Transcript
Transcript: Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar Lecture: Stewardship and Capacity Building for Effective Canadian Policy Practice
CSPS Descriptive: HAP-072- Visiting Scholar – Stewardship and Capacity Building for Effective Canadian Policy Practice / Descriptif de l'EFPC : HAP-072- Chercheur invité – Intendance et renforcement des capacités pour une pratique politique canadienne efficace
[00:00:00 CSPS animated logo appears.]
[00:00:06 Aerial image of Parliament Hill. Edgy music plays. Overlaid text on screen: We would like to begin by acknowledging that this event is filmed on the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. We encourage you to take a moment to reflect on the traditional Indigenous territory you occupy. / Nous tenons tout d'abord à souligner que cet événement est filmé sur le territoire traditionnel et non cédé du peuple algonquin Anishinaabeg. Nous vous encourageons à prendre un moment pour réfléchir au territoire autochtone traditionnel que vous occupez.]
[00:00:19 Exterior view of the CSPS building. Text on screen: Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar Lecture 2024 / Conférence avec le chercheur invité dans le cadre de l'Initiative Jocelyne Bourgon 2024.]
[00:00:27 Image of the Provincial and Territorial flags. Text on screen: Stewardship and Capacity Building for Effective Canadian Policy Practice. / Intendance et renforcement des capacités pour des pratiques efficaces en matière de politique canadienne.]
[00:00:35 A microphone is being clipped on to Dr. Jonathan Craft's tie. Text on screen: Visiting Scholar/Chercheur invité/Dr. Jonathan Craft.]
[00:00:46 Taki Sarantakis and Jonathan Craft sit together in conversation. Text on screen: Discussion with/ Discussion avec/ Taki Sarantakis.]
[00:00:56 Text on screen: Welcome / Bienvenue.]
[00:01:00 Taki Sarantakis appears full screen. Text on screen: President, Canada School of Public Service. / Président, École de la fonction publique du Canada.]
Taki Sarantakis: My name is Taki Sarantakis. It is my great honour to welcome you to the 2024 Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar Lecture at the Canada School of Public Service. This year's lecture is being given by Professor Jonathan Craft from the University of Toronto.
Professor Craft is one of the bright lights in the Canadian public policy and Canadian public administration spaces, and he has spent the last little while examining this thing we call the policy community within the Government of Canada.
And policy is tremendously important to all our lives because policy determines what we can do; what we can't do; what laws are passed; what regulations are passed; and it is critically important that the policy function within the federal government, and within other governments, has tremendous capacity to be able to deal with society's issues.
After Professor Craft finishes his lecture, we will have a little panel discussion to talk about some of the key things that he's raised. Professor Craft.
[00:02:08 Dr. Jonathan Craft appears full screen. Text on screen: Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto / Professeur adjoint, Départment de science politique, Université de Toronto.]
Dr. Jonathan Craft: Hello. I'm Dr. Jonathan Craft, associate professor of comparative public policy at the University of Toronto.
I'm also honoured to serve as the Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar at the Government of Canada's School of Public Service for the year 2023–2024. I would like to start by thanking the School's leadership and the team that supported me. They displayed the very best qualities and skills that the public service has to offer.
I'm often struck by how little time we spend as a country, and as a scholarly community, discussing our public service and the state of Canadian public administration. I would argue that this is because it largely works. Of course, I recognize, like we all do, that there are times when it falls short, and that's often when we talk about the public service. But for many, it's an institution that can easily be taken for granted.
The Government of Canada is the nation's largest employer and has an annual budget in the hundreds of billions of dollars. More importantly, it's the institution that, in concert with our democratically elected representatives, creates and administers key programs and supports to ensure that Canadians thrive. It deserves scrutiny and analysis, but also support to ensure that it is effective.
My talk today is therefore focused on questions of capacity to make effective public policy and the need to modernize policymaking practices. I'll flag core challenges to strengthening Canada's policy capacity. These challenges, in my view, are linked to the way the public service is organized; how the public service has sought to generate and sustain its policy capacity; and, of course, the changing nature of policymaking itself.
Today's speech reflects my personal views but is also informed by a decade of research into the public sector's advice, design, policy, policy capacity and reform issues. I will conclude by providing five recommendations that are practical and feasible options.
Researchers in Canada and elsewhere have been studying various challenges to effective public policy making. To name a few, a growing emphasis on short-termism, or issues management in policymaking. The pernicious gap between policy design and implementation. Or the disconnect between policy intent and what actually is delivered and outcomes. To be sure, these and other big challenges are being experienced by public services around the world.
However, by international comparisons, Canada's public service and governments of various stripes have been much less active on matters of public service reform, particularly [when] compared to Canada's Westminster-style cousins of Australia, Britain, and New Zealand, where regular reforms and attempts to modernize policymaking have been clearer and more sustained. To be sure, there are excellent pockets of modernization and renewal in the federal public service. I will point to those in a moment.
Canada's approach has, however, emphasized what scholars would call the individual dimension of policy capacity, recruiting talented policy thinkers and doers. While this is undoubtedly a key ingredient to effective government, Canada's challenge is a structural one, linked to organizational forms of policy capacity. That is, in the ability of the public service to effectively coordinate and deploy its policy resources and to ensure adequate mechanisms for organizational learning, human resources management. These challenges can best be addressed, I argue, through the adoption of a more robust stewardship approach in Canada.
Stewardship is a duty of proactive care for a resource, which can include people; information; processes; and institutions. Stewardship is interpreted and applied in different ways in various jurisdictions, of course. In Canada, it's already one of the five core values in the public service Code of Values and Ethics. Indeed, the current clerk of the Privy Council has launched an important conversation about those core public service values. This is an excellent opportunity to revisit the stewardship value, to have a discussion about what stewardship means for Canada's public service today, and to look for opportunities to strengthen and modernize that value for policymaking. Of course, adapting a more robust stewardship approach involves more than just language or statements of ethics.
In this talk, I'll provide five key recommendations for organizational changes and reforms. These include creating a stand-alone, deputy secretary level led public service modernization unit in the Privy Council Office to drive and better coordinate public service renewal and policy capacity. Second, mandating reviews of existing policy capacity within the public service every two years. Third, expanding and deepening the clerk's report on the state of the public service.
