Prof. Savoie, the Canada Research Chair in public Administration and Governance at Université de Moncton, and author of more than 40 books on politics and public administration, said evidence-based policy making today is not valued as it once was, and “policy-making has become a matter of Google searches, focus groups, and public opinion searches, where a well-connected lobbyist can provide any answers politicians wish to hear.”
Prof. Savoie said it’s time for Canadians and politicians to have a frank discussion about what they want from the civil service and answer fundamental questions on the role of the public service.
“We haven’t seen a revolution, we haven’t seen the public service go off a cliff, but over the past 30 years or so, it has changed by stealth,” said Prof. Savoie. His latest book, Whatever Happened to the Music Teacher? How Government Decides and Why will be out in March.
Prof. Savoie said his latest book issues “a cry of passion” for Canadians to understand and care more deeply about their public and political institutions.
“I think the time has come to ask and answer fundamental questions on the role of the public service on the policy advisory front, and on the service to Canadians front,” he said.
Over the past 30 years, the prevailing management tactic in the federal civil service has been to move away from the traditional role of providing advice on policy, and to try and make it look more like the private sector, something Prof. Savoie said is “misguided.”
“No matter how hard you try, and no matter how many times you try it, you can never make government look like the private sector. They are basically, fundamentally, different in both important and unimportant ways,” he said.
The difference boils down to the fact that in the private sector, there is a bottom line—either a company is successful and turns a profit, or it does not, said Prof. Savoie. The same can’t be said for the public sector, but that hasn’t stopped the growth of oversight or the reporting mechanisms attempting to extract the same kind of accountability, he said.
The attempts have resulted in a public service that is less dynamic, more risk-averse, and more mired in bureaucracy than before—exactly the opposite of what those hoping to import private-sector ideals into government were hoping to achieve, said Prof. Savoie.
It’s also created a burgeoning body of overseers and departmental reports that has taken away from the public sector’s service delivery role.
The title of Prof. Savoie’s latest book comes from a conversation he had with a prominent businessman and Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter. The businessman recounted that when he grew up in Cumberland County, N.S., the school he went to had a music teacher, and in town there was a small Department of Natural Resources office with two public servants in it. Now, the department is housed in two buildings and has a staff of 150, while the local school can’t afford a music teacher.
In his book, Prof. Savoie addresses the paradox of disappearing front-line workers and expanding bureaucracy.
“We’ve taken away from the music-teacher type people, people on the front line delivering services. We’ve reduced their ranks and what have we added? Well, if they don’t have the policy advisory function that we once did, the one thing we’ve added—and in my view grossly oversupplied—is oversight bodies, oversight functions, reporting requirements,” he explained.
“Not that long ago, 25 years ago, 71 per cent of federal public servants were in the field, in regional offices and local offices. Today, it’s down to 57 per cent. Imagine the shift,” he said.
Prof. Savoie said that the public service is now burdened with so many reporting requirements that many public servants are “shell-shocked” about always having one or more oversight bodies looking over their shoulders.
The extra reporting burden, far from increasing transparency, has taken a toll on the system, said Prof. Savoie. He noted that the resulting accountability reports, with few exceptions, are rarely read.
“They are busy turning cranks that are not attached to anything, and there is a tremendous cost to taxpayers, and there is a tremendous cost to the traditional culture of the public service,” he said.
“A big part of what people do in government is blame avoidance,” said Prof. Savoie, who noted that Parliament and the media are “blame machines.”
Public servants have been getting squeezed out of policy advisory roles since the 1980s, and it’s happened not just in Canada, but across Anglo-American democracies, said Prof. Savoie.
“It’s not a Tory phenomenon and it’s not a Liberal phenomenon. Politicians, starting in the 1980s, decided that public servants had too much influence on policy so they pushed them back, they pushed them far back,” he stressed.
The shift raises the question, Prof. Savoie said, if we don’t want public servants to be policy advisers, what do we want them to do?
The change in priorities has also created a culture clash in the public service, said Prof. Savoie. Newer public servants are taught to respond more to central government agencies, political requirements, and oversight bodies while old guard public servants are rooted in the tradition of policy advice and delivering services to Canadians.
“That’s two different cultures: one looks up, one looks down. … When I say, ‘What happened to the music teacher?’ Essentially really what it means is what happened to that second culture,” said Prof. Savoie.
Public servants aren’t the only ones being marginalized. Most Cabinet ministers are now removed from policy making in their own departments, and Cabinet itself is a “focus group” for policies that come from the prime minister, the finance minister, and finance department bureaucrats, said Prof. Savoie.
“Ultimately it’s the minister of finance and the prime minister who sign off on all new spending and spending cuts, it’s not Cabinet,” he explained.
One of the side effects of such a centralized system is that issues that are not a government priority can stagnate.
“There is such a thing as an overloaded agenda, and the prime minister and the minister of finance, there’s only 14 hours in a day that they can work, and so they can only deal with a certain number of issues. The issues that they can’t address because they simply don’t have the time and the resources, they are left to run in their tracks,” he said.
This is one of the reasons for the growth of the public service, which since Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) came to power in 2006, has grown at a rate of 5.5 per cent a year. Its population currently sits at about 366,000 people, including the Canadian Forces and the RCMP.
In 1985, the public service employed the equivalent of 241,170 people. In 1995, with major cuts under prime minister Jean Chrétien, that number dropped to 222,362 people, according to the Treasury Board Secretariat statistics from the time.
“Whenever there is a new requirement of the public service, invariably departments say, ‘Well, we need more resources.’ They never look inside at what they could reallocate. So the public service grows and all of the sudden the prime minister says, ‘Ooh that’s too much,’ and they take a big whack at it, like Chrétien did, like Harper did, and then they cut it back to size. Then they take their eyes off the ball and it grows again,” said Prof. Savoie.
Prof. Savoie said he doesn’t have a problem with Mr. Harper’s “desire to hang a question mark along a lot of the operations of government” through spending restraint exercises like the yearly strategic reviews and the 2012 strategic operating review. But he added that he would reserve judgment on the government’s pledge not to cut front-line services until the dust settles in three or four years.
“The notion that they’re not going to cut front-line services, and cut into bureaucracy, I will just remind you that’s what Chrétien/Martin said in ’95. It didn’t work out like that. It’s one thing to say it, it’s another thing to make sure that what happens,” he said.
The bureaucracy needs to be simplified so public servants can get on with their work, he added.
“The only way really is to de-layer management, say that from now on there will only be four management layers: deputy minister, assistant deputy minister, director general, and directors. No more of these associates and layering management levels. That consumes a lot of paper and a lot of make-work activities,” he noted.
When Prof. Savoie was speaking to senior bureaucrats about his book, they tried to persuade him not to write it, he said. They were concerned that it would heap more criticism onto the already unloved civil service.
“I don’t think this book is critical of the public service, or critical of politicians, it just explains how we’ve gone astray,” said Prof. Savoie.
“I think we need to give a sense of value and esteem to the public service. I think we cannot denigrate the public service and think that all will be well,” he said.
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: JESSICA BRUNO
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