Policy analysts are feeling deeply exposed as billions in departmental spending cuts roll out. In federal circles, they’re known as ECs, the government’s policy workhorses. Twenty per cent of them have received “affected notices,” the union representing them says. Jobs affected are not jobs cut, but the bureaucratic limbo comes with maximum anxiety.
This raises a fundamental question: what’s happening to policy, the lifeblood of decision-making?
Is it being cut in favour of operations, as some ECs fear? Or is it being redesigned to deliver faster results under the Carney government’s “get it done” agenda?
The EC category has long carried the cachet of influence. From the days of deep thinkers with a monopoly on policy ideas to today’s “everything bagel” approach to policy-making, EC’s have had a track to the top.
The mighty “everything bagel.”
Now they’re facing a shake-up that could reshape how policy gets done – a rebalancing that brings together thinking and doing. Or maybe it’s simply about saving money.
Let’s dig in.
Today:
An EC is born: It started with a merger in 1999.
The logic of delayering: “This could be more rewarding work.”
In pursuit of plumbers: Gotta have enough frontline workers.
EC cachet: Policy, prestige and a path to the top.
Skills check: Government is fuzzy on its own policy capacity.
ONE GIANT POOL
ECs are everywhere, all 27,093 of them EC’s are now the third-largest occupational group in the public service, with more than 27,000 employees across departments. Their ranks grew faster during the Trudeau decade than the public service as a whole and numbers more than doubling since 2010.
But that growth hasn’t been evenly distributed. The biggest increase came at the senior levels — EC-06 to EC-08 — according to Jonathan Craft at the University of Toronto. He tracked that growth, which signalled a structural shift in the EC group away from junior analysis and toward more managerial and co-ordinating policy roles. The junior EC rank remained flat or declined.
In the public service, everything lives and dies by classification groups. They’re largely rigid holdovers from a pre-digital age, but they dictate title, pay, influence, and place in the pecking order. They determine everything from hiring to collective bargaining. The EC category is one of those groups — but it evolved differently.
The EC origin story. ECs were born out of a 1999 merger of economists, sociologists and statisticians with the Social Science Support group, which later coalesced into CAPE, the Canadian Association of Professional Employees union.
ECs started out as analytical and research specialists focused on thinking and advising. Over time, their roles expanded into multi-skill positions, blending analysis, program design, digital work and implementation to meet the growing complexity of policy and delivery.
Today, ECs are considered a catchall, a giant pool of flexible talent increasingly bridging policy and implementation. The government’s newly releasedjob-cuts tracker shows more than 24,000 employees total have been warned that their jobs could be affected. That is far more than the number planned cuts. But from the start, there hasn’t been much transparency on these 15-per-cent spending reductions.
The budget didn’t say where the cuts would land. The Parliamentary Budget Officer — now joined by public-service unions — has pressed for details: which jobs, which functions, which programs, and what that means for services. Two months after affected notices went out across the country, there’s still radio silence on the kinds of jobs being cut or the breakdown by level.
Anecdotally, the impact appears concentrated at the upper end of the EC scale — particularly EC-06 to EC-08. That’s left some analysts wondering whether the government is pulling back from policy in favour of delivery. The Carney government has never said it’s not interested in policy. But it has made it loud and clear that it wants faster execution and delivery.
“There’s a premium on delivery, but no formal directive,” said one senior bureaucrat. “It’s not like every deputy is saying, ‘Oh, we need to get rid of all our ECs and hire more PMs (program managers).’ It really varies depending on a department’s mandate and priorities. But broadly, there is a desire to move away from thinking and planning toward getting on with it and doing it.”
The tension between delivery and policy is longstanding. Many have warned that an intense focus on delivery is tilting the public service away from its policy and “fearless advice” role.
Former PCO clerk Kevin Lynch and Jim Mitchell wrote about this in their recent bookA Blueprint for Government. As power shifts toward the Prime Minister’s Office, they argue, the public service risks becoming an administrative service “whose sole task is to execute the orders of politicians and their aides without them having had the benefit of informed policy advice, questions, or discussion.”
They call it a dangerous imbalance. That’s not what most public servants signed up for. They came to provide advice, not just follow orders. And no group feels that tension more than ECs, caught between giving advice and getting it done quickly.
THE PUSH It’s delayering, not anti-policy
Insiders say the push for faster delivery isn’t anti-policy — it’s delayering. Treasury Board has set a 12-per-cent reduction target for executives and is pushing departments toward fewer layers — ideally no more than three — with wider spans of control. That logic is now trickling down to the EC ranks, said Allen Sutherland, president of the Institute on Governance.
Senior ECs manage other policy analysts, but they appear to be facing the same thinning as executives. Fewer senior roles and wider spans of control mean fewer checkpoints as policy briefs move up and down the ladder with the aim of speeding decisions. In short, the idea is: supervise more people, make faster calls.
Ultimately, this could be more rewarding work for policy analysts,” says Sutherland.
