Governing: Essays in Honour of Donald J. Savoie 9780773588721

Table of contents :
Cover
GOVERNING
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
1 Looking Back
PART ONE EXECUTIVE POWER AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
2 Power, Responsibility, and Agency in Canadian Government
3 Constraining Executive Power in the Era of New Political Governance
4 Communications and Prime Ministerial Power
5 Establishing the Boundaries of the Public Service: Toward a New Moral Contract
6 Categorizing Senior Officials: Toward a Classification of Typologies
7 Thirty Years of Public Management Reforms: Has There Been a Pattern?
8 The Future of Public Administration
PART TWO REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT
9 Why Regional Development Policies Are (Mostly) Ineffective and Why It Does Not Matter
10 Revisiting Grandchildren: Building Regions in the Maritimes
11 Democratizing Regional Economic Development in Sweden: Why? Did It Make a Difference?
12 The Economic Integration Continuum and the Canadian Securities Industry: In Praise of the Status Quo
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

governing

The contributors gathered together in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, 8–10 June 2011, for a conference in honour of Donald Savoie, who is pictured near the centre of the group with hands folded.

Governing Essays in Honour of Donald J. Savoie

Edited by j a m e s b i c k e rt o n and b. guy peters

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2013 ISBN 978-0-7735-4125-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-8872-1 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-8873-8 (ePUB) Legal deposit second quarter 2013 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Institute for Research on Public Policy and Administration at the Université de Moncton. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication   Governing : essays in honour of Donald J. Savoie / edited by James Bickerton and B. Guy Peters. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7735-4125-2. – ISBN 978-0-7735-8872-1 (ePDF). – ISBN 978-0-7735-8873-8 (ePUB)   1. Public administration.  2. Regional planning.  I. Bickerton, James II. Peters, B. Guy  III. Savoie, Donald J., 1947– JF1351.G684 2013  352  C2013-901161-7 Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in 10.5/13 Sabon

Contents

Preface vii 1 Looking Back  3 Donald J. Savoie pa rt o n e  

e x e c u t i v e p o w e r a n d p u b l i c a d m i n i s t r at i o n

2 Power, Responsibility, and Agency in Canadian Government  25 Senator Lowell Murray 3 Constraining Executive Power in the Era of New Political Governance 32 Peter Aucoin, Herman Bakvis, and Mark D. Jarvis 4 Communications and Prime Ministerial Power  53 Paul G. Thomas 5 Establishing the Boundaries of the Public Service: Toward a New Moral Contract  85 Ralph Heintzman 6 Categorizing Senior Officials: Toward a Classification of Typologies 139 Jacques Bourgault 7 Thirty Years of Public Management Reforms: Has There Been a Pattern? 180 Christopher Pollitt 8 The Future of Public Administration  203 B. Guy Peters

vi Contents pa rt t w o  

regional development

9 Why Regional Development Policies Are (Mostly) Ineffective and Why It Does Not Matter  225 Mario Polèse 10 Revisiting Grandchildren: Building Regions in the Maritimes  260 James Bickerton 11 Democratizing Regional Economic Development in Sweden: Why? Did It Make a Difference?  291 Jon Pierre 12 The Economic Integration Continuum and the Canadian Securities Industry: In Praise of the Status Quo  306 Thomas J. Courchene Contributors 331 Index 337

Preface

Governing is a central activity in all societies, which must have some means of setting and attaining collective goals, in other words, of governing. Although this activity is conventionally conducted through governments, as public policies have become more complex and societies have come to stress participation more, there has been more extensive involvement of market and social actors in governing. Even with the increased involvement of non-governmental actors, however, the public and others involved in the governing process tend to focus on the role of prime ministers and presidents and often assume that success or failure in governing can be attributed primarily to those chief executives. Our colleague Donald Savoie has spent his distinguished career investigating several key dimensions of the process of governing. His career has involved both the practice of governing as a civil servant and also the careful study of several key aspects of governing as a scholar. Even as a scholar, however, Donald’s work has had immense practical application and has influenced government structure and policy both in Ottawa and in the four provinces of Atlantic Canada. The breadth of Donald’s research interests is impressive, but all the fields in which he has been involved are closely related to the processes of governing and are also concerned with questions of democracy and accountability in governing. Although we could identify other areas of research, such as public budgeting, in which Donald Savoie has made significant contributions, this volume in his honour will address three main areas of research: public administration, executive power and politics, and regional development policy. In all these areas Donald has made significant contributions and has been recognized nationally and

viii Preface

i­nternationally for those contributions. Further, he has worked with and inspired the authors of the ten essays contained in this volume, and our work reflects his influence perhaps more than he or we can know. p u b l i c a d m i n i s t r at i o n

Donald Savoie has made a number of contributions to the understanding of public administration in Canada and in other AngloAmerican democracies. His varied experience as a practising civil servant, along with his extensive scholarly research, has given him insights into this field that few if any scholars could hope to match. For example, his book on the influence of market ideas in the ­Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney governments represented a major statement about the evolution of the state under governments of the “New Right.” In addition, his research on the fundamental premises of administration in Westminster-style parliamentary democracies is foundational for understanding administration in these systems. Governing and public administration are also constantly in a process of change. “Reform” is one of the most commonly used words when discussing governance, and Donald Savoie has been very much involved in the analysis of reform in the public sector. Indeed, much of Donald’s research and writing on public administration over the past several decades has been directed toward understanding and explaining the widespread reform of the public sector during that period. Importantly, he was skeptical about the sweeping claims of New Public Management as the panacea for the ills of the public sector, and he engaged in spirited debates with the advocates of that approach to governing. Likewise, a series of books he published in conjunction with the Canadian Centre for Management Development are widely cited by other scholars in the discipline. Donald Savoie’s interest in maintaining accountability and democracy in public administration was also demonstrated in his work as research director of the Gomery Commission. His work and that of the commission as a whole addressed the implications of emerging forms of governance for the public sector in Canada and elsewhere. In particular, this report addressed the continuing problem of the relationship between politicians and civil servants in democratic governments.



Preface ix

executive power and politics

The concern with democracy in parliamentary regimes extended from public administration to concern over changes in the role of prime minister and cabinet. As are many other scholars, Donald Savoie has been concerned with the increasing “presidentialization” of prime ministers, with the traditional powers of parliament and cabinet as a whole being reduced in favour of an enhanced role for the prime minister. The traditional role for the prime minister in Westminster systems as primus inter pares appears to have vanished in favour of more powerful and controlling political leaders operating from the centre of government. Although he has had some comparative concerns, Donald has been especially concerned with the transformation of Canadian government. He has characterized the emergent form of government as “court politics,” analogous to the style of governing in absolute monarchies. In this style, not only is the chief executive virtually all powerful but also much of the politics is concerned with enhancing the power and prestige of the leader. In such a governing style, the usual business of governing – delivering public services and holding officials accountable – appears secondary to the more personalized goals. Again, although Donald Savoie’s work on executive politics has a strong academic and research background that speaks to issues of concern within the scholarly community, it has also become a major part of the public debate about governing in Canada. His writings have opened a public discussion about the nature of contemporary governing and how to maintain accountability and democratic control in a period of constant media exposure and the capacity of communications managers to “spin” events in ways that support the role of the chief executive. In particular, this discussion has provided strong support for traditional ideas about governance in Canada, even in the face of continuing changes in the technology of governing. regional development policy

The third area of research for which Donald Savoie has gained welldeserved recognition is regional economic development policy. While in general his research has relevance for many areas of C ­ anada,

x Preface

and indeed for other parts of the world, the primary focus of this research has been on his native Maritime Provinces, and especially New Brunswick. He has written extensively on the possibilities for, and constraints on, economic development in this region, and on the most appropriate ways of fostering economic growth. His prolific research in this area has been path-breaking, broad in scope, and penetrating in analysis. As a result, it has been both influential in policy circles and highly regarded by academic peers. As noted, his work in this area has not been purely academic. He has been actively involved in shaping government policies aimed at promoting economic development in the Maritimes and other “have less” regions in Canada. Among other things, his scholarly work and professional recommendations were central to the creation of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA), which for the past quarter century has been the federal government’s primary development agency for the Atlantic region. His decades-long involvement with regional policy and with the exigencies of governing in the Maritime provinces has placed a strong personal stamp both on the history of government policy and programs in that region of C ­ anada as well as on the continuing evolution of the regional development field. acknowledgments

The contributors to this volume all felt honoured to be involved in this enterprise. It is our way of expressing our appreciation for ­Donald’s research and for his important influences on our own research and our own careers. The essays contained here all address some aspect or another of Donald’s many contributions to the literature in public administration, political science, and economics. They also speak to the contributions that he has made to the practice of governing in Canada and elsewhere. While these essays all reflect and speak to Donald’s work, they also make their own contributions to the discussions about governing that have so animated his life as an academic scholar and public intellectual. In so doing, it is intended that the essays in this book will not only honour the stellar career of Donald Savoie but provide as well an important set of perspectives on the changing vicissitudes of governing and on the role of the state in contemporary society.



Preface xi

This collection of essays originated as a set of papers presented to a festschrift in honour of Donald Savoie hosted by the Canadian Institute for Research on Public Policy and Public Administration at the Université de Moncton and held in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, 8–10 June 2011. The conference was a great success, and on behalf of the contributors to this volume, the editors would like to thank all the organizers for their dedicated work on this project. In particular, Pierre Marcel Desjardins and B. Guy Peters deserve special mention as conference convenors; Manon Cormier at the Université de Moncton was essential to its organization; Marcy Baker at St Francis Xavier University provided valuable technical support during the editing process. The editors would also like to gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the conference sponsors: the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, the Canadian Institute for Research on Public Policy and Public Administration (CIRPPPA), and the Université de Moncton.

