Elon Musk holds up a chainsaw onstage during the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, on Feb. 20.Nathan Howard/Reuters
John Turley-Ewart is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail, a regulatory compliance consultant and a Canadian banking historian.
Rightsizing government bureaucracies and ensuring accountability to democratically elected officials is part and parcel of refreshing responsible government. The wrong way to do this is evident in the United States, where President Donald Trump appointed tech-billionaire Elon Musk to oversee federal government cost-cutting through the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
While axing thousands of civil servants, many just starting their government careers, Mr. Musk is making extraordinary claims that the department has saved “billions.” Fired experts in important agencies, such as those that supervise the U.S. banking system, are being replaced by political appointees under a presidential executive order that trades on the idea that bureaucrats often operate outside their lane – imposing rules and regulations of their own making – and obstruct government policies they oppose. It is a convenient argument for stuffing government agencies with partisans.
Canada’s problem with its bureaucracy is rather different, but there are also similarities, including the obvious need to make it more efficient and effective. For years, federal governments have been ceding responsibility to bureaucrats for government policy and administration. Ministerial responsibility – a cornerstone of Parliamentary democracy – is undermined, and the political neutrality of Ottawa’s civil servants, who are thrust into the political spotlight in Parliament and the media, suffers.
Proof is easy to find. Consider the declining decision-making by the federal government’s Treasury Board, which comprises some of the government’s most senior ministers and is expected to manage Canada’s budgets and government operations. It makes far fewer decisions today than in the 1980s – meaning oversight and decision-making on spending tax dollars as well as the adoption and execution of programs is now either being left to bureaucrats to manage or is centralized in the Prime Minister’s Office and delivered using external consultants in conjunction with the civil service.
Donald Savoie, a leading scholar on Canada’s public service, documented this trend more than 20 years ago and it hasn’t changed. He points out, for example, that in 1983 the Treasury Board rendered 6,000 decisions annually. According to the federal government, today that number hovers around 900.
It has become so common place for government ministers in Ottawa to relinquish responsibility to civil servants that Canadian business leaders call on government to appoint bureaucrats to drive needed policy changes, as National Bank’s chief executive officer Laurent Ferreira did recently when he asked Ottawa to appoint a deregulation official.
There is further evidence that businesses see less value in engaging elected government ministers when existing policies need revisiting or new policies are needed to meet changing competitive environments at home and abroad. Consider who Canada’s largest corporations lobby. Royal Bank of Canada, for example, spent more time lobbying bureaucrats in 2024 than it did government ministers. RBC isn’t an outlier on this. It is how government now works in Canada.
Where Canadian government ministers fear or refuse to tread, civil servants step in. Canadian government departments and agencies now employ armies of communications teams to explain their policies to MPs and to address media and other inquiries. When things go wrong, it is not surprising to see a bureaucrat in front of the microphone defending their department, rather than the responsible minister.
Such a scenario unfolded last October amidst the U.S. anti-money laundering mess Toronto-Dominion Bank found itself in. It was not then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland explaining on BNN Bloomberg how one of her departments, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, missed TD’s AML lapses. It was the superintendent himself, Peter Routledge.
Deferring to subject-matter experts and not politicians at times has its merits. But we in Canada have vastly overdone it. In such a context, should it be surprising that the Liberal Party of Canada has recruited Mark Carney, one of Canada’s most successful bureaucrats, to run for leader (and therefore prime minister), as it seeks to renew its political fortunes while facing U.S. tariff threats?
If Canada ever had a DOGE-like moment, it was in 1993 when Kim Campbell’s Progressive Conservative government reduced the number of federal government departments from 32 to 23, axing 80 assistant deputy minister positions, eliminating 50,000 civil servant job and producing $30-billion in savings, according to the Campbell government.
How to restructure the federal civil service to make it more efficient and effective is a question that is not want of answers in Canada. Canadian experts such as Michael Wernick, former clerk of the Privy Council, and others have detailed changes to address such matters that would avoid the excesses and damage being done in the U.S. by Mr. Trump.
What is needed in Canada is answers to how we can restore ministerial responsibility in Ottawa and return elected officials to the business of governing.