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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Lynch, Cappe and Mitchell: This is no time for ambitious federal projects

2025/03/04 Leave a comment

Good and needed commentary on Liberal over reach:

…Normally, in the period between the calling of an election and the swearing in of a government afterwards, the government of the day is supposed to refrain from making major discretionary decisions or announcements. The routine business of government carries on, as it must, but it is an important convention of our Westminster system that the government does not take the opportunity of the period between one sdministration and another to announce big decisions. This is called the “caretaker convention.” It’s a norm, a governing convention, not a law. But that doesn’t make it any less important.

Technically, we are not in a caretaker situation. While a federal election has not yet been called, it’s obvious that the circumstances today are far from a normal. Parliament has been prorogued in order that the governing Party can have the free time required to select a new prime minister. Yet however useful prorogation may have been in political or practical terms, it does impose upon the prime minister a duty of care, a duty of respect for the institutions in his charge. Making big decisions of a discretionary nature violates the spirit of the caretaker convention.

Source: Lynch, Cappe and Mitchell: This is no time for ambitious federal projects

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Lynch and Mitchell: Six areas to address for a better federal public service

2023/12/15 Leave a comment

As always, the general diagnostique is easier than concrete implementation, a common failing of these high level commentaries:

The non-partisan Public Service of Canada is an essential national institution, responsible for delivering government services to Canadians and providing policy advice to the government. It has played an outsized role in helping build this country.

But these days it seems to be constantly under the spotlight in the media and in Parliament, as a steady stream of intelligence leaks, contracting fiascos, procurement bottlenecks, workplace harassment incidents and service delivery snafus grab public attention.

This drip-drip of shortcomings is not good for public trust in a vital national institution, nor is it good for morale among public servants themselves.

We can do better. A high-performing public service is what taxpayers deserve and the country needs, and no one wants this more than today’s public servants. They are as troubled by these shortcomings as anyone else. But they are equally aware that they work in an institution burdened with serious impediments to nimble decision-making, innovative ideas, clarity on priorities and meaningful accountability. Indeed, responding to recent problems with yet more rules and regulations rather than solutions would only exacerbate things. So, what can be done?

What is needed is not a years-long Royal Commission but rather a common-sense approach to fixing how government operates. Here are six key problem areas, solutions to which would yield a more engaged public service and  improve services to Canadians.

• The starting point is realizing that government has become too complex to manage effectively. Today, the federal government is composed of 22 regular departments and more than 80 departmental agencies and corporations. This is in addition to 34 Crown corporations, the RCMP and the military.

No private sector firm, no matter how large, would ever set up such a byzantine organizational structure and expect to operate efficiently. The proliferation of entities makes alignment and cohesion of programs across government difficult, creates overlap and duplication, and increases administrative overhead costs.

• Second, and related, the public service is too large to operate effectively. Today it numbers almost 360,000 employees — an increase of 95,000, or 36 per cent, over the last decade. But why?

The Canadian population has expanded by 14 per cent over the same period and the Canadian economy grew just shy of 20 per cent, suggesting public sector productivity has deteriorated. A smaller public service, with less duplication of functions and leaner management structures, would be more efficient and less costly.

• Third, oversight is too diffuse to be effective. Responsibility for oversight spans the Treasury Board, the Privy Council Office, the Public Service Commission, the Auditor General, departmental audit and evaluation committees, and a host of parliamentary agents as well as Parliament itself.

These oversight bodies attempt to enforce a bewildering morass of rules, regulations and red tape that stifle healthy risk-taking but perversely create incentives to work around the rules, as we have seen recently in procurement. Fewer and clearer rules, and clarity about who is responsible for oversight, makes a lot of operational sense.

• Fourth, accountability is too opaque. No organization functions well with fuzzy accountabilities. Clear accountability is not just about who is responsible when things go wrong, but also about who is responsible for making sure they go right.

The accountability problem is exacerbated today by the increasing involvement of political staff in both controlling advice to ministers and implementing policy decisions. Restoring clarity on the respective roles of PMO, political staff and public servants is essential to a responsible, accountable and high-functioning public service.

