Ottawa’s Greatest Mandarin

Clifford Clark was Canada’s deputy minister of finance from 1932 until 1952— 20 years that encompassed not only the Great Depression, but World War Two as well. InBehind the Scenes: The Life and Work of William Clifford Clark, Robert Wardhaugh does a masterful job in bringing to life the enormous achievements of a pioneer public servant who served his country during these challenging years with honour, dedication and intelligence. In this book, we catch a glimpse of Canada’s golden age of public administration, told through the biography of an intensely private man who was loath to draw attention to himself and was committed to doing his work “behind the scenes.”

Here is how Wardhaugh outlines Clark’s remarkable contributions:

He was the driving force behind the creation of the Bank of Canada; he introduced the federal government to national housing policy; his management of the economy during the Great Depression led to a fundamental rethinking of dominion–provincial relations and the Canadian federal structure; he was the architect of the Canadian economy during the Second World War; and he was instrumental in forging Canada’s international economic role in the “Brave New World” of the post-war era

Public servants, in particular, will understand the importance of another contribution from Clark—he personally led an overhaul of the Financial Administration Act, which is to public servants what the constitution and the charter are to lawyers.

So who was this amazing mandarin that most Canadians outside the federal public service (and many within it today) have never heard of? Clifford Clark was born in a small agricultural community in southern Ontario on April 18, 1889, one in a family of five children. At school he demonstrated an impressive mind and secured a scholarship to Queen’s University. There he continued to impress, winning a number of academic prizes. O.D. Skelton, head of the department of political and economic science, had this to say about Clark as an undergraduate: “He has a quick and wide grasp of facts, power to analyse and correlate them in a systematic fashion.”

Clark went on to graduate work at Harvard University, where he won a prestigious prize open to all graduate students. He was offered an appointment in the department of government and economics at Harvard. But Skelton would have none of that. He offered him an appointment at Queen’s, which Clark accepted. Clark never completed his PhD thesis, however, and Wardhaugh explains that he wanted to “focus on applied economics” and “to offer solutions to everyday problems.” He had plenty of opportunities to pursue applied economics as an advisor consultant to government and, between 1922 and 1932, as a senior executive with a large American real estate firm. By 1932 Skelton had also left Queen’s for the federal public service, but he never lost sight of his former student. He recommended Clark for a senior position and Prime Minister R.B. Bennett appointed Clark deputy minister of finance in the middle of the Depression.

In tracing Clark’s progression from his student days to the top of the federal public service, Wardhaugh paints a sympathetic picture. He provides a detailed account of how “Clark’s boys” shaped Ottawa’s machinery of government and how they worked with political leaders to define policies that met the challenges of the day. Indeed, there were moments when the challenges were so daunting that some political leaders simply turned the steering wheel over to Clark and his boys and said, “Okay, now, boys, you drive!” At one point, a junior public servant warned a Clark-chaired committee that what it was about to decide would be “completely contrary to present government policy.” Clark asked: “Are you absolutely sure you are right?” and got an affirmative response. Clark simply leaned back and said: “In that case, gentleman, we must change government policy.”

To be sure, the key actors were indeed “boys.” All were men, all were white and all were English speakers. Francophones are rare in this story and women rarer still. Clark saw francophones as inferior products of a hopelessly dated education system. At one point, he did add a single francophone to his powerful eleven-member economic advisory committee. The appointee soon realized that he was a token and bowed out. One senses that Clark was not disappointed. Women, of course, had yet to reach even token status.

Clark was a major actor in all key moments in Canada’s development from the early 1930s to the early post-war years. There were occasional tensions between politicians and public servants during his era. But there were also trust, respect and an appreciation of what both sides could bring to the table. Clark and his boys knew their place. They always showed proper deference to the prime minister and ministers and made every effort to ensure that politicians, not themselves, would enjoy the limelight. They had a profound respect for parliamentary democracy. The boys never revealed their personal views on contentious issues confronting the government. And Clark was always available, day or night, it seems, to brief the prime minister and ministers on the finer points of public policy. He was a member of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club but could only manage to play a few times a year. One can easily imagine that he played in a white shirt and tie, always on the ready to return to the East Block for a briefing. Wardhaugh has very little to say about Clark the family man, which comes as no surprise. He writes that “Clark was not content unless he was working … [and] … he was always more comfortable at his desk.”