Fourth, through Canada's policy community initiative, the public service must develop clearer and well communicated policy practices and principles. What does modern policymaking look like, and how should it be done? And these must be linked to reforms to ensure key processes which enable and require them in the lived experiences of public servants. Lastly, the public service needs to develop an enterprise-wide, or whole of government approach to developing existing policy staff's training and competencies.
These are concrete reforms and opportunities that, as I will show, are based on what has worked in Canadian and international practice. However, most importantly, these opportunities must be anchored in broader change, in a stewardship approach — an approach that recognizes the public service's unique obligations and responsibilities to proactively ensure that it has the policy capacity to properly serve the government and Canadians.
So, what is policy capacity? Why do we need it, and why is it under threat? Policy capacity is an essential element for effective governing. It is the set of skills and competencies and resources across government agencies to design and pursue policy goals. Researchers have noted that it consists of individual, organizational, and system level dimensions. These speak to the skills and competencies of individual staff, the way the organization of the public service, as a whole, can manage and coordinate its policy capacity and do the work of policy, and broader systems level considerations linked to state society relations and the global context.
The consensus, in Canada and elsewhere, is that the public service's policy capacity has declined or become less effective than in the past. Specifically, these involve concerns about the research, analytical, and advisory skills, and abilities of the public service; shortages in public service policy talent, including churn of staff; over reliance on outside consultants; and underinvestment in public service training; weak systems for prioritization, collaboration, and policy coherence owing to silos in the public service.
Others have long emphasized that capacity gaps manifest themselves in the lack of the ability of the public service to implement successfully; that public services lack policy capacity to implement and achieve desired outcomes; that the line of sight between policy formulation and implementation is increasingly obscured; and that the public service's ability to mobilize and coordinate around whole of government priorities and issues is now challenged.
Again, these are issues that are regularly discussed by international scholars and those in governing circles, not just here in Ottawa, but in Canberra, Australia, Wellington, New Zealand, and London, England, too. These challenges are not new, and neither are attempts by governments to deal with them. The Government of Canada has long been interested in questions of policy capacity. Work in the mid 1990s, spurred by then Clerk Jocelyne Bourgon, recognized that there was a need to take stock of existing capacity and ensure that the public service had the right kinds of capacity and in the right corners of government.
Led by the then-Chief Statistician of Canada, who headed a deputy minister–level working group, and in collaboration with academic researchers, they identified key challenges to the public service's policy capacity and ways to address them. Their report focused on five themes: First, the ongoing need for quality services and policy development to meet the major challenges that the government is facing. Second, the need to pay more attention to the management and work processes for policies, both at the departmental and interdepartmental level. The need to take a closer look at strategic and longer-term issues, including the major functional issues that are common to a number of departments, and improving interdepartmental forums where these issues are addressed. The need to consider external policy resources and contributions as complements to internal government services. Lastly, the importance of the leadership that the most senior public servants must assume in order to meet these needs.
What's striking is how relevant these themes remain. The need for capacity to respond to pressing policy challenges; recognition of a diversity of policy techniques and practices; the need for strategic and long-term policy thinking, coordination, and horizontal policymaking; and optimization of internal and external capacity and senior leadership. These themes endure because they reflect the very essence and the greatest challenges of policy making. Avoiding being captured by the urgent at the expense of the important; failing to think and act strategically, and to develop effective ways of coordination in a public administration system that is complex, and rules based.
Part of the challenge also rests with the fact that the nature of policy work has itself evolved since the task force looked at those issues some 30 years ago. Public service institutions and key policymaking processes were designed in and for another era. Indeed, they've struggled under the weight of the pace, demands and complexities of today's policymaking and its issues. Scholarly research over the last 15 years, including my own, has provided us with an excellent grasp of how policy now gets done, and where capacity is strongest and weakest in Canada.
We know that there have been trends towards firefighting, short-termism, and policy work. Evidence is also clear that there's been a shift towards process-heavy forms of generalism in the Canadian federal public service.
This is a departure from a more substantive and experience-based capacity developed by policy staff remaining in the same departments for prolonged periods of time. We know that there's a tendency towards internalism. That much consultation and engagement activity is undertaken amongst public servants within the Government of Canada itself and with other orders of government. This is in addition to the engagement that happens with Canadians and with key constituencies in the private, non-profit, and international sectors.
The Canadian public service has, over the years, sought to address these challenges. The recruitment of policy leaders and advanced policy analyst initiatives have been successful and important. These were, in fact suggested in principle in the recommendations of the 1996 policy capacity report.
Today, many in the middle to higher ranks of the public service are recruits from the RPL program. It's an asset. The APAP program has shown the effectiveness of rotational approaches for moving new recruits with advanced degrees through sectoral departments and central agencies so they can gain policy experience. However, these programs, by design, recruit only a limited number of top policy professionals.
In the last five years, only approximately 180 new hires have joined the public service through these two streams. By comparison, the EC category – the Economics and Social Science staff, which is the traditional category of policy staff here in Ottawa – has grown from over just 12,000 in 2009, to 23,000 as of 2023. While not a perfect measure of public service policy capacity, given the work done by executives, program staff and other types of public servants, it's not clear that planning or strategic thinking at the whole of government level was brought to bear on how this EC capacity was onboarded, or how it can be best deployed in government. To be frank, in undertaking my research, I had to request raw data on the distribution of EC staff by department and seniority over time, and then complete the analysis with a graduate student. The government didn't have it on hand, and it should, along with analysis that looks at cognate categories of staff and a range of other issues.
Upon analysis of just that EC category, it was clear that there's been some big changes. Not only overall growth, but changes in where EC staff are allocated in government; a significant increase in the seniority of the EC staffing category as a whole; and more ECs doing managerial types of policy work. Well, what are the impacts of these changes? How is the government dealing with these key trends in its key set of policy staff?
As well, the various departments often have talent management and development initiatives. However, these initiatives are ad hoc and depend on resources and the interest of managers and leaders. We don't really know because the government doesn't have enterprise-wide coordination, and the research is limited.
This is just an illustration of the broader point. The public service needs to get serious about understanding its own policy capacity and adopt a more active stewardship approach to nurturing and deploying that capacity.
