This article originally appeared in the Globe and Mail.
By Donald Savoie, June 2, 2025
It is clear that Ottawa is looking to get its fiscal house in order. On the campaign trail, the Liberals and Conservatives both talked about getting the cost of government operations under control, with both, pledging to reduce spending on outside consultants, currently running at $16-billion a year. Who could possibly disagree with that?
But both parties were less forthcoming when talking about the ideal size of the public service. The Liberals pledged to implement a cap, a promise that makes some sense in a campaign because no difficult decisions are required until after the election; the commitment only matters if they win. But it also suggests that to them, the size of the federal public service is about right at current levels, even though it has grown by more than 40 per cent over the past 10 years.
Now that the Liberals are back in power, however, a cap will prove unworkable. History has shown that these efforts will invariably generate new committees and countless meetings, which will only produce reports, not actual change.
An ambitious reform of the federal public service is needed. It is necessary to improve morale, to streamline decision-making, to reduce the cost of government operations, to empower frontline managers, and to give meaningful careers to more public servants. It will be hard, and it may not be popular – I do not believe that it is possible to meaningfully reform the federal public service without taking a fresh look at the work of public sector unions – and so it will require a sustained commitment to see a bold agenda through to its end.
Achieving this will require direct engagement from the most powerful man in the country: the Prime Minister.
The current federal government is Ottawa-centric – indeed, Mark Carney is a former senior federal Finance official, and represents an Ottawa constituency in Parliament. The most senior public servants are typically a product of the Ottawa system, too; many have no private sector experience or even experience outside of Ottawa delivering programs to Canadians. This can be both good and bad: good because they have an intimate knowledge of how the government decides what does and does not work, but bad because career government officials are not known for charting bold reforms. Cutting public service staff is hard because there are no market forces and bottom line forcing the issue. As history has often shown, it is easier to let things drift until they leave government.
Once outside government, officials are far more forthcoming about what needs to be done. In recent weeks, we have seen several of them in this newspaper and elsewhere calling for substantial cuts in the number of senior positions in Ottawa, in the number of cabinet ministers, in the size of central agencies and in programs. This calls for high-level decisions that go far beyond capping the public service.
In the mid-1990s, Jean Chrétien’s successful program review exercise showed that the Prime Minister must have a direct hands-on approach for an ambitious agenda to have any chance of success. It is an issue that Mr. Carney must own because it is his government, and the machinery of government matters cannot be delegated. The problem is that there is no shortage of urgent things for the Prime Minister to attend to. This, more than any other reason, explains why past public service reform efforts have failed.
No other ministry is capable of taking up the project. The Department of Finance does not regard reforming government operations as part of its mandate. And while the Treasury Board does have the mandate, it doesn’t have the will, the credibility or the support to pull it off, as it remains the poor cousin of central agencies, no match for the Privy Council Office or Finance. It can follow up on the government’s commitment to cut back on the use of outside consultants, but that is probably as far as it can go.
The government’s agenda can be developed by asking a series of questions. What government structure is needed to promote a unified, single Canadian economy? How can we best redirect resources to high-priority areas such as trade and national defence? How can Ottawa pull back from more areas of provincial jurisdiction? The federal government has nearly 300 organizations, and it’s time to weed out those that are past their best-before dates; the same can be said about some federal government programs.
But unless the Prime Minister ensures that these questions are answered and action is taken, the government will be like the proverbial goldfish, going around and around in its bowl repeating nice castle, nice castle
Donald J. Savoie is a Distinguished Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and Canada Research Chair in Public Administration and Governance at Université de Moncton.
