of Finance, which is arguably Canada’s most important ministry, responsible for developing the government’s budget, tax and fiscal policies, among other things.

This nearly doubling of the PCO in just a decade is more evidence of the pernicious trend toward prime ministerial government, where collective Cabinet decision-making is replaced by prime ministerial fiat on most issues.

If Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre becomes the next prime minister, as is widely expected, and is serious about reducing the $40-billion federal deficit, trimming the public service payroll – which now runs to $67 billion per year, a staggering 68 per cent increase since 2016 – will have to be in his sights.

While Poilievre should definitely take aim at the Big Six, he also needs to lead by example and cut his own department in half. No Canadian beyond the shadow of the Parliament buildings would notice.

Source: Deconstructing Canada’s ballooning $67-billion federal bureaucracy

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Lang: Why Ottawa won’t come to grips with Canada’s productivity problem

2024/07/18 Leave a comment

Dispiriting but likely correct even without the exacerbation by ill-designed immigration policies (knew Lang when he worked in Deputy PMs office in the late 90s):

…Three reasons spring to mind for why Canada has done so little on the productivity front.

First, federal policy change is often driven less by the importance of the issue and more by a sense of urgency – it’s the classic dilemma: urgent crowds out the important. Unfortunately, long-run economic decline is never seen as a matter of urgency in government. It is the quintessential boiling-frog problem.

Second, persistent productivity weakness suggests deep-seated structural problems in the Canadian economy. You can’t meaningfully get at that without paradigm-shifting policy change. That entails risk, and all governments are masters of risk aversion. The irony here is that over the years the federal government has routinely chided Canadian business for insufficient investment in R&D, inadequate pursuit of foreign markets and weak entrepreneurialism, all of which boils down to risk-taking.

Third, when governments do get down to discussing innovation, the regional political imperative rears its head. Meaning innovation policies, especially spending programs, are usually designed to confer benefits on all regions of the country, seriously diluting their impact.

All previous federal innovation reports have tripped over some or all of these three hurdles. And this will likely continue. When the next government comes along, expect either indifference to Canada’s productivity crisis, or yet another study and report into the problem, which will be largely ignored. Then turn the heat up one more notch on the frog in the pot.

Source: Why Ottawa won’t come to grips with Canada’s productivity problem

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Lang: Missing – public servants who could warn Trudeau about WE conflict

2020/07/18 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Lang who worked under Herb Gray when he was deputy PM (I worked in PCO at the time and interacted with him time-to-time):

“Mandarin” is another word sometimes associated with such powerful bureaucrats, who were occasionally resented – but often valued – by politicians for their knowledge, wisdom and willingness to stand up to ministers to ensure the basic integrity of the ministry.

As the government has lurched from the SNC-Lavalin scandal of a year or so ago to the WE charity controversy of today – both of which centre on questions of prime ministerial and ministerial ethics and judgment – one question that isn’t asked enough is “Where are the mandarins in all this?”

When Justin Trudeau’s government came to office nearly five years ago, its chief hallmark was inexperience. The few ministers from previous Liberal administrations in its ranks at the beginning had little power. From its inception, power in the Trudeau government has been highly concentrated in the Prime Minister’s Office and among a few trusted ministers — notably Chrystia Freeland and Bill Morneau — none of whom had any prior government experience.

The feeling among some Ottawa watchers in the early days was that this inexperience would be managed and shaped by the mandarins. They would help ensure the government remained stable, competent and exhibited good judgment most of the time. This expectation was re-enforced by the prime minister himself, who stated early on that his government would rely much more heavily on the advice and counsel of the professional public service than his predecessor, Stephen Harper, had.

It doesn’t seem to have worked out that way. Or, perhaps there are no “old school” deputy ministers left in the government of Canada.

Take the SNC-Lavalin scandal. The issue boiled down to a big company allegedly threatening to cut jobs and investment in Canada if it was not given a specific legal concession from the government that would enable the firm to continue to bid on federal contracts.

Any decent mandarin should have known at the outset that corporations routinely tell the federal government job losses will result if they do not get X, Y or Z. This kind of thing used to be greeted with skepticism by the public service, justifiably so. But if the SNC threat was judged a serious risk, there was also a time when a few senior deputy ministers would have sprung into action and developed options for the government to manage its way of out of the issue, such that it might never even have come to public attention, much less have led to two ministerial resignations and threatened the viability of the government.