JB/BGP

GOVERNING

1 Looking Back d o n a l d j . s av o i e

My career has been devoted to the study of two issues: regional economic development and public administration. At least on the face of it, one may well think that there is little in common between the two fields. However, there is a common thread linking the two: regional economic development requires the active involvement of the public sector to be effective, and public administration is concerned with improving the performance and accountability of government. In brief, good public policy is not possible without good public administration. The participants in this Festschrift recognize this connection, and all came with ideas to strengthen both regional economic development policy and public administration. As the reader has discovered, the Festschrift was fortunate to attract an impressive collection of scholars from Canada, Europe, and the United States. They gathered in Bouctouche, a beautiful coastal community near my birthplace on the shores of the Northumberland Strait. It is fitting that the sessions were held in Bouctouche for another reason, since the community was one of the first areas in Canada to be designated by the federal government for regional development programs. It was designated in the 1960s as a “Newstart” community, under a program that sought to identify innovative ways for governments and citizens to collaborate to promote economic development (Savoie 1986). It exemplified the importance of public administration in shaping and delivering the Newstart initiatives, and it would be the first of many such meetings between the two fields of expertise.

4 Governing f r o m p u b l i c a d m i n i s t r at i o n t o n e w p u b l i c m a n a g e m e n t , t o n e w p u b l i c g o v e r n a n c e  – a n d b a c k a g a i n ?

There was little in the way of a private sector in small Acadian communities like Bouctouche in the 1950s and 1960s. Acadians fished, farmed, worked on construction sites, or left for work to the “Boston states,” as they were then called. The Roman Catholic Church was the glue that held Acadian communities together, and the English-­ speaking majority ran the businesses. When the church lost standing in our communities, Acadians of my generation turned to government for the new glue and for measures to grow our regions. We had nowhere else to turn. Louis J. Robichaud was elected premier of New Brunswick in 1960, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau became prime minister in 1968. In the parlance of the Facebook generation, “it was a game changer.” Suddenly, governments were extending helping hands to communities, to groups, and to individuals to help them climb the economic ladder. We now have a catalogue of past and present government programs designed to promote economic development, official languages policy, education, new health care services – and the list goes on. For Acadians of my generation, it was a brave new world opening up before us, full of opportunities and promise. We wanted to be part of the building process. I took a strong interest in political science, economics, and public administration at university. I wrote my doctoral thesis on the interplay between public administration, regional economic development, and Canadian federalism. The study of public administration in my formative years was essentially about the workings of our political and public service institutions and about the discourse between politicians, public servants, and citizens. Students of my generation saw considerable merit in Wallace Sayre’s classic phrase that public and private management are “fundamentally alike in all unimportant ways” (Wilson 1981, 428). We accepted without much debate Graham Allison’s argument that “the notion that there is any significant body of private management practices and skills that can be transferred directly to public management tasks in a way that produces significant improvements is wrong” (Allison 1987, 425). We studied public administration, our courses were labelled public administration, and our textbooks had unabashed public administration titles. We read Ted Hodgetts’ The Canadian Public Service:



Looking Back 5

A Physiology of Government, 1867–1970 to understand how the public service as an institution took shape (Hodgetts 1973). James Mallory explained how the machinery of government should work with all policy and public administration actors playing their proper roles. He insisted, for example, that the role of political staff should be limited to basic functions such as scheduling and communications, while leaving policy to public servants and ministers (1967, 25–34). By the 1980s, however, both public administration and regional economic development policy had come under attack throughout the Anglo-American democracies. Both were viewed, at best, as outdated and, at worst, as wasteful and in urgent need of repair. Something had gone wrong with both, but the cause was unclear. It may be that the public sector had grown too big while clinging to dated structures, or that expectations of new regional economic measures were set at such a high level that they could never be met. Whatever the explanation, disappointment set in and the search, at first led by Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, was on for new approaches. Public administration took on a new look with the introduction of New Public Management. NPM was structured along the lines that Wallace Sayre and Graham Allison had warned could never work. Senior public servants knew that the new wave of politicians such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Brian Mulroney rejected out of hand the status quo (Savoie 1995). Still, public servants were themselves quite comfortable with what they believed to be the tried and proven tenets of public administration; thus the politicians were left on their own to try “this” or “that” to see what could work better. They turned to private sector executives to show the way ahead. Indeed, the political leadership of the 1980s in Anglo-­American democracies turned to privatization, make-orbuy policies, and private-sector inspired management practices to deal with real or perceived shortcomings in government organizations. What in government could not be privatized would be made to look like the private sector, to the extent possible. Among other things, citizens became customers, strategic plans became business plans, and pay-for-performance schemes replaced steady-as-she-goes human resources practices. We soon discovered, however, that it was considerably easier to change the vocabulary than it was to change the decision-making process. Some thirty years later, NPM is no longer in fashion. A good

6 Governing

number of NPM measures are being scrapped or are not living up to expectations (for example, pay-for-performance schemes). Today, much is being written about New Public Governance (NPG), with the focus on the role of political staff, the concentration of power in the hands of prime ministers and their courtiers, and the growing pressure on the public service to provide a pro-government spin in government policy and communications (Aucoin 2008). NPG’s central message is that something has gone wrong with NPM and the public sector is once again in urgent need of repair. The current state of the public sector is all too familiar for Acadians of my generation. It takes us back to when the Roman Catholic Church saw its dominant position in society slip. Government bureaucracies are under attack despite sustained efforts to make them look like the private sector. Calls are being heard even in small communities like Bouctouche for politicians to cut government departments down to size, to put an end to generous pension plans for public servants, and to lower taxes. The private sector is now king. In some quarters, and here again in many small Acadian communities, the private sector is regarded as the sole legitimate “creator” of wealth, while the public sector is regarded as bloated and spendthrift. Acadians, like many other Canadians, have not been immune to the shift in society favouring the attributes of individuals over those of the community. Acadians of my generation witnessed first-hand a shift away from the church to the promises of the welfare state and a growing public sector. We are now seeing a shift away from reliance on the public sector towards the individual, towards the notion that every one of sound mind and body should look after his or her own welfare. It is not too much of an exaggeration to write that the past thirty years have proven that Wallace Sayre and Graham Allison have been right all along. Attempts to make the public sector look like the private sector were misguided and subject to failure from the very beginning. They have instead served to make the public sector look less competent than it was in years past in the eyes of many citizens. Lest there be any confusion, I am firmly of the view that the public sector can never be made to look like or operate like the private sector, that the public sector can never be made to be as efficient or as effective as the private sector, and that one does a great disservice to the public sector to make citizens think that it can be run like a business. The belief that it can (or should) has contributed greatly in



Looking Back 7

recent years to the continuing deterioration of the public service as an institution. This may well suggest that fixing the public service as an institution requires a back-to-the-future strategy. Canadian regional economic development efforts took form as Canada’s welfare state came of age. They have had, however, an uneasy existence from the beginning. Politicians, for the most part, whether from the political left or right, have embraced the efforts, but senior public servants, particularly those serving in central agencies, notably the Department of Finance, invariably see problems with it. Tom Kent, a former deputy minister of the Department of Regional Economic Expansion (DREE), put it succinctly when he observed, “From the point of view of almost all conventional wisdom in Ottawa, the idea of regional development was a rather improper one that otherwise reasonable politicians brought in like a baby on a doorstep from an election campaign” (Canada 1973, 24). Until the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) was introduced in 1987, a new approach and a new organization for regional economic development would invariably follow an election campaign. As has often been noted, Canada has since the late 1950s put in place a veritable alphabet soup of regional economic development programs. We have seen measures to promote rural development, urban development, entrepreneurship, tourism, the forestry sector, fishery, industrial parks, the relocation of government units, infrastructure developments – and the list goes on and on. We have also seen a host of organizational models to promote regional economic development – a line department, a central agency, a mix of the two, a stand-alone agency, and federal-provincial agreements. Each new approach was introduced with considerable fanfare and promise, only to be abandoned a few years later for yet another new approach (Savoie 2006). Two overriding forces have shaped and reshaped Canada’s regional economic development policy over the years: the politics of Canadian regionalism and the rise of neo-conservatism. It was concerns over national unity that drove regional development policy in its early years and, later, neo-conservatism that changed its orientation. Former prime minister Trudeau spoke to the policy’s central purpose when he observed that “regional economic development is as threatening to national unity as the language issue” (Phidd and Doern 1978, 324). While Ottawa’s regional economic development policy has had many twists and turns, it has had at its core the

8 Governing

­ romotion of national unity, managing regional tensions, and prop moting partisan political interests. In its early years, the policy was clearly about alleviating Canada’s regional economic disparities. Jean Marchand, Trudeau’s trusted Quebec lieutenant and the first minister responsible for DREE, made it clear that the department was above all dedicated to alleviating regional economic disparities in Atlantic Canada and eastern Quebec. He maintained that the department should, for some years to come, spend something like 80 percent of its budget east of TroisRivières, Quebec. Only “modest and controlled” spending should be directed to “slow growth” areas in northern Ontario and the northern parts of the four Western provinces (Savoie 1986). This commitment was short-lived. With the rise of the sovereignist-­ separatist movement in Quebec in the 1970s, the federal government decided to adjust its regional economic development policy to show Quebecers that Canadian federalism could be made to work for them. It designated the city of Montreal under its policy, which made the city eligible for cash grants to businesses and for federal infrastructure spending. Members of parliament from all sides began to ask, if Montreal, given its size and its economic activities, can be designated, then why not the community I represent? (Savoie 1986, chapter 6). Before long, Canada’s regional economic development efforts were extended to cover virtually every region, area, and community in the country. The economic recession of the early 1980s prompted Ottawa to overhaul once again its approach to regional economic development. The minister of finance told Canadians in his 1981 budget speech that Canada’s regional balance was changing as a result of buoyancy in the West, optimism in the East, and unprecedented softness in key economic sectors in Central Canada (Savoie 1986, 76). Ottawa policy-makers, as elsewhere, were – and for that matter remain  – preoccupied with Canada’s industrial heartland, the Windsor-to-­Quebec City corridor. DREE was abolished and a new Department of Regional Industrial Expansion (DRIE) was established. Ed Lumley, DRIE’s first minister, rose in the Commons to announce that he had defined a new program to correspond to Canada’s new economic realities. He declared that the program was a “regionally sensitized, multifaceted program of industrial assistance in all parts of Canada. This is not a program available only in certain designated regions. Whatever riding any Member of this



