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The Carney government keeps setting short deadlines to jolt the public service into moving faster: 100 days here, 45 days there. But real culture change takes years, not days.
Many public servants are braced for more of these sprints as the prime minister pushes his national-building ambitions. Will they become a marathon of reform? Or will they deliver a few quick wins and leave everyone exhausted after logging long hours? Will the public service end up back where it started: too slow, too risk-averse, process-driven and rule-bound?
So, let’s dig in.
Today:
Four sprints: Four timelines.
It looks like reform: And it feels like reform.
100 days / 45 days: Under the gun in two departments.
The optics of deadlines: It’s about signals.
(Not) wired for speed: The PS moves slowly (for a good reason).
The action divide: “It” files create a dangerous gulf between doers and watchers.
The “start-ups” within: Carney’s recruiting sends a message.
So, debate, you say: Are we talking bare knuckles here?
TESTING, TESTING This is stopwatch government
Governments are no strangers to deadlines. They set them all the time for marquee projects. Remember Trudeau’s fall election promise in 2015 to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees by that Christmas? (It took longer, mind you.) Governments can also mobilize on the fly for a crisis – think pandemic, 2008 global financial crisis.
But Mark Carney’s deadlines are tactical and organizational, aimed at helping to speed up delivery of the prime minister’s seven priorities.
They are a string of high-pressure sprints with tight deadlines and clear deliverables: fix the CRA in 100 days, review all contracts in 45, find 15-per-cent savings in 60, same with cutting red tape.
These aren’t designed as policy exercises — they’re tests, pushing the public service to deliver results while instilling behaviours Carney and his top bureaucrat prize: speed, decisiveness and a bias for action over process. It’s a major operating shift from the past decade.
FOUR INITIATIVES
The Carney sprint timelines
They’re all tightly connected. The procurement review feeds Carney’s push to buy Canadian and speed up delivery on big projects. The expenditure review raises cash for priorities: housing, defence and infrastructure. And now the Grey Cup has become the symbolic moment to show Canadians that the government — and the public service — can actually move fast and build things.
Michael Sabia, Clerk of the Privy Council in Toronto in early September. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
PIECE BY PIECE If it walks like reform and talks like reform… Forget the glossy white papers or branded-reform plans like the Glassco Commission, PS 2000, or even Blueprint 2020.
The operating style that PCO Clerk Michael Sabia outlined in his July letter to public servants could shake up how government works, says Allen Sutherland, though it won’t be a full-blown reform. (You’ve all heard the Sabia mantra: focus, simplify, accountability.)
Sutherland was the PCO’s long-time “machinery guy,” someone who knows how Ottawa really runs. Now he’s the new president of the Institute on Governance. For him, it’s less about writing a reform plan and more about changing behaviours and how people work. Sometimes, he says, reform “happens just by doing things differently.”
And so: as the prime minister and clerk set a demanding tone, decisions get made faster. That can add up to reform even if it isn’t “capital-R reform,” he says.
Allen Sutherland in Ottawa last March, in his capacity as assistant secretary to cabinet. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
That is the case for at least one senior bureaucrat under the gun in a department running on tight deadlines. Here’s the view from there:
“Look, we’re going through public-service reform — it just isn’t branded as such. It’s being done bit by bit, piece by piece. Carney’s not interested in reform for the sake of reform. He wants change where it matters to accomplish his goals. That’s why you see 45-day sprints and the hurry, hurry, hurry — to show Canadians the government is moving on areas it considers important.”
And here’s view from another bureaucrat in a department under fire, who says these deadline sprints aren’t seen as a surrogate for reform. “Maybe they will lead to some changes in practices and policies. But the main goal is to deliver fast. Move forward and achieve some things in the short term, not systemic change.”
The PS is running flat-out now. The public service has barely taken a breath since the pandemic. The Trudeau government’s post-crisis spending spree brought a lot of: new this, new that and rush after rush followed by a new U.S. president, new prime minister, two transitions, a trade war and a whole new direction for government.
But urgency can be corrosive. It creates uneven workloads. It can erode trust and hurt morale. Then comes burnout, resentment and frustration.
“They’re running us like this and cutting us at the same time,” one senior official said. “I think they underestimated the underestimation of fatigue,” said another.
THE ORDERS
Renegotiate, reassign, prioritize and pool
Here’s a snapshot of some of the high-pressure sprints that have departments under the gun.
100 days to fix CRA and its “rock-bottom service.” This is aministerial orderfor execution with deliverables. It’s not a review. Service delivery has been government’s Achilles’ heeland the government doesn’t want another passport fiasco playing out at the Canada Revenue Agency, its leading service agency.
For this, no new funding.
For call centres,the ordersare to: - Reduce wait times. - Increase the percentage of successful calls by reassigning and hiring more staff. - Pilot new scheduling tools so Canadians can book call-backs or appointments. - Improve digital services, including an enhanced AI chatbot and more accessible, relevant online information.