Moving from the individual level to the aspect of organizational capacity means looking at the Policy Community Initiative. Launched by the Privy Council Office in 2017, it sought to bring together policy professionals in Ottawa and develop resources for those who identify as policy professionals. I have attended these events in the past and know that they are of high quality. However, my research was clear and critical: compared to international benchmarks, it is underdeveloped.
While it's focused on convening a yearly conference and managing a small cross mobility functional group within government, these have both been quite limited in scale. I want to be clear. My view is that it's underperformance, benchmarked to other jurisdictions, is tied to a lack of ambition in its mandate, and a lack of stewardship to ensure that the policy community is adequately resourced and supported.
The current resourcing of approximately $1 million a year and a dozen full time staff equivalents are an indication this is not being taken as seriously as it should. The British policy profession, for instance, is funded at just over 3 million pounds a year with a staff of 40. It does much more, but it has the resources to do so.
I've been pleased to learn in conversations with many in Ottawa that there is an appetite to do more. The signals are positive. However, it remains unclear if the mandate of the policy community is sufficient in scope and scale to serve as a system wide catalyst. If it's linkages to senior decision-making tables are sufficient to provide the needed traction to mobilize reforms and capacity building at a systems level.
Looking to other countries, we can see other approaches and opportunities for Canada to draw from. The United Kingdom has a longstanding policy profession unit, with standards for policy professionals and a policy curriculum. Australia has a delivering, great policy program located in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet that has recently been relaunched, building on previous initiatives. New Zealand has taken, arguably, the most comprehensive approach through the policy project out of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. A core output produced by most of these initiatives is policy improvement frameworks that serve as the foundation of their work. For example, New Zealand's policy skills, policy quality and policy capability frameworks. Or Australia's model of delivering great policy, and the UK's policy profession standards.
These are currently lacking in Canada. We simply do not have comparable tools in place. I know that the Canada School of Public Service has just launched some policy analyst learning resources, and the policy community has just recently launched an adaptable policy framework. This is an excellent start.
But, in comparison, New Zealand has made the greatest investment, given the size of its public service and the relatively smaller number of employees specifically dedicated to policy. Meanwhile, in Canada, there is much lower investment and a more limited scope of activities, despite having a comparatively larger public service and a greater number of employees who officially specialize in policy.
The New Zealand and British initiatives have also been subject to more regular and formal reviews, which is helpful to identify what's working and where new strategies or investments may help. These jurisdictions use reviews all the time regarding the general state of policymaking capacity within the public service, and policy modernization efforts. This is something that Canada simply does not do enough of, either.
Whether you favour a comprehensive and lengthy Royal Commission on the state of the public service, or a shorter task force or blue-ribbon panel, Canada is doing little of either. Like a good family doctor, regular checkups and full physicals at appropriate intervals are helpful to identify problems and take stock of one's health. Indeed, the task force on policy capacity in the 1990s was a clarion call that led to meaningful and important initiatives and policy reforms.
So, how do we get there? How can we foster a more robust stewardship approach for policy practice? The good news is that stewardship is already a value in the Canadian public service. In Canada, this value means, I quote, "Federal public servants are entrusted to use and care for public resources responsibly for both the short term, and long term." Indeed, the code further specifies linked behaviours, including, I quote, "Effectively and efficiently using public money, property and resources, considering the present and long-term effects that their actions have on people and the environment. Acquiring, preserving and sharing knowledge and information as appropriate." These are excellent, but they do not speak to the need for proactive care of the institution of the public service, or for sufficient policy capacity renewal.
In New Zealand's public service, stewardship means something different. According to the government, and I quote, "Stewardship requires taking active steps rather than a responsive or passive approach. Public servants uphold the principle of stewardship by contributing to processes within their department that ensure that people; information; processes and assets of the public service are appropriately developed and maintained, and that Ministers receive advice that supports them to be good stewards." This is a more comprehensive approach that identifies the need to be proactive and nurture the capacity of the public service to support Ministers, Cabinet, and ultimately to serve citizens.
The big challenge for Canada is that it lacks a clearly accountable and sufficiently resourced hub to drive and manage policy renewal and capacity building to drive a stewardship approach. At present, there's a deputy Minister level committee, the Board of Management and Renewal, chaired by the Clerk, mandated to advance the management agenda and the renewal of the public service. There's a Treasury Board Secretariat Public Service Management Advisory Committee, mandated to provide a forum for consultation, collaboration, and discussion on the public service management issues.
These are useful tables for senior executives to discuss issues, but they meet irregularly and have not fostered a coherent or ambitious policy capacity building, or policy modernization experience for the public service. Canada's Clerk of the Privy Council – and by this, I mean the institution, not any one individual in the role – is heavily oversubscribed. The role includes them serving as Secretary to Cabinet; Deputy Minister to the Prime Minister; and also, the statutory head of the public service. No one should be surprised that roles one and two have trumped role three, for most.
Supporting a government in managing the day to day of public service clearly crowds out the longer-term thinking, and positioning, to build policy capacity and ensure policy practices are fit for purpose. Indeed, in other Westminster jurisdictions, the function of the head of the public service, with responsibility for renewal, is often handled by a separate institution. A public service commissioner, or a public service commission, or is clearly led by a second very senior official working from the centre of government.
There's a clear need in Canada for reform, and my first recommendation is to create a stand-alone Deputy Clerk position and modernization unit within the Privy Council Office. This should drive and coordinate public service reform, including policy capacity building, and modernization. Organizationally, the current model sees senior appointments and public service renewal combined at PCO. I argue that this underserves the important public service renewal agenda in Canada. A Deputy Clerk and policy modernization unit should have a clear mandate to lead renewal work, which should include oversight and enablement of the policy community initiative.
The policy community was initially launched out of the Privy Council and has since bounced around to a few departments, but still reports to the Clerk. In my view, for it to be effective, it needs that enterprise-wide line of sight and stronger institutional support from the centre and senior management tables. This comes from being at PCO and with the support of a new, dedicated public service renewal Deputy Clerk.
