The Black Hole of Public Administration

PART I THE DYNAMICS OF THE BROADER CONTEXT

PART I TheDynamicsoftheBroaderContext It is not possible to gauge the efficiency, effectiveness, valueadding capability, the innovativeness and capacity to learn and transform the Canadian federal public administration, and to imagine ways to improve it without first gaining an appreciation of the broader context within which it has been operating, of the historical mortgage that has shaped this context, and of the challenges that this public governance regime is facing in modern times. Ideally, one would need a sense of the whole Canadian social system and its circumstances, of what the Canadian federal system has lived through, and of the forces that have got the public administration apparatus to crystallize in its present form—with its strengths and weaknesses. This is too much to expect from two relatively short chapters. A more modest and somewhat idiosyncratic introduction to the Canadian public governance regime has been developed through two anamorphoses—systematically distorted and partial representations—of the dynamics of Canadian public administration: one through the lens of the Clerk of the Privy Council; the other through an analysis of the more recent drift of the Canadian federal system. The first one has a retrospective flavour. It etches the dynamics of the evolution of Canadian federalism in historical perspective with a view to presenting the tapestry of forces at work in shaping the governing of the federal public sector. This is done through 17 18 The Black Hole of Public Administration the lens of the role of the Clerk of the Privy Council, the most senior and the most powerful bureaucrat in Ottawa. Through an analysis of the evolving context of the Clerk, and of the ways in which the Clerk’s role has itself evolved, it is possible to gain an appreciation of the dynamics of the Canadian federal public administration from the time of Confederation to the present. The second one has a more prospective flavour. It zooms in on Canadian federal public governance in the more recent past to show how its fabric has evolved, and how the two drifts from ‘Big G’ to ‘small g’ and toward a new mix of G1 + G2 have changed the ways in which social learning has proceeded. Some scenarios for the future evolution of the Canadian system are presented, and the broad levers likely to be used to effect a general transformation of the system are identified. This macroscopic overview is meant to equip the reader with an appreciation both of the rich fabric and of the evolution of the Canadian federal public administration system. Like any such synthetic sketch, it is not a totally aseptic picture. Indeed, our sketch is boldly idiosyncratic: it is as accurate and as complete as possible, but we have underlined some drifts that have appeared important to us in this historical process, and we have most certainly framed the differential probabilities of potential futures on the basis of certain parameters that have appeared to us to be of critical importance. Some may not agree with our observations about the long trend toward decentralization, subsidiarity, and the dominance of social learning, and even less with our suggestion that this trend is indeed a desirable outcome. But whether our hypotheses are welcome or damned by the reader, the basic compendium of information presented and the material on which we base our observations of the past and our conjectures about the future, should help in gaining a good sense of the challenges faced by the Canadian federal public administration apparatus over the last 150 years or so. This compendium also supports our concerns about the particularly difficult choices it now faces and allows the reader to develop alternative hypotheses. 19 Ifourcanvasis,asweexpect,sufficientlyrich,itshouldprovide the reader with enough information to deal critically with our provisional conjectures but also to contextualize the pathologies we denounce in Part II. This canvas, we hope, will also allow the reader to develop a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of the challenges ahead to gauge the extent to which the repairs we propose in Part III may suffice or not in initiating the sort of systemic overhaul of Canadian public administration required to trigger an ‘open-source-inspired’ renaissance. The Dynamics of the Broader Context ...