• Fifth, scant attention is paid to measuring or managing public sector productivity. Rather, governments typically report on inputs and activities, not outcomes and results. The broken procurement system is a logical place to start a focus on productivity and results, after the horror shows of the Phoenix pay system, innumerable military procurement failures and the incomparable contracting fiasco around the CBSA ArriveCAN app.

Another productivity destroyer is long lists of policy priorities set out in mandate letters, with public servants expected to deliver on all of them. Yet the sheer number and lack of prioritization means lots of activity but few priorities actually delivered.

• The sixth is a hesitant management culture. The public service needs to rethink the required skills for working effectively in a 21st-century, data-driven and uber-connected economy and society. Like the private sector, government should be bulking up on data scientists, AI experts, IT specialists and project managers rather than relying on consultants.

High-performing organizations deal promptly with ineffective managers, because they hurt productivity and morale, and with bad apples who undermine the credibility and culture of institutions. More proactive management would yield better service delivery to the public and better morale and engagement by public servants.

Thoughtful people inside and outside government have been writing about these concerns for some time. Now is the time to do something, and that will take leadership and courage. The best way to deal with these issues is not to talk endlessly about them, but to act, to take the tough decisions that will make the public service a more productive organization, geared for success in the 21st century.

It’s only common sense.

Kevin Lynch was the Clerk of the Privy Council and is former Vice Chair of BMO. Jim Mitchell is an Adjunct Professor at Carleton University and a former Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet in the Privy Council Office.

Source: Lynch and Mitchell: Six areas to address for a better federal public service

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Cappe and Mitchell: Fixing Canada’s access to information regime will require more than just people power

2023/06/26 Leave a comment

Starts with changing the default to being open, as open data illustrates. But the reality that politicians tend to support more open government when in opposition and be “less enthusiastic” when in government is likely the fundamental obstacle. But modernizing the process and digitizing holdings should be doable:

The Globe and Mail has done Canadians a service by exposing the serious shortcomings in federal and provincial freedom of information (FOI) regimes. The reporting done as part of the Secret Canada project has shown that Canadians cannot get timely access to the information held by governments that they need, and to which they are legally entitled. Either the governments are egregiously slow in responding to access requests or, in far too many cases, they simply fail to provide the information requested. These delays are not simply frustrating; in far too many cases, they affect the material interests of Canadians who need to know what the government knows about them.

This problem is an important challenge to democratic governance in this country. But the solutions may not be obvious.

For example, simply adding more people, working millions more hours, to beleaguered access/FOI units in the federal and provincial governments will not solve the problem. Moreover, our Westminster system of government differs in fundamental ways from the municipal-government-style model with which most Canadians are familiar: Westminster government is cabinet government, where there is a fundamental requirement for secrecy to enable frank discussion among ministers and collective responsibility before the legislature, while municipal councils do their business in the open, as they should. But the obligations of openness differ in important ways between these two forms of government, and this can cause confusion.

To figure out solutions, we must understand the source of our access/FOI problem – and that lies with two fundamental features of the current regimes operated by both the federal and provincial governments.

First, the system we have is governed by the assumption that documents belong to government and are protected unless they can be allowed to be released. The result is that officials are obliged to spend an enormous amount of expensive time examining and redacting documents to protect information that, frankly, has no need of protection. Instead, governments should accept that the information they hold is inherently public, unless it falls within a limited set of exceptions to that rule, and make this information easy to access for citizens.

The second and more fundamental problem is that the laws were written, and governments are operating, in an analog world of paper and paper-based processes, while the needs and expectations of citizens reflect their experiences in a 21st-century digital world.

