Plus: a tidal wave of studies, reviews and probes into outsourcing.
A newsletter about the federal public service.
Brought to you by Kathryn May.
Hi all. I’ve been away for a few weeks, but I’m back. Let’s dive in with the uproar about outsourcing, a bonanza for consultants, and allegations of China’s interference in federal elections. All of it will continue with the return of Parliament this week. All at time when there are new calls for reform and digging into what ails Canada’s public service.
Today: They’re on it: A sudden wave of studies, reviews and probes. Time and place: On consultants, a common thread emerges. We need a “real deep dive”: Yves Giroux is mystified. Way too much on the go: Kevin Lynch and Jim Mitchell on the PS’s workload. A new “adaptive” culture: Reform should be a daily thing. In lieu of a one-off commission: Michael Wernick has five fixes. Foreign-interference whodunit: The scramble to find the leak.
CRISES It’s getting existential
The government’s dependency on consultants and leaks around Chinese interference in Canada’s elections are raising basic questions about the role of the public service and the traditional ethics underpinning its work.
An impartial public service is a cornerstone of Canada’s democracy. Bureaucrats are supposed to speak truth to power. The ethos of fearless advice and loyal implementation is at the heart of the job of providing advice to ministers as well as reliable, well-run services for Canadians.
Are departments relying on consultants because they don’t have inhouse policy capacity or the know-how and expertise to buy and deliver services? Leaks coming out of CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, around alleged Chinese interference strike at the heart of the loyalty and secrecy expected of non-partisan public servants.
A royal commission? Donald Savoie, Canada’s dean of public administration, has written exhaustively about what’s wrong with the public service. He now believes the public service has so lost its way that it’s time to call a royal commission to sort out its role. Can’t say the idea has caught fire, but former clerks and other experts are chiming in on what needs fixing and ways to do it.
“Public service reform is having a moment. The question is will it have momentum?” That’s from Michael Wernick, Canada’s former top bureaucrat and now the Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management at the University of Ottawa, who has ideas to kick-start reforms.
Talk of reform have bubbled to the fore recently with the spotlight thrown on the government’s growing dependency on professional services – to the tune of $21.4 billion a year. This army of consultants, known as the shadow public service, is doing more of the thinking and doing these days. A big question is why?
The House of Commons government operations committee is juggling three sets of hearings into federal contracting. The probe into the scandal-ridden McKinsey & Company’s contracts is the most politically loaded and, for now, has bigfooted the other two studies.
The growth of professional services is even more breathtaking because the size of the public service has also grown to record levels.
It’s all sparked lots of studies, reviews and investigations.
– Treasury Board President Mona Fortier is leading a review of McKinsey’s contracts. Comptroller General Roch Huppé has all chief financial officers examining McKinsey contracts back to 2011 to see if rules were followed. That’s due June 30. Fortier asked Crown corporations to conduct a similar review. (See a rather tense exchange – at 17:52:51 – between Huppé and government operations chair Kelly McCauley during a standing committee in February.)
Source: Meeting No. 51 OGGO - Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates.
– Public Services and Procurement Minister Helena Jaczek dispatched the procurement ombudsman Alexander Jeglic to assess whether McKinsey contracts have complied with contracting rules.
– Auditor-General Karen Hogan has confirmed she will conduct separate investigations into the awarding of contracts to build the ArriveCAN app and all McKinsey contracts. So far, she has provided no details on the scope and timelines of the two probes.
– The committee is also widening its study to contracts of other big consulting firms Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), KPMG, Ernst and Young (EY) and Accenture.
On top of that, the government operations committee is keeping departments hopping with requests for a mountain of documents, contracts, invoices, correspondence and names of suppliers.
CONSULTANTS There’s a time and place for them
A chorus of experts, former clerks, senior bureaucrats and academics has quickly weighed in with a convergence of views that an over-reliance on consultants may be a symptom and a cause of what’s wrong with the public service.
A common thread: stop the centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s Office – which former clerk Kevin Lynch and his co-writers call the “bane of day-to-day government operations.” And dial back on consultants.
Here’s what they are saying:
What’s the role of the public service anyway?Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux is the latest to chime in. He’s mystified as to why departments are spending billions on consultants while also hiring a record number of employees. “Do we have the public service we need right now? … Is it equipped to deal with the expectations Canadians have of the public service?” He is calling for a “real deep drive” into the workings of the public service.
Stephen Van Dine, former assistant deputy minister and governance expert, looks at the outsourcing of the public service and what has happened to public interest in policy-making.
Overload. Former clerk Kevin Lynch and former senior bureaucrat Jim Mitchell say the public service has way too much on the go, more than it can handle. When governments try to do more and more, “they may end up achieving less and less,” they conclude. A culprit? The government’s “stratospheric and scattered spending” hampers the public service’s ability to deliver services like it should.
What to do? Lynch's and Mitchell’s recommendations:
– Throttle back on spending and new programs, and focus on what you have.
– Stop the “extreme centralization” of decision-making in the PMO; let ministers, cabinet and public servants do their jobs.
