FEATURE 12 / Canadian Government Executive / Spring 2025 To be productive the public service will have to move money, people and information around at a much quicker pace. Procurement Procurement of goods and services is the aspect of government operations in most need of early attention. Before the election the ArriveCan app procurement drew media and Parliamentary attention to the tangle of overlapping policy objectives and to shortcomings in oversight. The current political context will create pressures to procure faster, especially for defence and security, and to tilt procurement even further to Canadian sources. Those objectives are often in conflict. There is an old adage that among cost, speed and quality you can out pick two of the three. Procurement reform will be a big undertaking. The design and boundaries of any new procurement agency will be crucial to future success and is just the beginning of a bigger policy conversation. You should consider banning public servants from also acting as contractors. A proactive approach The other path open to you would be to place the issues set out above in a larger frame and make public service renewal an explicit part of your agenda, worthy of serious attention and focus. A comprehensive reset/renovation/renewal of the federal public service would address all aspects of what has made the public service what it is today and shape its future: • The role of the federal government in our economy and society • Intergovernmental boundaries and federalism issues • Total spending and total operating costs • Total headcount of the public sector workforce and its distribution across Canada • Reducing program sprawl and complexity • Structural issues in management layers and occupational groupings • The toolkit for compensation • Opportunities and challenges presented by AI and other digital technologies • Enhancing productivity and effectiveness • Strengthening capabilities needed for the future • New machinery of government options • Deep dives into the future of a few specific federal organizations Why Comprehensive? The alternatives are worse. Muddling through would mean a drift into mediocrity that will constrain your government’s success and further erode the trust of citizens. Relying exclusively on attrition to bring down staff levels is a bad idea. In practice it means a slowdown or freeze in hiring that chokes off the recruitment of new talent and skill sets. It is a passive approach anchored in a random distribution of departures that is very unlikely to lead to having the right people in the right places. It foregoes the opportunity to strengthen functions or skillsets that are priorities for the future. There is no avoiding the need to use layoffs and early departure incentives. There is no way to insource a lot of the work done by contractors and consultants without a substantial investment in training and development of the public service workforce. Looking only at the body count or salary spend doesn’t take you very far without looking at the actual workflows. What are those people working on? Which programs, external services, functions, professions and internal services are more important than others? Where are they located? The second worst approach is the traditional one of slicing operating budgets with flat across the board cuts. This also damages future capability. Without political cover to make deliberate changes to programs and institutions, organizations reflexively turn to reducing their spend on new hiring, training and upgrading of technology. The cumulative impact on the public service can be debilitating. During the campaign a distinction was drawn around spending that is for investment. The same thing applies to the public service. Spending on training and technology is an investment in future capability. Past spending reviews have achieved savings targets but have fallen short of achieving serious reform. “Vertical” reviews that look at each department or agency separately forego the chance to look at boundary issues with other organizations and miss opportunities to prune overall program sprawl, reduce overlap, or renovate common internal processes. Vertical reviews treat the current machinery of government as a fixed constraint and miss the opportunity to make structural changes that create new organizations better fit for purpose. Functional or “horizontal” reviews that cut across organizations have been useful in reviewing common cost centres such as real property, advertising, vehicle fleets, fixed assets, or common administrative services such as security clearances, translation and interpretation, legal advice, human resources, or finance. These horizontal reviews tend to disadvantage the many smaller organizations or departments with thinner operating budThe public sector is already well into another wave of disruptive technological change. You are inheriting the legacy of previous initiatives to incorporate digital technologies, more sophisticated and strategic approaches to data and information, and the early applications of artificial intelligence (AI).
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