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Since 2015, Canada’s federal work force has grown by more than 100,000, and executives have multiplied faster than anyone else.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Eugene Lang is acting director at the School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University.
Brigid Waddingham is a graduate student at the School of Policy Studies.
Changes are coming to Canada’s public service. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said Wednesday that the upcoming budget would cut the bureaucracy to a “sustainable level,” suggesting that Ottawa wants to go further than the staffing cap it had previously announced. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mark Carney is taking heat for appointing two private sector executives to lead new federal agencies – the Major Projects Office and the Defence Investment Agency – both with annual compensation to the tune of almost $600,000. These are alleged by some to be exorbitant salaries and an affront to taxpayer value for money.
Criticism about the two private-sector executives misses the point. Mr. Carney’s experiment in hiring people from outside the career federal public service into top government jobs is not new. And the high salaries should not be a surprise.
Hiring from the private sector has been tried before and has rarely worked. The culture, values and incentives of the public service are so radically different from those of the private sector that business executives who do enter government almost invariably get frustrated and do not last long.
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If Ottawa is serious about returning the public service to sustainable levels, it must look at both the size of the work force and its structure. The experiment in hiring from the private sector is worth repeating, if for no other reason than to send a message to Ottawa’s bloated executive ranks that the Prime Minister is looking for a different approach to management – one focused on efficiency and results. Any credible effort to cut the bureaucracy must start with its executive class.
Since 2015, Canada’s federal work force has grown by more than 100,000. Executives have multiplied faster than anyone else. By the Treasury Board Secretariat’s count, executive positions have increased 52 per cent, well above the 43-per-cent growth of the non-executive ranks. The number of assistant deputy minister (ADM) positions – roughly equivalent to a vice-president in a corporation – has climbed nearly 50 per cent, while senior ADM roles are up almost 79 per cent.
Take Transport Canada as an example. Its ADM cadre has doubled, from five people in 2015 to 10 this year. At the vaunted Privy Council Office – the Prime Minister’s department and once the preserve of a small number of Ottawa’s bureaucratic elite – senior assistant deputy minister jobs have increased 267 per cent since 2015, from three to 11 positions. Meanwhile at Public Services and Procurement Canada, those same positions have surged by an astonishing 300 per cent in the last decade, up from two to eight.
Seventy years ago, British historian C. Northcote Parkinson coined “Parkinson’s Law,” which helps explain this staggering growth of the public service and its executive class. Observing the expansion of the British Colonial Office, which occurred alongside the decline of the British Empire, Parkinson pointed out that the ranks of the public service tend to grow regardless of the volume of work to be done. He attributed this to two claims: “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals” and “Officials make work for each other,” in other words, there is a natural tendency to multiply subordinates to sustain the rise of officials, which in turn creates demand for more and more officials. As Parkinson put it, “Far more people have taken far longer to produce the same result. No one has been idle. All have done their best.”
Ottawa’s bureaucracy is well aware of the problem, even if it hasn’t done much to fix it. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, recent attempts at work-force reduction have targeted term and casual employees, while the share of permanent positions, such as those occupied by executives, has reached a decade high.
A report by the Public Service Management Advisory Committee could have been lifted directly from Parkinson’s playbook: “New [executive] jobs at all levels are created, in many cases without a significant change in the organization’s mandate.” The result is “dilution and duplication” leading to “unnecessary layers of decision-making and unclear accountabilities. It slows down productivity and creates workplace conflicts.” Former clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick has raised concerns that Ottawa’s “pyramid of executives” are slowing decision making and impeding communication.
Businesspeople will recognize the pathology. When companies multiply vice-presidents, decisions slow, accountability blurs and egos multiply faster than outcomes. But in the private sector, profit and loss eventually impose discipline. In government, the taxpayer funds the experiment until someone yells “enough is enough.”
None of this is to deny the need for competent, appropriately compensated public service executives. But competence does not scale infinitely. Beyond a certain point, multiplying executives does not produce efficiency or better public service outcomes: it leads to duplication of effort, if not paralysis. Each new layer solves the problems created by the existence of the last.
Parkinson saw it in the British Admiralty, whose officials almost doubled while the fleet shrank by two-thirds. When Alessandro Natta, Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, complained of bureaucratic bloat in 1986 to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet president responded: “Parkinson’s Law works everywhere.” Ottawa is no exception.
If Mr. Carney is serious about discipline, results and efficiency in government, he will have to be the one to say “enough is enough.”
