34 / Canadian Government Executive // WINTER 2025 “If accountability cannot be fixed, government operations cannot be fixed.” Savoie This is the theme of Savoie’s latest and, maybe, his most excoriating analysis yet of the federal government and public service. His assessment of public service failures and the lack of accountability and results is relentlessly pointed. It is an essential and sometimes bleak read. Savoie’s contribution to understanding how public services work is legion. Best known for Governing From the Centre, his 1999 book which established PMO and PCO as the true locus of decision-making in Ottawa, Savoie has written some two dozen books on government and life and personalities in his home province of New Brunswick. Savoie draws on many of them to revisit the trends in public service management over the years to ask whether anything has changed for the better. His conclusion: it’s worse. His list of challenges and shortcomings include: “the failure to control growth in the federal public service, the inability to establish performance, prime ministers having to resort to bolts of lightning to control spending, an unwillingness to ask penetrating questions about government operations, too many decisions being delegated up rather than down, and the government’s inadequate accountability requirements.” (p. 248) That’s a pretty comprehensive indictment. And one which he points to both politicians and senior public servants aiding and abetting. Savoie delineates two types of public servants in Ottawa, what he labels “poets and plumbers”. Poets are the policy, advisory, strategy, communications, administration and back office types; plumbers are the front-line operational and service delivery types. He finds that some 60 per cent of federal public servants can be classified as “poets” who do not actually deliver services to Canadians. This bifurcation in public service roles leads him to wonder if there are, in fact, two public services combined within one. Their values and behaviours are different from each other’s; their public servant experiences radically different from each other’s. Plumbers are the “poor cousins” in the public servant hierarchy who “know first-hand that Canadians see the federal government is not up to standard in delivering programs.” Poets, meanwhile, are more highly valued in Ottawa due to their political and policy skills in navigating and advising the Centre and decision-making branch of government. Poets are the ones to become deputy ministers, not plumbers, in Savoie’s telling. “We need to recognize that there are now two public services…”, he declaims. Savoie cites expansive – 25 per cent - public service growth in less than ten years, questioning forcefully whether so many more public servants are needed and can be justified. More government is clearly not better government, in his view. Despite this explosive growth, particularly during COVID-19, the service delivery quality has not improved and, in fact, has deteriorated in important areas, such as passports and airports. Adding additional layers of senior management comes in for particular attention by Savoie after reports and commitments by public servants and politicians to “de-layer” and empower managers directly. He points out that not one of the 29 reports of the Clerk of the Privy Council, the federal government’s top public servant, has ever touched upon the issue. As an example, he notes that with Treasury Board Secretariat, the government’s central agency for spending control, there are twice as many public servants dedicated to internal services than to expenditure management. The rationale for more public servants is not more public service but meeting the needs of a more complex and demanding political and policy environment, particularly in meeting demands from the Centre or “upstairs” as he calls it. Trouble is, that’s not leading to better service and accountability for government spending and decisions. This all adds up to a machinery of government overload, for Savoie. “Rather than introduce measures to simplify the machinery of government, in recent years, governments have done the opposite. They have made it bigger, adding new requirements and new layers, making accountability more impenetrable.” (p. 41) Book Review, Speaking Truth to Canadians About Their Public Service By Professor Donald J. Savoie, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024 BY DAVID McLAUGHLIN, BA, MA, MBA POETS, PLUMBERS, AND PLATO’S CAVE THE LEADER’S BOOKSHELF
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