By Donald J. Savoie

McGill-Queen’s University Press

Article dans Quile & Quire

Donald J. Savoie holds the Canada Research Chair in Public Administration and Governance at the Université de Moncton.
“An insightful account of the forces that shape Ottawa’s expenditure budget and the relations between politicians and public servants.”

Policy making has become a matter of opinion, Google searches, focus groups, and public opinion surveys, where a well-connected lobbyist can provide any answers politicians wish to hear.

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Running Governement Like a Business Has Been a Dismal Failure

Donald J. Savoie, The Globe and Mail

For the last 30 years, politicians throughout the Anglo-American world have inveighed against big government in the name of greater efficiency, while governments have simultaneously become bloated and less efficient. In an attempt to shed light on a subject often kept deliberately obscure, Donald J. Savoie, Canada Research Chair in public administration and governance at the Université de Moncton, gives us a timely and informative primer on how our political bureaucracy works, and offers explanations for how government makes decisions and allocates funds.

There is a lot to digest. Canada’s federal government has become increasingly centred on a small coterie of advisers surrounding the prime minister, leaving the rest of the civil service to simply keep things going without too much fuss. The introduction of private sector management techniques into the public sector, meanwhile, hasn’t worked, Savoie argues, because the two sectors are “fundamentally different in all important and unimportant ways.” And the civil service itself has grown into an outsized and demoralized (though relatively well-remunerated) class increasingly resented by the public it serves.

Savoie takes care to temper his criticism, but it’s clear he is describing a broken system. One comes away with an impression of a public sector consisting of some people toiling very hard at work that isn’t particularly important – “turning a crank that’s not attached to anything” – and others doing very little at all. Why do we need expert policy advisers anyway, the thinking in some circles goes, when we have Google?