I appreciate that there are benefits to rotating the policy community initiative to departments. This could still be accomplished through a rotating departmental DM, or ADM champion. However, as keeper of Cabinet decision-making processes, including memorandums to Cabinet, and with its whole of government line of sight and machinery of government authorities, housing the policy community in PCO makes more sense, particularly as it needs to be linked to broader modernization and reform efforts across government.
In fact, most similar initiatives in other jurisdictions are still managed or strongly supported by the centre of government. The new role of the Deputy Secretary of the Privy Council Office and the policy community should be subject to regular formal reviews, not only to ensure that they are achieving their mandate but also to identify opportunities to strengthen and better support them. This ties in with my second key recommendation.
As noted already, regular and serious reviews of policy capacity and capability are standard practice in other jurisdictions. At present, there is no public service baseline and very little data to provide an effective grasp of who is in the Canadian policy community; where is capacity located or missing; and how best to target modernization efforts. The reform unit and new Deputy Clerk that I'm proposing should be mandated to coordinate regular reviews of policy capacity. These reviews should be facilitated by the policy community, but also the Treasury Board Secretariat Committee on Management Reform. This is another management table that could be more actively playing a role in policy and capacity modernization. The Treasury Board Secretariat supports the formal employer in the Government of Canada, and it also has ownership of key government-wide internal policy suites that are consequential for how policy work gets done.
No one wants a review for the sake of review, and that's certainly not what I'm advocating. These stock takes should be data driven and evidence informed – opportunities that are clearly designed to improve self-awareness of where policy capacity is located, and where gaps persist. They should be catalyst to actively align rules and internal policy to institutionalize modern policy making practices.
There's also a need to get a better handle on internal talent management and development programs. The Treasury Board Secretariat, working with the Privy Council Office and the Policy Community Initiative, should study and work on developing a whole of government talent management and policy development initiative. What are the suites of internal applicable policy? How are various existing departmental initiatives working? Where can coherence and scaling up be explored?
There are, of course, many models that this could adopt and take, but the above point on the number of EC staff, versus RPL and APA recruits, suggests a strong need to work on managing and developing talent already in the system, in a coordinated fashion across the entire public service. This is particularly important, given the greater movement of policy staff from department to department, and also the seemingly more senior types of policy staff in the EC category.
My fourth recommendation takes us back to reporting and back to the Clerk. Section 126 of the Public Service Employment Act states in one sentence that the Clerk is the head of the public service, and the next section requires them to submit a yearly report to the Prime Minister to be tabled in both houses of parliament.
The reports have come in many shapes and sizes. They are used quite effectively to communicate the great work being done by the public service. This is important but there are clear opportunities for this report to also identify areas that require further attention. A similar report from the Australian Public Service Commission, which has this statutory duty in Australia, was approximately 220 pages long in 2023.
It's clear that there is a runway for a more ambitious Clerk's Report. In an ideal world, the legislation I mentioned would be amended to be clear about the expectations and obligations of Canada's head of the public service to legislate a stewardship role. I also support others who've called for a more active public service reporting to Parliament through the Clerk or their designate. It's time for that conversation, too, about the role of parliament in ensuring an effective and sufficiently resourced public service.
My final recommendation returns to policy as practice. Through the Policy Community Initiative and my proposal for a new PCO Deputy Clerk, the public service should develop clear and well communicated policymaking playbooks and practices. These are well established in other jurisdictions and are important tools to help set expectations and guide public servants towards modernizing policy practices.
There's been a widespread recognition of the failings of the traditional waterfall-like policy process. That is, the long, drawn-out process where policy is developed in a way that's disconnected from operational contexts, data, and experiences. A move to test-and-learn, or more iterative approaches is now being put in place in other jurisdictions, [and] in some pockets of the Canadian public service, too.
Research from my current book on policy modernization and digital government has revealed, through interviews with officials across these Westminster-style governments, that Canada is much further behind in adopting these test-and-learn approaches. Attempts to institutionalize these practices, such as via the digital standards, have been voluntary, not mandatory. They're "nice to have", not "it must work this way". The proposed PCO reform hub and a Deputy Clerk working with the policy community and TBS Management Reform Committee would be well placed to tackle this issue. The UK policy profession and the New Zealand policy project – they've developed similar instruments. Are they perfect? No. However, the seeds of policy modernization have been planted and stewardship approaches are ensuring that they're being nurtured.
However, for this to become concrete, the policy community, empowered by a PCO Deputy Clerk leading a reform hub, must take a look – a hard look – at departmental level and whole of government policy processes. Briefing notes; policy development processes and the relationship between memorandums to Cabinet; Treasury Board submissions; budget; these can all be reviewed and modernized. This should involve collaborative work with departments and units across the public service, as well as central agencies. This will ensure to reflect the best practices that are essential to delivering policies that work on the ground and meet their policy intent. Where data and operationally informed test-and-learn policymaking is the norm, not a "nice to have". The integration of GBA+ analysis and the adoption of a climate change lens are examples that this type of change can be done, and it can lead to stronger policymaking.
Without catastrophizing, or wearing too rosy of glasses, I think there are some practical options to move towards a more robust stewardship approach in Canada. In closing, let me draw out a few themes. The first, and arguably the most important, is that institutions matter. The Canadian public service needs to embed modernization and policy capacity within its institutions. Notably, the central leadership of the public service, but also fostering it in departments, too.
Canada has a good foundation, excellent recruitment programs and a Policy Community Initiative, and I think there is goodwill within the system for reform. However, greater systematic coherence is needed to coordinate and integrate the various policy reform and improvement initiatives.
The reforms I've suggested here are practical, and leverage a whole of government approach, while linking policy capacity and practice modernization to key decision-making tables and accountability structures. Reforms to key policymaking processes and practices are needed to ensure that operationally informed, data rich, user centred and test-and-learn styles of policy are put in place, but also that the public service has the capacity to undertake them.
With all this uncertainty, and the challenges in our world today, the public service remains a crucial institution. It's time to move towards a more robust model of stewardship to ensure Canada's public service remains fit for purpose.
Merci, thank you.
[00:35:58 Image of the Provincial and Territorial flags. Text on screen: Discussion.]
[00:36:04 Taki Sarantakis and Jonathan Craft sit together in conversation. Text on screen: Taki Sarantakis, President, Canada School of Public Service. / Taki Sarantakis, Président, École de la fonction publique du Canada.]
