MEMORANDUM TO THE PRIME MINISTER: Congratulations on your election victory. You have earned the trust of Canadians to lead the country through one of the most challenging periods in our history. The public service is here to support your government and deliver for Canadians. You take office having set out a platform of electoral promises as well statements you made in numerous campaign appearances and interviews. These will be foundational to building the agenda of your government, and will soon have to be translated into laws, policies, programs and changes to the taxation and regulatory systems. You can also sift for policy ideas through the recent wave of entrepeneurship from stakeholders, think-tanks, op-ed writers and podcasters and look for nuggets of gold BY MICHAEL WERNICK FEATURE 10 / Canadian Government Executive / Spring 2025 IT’S YOUR PUBLIC SERVICE NOW among the dross. The public service will be able to help with due diligence and translating all these disparate and often conflicting ideas into implementable options your Cabinet can consider. You will also be provided with scans and assessments of many other issues that will come across your desk, from events around the world, upcoming international summits and negotiations to upcoming court cases, sunsetting laws and programs, Auditor General chapters and appointments to be made. The first set of decisions about how you structure your government will imprint on all subsequent decisions. You will be assigning the more than 300 federal government organizations to Ministers for the purposes of accountability and reporting to Parliament, and you have options to restructure some of the departments and agencies as you do so. You will also be determining who will have the levers of influence and decision making on issues that will arise. The next set of important decisions will come with the first Budget or Economic Statement. Your decisions about taxes and spending priorities will shape the overall fiscal envelope for planning the rest of your mandate. You have the option of starting down the path of a spending review or a policy overhaul of the tax system right away or leaving that until later. Part of your agenda should be the public service itself – not what it will be asked to do but how it works. You have the option of making the size and capabilities of the public service part of that initial Budget or waiting for another window to launch a renewal initiative.
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