Donald J. Savoie, What Is Government Good At? A Canadian Answer, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015).

gouvernement savoie

– Leaving aside the Prime Minister and a handful of advisers, no one is in charge in government.

– Among other things, government managers and unions need to explain why, on average, fewer than 100 employees are dismissed for incompetence every year from a work force of about 260,000 employees in the government of Canada.

– The courts now have a direct hand in not only shaping government policy, but also in deciding how they should be implemented. Judges are in the enviable position of being able to shape public policy without being concerned about cost or the finer points of program implementation. Politicians and public servants are left to deal with the more difficult and unpopular aspects of public policy: Finding the necessary funding and actually delivering programs and services in a sea of oversight bodies and constraints.

– “In some cases, asking what government is good at is beside the point,”. “There are things that governments must continue to do, whether or not they are good at it.”

– (les politiciens et les fonctionnaires) “are good at generating blame, avoiding blame, blaming others, playing to a segment of the population to win the next election, avoiding risks, embracing and defending the status quo, adding management layers and staff, keeping [government officials] out of trouble in the media, responding to the demands of the prime minister and managing a complex, multi-objective prime ministerial-centric large organization operating in a politically volatile environment.”

– When it comes to managing operations, the Canadian government has lost ground. Contrary to the private sector and given the centralization of power around the Prime Minister, government managers have learned the art of delegating up rather than down. Too many decisions, including purely management ones, end up with the Prime Minister and his courtiers.

– Government is now a big whale that can’t swim, that can’t keep up with the fast-changing global economy. It has too many management layers, too many oversight bodies and too many public servants generating performance reports that feed a fabricated bottom line that has no footing. The government is now also home to too many conflicting goals and has piled on too many activities on top of one another. In the process, it has lost sight of its core responsibilities, including managing effectively a regulatory regime that not only is able to set standards, but also to make sure that they are respected, as Lac-Mégantic so clearly demonstrated. Notwithstanding high-profile program reviews, the government still relies on across-the-board cuts to control spending.

– Government operations are also tied to a human-resources approach that is hopelessly past its best-by date. Public-sector unions are inhibiting change at a time when other organizations change or fall behind. Some 75 per cent of public-sector employees in Canada belong to a union compared with only 17 per cent for private-sector employees. Among other things, government managers and unions need to explain why, on average, fewer than 100 employees are dismissed for incompetence every year from a work force of about 260,000 employees in the government of Canada.

– Leaving aside the Prime Minister and a handful of advisers, no one is in charge in government. Problems that are of no interest to them or the courts simply roll on through one consultative process after another. The government is truly at a crossroads. It needs to overhaul its approach to shaping policy and delivering programs and services or run the risk of becoming increasingly irrelevant, thus losing the ability to promote visionary investments.