Looking Back 9

House represents, his or her constituents will be eligible for assistance” (Canada 1983, 1–2). It will be recalled that the economic recession of the early 1980s was short-lived and that Canada’s industrial heartland saw strong economic growth return within a few years. In addition, Finance Department officials and the minister never explained how, sitting in the Laurier Building in downtown Ottawa, they were able to gauge a growing level of “optimism” in Atlantic Canada. DRIE, however, performed as expected and saw the bulk of its resources spent in Ontario and Quebec. By the late 1980s it became clear that DRIE was unable to promote – was perhaps uninterested in promoting – economic development in Atlantic Canada. Some provincial government officials in Atlantic Canada started to point out that, on occasion, firms that were thinking of establishing a plant in either their region or southern Ontario received more generous offers from DRIE to locate in southern Ontario (Savoie 1987, 14). New Brunswick premier Richard Hatfield told the prime minister to abolish DRIE, since it was promoting regional disparities rather than alleviating them (Savoie 2006, 136). Prime Minister Brian Mulroney decided to change both the government’s regional economic development policy and its machinery. He asked me to consult with Atlantic Canadians and to define a new agency to promote regional economic development. I consulted more than one hundred Atlantic Canadians, including the provincial premiers, federal Atlantic ministers, and a cross-section of business people, labour leaders, academics, and voluntary associations. The message came loud and clear: first, national economic policies showed little understanding of Atlantic Canada’s economic circumstances, challenges, and opportunities; second, federal economic development efforts were overly bureaucratic and overly cautious. I presented my report to the prime minister in November–­December 1985, and he, in turn, unveiled ACOA on 6 June 1987 in St John’s, Newfoundland. The agency would have its head office located in the region, in Moncton, not in Ottawa. It would sit between a line department and a Crown corporation (with a private sector advisory board), it would have a small staff (of about one hundred) so that it would not become overly bureaucratic, and it would focus on promoting local entrepreneurship and advocating Atlantic Canada’s economic circumstances before Ottawa policy- and decision makers. Within a few months, the prime minister unveiled a similar agency

10 Governing

for Western Canada. Later, agencies were announced for Quebec and for Northern Ontario. In the aftermath of the 2008 economic recession and in a development reminiscent of the recession of the early 1980s, Prime Minister Harper introduced yet another agency for southern Ontario, based on the ACOA model. Finally, Canada’s North is now also home to a federal economic development agency. One would be hard pressed to define the purpose of Canada’s regional economic development policy. To be sure, it is no longer designed to alleviate regional disparities. How could it, when every postal code in the country, including Toronto, has access to a federal economic development agency? It is about something else, but what? It is sustained by a political constituency, and the agencies come in handy when a project has to be supported somehow, when an announcement needs to be made, or when the government’s presence in a region has to be underlined. The agencies are politically and even bureaucratically convenient, notably when special infrastructure programs have to be delivered as part of a government’s action plan in dealing with an economic downturn. For the most part, however, the agencies are about promoting entrepreneurship, private sector growth, and the pursuit of trade opportunities for local businesses. Their budgets – notably that of ACOA – have been reduced from their initial funding levels. Unlike earlier regional economic development measures, the agencies view the world from a private sector perspective. I recall well an ACOA official telling me proudly over lunch, “we are just like a business, we are really not like a government department. We have to perform like a business, not like a government department.” That speaks to both the state of the public sector, even in the eyes of public servants, and to Ottawa’s regional economic development policy. The policy is now all about private-sector-inspired economic growth and has precious little to do with alleviating or even attenuating regional disparities in slow-growth regions. the contributors

Senator Lowell Murray provides an excellent mise en scène in chapter 2. Very few practitioners would have the knowledge and ability to produce such a thoughtful account of the challenges confronting both our national political and administrative institutions and Canadian federalism. He writes with authority and experience, given



Looking Back 11

his leadership role in the 1980s in overhauling Canada’s constitution and as the first minister responsible for ACOA. Every Canadian should take note of Senator Murray’s blunt observation: “Parliament, specifically the House of Commons, over a period of more than forty years, has allowed its most vital power, the power of the purse, to become a dead letter – its Supply and Estimates process is an empty ritual.” We might well ask: if the Commons can no longer discharge its responsibility for the power of the purse, then what can it do? (Good 2007; Bennett et al. 2003). Students of government know that cabinet government, as we once knew it, is broken. How could it not be, given that, as Murray reports, the key decisions regarding Canada’s military deployments in Afghanistan (one by a Liberal government and another by a Conservative government) were made by the prime minister with the help of only a handful of political advisors and civilian and military officials? The two relevant ministers – of National Defence and Foreign Affairs – were not even in the room. Senator Murray also goes to the heart of the matter of Canadian regional economic development policy when he writes about the need for regional agencies to overcome “Ottawa” attitudes. He hints that the Ottawa “mindset” accepts what it perceives to be “regional boondoggles” only so long as they do not challenge the status quo in national economic policies. Peter Aucoin, Mark D. Jarvis, and Herman Bakvis do both practitioners and students of public administration an important service in chapter 3 by seeking to answer the question, how best to constrain executive power? John L. Manion, founding principal of the Canadian Centre for Management Development, later renamed the Canada School of the Public Service, once told me that “academics are quite good at telling us what’s wrong about government and why things are the way they are. However, I cannot think of a single academic in recent years telling us – here is how things should work, here is how you can improve government, or here is a solution.” Aucoin, Jarvis, and Bakvis not only explore what is wrong, but also propose solutions on how to make things right. They provide an excellent overview of developments in public administration in recent years. They explain the emergence of New Public Governance and point to its more salient characteristics: permanent election campaigns, the emergence of partisan political staffers as a third force in governance, the personal-politicization

12 Governing

of appointments to the more senior public service levels, and a redefinition of public service loyalty to mean being “promiscuously partisan” to the government of the day. Central to NPG is the concentration of power in the hands of the prime minister and carefully selected advisors. They have come to dominate whatever aspect of governing they would like to dominate. The authors make the case that Canada represents the more extreme example of the concentration of power relative to other Westminster-style parliamentary systems. Aucoin, Jarvis, and Bakvis point to three areas of reform to strengthen the hands of Parliament and cabinet. They provide a list of possible changes, from the introduction of proportional representation, to revising party discipline, to having a smaller cabinet, they suggest changing the way senior public service appointments are made by instituting a more independent staffing regime, and they also call for measures to enable Parliament to scrutinize the government and to retract confidence as it sees fit. They suggest that the consent of a two-thirds majority of the Commons be required to prorogue Parliament. Jacques Bourgault has long studied the performance of senior public servants and their impact on public administration. In chapter 6, he seeks to identify the factors that influence the roles and performance of senior public servants. In his typology he considers, among other things, the institutional setting, the relationship between public servants and politicians, and career management measures. Bourgault compares different institutional settings within which senior public servants operate, from the career bureaucracy model, to one based on the spoils system, to constitutional bureaucracy. He discusses how senior public servants relate to politicians. In some instances, public servants occupy their own distinct space and see a separation between themselves and politicians. In other cases, they simply accede to the wishes of politicians, and in still others there is a genuine partnership between the two in shaping public policy. Bourgault also classifies how public servants operate in society. He writes about the representational bargain (representation of all major groups) and the agency bargains (delegated or directed bargains with senior public officials). He also outlines a number of departmental roles for senior officials: the guardian role, where they have both strong views and influence; the guru role, where one’s expertise is widely recognized; the promoter role, where the official



Looking Back 13

is engaged in pushing the government’s agenda; and the leader role, where the senior official has a strong grasp of the department’s culture and is able to define and promote it. Bourgault pursues his classification and assessment of the role of senior officials in implementing NPM measures. He writes about contractual arrangements, the shift to performance pay, greater managerial authority, and enhanced professional responsibility on the part of senior officials for results achieved. He correctly points out that this is not without implications for the public service as an institution. Bourgault acknowledges that assembling, classifying, and integrating a number of typologies “is not without limitations.” However, through his approach, Bourgault is able to shed new light on the impact management reforms have had on the traditional values of public servants, notably loyalty, as well as on their status in government and society. James Bickerton, one of Canada’s leading scholars of Canadian regionalism and federalism, asks some fundamental questions about the state of Canada’s regions and Ottawa’s regional development policy. In chapter 10 he offers insightful observations on two key terms that we all too often take for granted: regions and development. We frequently employ the two words to mean different things, and to bring order to the debate, Bickerton seeks to establish a common understanding of them. He correctly argues that practitioners, observers, and students of public policy too often simply assume what the words mean or employ them to serve their own purpose. Bickerton makes the case that development is more, or at least ought to be more, than economics. It involves creating economic opportunities to be sure, but it also speaks to a complex set of relationships between the state, citizens, the private sector, labour, and issues of regional inequalities as well as regional identities. Bickerton explores three dimensions of Canada’s regional development efforts, past and current: integration, institutions, and identities. He looks to integration – or rather, the lack of proper integration – to explain the economic underdevelopment of the Maritime provinces in relation to the rest of Canada. This underdevelopment also explains the region’s historical grievances directed to the terms of Confederation and the operations of national political institutions. The arrival of the global economy and free trade agreements have provided new opportunities but also challenges for the region.

