The Machinery of Government

Homelessness and housing affordability have been in the news a lot lately. Since these are issues that hurt a considerable number of Canadians, across regions and demographic groups, opposition parties have jumped on them to hammer the Trudeau government. Consequently, the prime minister and his cabinet have been keen to show that they take housing seriously and last year launched several new initiatives to help.

However, Ottawa had already been helping those Canadians facing homelessness and soaring housing costs — for years. In fact, according to a 2022 auditor general’s report, Infrastructure Canada’s Reaching Home program and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s National Housing Strategy together spent nearly $6 billion between 2018 and 2022 on precisely these matters. Despite all that money, the auditor general, Karen Hogan, found that there was “still no organization in the federal government taking the lead on Canada’s target to prevent and reduce chronic homelessness by half by 2028. In addition, the organizations did not know whether their efforts so far had improved housing outcomes for people experiencing homelessness and chronic homelessness.” In remarks to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Accounts, Hogan added that one of her biggest concerns was “the lack of federal accountability for achieving Canada’s target to reduce chronic homelessness.”

In other words, despite spending billions over four years on programs to help Canadians with housing, the federal government did not know whether it had succeeded in preventing or reducing homelessness. Actually, no one could know one way or the other. But since it was being pummelled by the opposition, the government opted to throw more money at the problem anyway.

This maddening anecdote is from Donald J. Savoie’s Speaking Truth to Canadians about Their Public Service. There are more like it, and together they paint a damning picture of a supremely and increasingly inefficient and unaccountable Ottawa. Savoie traces this evolution over decades and links it to declining levels of trust among Canadians in their government.

Savoie, a professor at the Université de Moncton, is one of this country’s foremost experts on public administration and policy. His latest book highlights that expertise, honed over decades advising federal, provincial, and territorial governments, the private sector, and international organizations, as well as through considerable scholarship. The result is a deep dive into the black box of Canada’s public service.

Speaking Truth to Canadians about Their Public Service likely won’t sway readers who have already made up their minds about Ottawa, but it will help others understand why the institution tasked with designing and delivering the programs and services we claim to want too often works so poorly — why, for instance, “it took up to five months in some cases for Canadians to obtain a passport” in the summer of 2022. And why that never seems to change. If nothing else, the book will arm curious readers with the information they need to demand better the next time a candidate for Parliament knocks at their door.

The question Savoie seeks to answer is whether the federal government — despite growing by more than 30 percent since 2015 — is still “able to act on citizens’ concerns and show that they are making an impact.” For several reasons, it’s getting harder, he contends, to see that it can and does.

Savoie isn’t naive. He acknowledges that citizens in many countries are losing faith in government. Still, he does a good job of highlighting Canada’s particular failings. These include the deepening concentration of power in the Prime Minister’s Office, a state of affairs that is antithetical to the very basis of our Westminster system. “The current machinery of government has no solutions to the continuing weakening of the conventions of ministerial responsibility,” he writes, adding that the principle itself is “on life support.” The PMO is now filled with unelected advisers, consultants, and other staffers who are free “to roam wherever they want to roam, at times asking questions and at other times giving directions.”

This is not how our government is supposed to work, and it breeds bad outcomes. If all matters — even the most mundane — travel through the political bottleneck of the PMO, the machinery of governance slows down even as ministers wash their hands of responsibility. The gumming up of the works is also contagious: Savoie tells us that ministers, perhaps making up for their own lost authority, have added “parallel bureaucracies” in their own departments. This, too, thickens and slows government and renders it less accountable.

These developments are partly understandable, even inevitable: governments are increasingly called on to deal with thorny problems that lack simple solutions. As a result, contemporary policy making is complex, often involving work across several ministries and multiple departments. Chronic homelessness, for example, is an infrastructure issue as well as a health issue and an Indigenous issue, among others.

Savoie describes how multiple, repetitive, and sometimes needless layers of bureaucracy too often clog the system: “In the federal government, there is no straight line from the bottom to the top — responsibility zigzags on the way up and again on the way down. There are many hands in the soup, and everyone along the way has a say, from front-line workers, their managers, several other senior management levels, staffers working in policy units in Ottawa, political staffers, the minister or other central agencies, and the prime minister.” Attempts to add accountability requirements make this system even more impenetrable, which makes the delivery of programs and services worse “every time.”

So — what to do? Elected officials have little incentive to improve the system. “If MPs have a choice between scoring points or working on refining accountability requirements over the budget process,” Savoie writes, “they will opt for scoring points.” The civil service has even less incentive to fix the system and comes in for plenty of criticism here. Although he’s sympathetic to the institution, Savoie’s description of it is not pretty: bloated, inward-looking, secretive, and unwilling to admit failure or to reform itself in the interests of efficiency and productivity. If elected officials do attempt to rein in government sprawl by making targeted cuts, the civil service circles the wagons and finds ways of circumventing the will of Parliament. Quite simply, public servants are “unwilling or unable to identify cuts to their departments.”

