As the kids would say, one thing I’m trying to do with my journalism these days is to normalize talking. This country is utterly beset with bafflegab, secretiveness, mistrust and six-week all-hands-on-deck team efforts to massage the message until there’s no information left in it.
So when I heard that Treasury Board president Anita Anand wasn’t thrilled with the piece I wrote the other day — in which I was unimpressed with her announcement of a working group on productivity — I offered a novel solution: I said she was free to rebut me, and I’d pass whatever she said along to you.
I’ve posted video from the resulting interview here. For those reading this post on your laptops on the website (the link to do that is here), you’ll also see a TRANSCRIPT tab that will take you to a full transcript of the interview. It’s machine-generated, but it looks pretty good.
The minister’s remarks speak for themselves, but I think that in my original piece I let myself get misdirected by some delicate phrasing. What Anand said in Halifax was that she “will be launching a working group to study productivity in the public and private sectors.” Turns out that the lion’s share of its attention will be devoted to productivity in the public sector. Which is to say, the public service. Which is to say, a large and cumbersome apparatus that hasn’t exactly been driving productivity gains in recent years.
Anand says there’s been far less attention devoted to public-sector productivity than private-sector productivity. She’s right. What has been written suggests there are big problems. From David Dodge’s report on productivity for his law firm, Bennett Jones, which I mentioned in last week’s post:
“A productivity focus by government also entails more attention to execution and delivery. Federal, provincial, and local governments together represent over 40% of GDP, and the delivery of their services affects the performance
of firms and workers. Federally, the multiplication of policy priorities and programs, pre-, during, and post-COVID, has tested capacity to deliver. The old adage “underpromise and overdeliver” has been all too frequently ignored.
A 40% growth in the size of the public service between 2015 and 2023 has exceeded onboarding capacity. While productivity is difficult to measure in the public sector at the best of times, it likely diminished during this period. There have been spectacular administrative failures that, while affecting a small proportion of total government activity, have resonated beyond government, causing damage to the reputation of the public service. Provincial and local governments also struggle across the country to deliver health care and other public services that Canadians wish—rightly so—to be among the best in the world. In government as in the private sector, the efficient delivery of services requires more investment in people, technology, and data, including AI.”
That’s a big block of text, so let me summarize it. Governments need to get better at doing stuff. They make up nearly half the economy, and the last half-decade has deteriorated the effectiveness of nearly everything they do. Everything needs to improve — staffing, training, equipment and technology.
Anand told me that her efforts will follow an announcement in Chrystia Freeland’s April budget that the federal civil service will shrink by 5,000 in the next few years through attrition. The thing about attrition is, it’s hard to control or optimize. So Anand said she’s looking at further cuts, beyond the 5,000, that would be guided by considerations of efficiency and effectiveness.
The job she describes here is a formidable challenge. Having surveyed the very mixed results of previous efforts, I won’t predict the outcome of this one. But one thing’s for sure: it’s not every day that a politician in this town responds to criticism with a desire to explain her work in more detail. I’m grateful to Anand for being an exception to some discouraging trends.
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