14 Governing

Institutions matter in promoting development, and provincial governments have over the years expanded their roles in this area, in part because – as Bickerton points out – national institutions “in their design are relatively impermeable to regional political forces.” He makes the case that we now need strong and adaptive institutions that are less tied to path dependency. He also highlights the importance of regional identities and culture in underlying both regional leadership and development. Bickerton writes about “regions within regions” and highlights two – Acadia and Cape Breton. Both are peripheral regions within a peripheral region (the Maritime provinces), settled by people speaking a minority language and with poor agricultural land. Acadia was able to strike a strong partnership with the federal government in search of linguistic and social equity, and with the provincial government at the time Louis J. Robichaud came to power in 1960. Cape Breton, meanwhile, underwent an economic crisis when its industrial base started to give way with the closing of its coal mines and steel mill. While Acadia sought to strike alliances with both senior orders of government, Cape Breton sought to set itself apart as a region. Bickerton concludes with a call for local elites to take the lead and to make effective use of the institutions and identities that they themselves have helped to establish in order to “thrive economically and culturally.” Ralph Heintzman has produced an excellent chapter (chapter 5) on an issue that is at the core of the new challenges in public administration – defining a proper role for public servants after NPM and NPG have run their course. He seeks to answer what is arguably the most important question in public administration: what is the relationship between the political executive and public servants? He has produced, in my view, the most thoughtful and insightful essay on the issue currently available. He does not mince words, suggesting that unless we delineate some boundaries between the two, the public service will not be able to renew “its moral contract with Canadian citizens, or even with its own employees.” Heintzman reviews, in a systematic and insightful fashion, four approaches to establishing boundaries between the political executive and the public service: the constitutional independence of the public service; the accounting officer; the appointment of deputy ministers; and a charter of the public service. Employing a dialectic approach, he underscores the strengths and weaknesses of the four



Looking Back 15

approaches, and he never hesitates to challenge accepted wisdom and to debunk easy solutions that would not work when put into practice. Constitutional independence of the public service is fraught with problems. How could one pursue constitutional independence when the first duty of a public servant under the law is to help ministers pursue the public interest? The concept of accounting officer holds promise but, at least as it is applied in Canada, it has significant shortcomings. The concept, properly defined, enables deputy ministers “to draw a line in the sand” in establishing where “the boundaries of public service values and action end and those of political accountability take over.” The concept, however, has been poorly defined in Canada because it does not give deputy ministers the tools to clarify accountability – rather, as things stand, it may well make things worse. Among others, much has been written of late by Peter Aucoin, Jacques Bourgault, and the Gomery Commission about the appointment of deputy ministers (Aucoin 2006, 33–49; Canada 2006). Heintzman argues that the current approach serves to centralize power at the centre of government. He reviews alternative approaches but sees flaws in all of them. He then considers establishing a “Charter of the Public Service,” which, he points out, holds considerable merit. This charter would serve to put in place a new “public service bargain,” one that would serve to make the public service professional and non-partisan, a state of affairs that politicians would be required by statute to uphold. B. Guy Peters takes on both a timely and a difficult topic in chapter 8 – the future of public administration. Few anywhere could rise to the challenge as well as Peters does in his essay. He revisits public service reforms, notably those associated with NPM. He points to a number of contradictions: public service reforms from the bottom up that have to contend with reforms from the top down; strengthening the hand of public sector managers while degrading the public service or bureaucrats; somehow empowering politicians, public service managers, and citizens all at the same time. He explores the meaning and application of soft power in steering the ship of state. There are many facets to soft power, to the art of steering from the political centre without having to resort to command and control instruments. The political executive can set the broad policy agenda, then pursue a “golden thread” strategy

16 Governing

designed to focus on a relatively few lines of control and performance management measures. Peters, who has long promoted a broader perspective on governance, maintains that students of public administration need to focus on both the political class and the executive of the public service in the pursuit of effective governance. He writes that “they are” the partners in making and implementing public policies. He points out, however, that the reforms of the past few decades appear to be “contradictions” because the political side often sent conflicting messages to its public service. The future of public administration is tied to strong working relations between politicians and the public service. Peters suggests more effective political controls to ensure the “primacy of politics,” and he concludes with the observation that “it is a question of steering more cleverly, and more softly, rather than not steering at all.” In chapter 7 Christopher Pollitt has produced what students of public administration and government have come to expect from him – a highly readable, very well argued, and original contribution on an important issue in public administration: the impact of public management reforms. He asks whether there has been a discernible pattern in public management reforms and his answer is yes. He outlines six discernible elements. First, he correctly points out that public management reform has become a high-profile political issue. Reforming the public sector is no longer quietly debated inside government departments. Indeed, it has even acquired international networks. Second, political ideology has fuelled public management reform by treating government as if it were a business. Third, the reform measures, though widespread, have varied in their effectiveness. Fourth, we need to compare talk with talk and practices with practices. Fifth, precious few credible evaluations of the reform measures have been produced. And sixth, instances of alternation in reform measures are evident (e.g., from centralization to decentralization and back again). Pollitt provides an excellent assessment of the six elements that will be of strong interest to readers. I note, in particular, his analysis of the “business of governments.” The reforms have changed in a fundamental fashion the language of public administration. The language of government now closely resembles that of the private sector – departments submit business plans, a number of senior level public service positions have been relabelled chief executive officers,



Looking Back 17

and citizens are now called consumers in many jurisdictions. A good number of government departments have also turned over parts of their operations (e.g., information technology) to large private sector firms to manage. In looking back over the past thirty years, Pollitt maintains that the reforms have had an impact – some positive, some less so. To be sure, a new industry of government reform measures has taken shape. He concludes with an insightful and telling observation that is well worth repeating here: “public management reform may have become a policy sector in its own right, but its theoretical underpinnings appear to be disjointed, its evidence base is very patchy and its political identity remains as yet unsure.” Paul Thomas writes in chapter 4 about an issue that students of public administration have not paid sufficient attention to in the past: the role communications plays in shaping public policy and decision making and the role of the “centre” of government in establishing an overall communications strategy for the government. Thomas correctly points out that Canada, like its southern neighbour, has entered an era of “permanent campaigns,” and that as a result, the techniques for winning power have become part of the processes of governing. Given the importance of communications both in election campaigns and now in the processes of governing, Thomas persuasively argues that defining and implementing a communications strategy have strengthened the hand of prime ministers. Thomas explores all facets of the issue. He considers the ability of governments to deal with increasingly complex and demanding communications challenges, Canada’s constitutional and institutional arrangements, which shape both the distribution of power and communications pattern in and out of government. He makes the case that communications is an “underestimated source of prime ministerial power.” In exploring the key issues in shaping a communications strategy, Thomas looks at personalization, media relations management, and agenda setting. He also looks at recent developments in the communications world – the rise of spin doctors and the hotly debated difference between political and government communications. Thomas examines the Harper government (circa 2006–11) to review the role of the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office in communications and the impact of Harper’s decision to impose greater central control of communications. He also looks at

18 Governing

the operation of Canada’s access to information legislation and the potential for political interference in its implementation. Thomas underlines the importance of communications for the prime minister and insists that if a prime minister is not able to integrate communications into his political leadership and in leading the government, then he or she “risks failure.” This, in turn, explains why communications is now brought in very early in shaping government policy. It also explains in large measure why there are an increasing number of communications advisors at the centre of government and why the centre has consolidated the development and implementation of communications strategies. Mario Polèse, in his thoughtful and provocative contribution (chapter 9), dares to ask why regional development policies are mostly ineffective and why it does not matter. Polèse draws on forty years of research in his review of Canada’s regional development approaches. It is important to note at the outset that he equates regional development efforts with alleviating regional disparities. Polèse provides an overview of historical trends in regional disparities in Canada and some other selected countries. He looks at population growth, unemployment rates, and income and at four sub-regions in Eastern Canada: Grand Falls in central Newfoundland, northeast New Brunswick, Cape Breton, and the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec. He sees little progress. He also provides a brief history of Canada’s regional development policy in which he describes the widely employed “growth pole” concept as a faulty model, pointing to Montreal to make the case. Notwithstanding important public investment to promote Montreal’s development, the city actually underperformed during the immediate post-growth-pole period in relation to other cities, notably Toronto. In addition, the promised trickle-down effect to peripheral regions like Gaspé did not occur. As could have been expected, there was a political backlash in other communities that were not designated as growth poles. The growth pole concept, according to Polèse, is hardly the only policy initiative that did not live up to expectations. Canada, like a number of other Western countries, embraced the “clusters” approach to promoting economic development in the 1980s and 1990s. Regardless of whether this approach to regional economic development is a valid one (and it continues to be contested), the problem is that policy-makers have applied the concept to too many communities, including many small ones. In brief, the politics of the



Looking Back 19

“cluster” approach is at the heart of the problem with its application by policy-makers. Education and the “people chasing” approach are also not without challenges. Richard Florida’s work on local economic development and the creative class is the new fashion in economic development. If only a community had its own university and other cultural attributes designed to attract creative workers, then all would be well. Polèse is not convinced and raises a number of problems with the approach. He again warns of applying concepts that may well apply in certain large urban areas but not to many smaller communities or regions. Polèse also raises concerns with community economic development measures, insisting that market signals and self-sustaining growth will ultimately decide the future of communities. But he maintains, however, that in the end it does not matter if regional development efforts are effective. For one thing, it is simply not possible to measure their success. For another, they are politically unavoidable in any case. They exist and will continue to exist because they meet a perceived need. Voters in “have-less” communities will continue to turn to politicians for a helping hand and politicians will invariably wish to be seen to be providing one. Tom Courchene has, throughout his career, challenged the status quo in Canadian public policy. He has consistently produced accessible, well-argued, and thoughtful contributions to public policy debates. His contribution here (chapter 12) is certainly no exception, except that he writes in favour of the status quo. He poses fundamental questions on how things “national” operate in Canada by positioning them in a broader setting – Canadian federalism. He also challenges arguments in favour of establishing a national securities regulator. Courchene goes to the very heart of the issue and what, in my view, has plagued Canadian federalism from the very beginning  – Ottawa’s tendency to tack unitary state solutions onto a federal community. He challenges the notion that securities markets are inherently national and many of the traditional arguments in favour of centralizing Canadian securities regulation. He makes the case that these markets are not inherently national and that Canadian provinces have demonstrated a strong ability to regulate securities activities. Courchene makes the case that decentralized agents allow for diversity and that they can bring some of the competitive features of markets into the public sector. He reminds readers that