The “everything bagel” concept of policy-making also helped to fuel EC growth, Sutherland said. It’s a concept popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their bookAbundance,which examines why governments struggle to get things done.
“I am quite convinced by the everything-bagel argument,” Sutherland said. “Policy has become paralyzed by having to meet too many requirements.” And part of that is the web of rules, a tangle of regulations, reporting and approvals public servants navigate to do their jobs.
Every-what? Everything-bagel policy-making is when government loads a policy or project with every possible social and economic goal — equity, climate, consultation, labour standards, local concerns — until it’s so layered it becomes slow, bloated, and almost impossible to execute. (Look no further than Canada’s procurement policy. That alone could fill an everything-bagel edition.)
The ECs are the ones asked to add all those layers. All that topping means nothing gets done quickly. Government just keeps adding priorities. But nothing moves faster.
Call the plumber(s). The public service grew with too many “poets” and not enough “plumbers,” arguesDonald Savoie, a leading academic on public administration.
The poets are the people in policy, analysis and communications, most of them in Ottawa. The plumbers are the frontline workers who deliver programs and services.
Sutherland says the poets are largely gone, replaced by people who manage process. And process is exactly what PCO Clerk Michael Sabia wants less of.
There’s another side to the fear that the government is dialing back on policy.
First, the spending review is about meeting savings targets and reallocating resources toward new priorities. A push for faster delivery doesn’t mean a different workforce of fewer thinkers and more doers. It means a sharper focus on the Carney government’s stated priorities, says a senior official.
The public service is still in downsizing limbo. Much of the shift to the government’s new priorities like housing, infrastructure, and defence will unfold as people leave through attrition, redeployments, and targeted staffing. If ECs take a disproportionate hit, it may reflect where growth happened during the Trudeau years rather than a decline in policy’s importance, says one senior bureaucrat.
That growth was dramatic. During COVID and the Trudeau years, wave after wave of new programs needed ECs to design them, while the PM and AS (program and administrative) groups delivered. The ranks of PMs and ASs — the doers and implementers — also soared during the pandemic.
So why all those affected notices??
The EC allure. ECs aren’t just numerous — they’re prized. They come with higher pay, higher entry standards, and are one of the few groups treated as a profession. They’re where government has long parked its smart, promotable talent, and they remain the main pipeline into the executive ranks.
EC-8s sit at the top of the classification: they are positions created for specialists who didn’t want to enter the executive ranks. They’re unionized, their pay tops out at $159,046— striking distance of an EX-2. Many of them manage teams or major files.
But ECs are also generic. They’re deployed across policy, programs, stakeholder relations, briefing, coordination, data analysis, and other work that doesn’t fit neatly anywhere else. And that helps explain why so many are receiving affected notices.
With large, broadly defined groups like ECs, cuts are managed by casting a wide net. It’s not that more jobs are being cut, but that more people are deemed interchangeable on paper — so eliminating 10 positions can trigger dozens or even hundreds of affected notices.
Policy jobs are also easy to cut, as one senior official put it. They can disappear without anyone noticing — at least at first. And at the senior levels, their salaries make them prime targets for savings. “Eliminate one senior EC — through cuts or voluntary departures — and you can afford two junior analysts while pushing authority further down the hierarchy,” the official said.
Also, don’t forget: this downsizing isn’t unfolding according to plan. Departmentshad expectedthe early retirement incentive (the ERI) to be in place by now. That would have let employees 50 and over retire without a pension penalty. With this year’s Budget Implementation Act still pending, departments couldn’t use the ERI to encourage older employees to volunteer first. That has forced a wider net with more affected notices.
CAPACITY CHECK How well does the government know itself?
A big question is whether there are simply too many ECs. AI adds another layer of uncertainty: it won’t replace judgment, but it is already changing how policy work gets done. Privately, many public servants talk about a mismatch between the size of the group and the work to go around.
Few people have studied the growth of the EC group — and the management of policy — more closely than Jonathan Craft, whobegan pressingTreasury Board for data on ECs as a graduate student.
Now he’s the professor at the University of Toronto’s Munk School whodeliveredthe 2024 Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar lecture on federal policy capacity and how it needs to modernize to be ready for the future.
His work circles back to a basic problem: the government lacks a clear picture — let alone a plan — of its own policy capacity. It doesn’t know what skills it has, where they sit, where the gaps are, or what will be needed next. Craft (pictured) worries these staffing cuts are being driven more by savings targets than by reform.
Policy and delivery, he argues, can no longer be separated. One can’t be done without the other. If government doesn’t know what skills it has — or where — it can’t realign its workforce to Carney’s priorities or deliver them at the pace and speed he’s demanding.
As Craft puts it: “When the dust settles, what does the public service actually look like? And have the real problems been solved? I don’t think so. The reductions we’re seeing won’t fix delivery or implementation. They change the numbers, not the way government works.”
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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 been reporting 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.