For their part, ministers and even the speaker of the Commons would energetically defend public servants whenever they came under attack from the opposition benches. They maintained that it was unfair to attack bureaucrats publicly because they were not in a position to defend themselves. One member of Parliament accused the Clark boys of being “responsible to no one.” Mackenzie King jumped to their defence, insisting that they were “wholly deferential to all hon. Members of the house.” Contrast this to the current situation where members on both sides of the house and at times even elements of the public service leadership do not hesitate to attack rank and file public servants if it serves their political and administrative purposes.

Clark and the boys were highly qualified and worked for modest salaries. They considered public service to be a vocation, with the satisfaction of accomplishment, of contributing to their country, sufficient reward. Remuneration was not that important.

They did not, however, hesitate to speak truth to political power. We are told that Clark had guts and that Douglas Abbott, one of his ministers, described how Clark went about his work: “He was always forthright and vigorous in his presentation … His personal and intellectual integrity was of the highest order.” Wardhaugh writes that Clark was the “main advocate” at a “decisive cabinet meeting” on the issue of family allowances. Clark insisted that “family income had to be supplemented” and he did not hesitate to state the case for what Mackenzie King described as a “pretty big item for Ministers to face, let alone swallow.” The Clark view prevailed and King later wrote that it was “one of the most impressive and significant of any” cabinet meeting he had ever attended.

Clark and his boys owned their work and they were not unduly scrutinized by oversight bodies. Government was considerably smaller, the federal public service only numbering 46,000 in 1939 (today it is anywhere between 260,000 and 440,000, depending on how one counts), and transparency requirements, from access to information to whistle-blowing legislation, were still decades away. They only had one of Parliament to concern themselves with and even that officer’s bark was muted. Clark, we are told, was successful in temporarily narrowing the mandate of the auditor general. From the perspective of senior public servants, it was a golden age in public administration.

That was then. Today, the administrative institution that Clark and the boys gave life to is on life support. Salaries and performance bonuses have come to matter a great deal, perhaps because the spirit of public service no longer has the cachet it once did. Deputy ministers, making the case that they are responsible for an increasing array of complex issues, now enjoy better pay and benefits than their American counterparts and even than the president of the United States.

Today, there are anywhere from 12 to 14 officers of Parliament. Senior public servants may want to play behind the scenes, as Clark did, but access to information legislation, 24-hour news channels, a better educated population and the end of deference do not allow it. In fact, some of them now appear to enjoy the limelight, perhaps with an eye to a second career outside government.

One can easily speculate that Clifford Clark would be amazed to see a parliamentary budget officer freelancing on budget issues, essentially reporting to the media. He would find an office to “ensure truth in budgeting” bizarre. In his day, the Department of Finance was quite capable of ensuring truth in all its work, especially in the budget. If a deputy minister was not up to the job then, the solution would have been to replace him, rather than to create an entire new bureaucracy whose only purpose, it seems, is to bark at the work of the Finance Department in front of the media.

Clark and his boys would also be perplexed to see large ministerial offices, each with a chief of staff and an array of policy advisors and communication specialists. Why, they would ask, would ministers need policy advisors in their immediate offices? What is the role of the public service, if not to provide policy advice? Why, they would wonder, would the government want to turn to amateurs and partisans to secure advice on complex public policy issues?

They would also likely be alarmed at the number of hands involved in shaping policy and government decisions. They would ask what legitimate role paid lobbyists can possibly play in defining the public interest, and wonder how provincial governments were able to enlarge their power and influence over national policy making. They would have great difficulty adjusting to the world of collapsed borders and boundaries and would ask how anyone could possibly accomplish anything in this tangled work environment. They would take note of the notorious morale problem in the public service of late and link it to the inability of public servants to take pride in their accomplishments.

Robert A. Wardhaugh persuasively makes the case that Clifford Clark and the boys were “fixers,” looking for pragmatic solutions during two of Canada’s most difficult periods—the Great Depression and the Second World War—and that without them and their work Canada would be the worse today.

The federal public service seriously needs a new generation of Clark boys (and girls) to fix the public service, to redefine the machinery so as to accommodate the requirements of horizontal government, to instil a sense of accomplishment throughout the ranks, not just for the chosen few operating in the prime minister’s court, and to define a new relationship with politicians. It will be difficult, but I believe it can be done.