Today, we have the controversy surrounding WE, a charity that the prime minister and his wife have had a longstanding and very public association with, and to which the government intended to direct a contract worth some $19 million. The Clerk of the Privy Council, the prime minister’s deputy minister, must have known about Trudeau’s general relationship with WE.  He must have seen a conflict of interest here, or at least an appearance of conflict. An “old school” Clerk would have insisted on the prime minister recusing himself from any cabinet decision-making on this issue to protect the prime minister and the government. Instead, if we are to take Trudeau at his word, the public service more or less boxed him and his ministers in to an inevitable appearance of conflict of interest by recommending that only WE could do the job and offering no alternatives, something very rare in government.

None of this is to say that public servants are responsible for either the SNC-Lavalin scandal or the WE mess. Responsibility for both rests on the shoulders of the prime minister and his cabinet.  There is no legal, or even ethical, obligation on deputy ministers to stop ministers from exercising terrible judgment. Yet there was a time, not that long ago, when the expectation was that some wise, “old school” deputies had the government’s back.

Source: Lang: Missing – public servants who could warn Trudeau about WE conflict

Andrew MacDougall’s take is also worthy of note:

The thing you have to understand about the federal public service is that it isn’t geared toward excitement; it’s a “safety first” kind of place.

Pick a policy, any policy. If there’s a Flashy Option A and a Boring Option B, the public service opts for boring every day of the week and twice on Sunday. And that goes treble if Flashy Option A is, to pick a random example out of thin air, a sole-source contract worth nearly $1 billion to an organization with no track record of delivery of federal programming.

The other thing to understand about public servants is they’re big fans of their work. They believe in themselves and in their experience. Indeed, it’s rather the point of them. And so a federal bureaucracy telling its political master it’s not equipped to deliver a government program – or that somebody else is better placed to do it – is about as rare as a turkey voting for Christmas.

So let us please, then, drop the polite fiction that it was the public service that was the driving force behind Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to ship his long-time collaborators at the WE Charity approximately $20 million to manage the $912-million Canada Student Service Grant program. The story defies experience, practice and belief.

Put differently, the only way the public service recommended WE for the CSSG is if the political wing of the government gave it such narrow specifications that it could return only one answer. You can bet there exists, somewhere, an exquisitely crafted memo from the public service to cabinet saying, in effect: “If you really want to go forward with this completely brain-dead approach to federal programming, then you go right ahead, ministry.” The job of the opposition and the press is to now surface that memo.

Because thankfully for Trudeau, the federal bureaucracy is also rather polite, which explains why the prime minister is being allowed to hide behind his version of events. The public service is used to being human shields for politicians and will keep quiet.

Which isn’t to say the prime minister’s story is surviving contact with reality. Every day brings another WE tale of woe.

In this (still-surfacing) version of events, a charity with a long association with the prime minister, his family and his advisers, one that pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trudeau’s family members and puts together slick, campaign-style videos promoting the prime minister while simultaneously receiving millions of dollars of government grants and contributions and other sole-source contracts, is being laid low by the pernicious effects of the coronavirus. There is massive churn on the board of directors and large numbers of staff are being laid off as Canada enters lockdown. All looks lost. Until, that is, the Trudeau government comes to the rescue with an offer to administer a pandemic-related program.

According to the charity, the Prime Minister’s Office rang up the day after the program was announced in April to say it needed help from WE to deliver the program. All with the blessing of the federal public service of course, which already, by the way, runs the Canada Summer Jobs program targeted at much the same audience as the new Canada Student Service Grant. What are the odds?

Not that WE had ever delivered a similar program, mind you. Not that WE even have the staff to deliver the program (the charity had to hire back hundreds of laid-off staff in anticipation of getting the work before the program was formally announced in June). Not that WE even have any particularly good ideas to pull students into the program, other than throwing money at other groups to do it for them. And we’re meant to believe this group was the “only” one capable of delivering the program?

A sure sign Trudeau’s version of the story isn’t true is the fact he won’t release any evidence to support it. The government won’t even say which other groups were considered to deliver the grant.

In other words, this contract was friends, not safety, first.

Source: https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/macdougall-trudeau-ducks-for-cover-behind-the-non-partisan-public-service/wcm/0748db2c-65e8-4ddd-999d-b5bb87c16067/

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