May: Leadership Signals – Take it as permission to simplify

2025/11/12 Leave a comment

Her weekly posts are required reading. This week’s except that I liked:

…Small things can be transformative, says Allen Sutherland, president of the Institute on Governance. Such as: the steady signals Carney and Sabia send about not letting process or the “web of rules” get in the way. Streamline. Simplify.

“If there is some transformation in the public service day to day — where public servants act with more commitment to implementation and less focus on simply being rule followers — then I’d say that’s very transformative.”

In short, leadership signals can drive change and behaviour across the public service.

For Michael Wernick, who once sat in Sabia’s chair as clerk, the budget falls short on real transformation. It has aspirational reforms, but none of the legislative fixes, structural pruning, or deep investment in public-service capacity needed.

For Sahir Khan, the budget is like a solid mid-term grade. But “the final mark will depend entirely on execution — and that burden falls squarely on the public service,” says Khan, vice president at OttawaU’s Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy.

One senior bureaucrat summed it up: Carney’s approach isn’t about transforming the institution or rethinking its principles. It’s pragmatic: the public service is being reshaped by being told to deliver on priorities.

“That’s the Carney transformation. You don’t waste time on a grand plan. You set aspirational goals and tell them to get it done.”

Another added: “The government isn’t focused on institutional theory but on practical, delivery-focused fixes. Carney isn’t interested in changing the public service to be different — he’s interested in it changing to deliver something he wants done differently. The focus is on results.”

This approach of skipping grand plans is concentrating attention and decision-making in the PMO and PCO on departments tied to top priorities. Some bureaucrats worry that political staff will jump in to fill gaps if public servants can’t move fast enough. That would blur accountability. It also raises questions about whether departments not directly tied to top priorities are getting enough attention.

Source: May: Leadership Signals – Take it as permission to simplify

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Public service job cuts loom as Ottawa misses spending and deficit targets

2024/11/18 Leave a comment

Will likely be brutal with a change in government:

…Some argue part of the problem is today’s bureaucrats aren’t used to austerity and have only known growth for the past decade.

Today’s leaders may have been in the public service during the Harper government’s downsizing, but few were in senior positions directly responsible for managing those cuts. Back then, the government did regular strategic reviews, which were key to identifying budget cuts and the thousands of jobs that were eliminated. The Liberals had pledged a similar strategic review in their election platform, but it has yet to materialize, leaving some to question how prepared departments are to tackle current fiscal pressures.

It’s unclear what progress the government had made on these reductions. In fact, a PBO report that tracked the Liberals various spending reviews flagged the difficulty tracking the “overall plans, progress, and results” because there is no central document publicly available…

“There’s a coming squeeze here…and something has to give,” said Khan. A Liberal or a Conservative government in the future is “going to face the same stark choice. Before you cut programs that people want or need, the outsized growth of the public service has to be on the table. The unions will face this no matter who’s in power. It’s not going to go away.”

Source: Public service job cuts loom as Ottawa misses spending and deficit targets

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