July 9, 2026    |  Sign up + past editions    |    Unsubscribe  

Hi all,

July 6. Call it opening day for the delivery era.

This week, federal public servants go back to the office. But they’re not going back to the public service they left.

They’re back four days a week. Five for executives. Many public servants fear a fifth day is on its way for everyone, which would bring the public service right back to where it stood before the pandemic.

But the government has moved on. The flexibility that has been the norm for the last six years is disappearing. The control over time and work that public servants have become accustomed to is being dismantled, piece by piece, to meet the demands of delivery. More time in the office is just the most visible sign of that shift.

Welcome to the delivery era. It’s starting out messy and chaotic. Some departments have desks, others don’t. But the desks may end up being the easy part.

For a public service that has long struggled with delivery, what the new era of delivery actually looks like is still being debated inside and outside of government. Reform, anyone?

Let’s dig in.

Today:

Delivery, delivery, delivery: Did we mention delivery?

“It’s like, we’ve got to get a move on.”: The new vibe.

Cut straight to the decision: For Sabia, pace over process.

Thanks for the advice, but …: Politicians go elsewhere for policy ideas.

Experts zero in: A renewed push to improve state capacity.

RTO has a subtext: And it won’t be good for morale, prof says.

PARSING THE CLUES
From Sabia, no fanfare, no pep talk

The move will be a scramble, staged in as desks and space becomes available. The July rollout comes during summer vacations, lighter traffic, and empty schools. The real test will be in September. Worth watching.

But the chaos isn’t just logistical. Unions have fought hard to stop this move, with grievances, petitions, court cases, an all-out labour battle and the first national strike since 1991. It’s a top issue again in the current round of bargaining.

A senior official says RTO isn’t about making workers happy. The government wants a “high performing” public service that’s less bureaucratic, flatter, moves faster and gets things done. Maybe it’s not an inspirational vision people can rally around, he said, but it is the expectation.

The best clues about what the government wants are in PCO Clerk Michael Sabia’s latest report to the prime minister and in his message to public servants for National Public Service Week.

The message doesn’t read like a thank-you to a workforce that’s been through the wringer after budget cuts, job losses, and three rounds of return-to-office orders. It reads like a CEO memo about a turnaround. No fanfare. No pep talk. Just an operating philosophy.

“This is a moment that requires clarity about how we work
in the public service, not just what we aim to achieve,” Sabia has said.

RTO is sort of a symbol. Sabia doesn’t say much about where the public service works, but he’s clear on how it’s going to work. The word “deliver” appears in his report over and over. He also picks up the three priorities he laid out when he became clerk a year ago: simplicity (less process), focus (aligned to PM Carney’s seven priorities), and accountability.

He suggests the system isn’t working for employees, either, citing the 2024 public-service survey, in which only 47 per cent of respondents say senior management makes effective and timely decisions; 40 per cent say unnecessary complexity hurts the quality of their work, and 59 per cent describe their workplace as psychologically healthy.

From Sabia’s report to the prime minister:

Move, move, move. Sabia isn’t pursuing traditional structural reform. No legislation, no royal commission, no institutional redesign. What he wants is a new culture: an operating philosophy built on discipline and ambition. Not just any ambition, but “disciplined ambition” rooted in outcomes Canadians want.

It’s organized around four work pillars: focus, simplicity, accountability and inclusion. To that end, the government is using levers it already has to manage the workforce.

It is exercising return-to-office through management prerogative, cutting $13 billion in spending through the budget, cutting 40,000 positions from the post-pandemic peak, and using an early-retirement incentive funded from pension surpluses. Sabia has also challenged every deputy minister to produce one real “transformational” change without spending more money.

And then there is the constant expectation: move faster.

“It’s like, we’ve got to move on,” said one long-time bureaucrat. “The pace of decision-making and the expectation around rapid implementation are so different from the last government. And big things are being done — not more decisions, but bigger decisions.”

Pressure and accountability, applied from the top down.

“Let’s solve the problem.” Allen Sutherland, president and CEO of the Institute on Governance, said Sabia is highly results-focused and sees internal processes as too convoluted. They involve too many peripheral players and they take too long. By the time a decision is reached, the moment has often passed.

“He wants to cut straight to the decision and implement. He’s focused on: ‘we have a problem. Let’s solve the problem.’ There are people who believe good processes lead to good outcomes. He doesn't believe that.”

With that view, the relentless pace public servants have faced over the past year isn’t just pressure. It’s how Sabia sees effective government.

Timing probably helped firm up the RTO decision. Carney is in his second full year as prime minister. After a year of globetrotting and announcements, it’s time to implement. And the government wants a public service organized to do that.

Treasury Board Secretary Bill Matthews has probably been the most forthright and blunt about RTO. It’s not about productivity or helping downtown Ottawa businesses or commercial landlords looking to fill office spaces. “This is really about getting the most out of the public service,” Matthews said. “The government has a very ambitious agenda and is looking at new ways of doing things. It’s a philosophical choice, frankly. There’s a belief that having the teams together in the office to collaborate on doing things in new and different ways leads to a better public service.”