Indeed, growth in the civil service often comes from pressure exerted by the service itself and not from constituent-pleasing politicians. Collective bargaining reinforces these harmful trends and introduces others, all of which are acknowledged by the most senior civil servants with whom Savoie has spoken — including those who have been at the very top, the Clerks of the Privy Council (but only once they’ve retired).

Efforts to bring in private sector management techniques don’t, and won’t, help. For one thing, most of the public service doesn’t work in front line service provision; 60 percent now work in areas —“policy advisory, coordination, oversight, and back-office functions” that deal with “other federal public servants rather than delivering services to other Canadians”— where there simply are no hard criteria against which to measure performance. Another reason: “So many variables have an effect on the success of a policy, a proposal, and a government program and its implementation, that it is impossible to single out one or even several officials to document the success or lack of success of a policy or even of departmental operations.” A forty-year effort to import corporate management practices “has been little more than a fool’s errand,” Savoie argues; “they have made government operations costlier, more bureaucratic, and less accountable.”

Although Savoie’s work is measured in tone and meticulously researched, a clear sense of “enough is enough” permeates Speaking Truth to Canadians about Their Public Service. “I believe I am on safe ground when I write that more and more Canadians consider that the Ottawa system is not as competent as it should be, given the resources that it consumes,” Savoie explains in a masterful bit of understatement. His arguments are sometimes repetitive, but the combined effect is a profound indictment of what’s gone wrong with the process of getting things done in the capital.

Yet Savoie’s purpose is not to condemn the public service but to defend it, to help it work better and be more accountable. He favours a return of the public service to its former, simpler role of providing policy advice to the government, delivering services, and administering regulations. He also hopes for a return to the spirit of Westminster, which “would require prime ministers to restore cabinet government and for Parliament to rediscover its role of holding the government to account.” (He’s not holding his breath, however.)

Savoie counsels Canadians to demand more of their elected officials and warns senior public servants to “promote change within their institution,” because “either they do it or, at some point, others will come in to do it.” This admonition is important because the only other successful method he has identified to promote efficiency in government is across-the-board cuts. “Things will change only if Canadians take more than a passing interest in the workings of government,” he writes. “Politicians will react if Canadians demand it and public servants will respond if the prime minister and the clerk ask for change and both keep an eye on the efforts.”

Some readers will undoubtedly remember the federal cuts and program offloading of the 1990s and conclude that it may soon be time to tighten our belts once more. Others may be harder to please. Where Savoie sees the public service as necessary — who else will make sure your foods and medicines are safe? — less accommodating observers see a meddlesome “administrative state” impinging upon individual freedoms or even a nefarious “deep state” bent on imposing its unelected and unaccountable will upon us all. Such critics may not be satisfied unless the whole rotten edifice is torn down.

They should be careful what they wish for, warn Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein in The Assault on the State. While admitting the shortcomings identified by Savoie and adding a few others, Hanson and Kopstein make a short, compelling case that an assault on the state is unlikely to return us to a romanticized freer era. Instead, it will lead to ruling families, cronyism, and incompetence: the “rule of men” and not the “rule of law.” The untold story of the past decade, they argue, has been “the spread of traditional modes of personalist rule,” which threatens the professional administration of state institutions “upon which any workable democratic system of governance in the contemporary world must depend.”

In a particularly convincing chapter, “How Vladimir Putin Resurrected Tsarism,” Hanson and Kopstein trace the contemporary attack on government institutions to post-Soviet Russia, before it spread to Turkey, Hungary, Israel, India, Brazil, and the United States, where it has found fertile ground among homegrown populists. And as they put it elsewhere, “The combination of a libertarian suspicion of ‘creeping socialism,’ Christian nationalist resentment at perceived assaults on religious liberty by the ‘secular state,’ and anger at encroachments on Republican presidential power by ‘liberal judges and bureaucrats’ has become a recipe for general fury at the US administrative state in its entirety.”

Both experts on Soviet and Russian politics, dictatorship, and political violence, Hanson and Kopstein know that the real “deep state” comes from anti-democratic impulses and actions — from too little state and not too much. “As annoying as state bureaucracies and government experts sometimes are,” they write, “all of us depend on them to live what we now consider normal lives.”

As I finished their book and contemplated the dismemberment of the administrative state — as we are seeing it play out in real time in Washington — I remembered a quote attributed to Óscar R. Benavides, the former “personalist” authoritarian leader of Peru: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”