As of the fall, fully half of the 22 core deputy ministers in Canada had been at their jobs for less than two years. Nine had been there less than a year—a “chaotic, pick-up-the-file-and-run, everybody-on-the-march” way of running things, says Axworthy. Compare that with the Harvard Business School’s list of “Top 100 CEOs,” says public policy commentator David Eaves: of the top 10, seven had been at the job for 10 years. The others had put in at least eight. “Nobody just showed up, and did a two-year stint as CEO.” Deputy ministers aren’t exactly CEOs who run the show; still, years on the job count.
And a good relationship between politicians and senior public service, says Axworthy, “is the nub of the enterprise. If you’re a minister you want confidence that the man you’re talking to knows everything there is to know about agriculture.” At one time, he says, “ministers had a huge amount of trust in their deputies, cause their deputies knew those files cold.”
That atmosphere of trust, he adds, has disappeared. And Eaves says it’s not clear ministers actually dislike having deputy ministers who don’t know their files. “This shifts the relative power balance in those conversations, meaning they can’t get pushed around by strong deputy ministers,” he says. Axworthy says he “can’t conceive” how the civil service can implement big, serious projects under the present system: “You start it, and you leave, and someone else takes it over. In the course of a year and a half, you have six, seven, eight project managers; by the time it is approved, the project is out of date,” he explains. “It’s managed to fail.”
Not all observers agree. Sure, the system is under a lot of stress, says David Zussman, an expert in public sector management at the University of Ottawa. “That said, the Harper government, particularly under Kevin Lynch, has made special effort to keep people at their jobs as long as they could.”
One-third of public servants nonetheless reported working for three different bosses in three years, according to the CSD study. And the relentless churn takes a toll on workers. Depression among public servants is the country’s “biggest public health crisis,” says Bill Wilkerson, founder of the non-profit Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Mental Health. Seventy-five per cent of federal executives report burnout, and mental health claims account for 45 per cent of all disability claims.
Of course, what civil servants see as evidence of their tortured state is seen by many outside government—staring down layoffs and delayed retirement—as evidence of a sector cruelly out of touch with economic and workplace realities. Rarely, in fact, has the disconnect between the public and private sector, which has borne the brunt of the current downturn, been felt so keenly.
But if Canadians don’t care that civil servants are unhappy, maybe we should because of another crisis in the bureaucracy: the brain drain. Although their numbers have soared—by more than 40 per cent over the previous 12 years—the public sector is “certainly not” getting a fair share of Canada’s best and brightest, says Peter Aucoin, professor emeritus at Dalhousie University. The “bright lights” who do land tend to jump ship after a brief stay, says an insider. In one competitive hiring initiative designed to lure exceptional graduate students, he says, the bulk of students in a cohort year left the sector after 18 months. After three years, none remained. Many question if the others, who “came for the parental leave, and stayed for the pensions,” as it goes, have the mettle to innovate and take much-needed risks to modernize the sector.
Public-sector union bosses bracing for a showdown in Ottawa are likely aware the enemy extends beyond the Hill. Around the world, snarls of hostility are beginning to be levelled against fatted states. But they’re not likely to go gently, and Heinbecker, for one, thinks civil servants have got ammo better than even the threat of strike. “If the Harper government thinks they had leaks before, and now they’re going to start playing with pensions—well, they ain’t seen nothing yet.”
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