Today, people expect that information will be available instantly online. The notion that the information that someone is seeking from government is sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere in a remote government building seems laughable – but sadly, it is accurate. The fact is that today, a request for information is, in most cases, actually a request for a paper document that must be located then examined by a government official, then perhaps redacted in some way or other, and then physically transmitted to the person who made the access request. That process takes a huge amount of time and effort, and what’s more, it’s expensive: A recent Treasury Board study revealed that the estimated per-page cost of a document released under the federal access to information program is $11.40, and pegs the total cost to administer the program at $195-million a year. Pro-active disclosure, by contrast, would cost a federal department or agency only $64,000 a year on average.

To solve the problem, we should first recognize a clear distinction between information that should be accessible – namely, almost all of it – and information that, for good reason, should be protected.

We should also recognize that different kinds of information require different forms of protection. Tax data require privacy protection, for instance; this is an essential obligation of government to citizens and is fundamental to our “self-reporting” system of tax collection. Discussions in cabinet and advice to ministers need protection to enable the giving of frank advice and to allow for candour around the cabinet table. National security and intelligence records need protection to protect the security of the country; commercial negotiations, as well as federal-provincial and international negotiations, require protection so as to protect individual and national interests.

All these protections should be pretty much absolute. After that, one can apply a harm test to protect the information, if that is necessary. Otherwise, the default position should be that the information held by governments is readily accessible.

Furthermore, in our digital world, not every digital artifact in government should be deemed a “record” for the purposes of access to information. For example, every e-mail and every telephone call inside government is currently regarded, in principle, as a digital record. These should not be considered a record, for the purposes of the Act. Why not? Well, not every request for access is benign; some requests are motivated, quite legitimately, by a political or journalistic interest in simply embarrassing the government or finding information on a competitor. And if all exchanges among public servants were made public, then people simply would not communicate digitally any more. If casual exchanges among public servants are to be accessible then fear of embarrassing the government or themselves would be a chill on frank exchanges.

So how can we best reform the access/FOI regime at the federal or provincial level to better respect the rights and expectations of citizens, while still protecting the legitimate interests of individuals, governments and the country?

Firstly, as noted, start by recognizing the principles of confidentiality of ministerial discussions that underpin Westminster parliamentary democracy.

Secondly, change the default position for access/FOI from one of protecting secrecy to that of making records releasable unless this would violate clearly defined principles of secrecy or privacy. In cases of doubt, apply a clearly defined justiciable harm test for disclosure.

Thirdly, set out well-defined categories of protected documents (e.g., cabinet confidences, national security and intelligence information, and tax information and other records protected by privacy concerns) in the law.

And finally – and perhaps most importantly – begin the essential task of changing the information holdings of government from analog to digital, and amend search and disclosure processes in the same manner. Emphasize the creation of searchable databases which allow for low compliance costs in government and what is equally important, low private search costs. Recognize the social and public costs of compliance in government (high) vs. the private costs of private search of public records (low).

The Globe is right – the system is broken. Canadians are not being well-served. But we can’t fix the system by simply opening it up. We must understand why it’s broken and what it should look like in future if the interests of Canadians are to be protected.

Mel Cappe is a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a former clerk of the Privy Council. James Mitchell is an adjunct professor at Carleton University and a former assistant secretary to the Cabinet, Machinery of Government.

Source: Fixing Canada’s access to information regime will require more than just people power

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Lynch and Mitchell: Instead of adding new programs, Ottawa should focus on proper delivery of the ones it has

2023/02/14 Leave a comment

Likely a perennial refrain among officials having to respond to political-level demands but valid nevertheless as capacity limits of the public service in areas such as passports, immigration and others have become painfully apparent post-pandemic.

Of course, one of the ironies of former DMs and ADMs raising these issues is that the vast majority rose up through the policy ranks, helping governments introduce new programs, rather than in service or delivery!

And one should not underestimate the difficulty of briefing the political level against a particular initiative or program based on service delivery grounds:

Most Canadians expect value for money in their spending, especially in these uncertain and inflationary times. With worker shortages, empty offices, supply chain woes, high energy prices, soaring inflation and painful accommodation costs, Canadian consumers are worried about their financial health.