20 Governing

international surveys often place the country’s securities industry at or near the top in global rankings. I have long held that we can learn a great deal more about the impact of a policy by comparing the experiences of different countries rather than by focusing exclusively on one. Jon Pierre (chapter 11) does the Canadian student of regional economic development an important service in his analysis of the machinery of regional development in Sweden. Since Sweden is a unitary state, its regions do not figure in the country’s political life to the same extent as regions do in Canada. Pierre explains that regions in Sweden have been to a large extent “invisible” to citizens and to the central government in shaping public policy. In addition, Sweden, like many other Western countries, decided to downplay government efforts to promote economic development in lagging regions in the 1980s. However, things are changing in Sweden, as regions are increasingly being regarded as the key to promoting economic development. The view is that within the new global economy, more dynamic elements are present in the regions than at the national level and, accordingly, that it is best to design and pitch policies and programs at that level. In addition, as is well known, the EU community attaches a great deal of importance to the regions in defining its approach to economic development and in allocating economic development funding. The challenge for Sweden was to establish a regional machinery of government that could encourage local initiatives and development while accommodating the country’s traditional top-down policy and decision-making processes. Pierre examines the region of West Sweden, for which a new regional parliament was created and for which an approach to regional governance was struck. Underpinning the new approach to regionalism was the view that it was important to open up issues to public debate. Pierre points out that there was a strongly held belief that “democratizing regional economic development” would both facilitate governance, broadly defined, and at the same time promote economic development. Pierre’s verdict is that over the long term the reform efforts have yielded some success. The regional factor is now more evident in Sweden, the new institutional arrangements have mobilized important economic development actors, and regional economic development is much more “democratic” than in years past. Democratization, however, has its limits. Within West Sweden, four



Looking Back 21

t­raditional sub-regions have re-emerged, and Pierre reports that regional strategies have essentially amounted to a “compromise among political parties.” This, in turn, has made it difficult to establish “distinct priorities.” The regional “democratization” process in Sweden remains a work in progress. Fundamental questions are still being asked: how many regions should Sweden have? Should the size of a region be determined by population, area, or the number of municipalities? What role should regional government play in promoting economic development? It is revealing to note that Sweden embarked on an ambitious reform of the machinery of government at the same time the central government felt that it could no longer promote economic development in lagging regions to the extent that it had in the past. To be sure, the policies of the EU have had an impact in Sweden as they have had with the other community members. Still, Sweden also offers an example of a central government telling the regions: “here is the wheel of economic development, now you drive.” Sweden’s regional reforms are designed to push decisions down to the regions to revitalize its regional economies. As is so often the case, time will tell if the efforts have been successful.

references

Allison, Graham T. 1987. “Public and Private Management: Are They Fundamentally Alike in All Unimportant Respects?” In J.M. Shafritz and A.C. Hyde, eds., Classics of Public Administration. Illinois: Dorsey, 525. Aucoin, Peter. 2008. “New Public Management and New Public Governance: Finding the Balance.” In D. Siegel and K. Rasmussen, eds., Professionalism and Public Service: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Kernaghan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2008. – 2006. “The New Public Governance and the Public Service Commission.” Optimum Online 36, no. 1 (spring): 33–49. Bennett, Carolyn, et al. 2003. The Parliament We Want: Parliamentarians’ Views on Parliamentary Reform. Ottawa: Library of Parliament. Canada. Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities. 2006. Restoring Accountability: Recommendations. Ottawa: Public Works and Government Services.

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– 1983. DRIE speaking notes, the Honourable Ed Lumley to the House of Commons on the Industrial and Regional Development Program, 27 June, 1–2. – 1973. Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance, no. 12, 22 March, 14:24. Good, David A. 2007. The Politics of Public Money: Spenders, Guardians, Priority Setters, and Financial Watchdogs inside the Canadian Government. Toronto: IPAC and the University of Toronto Press. Hodgetts, J.E. 1973. The Canadian Public Service: A Physiology of Government, 1867–1970. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mallory, J.R. 1967. “The Minister’s Office Staff: An Unreformed Part of the Public Service.” Canadian Public Administration 10, no. 1:25–34. Phidd, Richard W., and G. Bruce Doern. 1978. The Politics and Management of Canadian Economic Policy. Toronto: Macmillan, 324. Savoie, Donald J. 2006. Visiting Grandchildren: Economic Development in the Maritimes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1995. Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh. – 1987. Establishing the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. Ottawa: Office of the Prime Minister, May 14. – 1986. Regional Economic Development: Canada’s Search for Solutions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wilson, V. Seymour. 1981. Canadian Public Policy and Administration: Theory and Environment. Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 428.

pa r t o n e

Executive Power and Public Administration

2 Power, Responsibility, and Agency in Canadian Government* s e n at o r l o w e l l m u r r ay

Je suis ravi de me retrouver en Acadie et d’avoir l’occasion de saluer le rôle indispensable de l’Université de Moncton dans la renaissance du peuple acadien. Bien sûr, l’épopée acadienne doit aussi sa persévérance et son achèvement aux générations passées et à leurs institutions religieuses, éducatives, et culturelles. Donald Savoie connaît très bien l’Acadie du passé, celle du présent et de l’avenir. Il est issu d’une génération de jeunes Acadiens et Acadiennes qui ont vécu les derniers – et parfois glorieux – jours de la lutte pour la survivance acadienne, pour ensuite bâtir et occuper des postes névralgiques dans les institutions qui, aujourd’hui, sont au cœur d’une société acadienne dynamique et admirée dans tout le Canada et sur la scène internationale. It is most fitting that Donald Savoie be honoured by this conference of scholars. I am personally in his debt, and there are numerous people who, like me, continue to rely on his considerable knowledge and experience. I have no doubt that his efforts have enhanced the quality of academic research in his fields. More importantly from my perspective, he has contributed to better understanding of the issues and to the quality of the debate among practitioners, the media, and the interested public.

*  This chapter presents the keynote address Senator Murray delivered on 8 June 2011 to the Festschrift in honour of Donald Savoie held in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, and hosted by the Canadian Institute for Research on Public Policy and Public Administration at the Université de Moncton.

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I look forward to the next two days, to the presentations by distinguished scholars and the discussion of aspects of public ­administration and of regional development  – the two subjects in which Donald Savoie has well earned the pre-eminence and the honours that have come to him and to his university. I make no pretence to scholarship, and so my comments tonight will be somewhat anecdotal, as befits one who in three months’ time will retire from the Senate after thirty-two years there and, at the age of seventy-five descend into terminal anecdotage. Tomorrow morning, Peter Aucoin, Herman Bakris, and Mark ­Jarvis will open with a presentation on the concentration of power. A visitor to Canada might wonder why we need to be concerned about concentration of power. In theory, everything about our Canadian polity would seem to militate against such concentration: a quite decentralized federation; cabinet government accountable and responsible in a Westminster parliamentary system; numerous agents of Parliament with authority to oversee budgetary integrity, the rights to information, privacy, and language equality, the ethical probity of parliamentarians and so on; broadly based political parties; a Charter of Rights and Freedoms; an impartial and professional public service; a pretty lively and more or less fearless civil society. Some would add to that list a “well-informed and vigilant media,” but I don’t want to go there tonight. Almost 150 years ago, Disraeli reminded British Tories of their duty to uphold “a series of institutions that are in theory and ought to be in practice an embodiment of the national requirements and the security of the national rights.” It is a sad fact in our country that most of the institutions I’ve mentioned, which in their different ways are supposed to restrict concentration of power and restrain its exercise have been letting us down. Parliament – specifically the House of Commons, because over a period of more than forty years they have allowed their most vital power, the power of the purse, to become a dead letter, their Supply and Estimates process an empty ritual. • Political parties – because the autonomy of the constituency party (and consequently something of the autonomy of the individual MP) has been lost to a central party apparatus that has the money, the full-time professionals, and the polling and communications technology to micromanage your choice of candidate, •



Power, Responsibility, and Agency 27

your finances, your strategy, and your campaign. And because we have so nationalized and bureaucratized the political process that Elections Canada’s regulatory involvement now extends to every aspect from local nominating conventions to national leadership campaigns. Party volunteers are overwhelmed and discouraged. • Cabinet government – by way of a far from atypical illustration, two key decisions regarding Canada’s deployment in Afghanistan – one by a Liberal government, one by a Conservative government – were made in the PMO with the help of a handful of political advisors and civilian and military officials. The relevant ministers – of National Defence and Foreign Affairs – were not even in the room, as was later acknowledged and recorded in Janice Stein and Eugene Lang’s book The Unexpected War. By way of contrast on the process of cabinet government, you may wish to assign for reading by your students Robert Bryce’s book Canada and the Cost of World War Two and/or his earlier memoir Maturing in Hard Times – Canada’s Department of Finance through the Great Depression. • An impartial and professional public service – I can hardly add anything new to what has been said and written, notably by Donald Savoie, about the trend now more than forty years on to centralization of power in the PCO and the PMO. Tomorrow afternoon, Ralph Heintzman’s presentation is “Establishing the Boundaries of the Public Service: Toward a New Moral Contract,” and on Friday morning Paul Thomas will discuss “Communications and Prime Ministerial Power.” Does anybody in Ottawa now dare say “No, Minister,” or more importantly, “No, Prime Minister”? It is one thing to deplore, as I do and as the retiring president of the Public Service Commission has done (in more diplomatic language), the abusive conduct of young political assistants who go about trying to terrorize departmental officials. My question is whether those who should be “pushing back” on behalf of the impartial and professional public service do so. I see and hear no evidence of it. There are some agencies and departments of government that, while they and their ministers are necessarily part of the political process, should nevertheless be kept and should keep themselves at a certain remove from the government agenda. In particular the police and security services should not be co-opted, as they were in