Taki Sarantakis: Jonathan, thank you for providing the 2024 lecture. Now, as a visiting scholar, you're kind of a little bit of a zoologist. You come in somewhere, you walk amongst us, you observe and then you report. I'll let you in on a little secret. The biggest angst in Ottawa right now isn't policy, it's delivery.
So, when I started in the government 27 years ago, the biggest angst, actually was policy. It was, as you mentioned, one of the tables. It was, after program review, Madame Bourgon – who was Clerk at the time and whose lecture you were speaking under the auspices of – really was worried that program review had eliminated a lot of the policy capacity in the Government of Canada.
And policy – I just want to, as you're a professor – I want to start with a definition. What is policy? Because there are a lot of people in Ottawa that work in policy. If you ask them to define policy, they'll kind of go, I don't know.
[00:37:09 Taki Sarantakis and Jonathan Craft sit together in conversation. Text on screen: Jonathan Craft, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto / Jonathan Craft, Professeur adjoint, Départment de science politique, Université de Toronto.]
Dr. Jonathan Craft: Yes, I think, first of all, thanks for the invitation to deliver the lecture. And I think I've got a season's pass to the zoo because as a Canadian public administration scholar, I'm in Ottawa all the time.
And as a public policy scholar and enthusiast, I'm constantly engaging with public servants. And I think I would reject the premise that delivery and policy are two different things. I think that's actually one of the points I was trying to get across in my lecture, at the end, was around the need to close the false gap between delivery and implementation as a discrete activity that's disconnected from how you make policy.
Policy, for some, is conceived of as this exercise where you identify options, and you provide those to decision makers who decide what to do. And then somebody throws it over the fence to public servants to implement on the ground. And I don't think that's ever really been the case. I think it's a bit of a false construct.
And so, I think the big challenge is really around how do you think of policy as a spectrum that involves the agenda setting and formulation activities of determining options and feasibility and matching instruments with policy goals all the way through to, well, how do you actually do this? If you don't have a conversation about how to implement something, then your policy is never going to be successful. And I think that governments are really wrestling with this challenge to come at that.
And to answer your question, because you asked me a very specific question, I always start my policy classes with a slide that has four or five different definitions of policy. But I think the most parsimonious and the easiest to remember is, policy is whatever a government chooses to do, or not. And that's a famous definition from the 1970s. But I think that the nature of policy today is more complicated than that, and there are a bunch of different actors and realities.
So, policy isn't just developing options. It's that whole spectrum of activity from trying to decide what we're going to do about public problems and what is a problem, and how to define and structure those problems, all the way through to making sure that people are getting their passports; that old age security checks are going out; that Canadians can access all the programs and services. And policy scholars are partly to blame, I think, for trying to present something that's simpler. A heuristic that allows us to deconstruct that complexity.
But I think there's a recognition in governments around the world that we need to tighten up that, the feedback cycles and the duration between implementation and formulation, because that's all part of policy.
Taki Sarantakis: It is, I think, in a normal human being sense, that policy and delivery would be one and the same, because there's really no point in coming up with ideas, or schemata, or perspectives and putting them forward to decision makers if you can't implement them.
But that's not the case. I don't think it's the case, in much of the western world. If you look at, for example, I'm sure you're familiar with Jennifer Pahlka and her wonderful book, Recoding America. Her fundamental thesis is that a lot of what's wrong with government today is the policy delivery divide.
Going back to the zoo, there's a group of animals in one part of the zoo that are the big thinkers. They read Plato and Aristotle and scholarly journals, and they come up with the great ideas. And then there's another part of the zoo where at some point, when people are done their big brain activities, they say, okay, over to you guys, now you guys deliver what was in our big brain.
It's almost analogous to even a university. There are disciplines, even though there's a problem, universities are split up into different disciplines, different problems, different substrata.
That's how it is in the federal public service. We have a policy unit, and we have a delivery unit, or a programs unit. Sometimes they're in the same floor of the same building. They talk to each other as much as you would think.
Dr. Jonathan Craft: Yes. And I think Jennifer's book is excellent, but when I'm reading it, I think about, since the 1970s, people have been writing about the formulation implementation gap, or the nexus between what to do about problems, and how to actually go about implementing and delivering, as people like to call it today. So, I think that that problem is not necessarily new.
And I think of, for example, let's use border crossing. So, you have a policy around how border crossing works. You'll present your documentation, but as any Canadian knows, when you go to the border, they'll ask you questions. And there's a lot of discretion around whether you get pulled over for a further search, or what kinds of questions they ask you, or what that process is like.
And I think that the reality is, there's a misperception that policy is just, we're going to do X. Oftentimes, X is very broad and very general and gets given life by staff in programs and operational units that have to figure out, well, what does X mean, and how do I actually deliver those services? Or how do I actually get a visitor through our border crossing? So, I think those are, again, some ways of thinking about policy that need to change. And I think Jennifer and others are rightly pointing to the role of digital and data and other ways that can help give us insights on what's happening on the ground.
On your point about the zoo, back to our metaphor, and I quite like that. I think that there has been a recognition that we need to move to multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams where your policy person and your operations, or your business, or your programs, or whatever term you want to call them, are working either in the same team, or that there are processes around trying to create more connections and more connective tissues as the policy gets developed. So, that's informed by operational realities.
And so, I think that there are a variety of folks inside government that are trying to do that. But there are huge challenges on the human resources side to, in Ottawa speak, get the right boxes with the right people in the right teams. I think there are some great initiatives that are happening to build those types of modern teams.
But I also think that there is a lot of reform work that can be done to ensure that your ADM of Policy and your ADM of Operations are working in ways that are coordinated, ensuring that staff are aware of the issues. Because oftentimes, I think people in big P policy worlds get criticized by folks who are implementing and delivering on the ground. Saying, you don't know what this is like, or you don't realize that when you do it in official languages or with accessibility, it creates these dynamics.
Well, I think the arrow goes the other way as well, where sometimes operational folks who are working in a student employment centre, or working at a passport office, don't realize that the policy exists because it has to ensure that there's coordination amongst diplomats travelling with passports, or children's passports and the requirements for pictures, or five-year versus ten-year. There are all these policies that exist. And so, at a policy level, there's a need for coordination, and then below the surface there's the horizontal and vertical need for coordination.
