Hi all. It's been awhile since the last edition, but we're back after working through some changes to the platform we use to make this newsletter.
This year is shaping up to be anything but ordinary. The public service is chugging along day-to-day, delivering services and programs. By June, it is possible that public servants will have offered their fearless advice and loyal implementation to no fewer than three prime ministers.
Pierre Poilievre is poring over government programs one-by-one so as to be ready to start cutting, as he told Jordan Peterson two weeks ago.
A Conservative win could make 2025 a year of reckoning for the public service.
It would be new territory for many managers and more than 80,000 public servants hired in the past five years. They have only ever worked under a Trudeau government. They only know how to manage growth.
There’s also Trump shock. Could it be a rare opportunity for public-service reform? And in the middle of all this comes a series of academic papers on public-service reform. Talk about perfect timing.
Let’s dive in.
Today:
The tricky part: Spending while prorogued.
Cut, cut, cut: Poilievre is prepping hard, he tells Jordan Peterson.
Turnover quiz: How well do you know your deputy ministers?
Exquisite timing: 21 academic papers on PS reform just dropped.
Scrap, merge, de-layer: PS structure must be on the agenda, Wernick says.
Cutting is not a strategy. A smaller PS is not automatically a better PS.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford chat as they leave following a press conference to conclude a first ministers meeting, in Ottawa, Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic Leblanc, centre to right, Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly and Ambassador of Canada to the U.S. Kirsten Hillman look on. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
PROROGATION
This is where it gets tricky
The Trudeau government is still governing. But this is a tricky period, plenty of senior bureaucrats acknowledge. With prorogation, the government can’t advance legislation. But PCO is meeting often with deputy ministers and warning departments to keep a close eye on finances and major files, chiefly Canada-U.S. relations and Donald Trump’s tariff threats.
(Looks like those tariffs aren't coming today, after all, on Trump's first day. They've been put on hold. At any rate, public-service reformers say the Trump presidency could be a rare chance to align a new policy agenda with major public-service reform. PS reformers are always looking for glimmers of hope, and they see possibilities as the tariff threat forces Canada to recalibrate its fiscal, economic, and international priorities.)
Cabinet is having a retreat on Canada-U.S. relations Jan. 20. Deputy ministers are expected to have a retreat, too, but maybe not until February.
It may feel like we have a caretaker government, but technically it’s not. A caretaker government must act with restraint in the absence of an elected chamber. But Parliament has been prorogued, not dissolved. So a caretaker government won’t kick in until the dropping of the writ, which instructs the start of the next election.
The Liberals can still make decisions on things within their authority — like tariffs or regulations. They can still use funds already approved in spending plans from their main and supplementary estimates.
The tricky part comes with anything that needs new funding or Parliament’s support. That is pretty much off the table. Departments should assume that any spending they were going to table in February won’t be approved, and they should halt all spending now.
Departments can get money once an election is called. To keep the lights on and maintain essential operations, they can seek special warrants, but only after exhausting all other alternatives.
These warrants can’t be used for new initiatives or programs. Departments need to be mindful that this might not be a transition to a government of the same party. Any incoming government is likely to scrutinize these warrants closely. Caution is the word.
POST-ELECTION
When the real test begins
The next government will have to make some big decisions about the public service. If the Conservatives win, as widely anticipated, it will be a year of reckoning after a decade of unrestrained growth and spending — set against the political and economic upheaval of the Trump administration
There’s a lot on the table: a new round of collective bargaining, a productivity task force, more headaches with hybrid work, a lawsuit by Black employees, squabbling over pension surpluses, getting ready for the budget, staff and machinery changes. What happens to all those DEI programs?
The Trudeau government leaves the largest bureaucracy in history, and Poilievre’s promise to eliminate gatekeepers, shrink government, and cut spending will put the public service in his sights.
“This, this and this.” Poilievre is not going for the blunt DOGE-style cuts Trump is planning with his announced Department of Government Efficiency. But Poilievre won’t rely much on public servants, it seems, except to implement the cuts.
He told Jordan Peterson he’s already scouring every program. The two-hour conversation with Peterson, the academic/psychologist/provocateur, has 4 million views since it dropped two weeks ago.
“I want to go in with as much preparation as possible, so that when, God willing, I’m elected, the officials sit down and I can say, ‘Well, I already know that program is a waste of money, and that one’s a waste of money, and that one’s a corrupt scandal,’” he said. “We’re going to get rid of this, this and this.”
Public servants are braced for bigger and much tougher cuts than those imposed by the Liberals over the past two years.
