Why can't the government do stuff?
There was a great article in the Globe and Mail this weekend: Opinion: Why aren’t things working as they should? Policy execution is key.
Much attention is devoted to the numerous policy priorities of the Trudeau government, particularly at budget time. Scant attention, however, is paid to the government’s capacity to actually implement its policy promises. And that’s a problem.
Canadians may differ in what they think about the government’s wide-ranging policy agenda, but the unasked question is, can the government actually deliver on it? Policy implementation is complex, time-consuming work and, frankly, the government has not been focused on or good at it.
Why is the government so bad at doing things? Lynch boils it down to four reasons:
The bureaucracy is too bureaucratic. There’s too many layers of management and approvals with too little accountability
Excessive concentration of power in the PMO
Excessive risk management
Public service can’t hire good people
I think Lynch is spot on with this. Reading through some of the consequences of this problem (bad delivery of new services, bad delivery of old services, etc) are not problems unique to government. These are problems businesses face too, but it’s really a complex systems problem. These are also problems the armed forces face. Other organizations have frameworks for these type of issues but government seems content to trudge on. Left unsaid is that the leaders of government are the ones who can give the public the best sound bites and many haven’t really done anything else other than politics in their lives (Looking at the potential Conservative Party leader Mr. Poilievre).
I think Lynch focuses too much on this being a federal problem when really I think its a Canadian problem. Ford in Ontario has all the same symptoms. Trudeau, of course, runs, the largest organization in the country and has been for the last seven years, so he and it deserve focus, but we should at least recognize that this is not a unique problem.
The government’s problem with risk management crops up in unexpected ways. When other governments were spiriting people away from Afghanistan, Canada dithered and asked them to fill out forms online. Other governments were content to act, then sort out paperwork later, the Canadian government stuck to the rules until it became clear that this would become a political issue for the government. Or look at the provincial governments abysmal responses to covid - wait until its too late, then do too little.
The first step to a solution Lynch proposes is that the government needs to recognize that it has a problem. The rest of the steps don’t matter since I doubt it’s going to take that step.
As a final note, on public service and hiring, I’ve tried twice to get into the public service, first as a new graduate and the second time as an experienced CPA. Both experiences were basically the same: there’s a long application to fill out, then months and months of waiting. I only know the beginning of the process since both times I tried to get in I had a new job within a few weeks. I left my applications open as a gruesome experiment - it took about six months until my applications were far enough along that I needed to withdraw. Six months! Professionals with other options aren’t going to wait around that long.