And so, I think this is where government is complex and challenging. And I think Canadians and Ministers and officials can become frustrated because this is the system that we have. And so, I think it's just so crucial that we're looking at the processes that exist and trying to figure out where are those gaps to provide opportunities to close them or to do things in new ways, so that policy is seen as that spectrum, and that that zoo is all healthy and all able to put its best foot forward.
Taki Sarantakis: And this isn't necessarily a Canadian angst. This is an angst that goes across many countries in the world. You noted the Westminster system, our cousins in the Commonwealth, but they're also just across the globe. We have situations where legitimately elected democratic officials have come up with something. Whether that is a policy, or an idea, or a platform, and they have said, now deliver this. And there are missteps in that way. And I think probably the most famous of this is Tony Blair, in the UK, and his analogy of, the politicians would pull a lever, but the lever wasn't attached to anything.
And so, you've hit on something that's really important, which is that policy and delivery, even just the very fact of speaking of them as separate entities, right away you've made a mistake. Right away you've made a conceptual error. Is that an accurate way of representing what you're calling policy?
Dr. Jonathan Craft: Yes, I published a paper on what I called low fidelity policy design, which is, in essence, that instead of trying to come up with big P policy that's perfect, that's gone through and thought about, the business case and the requirements for three years, and not built and delivered anything and tested it, and then going and implementing that and realizing it doesn't work. You need to adopt an approach that is much shorter cycles of developing policy and implementing and testing. That's the test-and-learn approach that I think is being favoured by governments around the world, because they're all grappling with the same issue. I think you're right to point that out. And Canada isn't exceptional in this instance.
But I think what's driving it is not just politicians who are looking for levers, but it's the pace of policymaking where you need to respond to a Covid, or you need to respond to a natural disaster, or a climate change, or a cost-of-living issue. Whatever the issue du jour is, you want to respond quickly. And the problem is that that's often not possible. There are gains that can be made in efficiencies in the system, but I think what's also important is to have a really sober conversation about the trade-offs. We don't want rushed policy because we want to think about the considerations. We want to think about the implications of things.
And so, I think there's a bit of a delicate dance that has to happen between trying to be responsive and allow Canadians to see governments and public services there when they need them and responding to our most pressing policy challenges, but also to ensuring that the public service has the time and the capacity and the resources to bring to bear its expert analysis, to go out and find evidence and views from other communities and constituencies, and to stress test, as much as possible, the policies that they're going to put in place so that when they are put in place, they work. Because I think that if you want to respond quickly, it also has to work. Fast isn't good enough. It has to be fast and effective.
And again, I think this is why it's so challenging to be in public service, because the game is complicated, and the stakes are high. And so, Canadians and others are depending on the public service to be able to do that. And the public service does a great job, but the context in which it delivers policy now is awash in data. Everything is complicated and interconnected. And so, I think the public service has processes and institutions and a culture that are well established and have served Canadians well. But they're also causing a bit of pressure in the ability of government to be able to respond to that quick but effective balancing act that it has to undertake.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, let me take a perspective from outside the public service. Let me talk about, I think it was in the 90s, where we really started to see the emergence of platforms. I think the first one might have been Contract with America from Newt Gingrich, where it was, here's what we're going to do: ABCDEFG. And then I think it was Mike Harris, the common-sense revolution, or document. But it was like, if elected, we will do this, this, this, and this. And then again, in the 90s, we saw the red book at the federal level.
And so, to me, all those things, they're policy. They're the government before their government. But the partisan or the political side is saying, if elected, I will do this. I will do this to the GST. I will do this to a Free Trade Accord. I will do that to rents, or housing, or what have you. It seems to me that that's fundamentally changed the game.
And what I mean by that is I think the public service is less and less looked at as the fountainhead for developing the ideas and more and more looked at as, I don't really care what you think about the ideas, I was elected on this. Please execute these ideas. What are your thoughts on that?
Dr. Jonathan Craft: Yes, I think that's a really interesting question. I think there's a couple of things I would point out on this. I certainly think that it's healthy and useful for parties, and for those seeking elected office, to advance ideas in the democratic arena. I think that's important. And I'm actually for parties being able to do that in more sophisticated ways. Costing platforms, coming up with these ideas, I think that helps the democratic discourse and dialogue in a run up to an election. And I think public servants who are watching elections and seeing these policy ideas are obviously preparing transition binders and starting to think about what this looks like, in terms of policy and administration within government.
But I think the challenge that you're noting around, do we look to our public service anymore as a place to provide policy ideas, or are they really just a delivery arm, or an implementation unit? And I think my answer would be, I think it's a mix of both. And going back to our Westminster kind of governance arrangement, some governments want to look to the public service and say, I need some ideas. Or nobody was talking about this issue when we first got elected, but now all of a sudden, everybody is talking about affordability. What are our issues, or our options?
So, I think that the public service can be used for either, or I think at its best, it's used for both. But it needs to be responsive and look to the government of the day and say, what do they need to govern effectively and how do we provide our considerations? Even if I don't like the government's idea, what is the information that they need, and the advice that they need, to ensure that they've thought it through, and they appreciate what the consequences of their policy preference and implementation regime will be.
The only other point I would add to this is that I think that the move towards more implementation in the public service is useful because they're also aware of how to do things. And sometimes governments, of course, make announcements and campaign commitments and then come into government and realize, oh, this is a lot harder to actually do and implement. So, the public service has to play that role.
Quintessentially, though, my view, linking back to the talk today, is that the public service has an obligation, in my view, to ensure that it has the capacity to provide ideas, as you called it, or policy options, policy designs for a government that's looking for them, or the capacity to implement whatever the government's preference is. They need to be able to meet that suite of activity on both fronts. And so, they need the capacity to be able to respond to whatever the stylistic preferences of a Prime Minister or a Minister are.
Taki Sarantakis: So now, that's the second word I was going to ask you. Capacity. Because capacity could mean volume, it could mean flow through, it could mean sophistication. What do you mean by capacity?