Last year, the Public Service Alliance of Canada pressed hard for layoffs to be based on seniority. But to no avail. Meanwhile, a bunch of new regulations affecting layoffs were just published in the Canada Gazette. More on that another day.
A spending and strategic review is widely expected after the election. In the days before Chrystia Freeland’s bombshell resignation as finance minister, she was reportedly proposing a spending review and $12 billion in cuts.
Talk about turnover. The public service has grown 43 per cent since Liberals took power in 2015. If Conservatives form government, public servants face a transition of a magnitude not seen since the Harper government ended 13 years of Liberal rule in 2006. Many were not even around in 2006.
Only a couple of today’s deputy ministers were in deputy jobs for the 2015 transition. PCO Clerk John Hannaford wasn’t even a full DM then.
To get a sense of a decade’s worth of turnover in the public service, take a look at the two photos below. They show the two groups of deputy and associate deputy ministers who helped plan for the arrival and transition to the Harper government in 2006 and then the Trudeau government in 2015.
How many can you name? We’re curious.
Send your guesses and we’ll give a shout-out in the next edition to the best guessers. We’ll also send a bag of coffee beans to the person with the most points. Because it’s going to be that kind of year. It’s going to take a few cups to get through it.
So: one point for each name in the two photos.
First photo, from 2005, a few months before the election:
One hint: One person in this group has been in the news a lot lately.
From 2015:
Ok, send your answers: Hit reply if you’re a Functionary subscriber. If this email was forwarded to you, send your guesses to us at functionary@irpp.org. Otherwise we won't get them.
A SERIOUS SERIES
Manna from Heaven?
The timing is fortuitous for 21 academic papers newly released after being in the pipeline for a while. They come from Canadian Public Administration, the journal for hard-core wonks.
The series, Resetting the Public Service, marks the swan song of the journal’s long-time editor and academic Evert Lindquist, with academics and former bureaucrats laying out the issues and offering roadmaps on potential fixes.
Lindquist hopes it will help the parties “reposition the public service” at this pivotal moment as they plan for the transition or when the new government prepares its first budget.
The series highlights how deeply intertwined the problems are. The concluding paper is the one in particular that Lindquist hopes everyone will read. It ties together all the papers and charts a path forward.
Reform will take time, years. So channel your inner policy nerd and dive in.
Lindquist (below) is a professor of public administration at University of Victoria. He is a fan of regular, ongoing annual reviews “that can be scaled up or down, and re-focused depending on the issue” rather than big “episodic” program reviews.
Reviews can zero in on what the government is looking for: efficiency, spending, staff cuts, regulations or reviews.
“If we’re really serious about moving this institution into a new place – it could be smaller or bigger or different – to perform well for the next government or two and deal with the challenges that our country faces, then we need to figure out how this all works together.”
Sounds good. We’ll see how many politicians actually dig in.
Turning heads already. Michael Wernick’s paper has racked up the most downloads so far with his call to scrap, merge or create departments and do a big delayering of management and executive jobs. Can’t do a spending review without looking at structure or vice versa.
Now’s the time to get ideas before the parties. “Proposals, not diagnosis,” he says.
The authors of the 21 papers hope the series will spark debate and serve as a proxy for a royal commission, something leading academic Donald Savoie called for two years ago, when he argued the public service and politicians seem incapable of fixing it on their own.
A royal commission won’t happen. Too costly and time-consuming. There’s little enthusiasm for one these days, and Savoie is not tied to the idea. He just wants action.
Ideas. So many ideas. So much needs fixing, but cuts will only do so much. Making the public service smaller won’t automatically make it better. Sweeping blanket cuts could make things worse.
Plenty of people have mapped out ideas for creating a leaner, more efficient public service that can deliver services:
Former clerk Kevin Lynch says lots of countries struggle with how government operates, but Canada stands out by not paying enough attention to it.
Former bureaucrat Tim Sargent, now at Macdonald-Laurier Institute, says strong performers need to be rewarded and weak performers penalized and/or fired.
Former public-servant Sean Boots’s ideas for dislodging the public service from its stalled digital agenda got him a following with the IT crowd. (We do rank 47th in UN rankings of e-government.)
What’s the roadblock to getting all these ideas on the table?
The past decade has brought so much change: The pandemic, AI, misinformation, deep fakes, the advent of digital identity, from digital signatures and biometrics. Some countries are moving away from paper documents like passports.
“The world around us is changing really quickly, and the public service isn't even changing slowly,” one senior bureaucrat laments. “It just gets bigger.”
There was one change this week. Public servants can no longer watch Netflix and other streaming services on federal networks. Yes, it’s a change that took till 2025, a surprise for plenty of public servants who thought it happened years ago.
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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. My full bio. X: @kathryn_may.