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c­ onnection with the APEC conference in Vancouver fourteen years ago and in two more recent instances by the present governing party, in support of the diplomatic, trade, or political priorities of the government, legitimate as those may be. The issue was well illustrated by an e-mail message sent by an RCMP inspector who had been told to remove banners erected by protestors near the conference site. “Banners are not a security issue,” he wrote. “They are a political issue. Who is looking after that? If they are not going to be permitted, what is the authority for removing them, and who is going to do it?” Plausible deniability? It is the antithesis of responsible government. It is officially sanctioned cop-out. Ministers should not try to off-load responsibility for difficult or disagreeable decisions. Some years ago when the RCMP conducted a raid on the private residence of an Ottawa journalist in connection with the Maher Arar case, the minister declared that she had not known in advance about the raid, nor should she know of such operational details. In my view what should be unthinkable is that a police initiative of that kind, involving matters of, among other things, national security, relations with several foreign countries, and freedom of the press, could be conducted without the knowledge  – and approval  – of the minister. Instead of defending their independence she should have hauled them up short and offered them a refresher course in ministerial authority and responsibility. Je dois avouer que je ne suis pas du tout favorable à la thèse voulant que la faiblesse actuelle du Parlement soit corrigée par la délégation des pouvoirs exécutifs aux parlementaires. Pour ma part, je préfère que les prérogatives de l’exécutif restent intactes et que le Parlement réclame et récupère les pouvoirs qui sont traditionnellement les siens et qui sont tombés en désuétude. As Gladstone famously told his followers, “You are not here to govern; rather you are here to hold to account those who do.” A further issue that I believe is getting some scholarly attention but needs more is the relationship between parliamentarians and their ombudsmen and agents. The interest of parliamentarians tends to be somewhat episodic. Indeed Sheila Fraser alluded politely to this in pre-retirement interviews when she compared the attention given to the auditor-general’s report on the sponsorship program with that accorded many other quite important reports and recommendations from her office. Parliamentarians should not encourage



Power, Responsibility, and Agency 29

a culture of zealotry. There has to be a respect for balance all round: none of the rights upheld by these agents trumps all others. It is up to Parliament, not the media or advocacy groups, to validate the work of these agents. To do so, parliamentarians must enter into an uninterrupted, mature, and to the greatest extent possible non-­ partisan relationship with these agents. Message control? During the second mandate of the Mulroney government, I was the cabinet minister in overall charge of our communications, advertising, and polling activities, so I well understand the opposite of message control – mixed messages inflicted on the public by various ministers and departments. I am therefore somewhat sympathetic to the objective of central direction even while I believe it should not be necessary to make nonentities of most cabinet ministers in order to achieve it. It also needs to be said that the abuse of government advertising for partisan purposes, no matter how laudable the ostensible goal  – national unity in the case of the sponsorship program, economic recovery in the case of the Canada Action Plan – has to be stopped. The new auditor general should make it a priority to recommend effective, non-partisan, professional oversight and control of this function and not let go until a new process is in place and working effectively. Il me paraît évident que l’œuvre de Donald Savoie sur la concentration du pouvoir dans l’administration publique fédérale est le point de départ de ses études sur le développement régional. Dans ce contexte, Donald se préoccupe du problème que pose la concentration du pouvoir économique dans certaines régions au détriment d’autres régions. Il s’attarde aux disparités régionales et aux politiques publiques les plus propices pour les surmonter. Friday morning, the final paper at this conference, to be delivered by Mario Polèse, is entitled “Why Regional Development Policies Are (Mostly) Ineffective and Why It does Not Matter.” This sounds to me like a downer. I do hope that Donald Savoie, who is scheduled to make closing remarks before lunch, brings a glass that is at least half-full to the table. Donald recruited me in 2005 and again in 2006 to speak to government officials from China who had come to Canada to learn about regional development programs. The invitation to discuss them with the Chinese did give me the opportunity to reflect on regional development from a somewhat different perspective. I may find out tomorrow and Friday from some of our foreign guests

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whether there is any other country where regional development occupies such a prominent place in the policy of the central government. It has been a work in progress for more than fifty years, and since 1982, a commitment to regional development by both federal and provincial governments has been part of our Constitution. Canadians, especially those who live in or come from the slowergrowth regions, tend to take for granted and to seldom acknowledge how federal government transfers to persons, such as pensions and Employment Insurance, contribute indirectly to the maintenance of decent incomes and living standards in those regions and make possible the existence at any viable level of seasonal industries such as fisheries and tourism. Likewise intergovernmental transfers  – not just equalization but transfers for health, post-secondary education and social programs – help maintain national standards and prevent the massive rate of disinvestment, outmigration, and depopulation that would occur in the absence of such standards. Then of course there are the direct federal investments in ports, airports, military bases, and various infrastructure that contribute very significantly to the economy of those regions. All this is today part of the Canadian fabric, and having grown up in Cape Breton in the 1940s and 1950s, I cannot imagine what these regions, and indeed the social and economic cohesion of Canada, would be like without this federal commitment – or rather, I can imagine it and it would be awful. A friend reminded me the other day that in the mid1950s when the federal government first started to address regional economic disparities, the per capita personal income gap between Atlantic Canada and the rest of the country was almost identical to that between black and white Americans today. Those who are old enough will recall the alphabet soup of agencies and programs that succeeded each other with almost every political season for more than thirty years. We owe to a report by Donald Savoie the concept of a regional agency such as ACOA, which has already had a longer life than all its predecessors combined and which has served as the model for later regional agencies. Its headquarters and almost all its employees are located in the region; it has a legislated mandate and the budget to encourage investment and entrepreneurship in the region and to work with provincial governments, with educational and research bodies and private sector and community organizations. Significantly, it has the authority to co-ordinate the policies and programs of the federal government as



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they affect this region, and in the consideration of national policy to advocate for the interests of the region. In brief, the agency does not lack for authority, nor in my observation is it treated unfairly in terms of its budget. The Savoie concept, like any other, needs political and bureaucratic will to succeed and equally important candour, courage, and discipline on the part of the region’s economic and political actors. There will always be some more or less principled opposition to the very idea of federal involvement in regional economic development – there is the belief still held by a few actors and critics that Almighty God created the Canadian economy according to a Divine Plan and that it is blasphemous to suggest that things could be different than they are. Sometimes, in my rare moments of cynicism, I tend to think that some authorities are quite willing to indulge, within the limits of the “fiscal framework” of course, the dispensation of regional pork and the creation of regional boondoggles so long as these do not challenge the status quo. The only way a regional agency can overcome such attitudes is by its performance. There are sometimes attitudes at home that confirm the worst suspicions of the critics. One is the reluctance to say no to proposals that are not financially sound even with government help, or that create new problems such as overcapacity in a given industry or locale. Then there is the approach, unfortunately too widespread even among provincial governments, to look upon the regional agency as a pool of funds to be accessed for whatever project is on the political agenda at a given time. Finally, there is the temptation to try to use the agency as a charitable institution to help finance whatever good cause is in vogue or to prop up dying firms for a little while. It is extremely difficult to persuade people who are focused on a four-year political horizon of the need for longer-term planning; yet this is where an agency can be at its most valuable, not by trying to develop a “master plan” – we have seen enough of those – but, sector by sector, program by program, proposal by proposal, day by day insisting on the long-term implications before all else, engaging all the players and contributing expertise, advocacy, leadership, and money to the process.

3 Constraining Executive Power in the Era of New Political Governance p e t e r a u c o i n , h e r m a n b a k v i s , a n d m a r k d . j a rv i s

Among Donald Savoie’s more notable publications, Governing from the Centre (1999) surely stands out as one of his more significant contributions, not only to the academic literature on governance but also to public discourse on parliamentary democracy more generally. With its theme focused on the untoward concentration of power at the centre of government the book captured the attention not only of academics but also of a much larger attentive audience concerned with what one journalist described as “near-total control [resting] in one pair of hands” (Greenspon 1999). Our chapter tackles three issues stemming from his book: the extent to which Savoie’s thesis has stood the test of time over the past decade; the manner in which “governance from the centre” has changed over time, particularly with the arrival of what Peter Aucoin has labelled the “new political governance” (NPG), which in many ways can be seen as an extension of the modes of control Savoie identified in Governing from the Centre; and, finally, under the assumption that the present concentration of power can be construed as “unbridled and undemocratic power in setting public policy” (White 2008, 19), we raise the question, what reforms might be possible that would constrain executive power in a meaningful and democratic way? governing from the centre

The argument of Savoie’s book can be very briefly summarized as follows. Over the past thirty years the centre (the prime minister, his/



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her advisers, and senior officials) has gained considerably in power at the expense of cabinet; that as part of this power shift the central agencies serving cabinet have become increasingly extensions of the prime minister’s office; and that while these developments echo trends in most Western executives, the concentration of power in the hands of the Canadian executive is more pronounced than elsewhere owing to features in many ways exclusive to Canada, including the preoccupation with national unity, especially from 1976 onward, the emphasis on personal and visible leadership on the part of the prime minister and the importance of perceived leadership strengths and weaknesses as a determinant of electoral success, the high level of party discipline in the legislature and the relative inexperience of Canadian MPs. Many of these features are mutually reinforcing. The emphasis of the party on the leader attracts the attention of the media. In turn media scrutiny of the prime minister results in the politicization of important files, which in turn leads to increased control and management of those files by the centre. The unusually large size of Canadian cabinets, necessary in order to meet the representational needs of a geographically vast and culturally diverse federation (Bakvis 1991), leads to a cumbersome body, so that by default power flows to a much smaller group centred around the prime minister, a group that might include at most two or three key ministers. The significance of Savoie’s work resides primarily in allowing people to make sense of what many perceive as some disturbing anti-democratic trends in the Canadian polity, trends often associated with the arbitrary exercise of prime ministerial power, as well as with the articulation of a model that gives primacy to political leadership in the shaping of public policy, under the right circumstances, a model that runs counter to the hollowing-out thesis that was especially popular in the 1990s (see Weller et al. 1997). In highlighting the potency of this executive power and its dangers, coupled with what many consider to be the lack of meaningful constraints on executive power, this outlook has given rise to works such as ­Jeffrey Simpson’s The Friendly Dictatorship (2001) and, more recently, Lawrence Martin’s Harperland (2011). The identification by Savoie of overt as well as covert politicization of the Canadian public service that is associated with enhanced executive power, particularly at the upper ranks, raises questions for those who believe that a ­merit-based, non-partisan professional public service is a critical feature of parliamentary democracy.