So that’s about culture, which the Carney government has been itching to change since it took office but without putting any big reform agenda in the window.

THE WORKAROUND
Creating agencies isn’t a fix

So far, Carney has worked around the public service when he runs up against a problem. He has created new agencies to deliver his priorities rather than fixing the existing ones. He brings in outside hires in to run them. Two examples: the Major Projects Office and Build Canada Homes.

Most recently, he hired tax expert Heather Evans, head of the Canadian Tax Foundation, as new commissioner for the service-troubled Canada Revenue Agency, the first time an outsider has been tapped for that job. Former Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux questioned the fit for such an operational department. Someone so steeped in tax legislation, he suggested, could find it strange being consulted on parking and call-centre volumes instead of tax policy.

But a year in, Carney can’t simply keep announcing, argues Sahir Khan, executive vice-president of the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa. He said Carney has to deliver: on major projects, housing, pipelines, trade, an AI strategy, a redrawn relationship with the United States. Somebody has to turn those commitments into results. That somebody is the public service. And its Achilles heel has long been delivery. Execution changes everything.

Trust didn’t erode on its own. ArriveCAN, Phoenix, the sponsorship scandal, defence procurement, a string of failed IT projects. The public service has not always been able to deliver on the mandate entrusted to it. In a survey of Canadians from this past winter, 61 per cent of respondents said they aren’t confident public servants can plan ahead over the next decade or two, and 67 per cent doubt they spend money wisely.

“It will never come back to you.” A cultural shift has been underway for years among all parties. The public service is no longer the primary policy advisor, and it has to accept that, Khan warned.

“It’s irredeemable. There is considerable competition is this space,” he said. “They’re going to have to become a different public service.

“Politicians aren’t going to the civil service anymore for ideas. If you think you’re waiting out governments until policy matters, it’ll never come back to you. So, get good at delivery. It matters that you’re good at it, because you’re non-partisan, you’re professional. You hold the collective history of governments."

Delivery, said Khan, is also “where the rubber meets the road, where Canadians connect their needs and interests with government.”

STATE CAPACITY
A fresh wave of calls for modernization

History has shown that reform rarely works unless the prime minister is on board and makes it a priority. But the inability of governments to do what they’ve decided to do – what scholars call a state-capacity problem – is preoccupying think tanks, former bureaucrats, and academics. Among them, calls for reform and modernization are bubbling up everywhere, such as Kevin Lynch’s and Jim Mitchell’s book A New Blueprint for Government.

The Institute for Research on Public Policy has begun a research program called the Capacity for Change: Designing a Public Service Built to Deliver. (The IRPP publishes this newsletter and Policy Options, where I also write and report.)

David McLaughlin, a public-policy expert who worked in politics and the public service, including as clerk and cabinet secretary in Manitoba, is leading a new task force on modernizing government that’s focused on implementation. It is assembling a group of public- and private-sector experts, including CEOs, to come up with practical solutions that, in his framing, “focus, simplify, and make government more accountable.”

That phrasing will sound familiar. Focus, simplification, accountability: Sabia’s own three-word management mantra, now showing up in the language of outside reform advocates, too. Is Sabia listening to reform advocates or are they reading his memos?

(South of the border, Americans are examining their own state capacity. In Washington, the Niskanen Center is leading a major study, recognizing that the impact of any government rests on whether the public service can implement what it’s promised.)

Three decades of theories. In Canada, Donald Savoie, Canada’s éminence grise on public administration, has long called for a royal commission. The diagnosis here goes back more than 30 years. Back in 1995, then-clerk Jocelyne Bourgon ordered a deputy-minister task force on service delivery.

Ralph Heintzman, a retired bureaucrat who helped create Service Canada and later launched the Institute for Citizen-Centred Service, traced the problem to political disinterest – until things go wrong – and a senior-management class he once described as “travelling salesmen,” deputy ministers and executives who hop from job to job without ever building deep knowledge of the departments they run.

The result, he argued in a 2022 interview during the passport crisis, is a public service with little institutional memory, no constancy of purpose, and chronic underinvestment in the technology, training and systems that service delivery requires, with no accountability for poor service.

The Trudeau government’s answer was to create a minister of Citizens’ Services. Carney killed the post. What’s that say about the importance of delivery?

And morale? Not good. Lori Turnbull, a professor at Dalhousie University, doesn’t think people are going to just get over going back to the office, “like, oh, the party’s over.” Public servants found real value in working from home, and losing it feels like part of a growing morale crisis for a public service that doesn’t know its role or how it fits into a Carney agenda. “The issue for me is more about morale,” she said. “The message they’re receiving is: we’re not valued.”

That brings us to the bargain every public servant learns. For generations, the public service has had two core responsibilities: give governments frank and fearless advice, then loyally carry out their decisions. If this government’s overriding expectation is execution, what happens to the bargain that has long underpinned that relationship? The real question isn’t where public servants work. It’s what kind of public service emerges.

Finally, here’s a post making the rounds with RTO:

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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. 

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