Oct. 22, 2026    |  Sign up + past editions    |    Unsubscribe  

The Carney government is driving at speed, but the clock is ticking. Nineteen months in, its political timetable is pressing up against the time it takes to deliver, and expectations for public servants will be running even higher in the coming months.

The rubber is about to hit the road.

Meanwhile, an independent task force is racing to figure out what keeps the public service from moving at the pace the prime minister demands. It plans to deliver its advice next fall. But Carney and his handful of decision-makers want action now.

Let’s dig in.

Today:

No time for fixes: Why it’s easier to start fresh.
Clear-eyed leaders: Think of the possibilities.
Time crunch: “Something’s got to give.”
Four bottlenecks: Four taskforce targets.

SPEED + CONFIDENCE
Can we have a show of hands?

“Carney speed” was a running theme last week at a national symposium by IPAC, the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. About 1,500 public servants from across the country took part to discuss the pressing topic of the day: leading with purpose and delivering results for Canadians.

IPAC works to develop and research public administration. Last week’s conference was held under Chatham House rule to allow for frank discussion about the rolling out of AI, beefing up cybersecurity, delivering major projects and how executives should lead.

Rules, processes and decisions all have to move faster. But the risks that come with speed? That is the other big issue on everyone’s minds.

The public servants in attendance seem galvanized by the ambition to reshape Canada. But is it doable? Only two or three hands went up in a session when asked how many of them feel confident about delivering at Carney speed with the tools they have. (Hmm... Canadians aren’t sure they are ready, either.)

Prime Minister Mark Carney arrives on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, before a meeting of the federal cabinet, Oct. 6, 2026. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

“A vote of impatience.” Carney is counting on a string of new agencies to speed up housing, defence procurement, major projects and now digital government.

Last month it launched Digital Transformation Canada, which promises to modernize how government develops, buys and uses technology, and cut through decades of duplication and fragmentation.

The ambition is enormous: transform how public servants work, what they do and how Canadians are served. (The Ministry of Magic was what some public servants nicknamed it the early planning days.)

The new agencies are a “vote of impatience,” says David McLaughlin, head of the newly minted task force for modernizing government. Those agencies are a way to get around processes that have piled up over decades, he said after the conference.

                                                                  David McLaughlin

“It’s not that the current structures don’t work, but we don’t have the time to fix them. So starting from new is important,” explained another participant.

An example raised: a bridge took two or three years to build more than a century ago. Now it can take 10 to 15 years to replace one, even after a contract is awarded.

This is not the first time there have been doubts about public-service capacity in a crisis. Public servants had misgivings about their ability to deliver during the once-in-a-century pandemic. But they rose to the challenge, said a long-time deputy minister later in an interview.

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ON THE PLUS SIDE
“Go for the big swings”

“It’s the public service’s moment,” said Arun Thangaraj, deputy minister of Global Affairs Canada. “Canada is at a turning point, and building a stronger country will depend on the work public servants do every day.”

Sarah Thiele, Manitoba’s clerk of the executive council and cabinet secretary, calls it generational nation-building. “What a privilege it is to be a public servant when leaders are clear-eyed and ambitious about our future.... Take advantage of the high expectations and go for the big swings.”

                                                                  Sarah Thiele

Isabelle Mondou, deputy clerk and Canada’s second-highest ranking bureaucrat, directly addressed the doubts. “I heard about some people doubting our capacity as a public service to do this. As a public servant of more than 30 years, I have absolutely no doubt we can do it.”

                                                             Isabelle Mondou

She also acknowledged that the public service has never faced a change of this scale. It's a less visible crisis than COVID.

But the Iran war, Trump’s trade war and the upending of longstanding alliances are reshaping the world order. “We have to make sure that the way we’re serving is still adapted to the time,” she said.

Anatomy of a government in hurry. Think back to the early days of the Carney government, with those short deadlines meant to jolt the public service into action:

• find 15 per cent savings in 60 days.
• cut red tape in 60 days.
• review all contracts in 45 days.
• fix the CRA in 100 days.

(That last one could use a second look after last week’s shocking report of anti-government sovereign citizens duping the CRA into approving millions of dollars in unverified tax returns.)

After the short deadlines came the agencies and now the Building Canada Strong Act, which would give cabinet and ministers new powers to cut through red tape and speed up permitting and reviews for major infrastructure, energy and resource projects.

“The world waits for no one,” Privy Council Clerk Michael Sabia told public servants in the July 2025 letter where Mark Carney’s close adviser laid out the mantra: focus, simplify and accountability.

So, yes, speed has been achieved.

“The government is operating twice as fast as it 20 years ago, whether it’s speed or pace,” said Michael Wernick, a former PCO clerk and now OttawaU’s Jarislowsky chair in public-sector management.