Dr. Jonathan Craft: Yes, well, this is an ongoing debate in the policy literature. So, I gave a definition in the talk that was really about the skills and competencies of governments to be able to advance policy ideas, policy designs, and make them real and implement them.
I think the capacity conversation in the academic literature has really broadened, much like policy has. I think the parallels between our discussions around what is policy and what is capacity are very tightly coupled, because they reflect the fact that it's not just about having someone in Stats Can, or someone who's competent and quantitative in data, and has significant analytical capacity. You also need the capacity within your organization to be able to couple that, or marry that, with the policy work that's happening with stakeholder views, et cetera, et cetera.
So, I think the notion of capacity is typically looked at in academic terms as the ability to execute. And the requirements that exist at the dimension of the individual staff you have, the organization. And then broader systems concerns around the Government of Canada exists within a broader system of international relations and the context of the day and our Westminster parliamentary system.
So, all these features are relevant to how we think about capacity. But at the end of the day, it's much like the notion of an elephant – you know it when you see it. It's hard to describe. But I think that the point is, it's the ability of government to actually do things. And what's interesting is that the conversations around capacity are now often also including those outside of government. So, your think tank community; your consultants; international bodies. How able are various actors and various institutions to provide what's needed to advance policy ideas and issues into concrete programs and services, and then execute on those and deliver those for whoever is the target population at the end of the day.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, if I had to take your talk, and summarize it in one word, I'll give you my one word, and I'd like you to react to it. My one word would be simply professionalization. From what I heard you say, it's like the policy function in the federal government isn't as professionalized as it maybe could or should be.
And you noted some of the things, and this really struck me in 1997 when I started in the policy world. At government, there is no job category called policy. There are job titles called policy analysts, but there's no job category. Most of us were slotted in, myself included, were slotted into a category called economists. And as we know, economists take one view of the world. Generally speaking, it's a disciplinary view. But I think, to me, a good policy analyst is somebody who's more multidisciplinary. Whether that's anthropology; sociology; psychology; behavioural psychology; economics; etcetera.
So, [that's] number one. Number two, you said something that I think would bring horror into the hearts of many people in Ottawa, which is we should actually test to see – I almost heard you say we should audit our policy capacity. Did I hear you right?
Dr. Jonathan Craft: Yes. So, my one word would be stewardship. I think that the point is policymaking is complicated. It's always been complicated. And if you go back and look, to use your example of people coming in as economists, policy analysis was about cost benefits, it was about econometrics, it was about those types of skills. Now policy is also about consultations and negotiations and a variety of different activities that are part of what we would call modern policy work.
And so, I think the one word of stewardship for me, and the emphasis in my talk was on stewardship, because the only way that we're going to be able to keep our finger on the fast-moving beast that is policy, is by being more introspective, being more thoughtful. I will never recommend the use of the word auditing because I think that will draw the wrong types of people. I don't think it's an exercise in accountability or in, Gotcha, you have this, you don't have that.
I think it's just there are a variety of different ways in which we can get a better sense of, where is that capacity in the organization to come up with ideas, design them, implement them? Where is it strongest? Where is it weakest? What do we need to do to address those types of issues and to do it in an ongoing way? I mean, the beautiful policy capacity report that was issued in the 1990s, in rereading it, it's still excellent work, and it resonates even today. And so, I think that, why do we need to wait 30 years to be doing that exercise? I mean, so much has happened that was pre-Internet. It's pre- kind of a lot of things.
And so, I think having those types of reviews, or stock takes, or whatever you want to call it, is about just – I use the analogy of going to the doctor's office. Is the public service capacity healthy? Where do we need investments? And crucially, I think governments have different preferences for how they use the public service. But all governments that are elected want it to be effective, to do whatever it is that they want it to do.
And so, the public service has a responsibility as a steward to ensure that it's ready, and it has the capacity to meet the different demands of various governments. So, stewardship is a way to – I give it a lot of thought because I think you can train, you can develop new competencies and skills, and who knows what's coming five years down the road. But if we have a leadership in the public service at the senior levels, but also in departments and managers and an approach that's really trying to think about, how do we ensure that we're healthy, and we're investing in ourselves in the right ways that will bode well for Canadians and for the public service.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, when we talk policy inside the zoo, the major instrument in the federal public service for that is the Memoranda to Cabinet. That's the document that gets stamped where you say, this policy idea has been approved, in some cases funded, in some cases, et cetera.
In the olden days – this is even before I started in the Government of Canada, I think this was up until the 70s, I don't remember exactly, but I really should look it up one day – in the old days, we would show our work from the policy community. And what I meant by that is, the Memorandum to Cabinet had two very distinct parts. One, that was the background part, which was: here are the facts; here's what Australia is doing; here's what Americans are doing; here's what the demographic profile is in Canada; here's what's changing; here's what's coming the same. And then the last little part would be the recommendation, the advice.
And my understanding of what the system was like, at some point after the decision had been taken – not 30 years after the decision had been taken, but maybe 30 days after the decision had been taken – you would, metaphorically, un-staple the two parts of the document. The advice would be hidden for 30 years, but the basis upon which that decision was taken was released publicly. And it was released publicly, I think, in the form of a white paper. Do you think that would help in the sense of showing our work?
Dr. Jonathan Craft: Yes. So, two points on this. The first would be that MCs, or Memorandums to Cabinet, I always see them as the pointy end of the spear. It's kind of looking for permission, policy authority to do something. But it really reflects, as you pointed out, a whole bunch of policy work that happens earlier. And so, my view on modernizing policymaking is not to emphasize too much the MC process. Sure, look at that.
And I will note also that the MC template that's currently in use by the government isn't publicly available to your second point. When they changed it in 2015, I asked for it.
Taki Sarantakis: [Whispers] Who told you that?
Dr. Jonathan Craft: And never got it. And it's still not public. And, to me, I always found that kind of problematic because if I'm in Wellington, New Zealand, their Cabinet decisions and the minutes of Cabinet meetings are publicly available. And so, I think there's just a different culture towards how Cabinet and its decision-making processes work in different jurisdictions. I think that's very far from where we're at. And I think that there are trade-offs and implications with that.