Ordered by: François-Philippe Champagne, minister of finance and national revenue.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
45 days to rein in contracts and Buy Canadian. A review. The aim: find savings and pivot toward Canadian suppliers, moving procurement from compliance to industrial strategy.
The orders:
- Benchmark contracts against global prices.
- Integrate international best practices.
- Prioritize Canadian vendors.
- Pool buying power with provinces and territories.
- Update procurement policies.
- Renegotiate contracts in high-cost areas like IT, travel, and construction.
Ordered by: Champagne and Joël Lightbound, minister of government transformation, public works and procurement.
This is part of a broader push to reduce operating spending by 15 per cent. Which brings us to the race: the expenditure review.
15 per cent in 60 days, ready or not. In early July, Champagne gave cabinet ministers 60 days to propose 15-per-cent savings in their departments over three years. It was the first major step in Carney’s fiscal strategy to rein in federal spending and reallocate resources toward priorities. The proposals are in, and the budget will be the big reveal for what government intends to cut.
Signal sent, signal received. Deadlines are about more than getting things done. They are also about looking like things are getting done. They are a signal for the public service to hustle. They signal to Canadians that the government’s on top of things. And by all accounts, the exercise is working — for now.
Several senior bureaucrats warn the 60-day dash to find 15-per-cent savings leaves no room for real transformational projects – and the big savings that can come with them. “There’s just no time to build them,” said one. “Departments will scramble to submit something that looks good.” But they won’t hold over time.
Another senior official quipped: “The brilliant part is not giving the bureaucracy time to draft a schedule. Just dump it on them. They’ll figure it out.”
But maybe the PS should be slow. Without a big crisis, the public service will default to incrementalism because that’s how it’s wired, says Christopher Ragan, economist at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill.
And maybe that’s how it should be, he argues. He doubts Carney’s government can force rapid transformation through deadlines alone.
There’s a reason things move more slowly, Ragan argues. Public servants see what outsiders like Carney don’t — the hidden risks, trade-offs, and complications that come with moving too fast.
Ragan last October at Canada’s Productivity Summit at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.
THE STOPWATCH SQUEEZE
Winners, losers and flight risks
People working on “it” files are energized and working flat out. People on the sidelines are not, and they can start to feel ignored and out of the loop. That creates friction — doers vs. watchers.
But the people racing to meet deadlines are often the most marketable and mobile. If they burn out — or get fed up with cuts — they can walk. And when they do, so does their experience and memory, the kind that’s especially hard to replace during downsizing. Same goes for the young and tech-savvy.
Leaning heavily on deadlines as a management tool only works when they’re backed up by people, skills, resources, and systems. Missed deadlines chip away at public trust. They erode the government’s confidence in its own workers, who end up feeling undervalued and blamed for problems they didn’t create.
Lessons not learned. The pandemic was a major stress test. The public service stretched like elastic to manage the crisis, developing pockets of innovation. But as COVID-19 eased, old habits returned, just as senior bureaucrats worried it would.
No system-wide stock was taken. No “lessons-learned” exercise was done. (This kind of exercise wasurged by boththe Centre of Excellence on the Canadian Federation and the Institute on Governance in 2024.) You have to wonder: would the government be leaning so hard on deadlines if the public service had hard-wired some of the changes COVID forced?
Welcome to trial by fire. Everyone expected a major deputy-minister shuffle over the summer, but only a few moves happened in thePrivy Council Office. Instead, Carney is keeping the current crop in place under high-stakes pressure. It’s trial by fire. Can senior leaders deliver on spending promises and keep a tight grip on the budget?
The Parliamentary Budget Office added to the pressure the other day with a fresh warning that Canada is“at the precipice”with a rising deficit, a rising debt-to-GDP ratio and little room to manoeuvre with Trump tariffs and economic headwinds. Meanwhile, the pipeline of seasoned executives who could replace departing deputies is thinning, sparking worry.
Enter the new “start-ups.” But Carney is going outside to draft leaders to run new agencies —Ana Bailão at Build Canada Homesand Dawn Farrell at theMajor Projects Office, with more expected – such as for defence procurement. The message: traditional departments are too slow. Better to createnew organizationsthan fix old ones. So far, no outsiders have been tapped to run departments — but that could change.
So, gloves on or off? Back to Sabia’s July 7 letter, and what IOG President Allen Sutherland sees as Sabia's push for diversity in thought. (Not HR/DEI diversity). Sabia sees non-traditional and contrarian views as an antidote to deference, hierarchy and especially excessive process, his bête noire. He wants public servants to stop treating process as the end itself, with endless consultation and consensus-building, and to see it instead as just one tool in decision-making.
If process is replaced with rigorous debate (Sabia’s idea), how will it work,Sutherland wonders.“Will we be playing byQueensberry rules," a boxing reference. “Or is it playoff hockey — or even a bar fight? Shades of all?”
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A bit about me. I cover and analyze the federal public service for Policy Options as the Accenture Fellow on the Future of the Public Service. I've been reporting on the public service for 25 years. My work has appeared in the Ottawa Citizen and iPolitics, and has earned a National Newspaper Award.