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Many of the tenets of Savoie’s concentration thesis are repeated in his book Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in Canada and the United Kingdom (2008), in which he explores the major damage done to accountability regimes at all levels of government by an all-powerful and controlling centre. (“Court government” and the “concentration of power” are used interchangeably, incidentally.) Finally, in identifying and accounting for the profound challenges facing parliamentary democracy from concentrated executive power, Savoie’s thesis has spurred considerable thinking by political scientists and students of public administration on what is required in order to limit some of the dangers stemming from this concentration of power. It is an important concern, one that preoccupies a good deal of the present chapter. Like all important contributions to the literature, Governing from the Centre has come in for criticism. Graham White (2008, 9), for example, has raised a number of methodological issues. He also suggests that what Savoie sees as evidence of the accretion of power by the centre through the deployment of media advisers and spin doctors is simply first ministers keeping pace with the dramatic changes in communications technologies in “a world of continuous and instantaneous news dissemination, spearheaded by aggressive, ambitious reporters”(2008, 9). Sayers and Banfield (2010, 9) argue that Governing from the Centre underestimates the extent to which executive federalism in Canada serves to constrain prime ministerial power. Provincial premiers, not members of his/her own cabinet, they claim, are the ones who are likely to challenge the prime minister on major issues. “It could be argued that primus inter pares is more aptly applied only to First Ministers Meetings rather than the federal or provincial cabinets” (2010, 9). At the same time, another critic indicates that while Savoie’s thesis may be overdrawn, it nonetheless has value and that the Canadian case likely “represents the more extreme example of the concentration of power” (Bakvis 2001, 67) among various parliamentary systems. Subsequent developments over the ensuing decade appear to have supported Savoie’s case even if some feel that his thesis should be somewhat tempered. In this respect, one of the more interesting tests of his thesis can be found in Canada’s most recent experience with minority government.



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governing from the centre and minority government

One of the key elements underpinning the executive’s capacity to control and direct lies in its dominance of Parliament, primarily through the parliamentary party. Party discipline, control over the legislative agenda, and power to appoint committee chairs are among the tools available to the governing party to ensure executive dominance over the legislature. These parameters changed, however, in 2004, when the Liberals under Paul Martin were left with only a plurality of seats that fell short of a majority after the election that year and were thus able to form only a minority government. In a brief but highly compelling monograph Peter Russell argued that the arrival of minority government bode well for the capacity of Parliament to constrain executive power in a meaningful way for the first time in several years. At the time he suggested, perhaps overoptimistically, that the government of the day can no longer expect to have its way on matters of legislation in all respects, it will need to take the House more seriously, and, with a committee system where the opposition parties have an equal or better than equal chance of chairing parliamentary committees, there is a greater opportunity for the House to become a genuinely deliberative body. Overall, according to Russell, minority government “is our best bet to take advantage of Parliament’s capacity to provide government that is both liberal and democratic” (2008, 128). The fourteen-odd months of minority government under Paul Martin seemed to bear out a number of points made by Russell and others. Certainly on the federal-provincial relations front the Paul Martin government appeared to be susceptible to provincial pressure, much more so than usual on issues ranging from health care funding to equalization. The Economist coined the unfortunate phrase “Mr Dithers” to describe his cafeteria “take-away” style of giving the provinces what they wanted on crucial matters, suggesting that it was in large part Mr Martin himself who was responsible for the altered approach to policy. Elsewhere, however, it was suggested that the changes could also be attributed to the fact of minority government itself, and in particular to the leverage enjoyed by the NDP in providing support to the Martin government on crucial votes (see Baier et al. 2005).

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Early 2006 saw the Martin government replaced by another minority government, this time by the Conservatives under Stephen Harper. The juxtaposition of the two minority governments represents in many ways a classic natural experiment: two cases roughly comparable but where there is significant variation on one crucial determining factor, in this case executive leadership. In brief, Mr Harper, more so than any of his predecessors, mastered the art of using all the resources at his disposal  – central agencies, appointments, political staff, and, above all, control over the government’s communications apparatus – to attain a degree of dominance over the policy process that in some respects made the need for a parliamentary majority redundant. Among other things, the period of minority government under Mr Harper, running from 2006 to 2011, provides ample material for identifying those factors that play a role in promoting the concentration of power at the centre. And one of the things that can be concluded is that the need for a parliamentary majority is perhaps not quite as critical as one might have thought in allowing the executive to assert its dominance. The Harper government has shown that in many areas a minority government can continue to pursue its agenda by extensive use of order-in-council instruments, appointments, and rigorous control over the bureaucracy. It also exemplifies a trend towards what Peter Aucoin has labelled the New Political Governance. new political governance and governing from the centre

“Message event proposals,” or MEP, is one of the innovations that the Conservative government introduced in 2007 not too long after their election in 2006. The management of communications, particularly those between government and citizens as mediated through the press, is one of the more critical functions of governments. Traditionally, most government departments have professional non-­ partisan communication officers who deal with reporters’ questions, prepare responses, and, prior to release, have them approved by their immediate superiors. Developed first in the Conservative Party for campaigning purposes and subsequently adopted by the PMO under the then director of communications, Sandra Buckler, MEP effectively centralized control over the communications function and, at the same time, gave it a much more partisan cast. In essence



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“all messaging that could or will be picked up by the media must receive approval from political staff before release” (Davis 2010). To manage this process, an elaborate system was created involving the use of a template for even the most minor media inquiries for review by staff not only in ministers’ offices but also in the PCO and the PMO in order to make the response fit and promote the government’s strategic aims. MEP represents but one element in an array of new tools introduced by the Conservatives for managing not only communications but also House committees and relations between ministers and the PMO and the caucus. It is, however, emblematic of one of the key features of what has been described as the New Political Governance (NPG), in which the continuous political campaign is integrated with governance. As described by Aucoin (2012, 179), NPG is characterized by four main features: the integration of executive governance and the continuous campaign, partisanpolitical staff as a third force in governance and public administration, a personal-politicization of appointments to the senior public service, and an assumption that public service loyalty to and support of the government means being promiscuously partisan for the government of the day. NPG constitutes an ideal-type in the sense that the extent to which jurisdictions exhibit these features will vary over time according to the party in power, the prime minister, the state of competition between parties in the legislature and in the electorate, and, among other factors, the institutional and statutory constraints that provide checks against politicization. As Aucoin clearly argues, NPG represents an ideal type. Notwithstanding the comments earlier about minority government and Harper’s demonstrated capacity to by-pass its constraints, the lack of a majority in the House did prevent his government from implementing elements of its crime agenda. Furthermore, the extent to which NPG is felt has varied from department to department. According to reports, MEP, for example, has had the most profound effect in Foreign Affairs. While the Department of National Defence was able initially to resist incursions into its operations and communications by political staff (Davis 2010), MEP eventually penetrated this department and most other departments as well.

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The question is whether NPG represents an extension of the concentration of power model or whether it constitutes a distinct model in its own right. According to Aucoin (2012, 185), “The critical issue with respect to the concentration of power is whether power is exercised at the center in the cause of strategic government or in a manner that makes executive governance and continuous partisan campaigning a seamless undertaking” (see also MacDermott 2008). Thus, in the case of the latter, partisan considerations trump virtually all other considerations, including sound administration and policy. Particularly with extensive use of political (“exempt”) staff in ministers’ offices and with the coordination of political staff through the PMO, ministers are much more likely to view policy matters from a perspective of political strategy or tactics with the goal of generating public support for their party (Aucoin 2010). It is perhaps the more overt politicization and the continual presence of a partisan lens through which all decisions and communications are filtered that distinguishes NPG from Savoie’s concentration of power. NPG can also be distinguished from New Public Management (NPM), and again the primary distinguishing feature is the partisan nature of NPG. Under NPM, efforts were made by political executives to control the public service so as not to be thwarted or undermined by the interests and agendas harboured by civil servants, an objective that can be seen as the legitimate exercise of power by the elected government over unelected officials (Aucoin 1990, 1995; Boston et al. 1996). NPG represents a form of corruption of such control, however, by effectively enjoining public servants to become active supporters of government policies and tools of partisan politics. Regardless of whether NPG is seen as either an extension of Savoie’s work or more of a separate model in its own right, the two are not incompatible. Both are premised on the idea of executive dominance and the use of the tools typically available to the prime minister in the Canadian variant of the Westminster model. If there is a key difference between the two models, it is that under NPG the likelihood of abuses of power are greater and the need for constraints all that much more compelling. As well, given the predominance of the partisan dimension under NPG, the type of reforms called for would more likely target mechanisms to protect the public service from being pressured into becoming what Aucoin (2012, 179) has termed “promiscuously partisan.”