– Cut red tape, reporting, and oversight. It’s time to modernize and replace a culture of control with one of innovation and risk-taking.
– Spend on the public service to better equip it, not make it bigger. It needs skills and systems for a digital world. Oh, and consultants should be the exception, not the rule.
Lynch was clerk under former prime minister Stephen Harper between 2006 and 2009, and Mitchell is a former assistant secretary to cabinet and long-time advisor on the organization of government and the reform of the public service.
The two along with former BMO executive Paul Deegan say it’s possible to prepare public servants for the unexpected so they can make policy on the fly in a crisis. Unexpected “black swan” events such as a war or a pandemic are the way of a globally interconnected world.
In their Hill Times article, they call for investing in foresight capacity, scenario planning, advanced analytics and warning systems, not just the traditional static forecasts for the future. Along with policy, Canada’s security, policing, military and intelligence needs to be ready as first responders. Also, get all the decision-making out of the PMO and rebuild Canada’s balance sheets.
Alerte d'emploi de l'IRPP! Responsable des partenariats stratégiques. Postulez ici.
“A disservice to Canadians.” Dalhousie academic Lori Turnbull says that if the advice of the outside consultants is “becoming louder and more sought after than public service advice, then that’s a problem that needs fixing.” Time to drop the politics and get at the critical issue of when and how consultants are brought in and at what cost.
Let’s get on it. Many say big reform exercises like a royal commission are too unwieldy. Reform should be built into everyday operations and start with full review of the public service’s organization and how service delivery has changed over the years. Academics Daniel Caron, Evert Lindquist and Robert Shepherd offer a to-fix list. They also lay out a possible roadmap to build a new “adaptive” culture for a public service that faces new policy demands and crises at a pace never imagined while operating with outdated structures and organization.
Michael Wernick suggests other fixes that could be faster and “generate a much bigger return than a one-off commission.” They include:
– Bringing back the Prime Minister’s Advisory Council on the Public Service, a Harper government initiative that disappeared under the Liberals.
– A new joint committee of the House of Commons and Senate on the public service.
– A Better Government Fund to support core and project funding at think tanks that work on public-sector issues.
– More employee swaps between public and private sectors through the Interchange Program.
– Work with provinces, municipalities and Indigenous communities to improve management the way it does for policy and administration issues.
The government, however, has no appetite for a royal commission or even new advisory committees. Treasury Board officials argue public service reform is an ongoing process, pointing to a laundry list of fixes in the mandate letter for Treasury Board President Mona Fortier, which has a big focus on diversity, inclusion, improving bilingualism and also a slew of initiatives to bring the public service into the 21st century. Talk about overload.
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INTELLIGENCE Chinese political interference is spooking us
The question of whether China interfered in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 elections has created a politically chargedfrenzy that’s reverberating through the public service. Thousands of bureaucrats work in security, intelligence and oversight to keep us safe, guard democracy and our institutions. That includes CSIS, the Canadian Security Establishment, RCMP, National Defence, Global Affairs, Public Safety and the Privy Council Office. The whole question has turned into a whodunit, with Canada’s top spy confirming an investigation is underway to find leakers of highly classified information on Chinese election interference.
CSIS director David Vigneault speaking on March 2, 2023, at the standing committee on procedure and house affairs.
Here’s a take by Bhagwant Sandhu, a former public servant, who argues leaks out of CSIS suggest a major crossing of the line between public servants and politicians that could undermine CSIS management’s control of the spy agency. After much pressure for a public inquiry, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has now ordered several new probes and the appointment of a special rapporteur. Here’s national security expert Wesley Wark’s take on the new initiatives, the country’s “fatally weak” national security policy and concerns about how media are steering the debate.
Another read is long-time deputy minister Morris Rosenburg’s report, which concludes attempts at foreign interference didn’t affect the outcome of the elections in 2019 or 2021. Also interesting is the transcript of a CTV interview where he talks about the monitoring process and how it can be improved.
Canadians’ trust in government has been eroding, and these allegations could accelerate that and erode trust in our elections. Polls show Canadians are worried about Chinese interference in elections. Many want new laws to combat foreign interference.
Michael Wernick told The Functionary that a big worry is how allegations of interference will affect declining public trust, especially if it “turns into an attack on the reliability of the entire security intelligence community” like the fear of the “deep state” in the U.S.
Once fears are inflamed and people lose confidence in the country’s security and intelligence community, it’s gone and very hard to rebuild, he said. “It's open game in American politics to attack the CIA and attack the FBI – from the left and on the right. Is that where we’re headed in Canada?”
Kathryn May writes about the federal public service for Policy Options magazine. She is the Accenture Fellow on the Future of the Public Service, providing coverage and analysis of the complex issues facing Canada’s federal public service. She has spent 25 years writing about the public service – the country’s largest workforce – and has also covered parliamentary affairs and politics for the Ottawa Citizen, Postmedia Network Inc. and iPolitics. The winner of a National Newspaper Award, she has also researched and written about public service issues for the federal government and research institutes. Twitter @kathryn_may.
The Functionary is published by Policy Options magazine at the Institute for Research on Public Policy
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