Donald Savoie: Why Canada’s public service is declining and why it matters

Good short interview with Donald Savoie:

Show me a weak country and I will show you a country with a weak public service. Every country needs a referee and the referee has to be the public service. No country can operate without a referee. You take the public service out of Canadian society and you will have chaos. We all need to recognize the public service is going through an extremely difficult period. There are three fundamental phases to the public service. The first one was when they put the infrastructure in place in the early days, canals, roads, railways. The second was post-world-war Keynesian economics – the government decided it could do everything in every sector. It grew by leaps and bounds, young university graduates flocked to it. It was the happy phase. We are now into the third phase, saying ‘oh, we overshot.’ We got government into things that government ought not to have been into. So how do we fix things?

Donald Savoie: Why Canada’s public service is declining and why it matters – The Globe and Mail.