But what about governments? Are they delivering value for Canadians’ hard-earned tax dollars? For anyone seeking a passport or visa, lining up for airport security screening, trying to get a Nexus card, waiting for a routine medical procedure or watching government procurement systems that cannot deliver payroll, the answer is unambiguously negative.

Core government services are not being delivered well today, and this not only erodes confidence in government as an institution – it also undermines productivity and competitiveness in the Canadian economy.

What are the causes? While there is no single answer, it is clearly not due to a shortage of spending, public servants, consultants or debt. At the federal level from 2015 to 2022, the size of the public service grew by 30 per cent, the use of consultants shot up 40 per cent, government spending skyrocketed by 66 per cent and government debt almost doubled. In short, the size of government expanded, considerably, while the efficiency of government declined, noticeably – not a good combination.

In fact, the stratospheric and scattered spending is one root cause of the delivery problem.

Before, during and since the pandemic, the federal government has unleashed a vast array of new programs. New program delivery is complex and time-consuming work, requiring highly capable, experienced and empowered public servants. Indeed, “delivery” is the nuts and bolts of policy implementation and program operations – it encompasses the design of new programs, the stress testing of the design to avoid unintended consequences, ensuring robust IT and data systems to support the program, the hiring and training of staff, establishing quality control and compliance systems, and communicating to the intended beneficiaries how the program works.

There is a risk of moral hazard here – as governments try to do more and more, they may end up achieving less and less. The problem arises from the scale, scope and speed of new spending. Too many new programs, with too little prioritization, that are too quickly rushed to the “press release stage” is a recipe for delivery problems, not only of the new programs but also related existing programs on common platforms.

Today’s reality of government not being particularly good at actually delivering things – both core services and new programs – should be a matter of concern well beyond the Ottawa bubble. If you believe what government does matters to Canadian society and the economy, as we do, then less-than-stellar delivery of government services neither serves the public interest nor bolsters the public’s trust in our institutions of government.

What can be done? Like any complex problem, there is no single solution, but four possible actions deserve serious consideration.

First, pause the proliferation of new spending and new programs. This is needed to restore operational integrity and program delivery capacity as well as to support fiscal sustainability in a period of high inflation, high interest rates and high debt. And yet, the risk today is a proliferation of new government programs and the scaling up of existing ones ranging from new industrial policies to new energy transition programs, national dental care and pharmacare, new health transfers, increases in defence spending and expanded immigration. Whatever the policy merits of these proposed initiatives, this is simply not the time to expand government. Rather, it’s the time to refocus on meeting the expectations of Canadians for quality and timely delivery of government services.

Second, reverse the extreme centralization of decision-making within government. This is necessary for better governance as well as better program delivery. Too much decision making has been vested in the Prime Minister’s Office at the expense of ministers, cabinet and Parliament. Ministerial accountability and collective decision making, with fearless advice from an empowered, non-partisan public service, are central to our Westminster system of government. The sad fact is we have strayed far from that guiding ideal.

Third, modernize the architecture of compliance and oversight within government. This requires a profound shift from an operating culture of control and risk avoidance to one of innovation, risk taking and delegation. In the name of protecting the taxpayer, there is a compliance morass pervading government today, with overlapping oversight bodies, excessive red tape and needless reporting – all of which impedes getting things done and delivered.

Fourth, invest in the public service. This is not a call for a larger public service but a better equipped one. The public service needs the IT and data systems that allowed the banks to develop online banking and companies like Amazon to revolutionize delivery. It needs the skill sets for a digital world not an analog one, and should engage consultants as the exception not the rule. The public service should be an exciting place to work, empowering public servants to make a difference and attracting the best and brightest – and public servants are up to the challenge.

Better service delivery is in everyone’s interest. These changes would result in a higher-performing, more productive public sector. That should be part of Canada’s competitive advantage in a challenging world.

Kevin Lynch was clerk of the Privy Council and vice-chair of BMO. Jim Mitchell is an adjunct professor at Carleton University and a former assistant secretary to the cabinet.

Source: Instead of adding new programs, Ottawa should focus on proper delivery of the ones it has

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