But I do think that there is a benefit. The other example would be their long-term briefings initiative, where their deputy level equivalents are required by law to publish through parliament long-term policy briefings on issues. So, these are kind of what's happening today, but they're – let's take AI, or take a big issue that's happening – and they generate long-term briefings to inform parliament. And that's publicly available, the views and showing their work on what the considerations are.
So, I think in the Canadian case, are there opportunities to look at opening up things? I certainly know within the scholarly community there's debate on the efficacy of having opened up mandate letters. Was that useful, or did that serve to complicate governance for people in Ottawa, or for Canadians, or what have you? So, I think you need to be careful when you open or close things from public view.
But my approach has always been that transparency and sunshine are wonderful, in a public policy context. But I do recognize and support the need for trust-based exchanges of policy advice between senior officials and Ministers and Prime Ministers and Cabinets, who are trying to sort through complicated policy issues, I think, to a degree, but I'm not sure that just opening everything up to the public would necessarily serve a purpose. My first principle here would be, to what end? Why are we doing this? What utility is it serving?
Taki Sarantakis: This isn't a red thing or a blue thing or an orange thing or a purple thing or a green thing, but in Canada we have a strong executive. And that executive, I think, continues to be very much stronger than it was, and is, in our Commonwealth cousins, or our Westminster cousins.
Is that part and parcel of the conversation that we're having here? That having a policy community, a policy capacity, in some ways, favours the executive? Because, if you have a strong parliament, by definition, the executive, I think, is weakened relatively speaking. In Canada, the relationship between parliament or the legislature and the executive is very different from most democratic countries. There are a lot of people that say they're like dictators that don't have the powers that our democratically elected executives have.
Dr. Jonathan Craft: Yes, I think we're seized in Canada with this concept and this discussion around the concentration of power in [the] Prime Minister's offices and at the centre of government. I think those discussions are warranted. But the problem is that as soon as you start having discussions about that, it sucks all the oxygen out of the broader question of how well our capacity and our policymaking systems and processes are working.
I think that having a strong political executive, in the Canadian case, has its merits in the sense of, if you look at other places where there's so much more turbulence because of the weak centre in the United Kingdom, or the repeated leadership spills that happen in Australia, and the United Kingdom, also, lots of leadership changes. What you see from a turbulent centre of government is that there's all these resets and not much gets done.
I think that having a concentration of power at the centre of government in Canada is a product of trying to govern in a really large federated public administration system, not a federal kind of country, but as well, in a federated public administration, where you've got all these different departments doing all these different kinds of things, that the tendency to want to centralize is really an attempt to try and add coherence and coordination around everything that's happening at the same time. It's problematic in other ways, and we want to make sure that Ministers, and Deputies, and other appropriate processes are in place that can inform that policymaking process.
But I am of the view that the centre cannot do everything. And indeed, I think, part of the discussion around looking at the role of, let's say, the Clerk as DM to the Prime Minister, as well as Secretary to Cabinet, and head of the public service, they're going through this conversation in the UK right now. A former Minister in the centre of government came out with recommendations on how to strengthen their centre of government. Think tanks are seized with the distribution of authorities and powers amongst the different actors at the centre of government, in part because there's a sense that they're doing too much.
And so, I'm of the view that a lot of policy work is happening that the centre of government is not unaware of, but is not necessarily as concerned with, because it's not a mandate issue or a government priority, or what have you. That policy work is still important and maybe tomorrow that's going to be something that the centre of government, or a Minister, or Cabinet wants information and policy work on.
So again, I take a more macro view, that you need to support our Cabinet and our Prime Minister to govern collegially in an effective way. But you also need, as head of public service, to be thinking about what's happening in global affairs, or happening in transport, or happening in agriculture. Those policy issues and policy files and capacity need to be nurtured as well.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, my last question is, and I want to close on this in terms of a question. You came and visited our zoo, so to speak, and you looked around the public service.
What's the role of your zoo in this? And your zoo happens to be schools of public administration, schools of political science. I think you're formerly affiliated with Munk,
Dr. Jonathan Craft: I still am. Yes.
Taki Sarantakis: which is a little bit of a think tank. What's the role of those things outside of the Government of Canada, and outside the Public Service of Canada, to help inform? Is it the generation of ideas? Is it training people? Is it being provocative? What's the role of your zoo?
Dr. Jonathan Craft: Yes, those all sound great. I think maybe a mixed bag of that. My talk was really centred around what the public service could do, and some options for them to think about for renewal and modernization. But I'm keenly aware that the community of public administration scholars thinking about, and working on these issues, is rather small in Canada. I think it's small internationally as well.
But I do think that there's been some great recommendations by colleagues in Policy Options Magazine recently around options for reform and things, and a debate around Royal Commissions versus task forces that I think is helpful. But I see our view as a bit of all of that. I mean, fundamentally, it's to do empirical research to help edify and inform the view of what's happening; providing some objectivity; providing a different view on what's going on.
I also see the benefit of comparison. As a scholar who spends a lot of time in the UK and New Zealand and Australia, they are wrestling with similar issues. Their cultures and their reform pathways and their institutions are all different. And so, I think that that provides us insights on what's possible, but also gives us a chance to reflect on ourselves, and to say what's unique about the Canadian case. What do we need to be thinking about now?
So, I'm in favour of all-hands-on-deck, more folks thinking about what's going on in these big questions, inside government, outside of government. And I've certainly appreciated the opportunity to be the visiting scholar here at the School. And one of the things I did was bring in other scholars and try and make connections with public servants through some events.
So, I think I'm bullish. I think there's lots of opportunity, and it's just about trying to be thoughtful and comprehensive and taking that first step towards more stewardship.
Taki Sarantakis: I can't say this enough, public policy matters. Public policy is what we do as a collective, whether that's at the municipal level, the provincial level, the national level, or the supranational level. But policy, at the end of the day, is what makes us live well, or not well, in civilized collective communities. And Professor Jonathan Craft is one of the brightest lights in the Canadian public policy and public administration space.
Thank you so much for your time as the 2024 Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar at the Canada School of Public Service and thank you for your provocative speech to end your tenure at that role.
Dr. Jonathan Craft: Thanks very much.
Taki Sarantakis: Thanks so much.
[01:11:35 Taki Sarantakis and Jonathan Craft shake hands amiably.]
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