Fearless Professional Advice:
Harper era  vs.  Trudeau era

This page highlights what I believe is the biggest threat to the Public Service: the "Elephant in the Room" that most know about but few discuss—the growing political interference in the work of Public Service professionals under the current government. 

In my view, the Union must urgently and prominently address this issue to ensure that all 40 million Canadians can continue to rely on the fearless professional advice of our Union members—highly skilled subject matter experts in their respective fields, particularly in areas related to Health and the Environment. If elected, I will make this a priority.

The following articles have been shared with me by my colleagues, and I believe they effectively describe the problem.

Highlights from the article (highlighted in bold by Dmitry):

• Despite growing seemingly uncontrollably under Mr. Trudeau – between 2015 and the first quarter of 2024, the ranks of the public service increased by more than 40 per cent to about 368,000 – the policy-making capacity of the bureaucracy has atrophied significantly. The role of outside consulting firms has exploded as in-house expertise withers and senior bureaucrats and departmental managers look to consultants for advice, in essence abdicating their own responsibility for formulating policy recommendations to their political bosses. The PMO’s obsession with communications wins means that the rigorous analysis once performed by the bureaucracy to assess the effectiveness, sustainability and affordability of new programs is skipped over. 

• Where senior bureaucrats once ran interference or warned unschooled politicians off their half-baked ideas, they now know better than to provide contrarian advice. The old Yes Minister trope about the wily bureaucrat pulling his political master’s strings has been turned on its head. Now, senior bureaucrats obey the PMO, period, as a matter of self-preservation. The millennials and Generation Zedders who now dominate the public service – more than half of all federal workers are under 45 – have known nothing else. 

• Parliamentary hearings into the ArriveCan fiasco have yielded an astonishing spectacle as senior bureaucrats publicly accuse each other of lying to deflect blame. The era when public servants worked anonymously and ministers were held accountable for mistakes or scandals that occurred in their departments is over. The ArriveCan hearings portray a rudderless and cutthroat public service – the image of a Hunger Games sequel – albeit one without consequences, since almost no one in the public service ever ends up getting fired. 

• “The notion that the public service has no constitutional personality distinct from the government of the day, and which has underpinned our parliamentary system, just does not work any more,” says Donald Savoie, the Canada Research Chair in public administration and governance at the University of Moncton, and expert on the federal public service. “You now have public servants appearing before parliamentary committees throwing one another under the bus and ministers are nowhere to be seen to accept responsibility.”
  
  
  

• This is not how parliamentary government based on the Westminster model is supposed to work. In Canada’s political system, inherited from Britain, a professional, permanent and non-partisan public service has traditionally been a bulwark against bad policy. Public servants “serve” the government of the day by providing “fearless advice” to cabinet ministers, who are often dilettantes with no prior expertise within the remit of their portfolios. Senior bureaucrats present the range of policy options available to address a given problem or issue, drawing on extensive research, cost-benefit analysis and data. Ideally, cabinet ministers choose the best course of action; but even when they do not, civil servants are expected to loyally implement whatever policy is chosen. Only, when things do go wrong, ministers are not supposed to pass the buck.

• Fearless advice and loyal implementation were long the touchstones of the federal public service. The 1918 Civil Service Act was the result of Conservative prime minister Robert Borden’s election promise to “destroy every vestige of patronage” with the adoption of a merit-based appointments system in the public service. Senior bureaucrats worked in near-anonymity but wielded significant influence, if not power. Unlike cabinet ministers, public servants possessed institutional memory and knowledge built up over years or decades in government. Smart ministers generally placed their unbridled trust in their unelected deputies. The latter returned the favour by speaking truth to power and saving unskilled ministers from scoring own-goals.