The Liberal government needs to make the public service an attractive place to work if it wants to recruit industry leaders.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s pre-Christmas shuffle of top bureaucrats was one of the biggest in recent memory. And it was likely a prelude to more such changes in the senior ranks of the public service as his Liberal government moves to speed up the otherwise glacial pace of decision-making in Ottawa.
Unfortunately, it will take a lot more than moving lifelong bureaucrats into new jobs to fix the public service.
The Dec. 19 shuffle of 12 senior officials – including the appointment of new deputy ministers in the key departments of Finance, Defence and Natural Resources – was the first major public-service overhaul since Michael Sabia became Ottawa’s top bureaucrat in mid-2025.
Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Sabia took over as Clerk of the Privy Council with decades of business experience under his belt. That makes him an oddity in Ottawa, where most senior bureaucrats have never worked outside the capital, much less outside government.
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Therein lies the problem that Mr. Carney and Mr. Sabia face as they try to inject new dynamism into a public service that has long operated according to the principles of risk minimization and strict adherence to procedure. The senior bureaucracy is almost exclusively composed of individuals who climbed the ranks during an era of increasing centralization of power and policymaking in the Prime Minister’s Office. Their skill set revolves around keeping the dust down, rather than disrupting the status quo.
As in any organization, however, disruption is a necessary component of innovation. And the federal public service is desperately in need of it.
“[N]otwithstanding the massive increase in hiring over the last decade, too few public servants have been hired for the leading-edge skills required for modern government,” write former PCO clerk Kevin Lynch and ex-PCO official James Mitchell in their newly published book, A New Blueprint for Government. “When Amazon can deliver a package to almost anyone in Canada the next day, public expectations for government service standards increase accordingly. Yet those expectations are too often not being met.”
It is not just that most public servants, including those in the senior ranks, lack the contemporary skills in data analysis, project management and information technology that modern organizations require. The federal public service has an attitude problem. Too few public servants appreciate the significance of public service as a vocation, rather than just a job.
“When senior leaders of the Public Service Alliance of Canada are issuing public statements and leading demonstrations on the conflict in the Middle East, Canadians might well ask whether the unions have become political actors rather than representatives of non-partisan professional public servants,” Mr. Lynch and Mr. Mitchell warn.
Unfortunately, the Carney government has spurned a basic recommendation of its own Working Group on Public Service Productivity, namely to implement a government-sector productivity-measurement program based on those in other countries. Apparently, according to the Treasury Board Secretariat’s reply to the group’s report, measuring productivity does “not readily align with government priorities.” Who knew?
The Carney government has announced plans to recruit 50 “leaders” in technology, finance and science from outside the government under an existing program that was rebaptized in the November federal budget as the Build Canada Exchange. That the Treasury Board calls this plan “ambitious” tells you all you need to know about the magnitude of the challenge it faces in persuading Canada’s best and brightest to work in government.
Compensation is an obvious deterrent. Low- and mid-level bureaucrats are fairly compensated compared to their private-sector peers. But pre-bonus salaries for senior bureaucrats top out at around $420,000. And unlike Mr. Sabia, not many talented private-sector executives or innovators are willing to accept the massive pay cut that taking a government job entails.
The Carney government appears to have concluded as much. Indeed, its creation of new agencies independent of the bureaucracy and led by private-sector recruits to oversee major projects, defence procurement and home building suggests it seeks to bypass the public service altogether to fast-track key agenda items.
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One such agency, the Major Projects Office, has even asked private-sector employers to top up the salaries of employees “lent” to the MPO to make it easier to lure talent. This, of course, is a terrible idea from an ethical standpoint, but it underscores the inadequacy of public-sector pay scales at the highest level.
You do get what you pay for, both in dollar terms and opportunities for professional fulfilment.
Luckily, the Carney government does not need to fully match Bay Street and tech-sector salaries. But it does need to make the public service an attractive place to work for people who seek to push the limits, embrace change and get results. Shuffling career bureaucrats from one department to another will not cut it.