“There’s less time for policy development; less time to get options in front of ministers and decisions back from them, and then less time to implement the decisions they take.”

Two-speed government. Carney speed, however, applies only to urgent files. Trade, housing, energy, defence and interprovincial affairs get loads of attention and piles of work. Other files fight for attention and wait, Wernick said.

Carney’s time in office has been dominated by politics and setting priorities, but the stretch since the summer has been “hyper-political,” Wernick said. National unity and the trade war have been centre stage along with Alberta’s referendum, elections in Quebec and B.C., the looming U.S. midterms and upcoming Nov. 5 budget.

The budget is always a signpost of priorities, showing where money and legislation are going. Wernick expects that to give way to a bigger focus on governance and implementation.

“But they aren’t tackling the deeper structural problems in the public service, and now they will be asking for more work at a faster pace from a shrinking workforce,” he said.

“Something’s got to give.”

This is where the task force comes in.

THE TASK FORCE
Three priorities and four pressure points

Its focus is “implementation and how to get things done.” McLaughlin has assembled public- and private-sector leaders to dig into the barriers and come up with practical solutions over the next year.

It is independent and funded by various foundations. McLaughlin is a public-policy expert who has worked in politics and the public service, including as Manitoba's clerk and cabinet secretary.

So far, he has briefed senior officials in PCO and PMO but has not met with Carney or Sabia.

Here’s what the taskforce is mapping out:

McLaughlin says it is focusing on three of the government’s priorities:

• digital government and AI,
• major projects and infrastructure,
• Arctic and northern sovereignty.

The task force wants to dig into four “pressure points”/bottlenecks that slow implementation.

Central agencies. PCO, Finance and Treasury Board Secretariat. Can their approval process shift from identifying problems to helping resolve them faster? In the lingo: can it move from a “challenge function to an enabling” one.

Rules, risk and accountability. The build-up of rules has made public servants risk-averse. Some even argue that too many people get ahead simply by following rules instead of demonstrating judgment or competence. The question is how to cut through rules that get in the way without letting accountability slip.

The talent pipeline. Is government recruiting, training and developing the leaders and skilled people departments need? Is it putting them in the right jobs? Government needs the “plumbers” as well as the “poets,” McLaughlin says.

Delivering complex initiatives. Government is increasingly complicated, making it harder to get things done. What can be simplified?

The task force is still in its “thinking” stage. Its plan is outlined in a discussion paper, which McLaughlin pitched at the conference and encouraged public servants to read and respond to.

McLaughlin argues that speed alone isn’t enough. Velocity is better: it’s speed with direction. Without direction, moving faster can mean rushed decisions, wheel-spinning, mistakes and even failure. Government has to “pick a lane” and get its priorities over the finish line efficiently and effectively, he says.

Which brings us back to risk.

Government rules and controls often apply across the board, whether or not they are proportionate to the task. And governments don’t always weigh the risks of delay or doing nothing at all. Everything about risk management now is to prevent something from happening, McLaughlin says.

The task force is exploring how to assess risk in proportion to cause and need. As McLaughlin puts it, the challenge is to figure out how to “cut through this; take it apart” and give public servants “the tools, the processes, the permission to move faster.”

In short, the task force wants to tease out which layers of rules, controls and processes are obstacles and which ones provide safeguards worth keeping.

About that plumbing… Calls for public-service reform are bubbling up everywhere, and they have been for decades.

The Institute for Research on Public Policy, which is the publisher of this newsletter and Policy Options, where I also write and report, has launched a research program called Capacity for Change: Designing a Public Service Built to Deliver.

All this debate is welcome and long overdue. But history suggests that reform rarely works unless the prime minister is on board and makes it a priority. The Carney team is a tight circle of decision-makers with a plan for faster, better execution. So far, that hasn’t meant fixing the plumbing and wiring.

As one insider put it: “The government is really just run by three or four ministers and Sabia and Carney. Maybe I’m cynical, but the report is a year out and they want results now.”

Lastly, some other IPAC news….

                                                           Arun Thangaraj

A new board chair. Arun Thangaraj, who is quoted earlier, has succeeded Ron Hallman, who retired earlier this year as president and CEO of Parks Canada.

And the IPAC awards go to…: The Vanier Medal for public service is one of IPAC’s prestigious awards. This year it went to Netha Dyck for a 50-year career as a Manitoba nurse and former dean of the College of Nursing at the University of Manitoba. The rest of this year’s IPAC award winners are here.

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A bit about me. I write The Functionary as part of my work covering and analyzing the federal public service for Policy Options, where I am the Accenture Fellow on the Future of the Public Service. I've reported on the public service for more than two decades, covering parliamentary affairs and politics for the Ottawa Citizen and iPolitics. My work has been recognized with a National Newspaper Award and a Canadian Online Publishing Award.