Constraining Executive Power 39

constraining executive power

After reviewing the concentration of power thesis, Bakvis (2001, 67) concluded both that Canada not only represented the more extreme example of the concentration of power but further, that relative to other Westminster systems “there are fewer formal checks on Canadian prime ministerial power.” For example, in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, party caucuses have much greater control over their party’s leadership, even when their party is in power. It was on this basis that a number of possible reforms were reviewed, reforms with the aim of creating what were termed “countervailing sources of power,” under the assumption that power can be best checked by power. Two substantial reforms were proposed – proportional representation (PR) and an elected senate – and three reforms of a lesser order that, by virtue of being realistic, could also see the light of day: increased power of caucus over the leader, non-partisan appointment of senior officials, and fixed election dates. These proposals were made in the pre-Gomery days and before the election of the Conservative government in 2006. A decade later one can say that while there have been some serious initiatives to introduce PR (or variants thereof) at the provincial level, all of them failed. Aside from the much-diminished likelihood of ever seeing this reform implemented, it is now further stigmatized by its association with minority government and coalition government. While in many ways this stigmatization, in part a product of relentless attacks by the Conservatives before and during the election, is unwarranted, the recent five-year experience with minority government does raise questions about whether this form of governance provides the constraining influence that people had originally hoped for. Senate reform is now a much more realistic prospect given Mr Harper’s intention to set term limits and have provinces elect senators. On the three “lesser order” proposals, fixed election dates are now the law of the land at the federal level and in a number of provincial jurisdictions. However, the federal legislation is fundamentally flawed. The incumbent government can all too easily still construct a justification for the dissolution of the House and an election, in the face of the putatitve intent of the legislation. Many of these flaws have to do with the wide-ranging discretionary powers of the Crown over the operations of the House. Though held by the ­governor-general, they are in effect exercised by the prime minister,

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and they r­epresent remarkable and relatively unrestrained powers that encompass more than the calling of elections. As demonstrated by the acute lack of both consensus on what people thought were relatively settled constitutional conventions at the time of the 2008–9 constitutional crisis over parliament’s prorogation, this remains perhaps the most critical area where reform is necessary (see Aucoin, Jarvis, and Turnbull (2011). With respect to the balance of power between party leaders and their caucus, one of the more interesting developments during the past five years is that minority government forced all party leaders to exercise greater control over their caucus owing to the exigencies of parliamentary manoeuvring that required leaders to strike behind-the-scene deals with their counterparts in the other parties, especially around matters of confidence. In the case of the government caucus, the behaviour of Conservative MPs in the House, in committees, and in relation to the media and outside constituencies is as tightly scripted, if not more so, as in any previous ruling party. In brief, things appear to have gone backwards over the intervening decade with respect to caucus having an influence over the party leader. One institution that is strongly linked to caucus is, of course, cabinet. In some parties in some jurisdictions, most notably the Labor Party in Australia, the caucus plays a major role in the selection of cabinet members. In Canada cabinet appointments are exclusively the prerogative of the prime minister, though traditionally he or she is constrained by representational imperatives, particularly the regional one. Overall, there has probably been insufficient attention given to relations between prime minister, caucus, and cabinet, including the issue of the way in which caucus and cabinet could or should act as a check on prime ministerial power. Finally, on the appointment of senior officials, while the Gomery Commission touched on the issue and some of the research studies made explicit recommendations favouring a New Zealand–style appointments process, there have been no reforms in this area at all, while the need for reform has arguably increased in the light of the sharp upward trend in the politicization of the upper ranks that includes not only the predilection on the part of the current government to select for promotion to the upper ranks those public servants who are seen as sympathetic to their agenda but also the expansion in political staff, which undoubtedly puts greater pressure on senior officials to make judgments that favour political rather



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than ­technical or evidence-based criteria. To summarize, in all of these three areas the need for reform is as compelling as ever; the Crown’s discretionary powers and the need for a less-politicized public service are at the top of the list. three areas of reform

In examining the issues noted above, and in light of developments, especially over the past five or six years, we can identify three foci for reform  – prime ministerial, cabinet, and caucus relations; the selection and appointment of senior officials; and the Crown’s discretionary powers and the manner in which they are exercised by the prime minister. Cabinet, Caucus, and the Prime Minister On 18 May 2011, when Mr Harper’s new cabinet was sworn in, there were relatively few surprises – except perhaps for the fact that at thirty-nine members it is the second largest ever. Intuition suggests that a smaller cabinet might serve the current prime minister better insofar as a smaller body is more manageable and reaches decisions much more expeditiously. Particularly now with a majority in the House, one would think the government would want to proceed with its legislation in the areas of crime and Senate reform, among others that were held up in the previous Parliament. However, looking at the question from the perspective of Savoie’s concentration of power thesis, and particularly his conceptualization of cabinet as focus group, Harper’s new cabinet makes eminent sense. Harper has no intention of using cabinet and/or its committees as a decision-making body. To put it bluntly, having a cumbersome, overstuffed body makes it all that much easier for the prime minister to by-pass it. At the core of this dilemma is the position of the prime minister vis-à-vis his fellow cabinet members. One model of this set of relationships is primus inter pares (first among equals), under which the prime minister essentially serves as a chair, seeking to establish a balance between conflicting interests, brokering deals among ministers, and generally ascertaining and affirming the nature of the prevailing consensus with that body. With the arrival of the “presidentialization of the executive” (see Foley 1993; Bakvis and Wolinetz 2007) in

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most Western systems, finding examples of primus inter pares in the flesh is difficult, though in some of the smaller European systems, particularly the ones with coalition governments, one can still find approximations to this model. Within Westminster systems, especially where single-party government prevails, the emphasis in those systems has been more on the primus than the pares. However, there is a general consensus that among these systems Canada stands out as being the most leader-centric, with the prime minister effectively operating as a chief executive officer, but, in contrast to the private sector, without the need to worry about a board of directors monitoring and, if need be, checking his or her behaviour. A number of reasons have been given for this state of affairs in Canada. As noted earlier, the issue of national unity and intergovernmental relations is one factor frequently cited. Other factors include the leadership selection as well as deselection process. Starting with the Liberals in 1919 Canadian parties generally used a convention system borrowed from the United States, moving in recent years to more of a hybrid system, one where party members or a subset of them are able to vote remotely using electronic means. The key feature is that the successful leadership candidate has few if any obligations to fellow caucus or Cabinet members. Recently introduced contribution limits will likely make it more difficult for candidates to mount lengthy and expensive leadership campaigns, but this change is unlikely to create new obligations to others that would subsequently result in constraints on their power. When it comes to deselection, the Canadian system is notoriously weak when dealing with leaders who have outlived their welcome. A second factor is the overall weakness of parties both as organizations and as vehicles with which individuals can identify or feel a long-term affinity. Instead, the primary focus tends to be on the leader, and the electoral outcome is generally seen as the product of the his or her capacity to project leadership qualities or his/her failure to do so. Unlike the situation in the United States or even Britain, the local candidate carries limited weight as a determinant of how people vote. The success of the local candidate tends to be attributed to the coattails of the party leader, as it was to either Stephen Harper or Jack Layton in the last election, which in turn means that the leader has unusual sway over caucus, since members are much more likely to be obliged to the leader rather than the reverse.



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A third factor often invoked to explain the rigid and sustained party discipline that the leader is able to impose is the relative inexperience of Canadian MPs compared to other jurisdictions. Turnover in the Canadian House of Commons is simply far higher than elsewhere. Introducing reforms is challenging. Aucoin (2012) has noted that New Zealand changed from a condition of having extreme prime ministerial dominance to one where the prime minister finds her or himself on the pares end of the primus-pares continuum, largely because of the shift to proportional representation, which has produced coalition cabinets that were the product of inter-party negotiation rather than prime ministerial decision. As noted above, at the moment Canadians likely have little appetite for either PR or coalition government. As well, it would be dangerous to assume that electoral outcomes produced by PR would invariably lead to coalition government in Canada. Nonetheless, it remains the single most important institutional innovation available for altering the character of the Canadian cabinet and governance more generally and for this reason is worth noting. Other reforms with a view to making caucus or cabinet – or both – more powerful vis-à-vis the prime minister can, with one exception, be introduced by only the parliamentary parties themselves. They include revising the way party discipline is exercised and committee assignments are made and, most important of all, ensuring that the caucus has the right to dismiss the prime minister, which is a longstanding practice that dates back to the eighteenth century. While not frequently used, or at least not in the United Kingdom, it can be a potent weapon, especially in Australia and New Zealand where this practice has been deliberately retained and where it serves as a major check on prime ministerial power. In Canada it would be difficult to reintroduce this practice because it would seem like a throwback to the nineteenth century. Logically, however, it is fully consistent with democratic practice under the rules of parliamentary democracy, where elected representatives make decisions for which they will be ultimately responsible come election time. One further reform that we will interject into the discussion can in fact be implemented through legislation: restricting the size of cabinet. It seems clear that the power and effectiveness of cabinet is inversely related to its size for the reasons noted above, namely when a cabinet as a body becomes too unwieldy because of its size, it becomes much easier to ignore by the first minister. The primary

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purpose of legislation limiting the size of cabinet would be for management purposes, to make cabinet both more efficient and more productive. But it would also have the added benefit of making it more meaningful as a deliberative body and, above all, as a check on prime ministerial power. The prime minister in turn is more likely to take such a body seriously, not only for advice but also for the rendering of decisions. In a scaled-back and more meaningful cabinet, ministers may also gain in public stature, and with more stature and visibility may come greater clout. The effect may be to nudge cabinet more towards the pares end of the continuum. It also an innovation that can be made relatively easily, without major upheaval in the culture or practices of the parties, or at least compared to changes such as electoral reform. Recruiting and Appointing the Senior Public Service Cadre For observers of the Harper government’s mode of governance the most disturbing element is likely the politicization of the public service. When using the word “politicization,” we have in mind not overt partisan appointments of party members to regular public service positions but rather the selection, appointment, and promotion to high-level positions of those within (or possibly outside) the bureaucracy whom the prime minister and his staff believe not only to be competent and able to implement the government’s policies but also to show a willingness to embrace the ideological premises of the policies in question. To be sure, there is a fine line between a professional public servant’s commitment to enact a democratically elected government’s wishes and promiscuous partisanship in helping a government pursue its wishes, but many would argue that line has been crossed more frequently than in the past. The adoption well over a century ago in various jurisdictions (it came rather later in Canada) of independent staffing of the public service, including appointments, promotions, assessments, and dismissal for cause, is seen as one of the major developments in the evolution of the Westminster system. The fact that public servants act and are seen to act in a non-partisan and impartial manner in implementing policies and delivering services to citizens is an important cornerstone of parliamentary democracy. The problem of the politicization of the upper ranks is not unique to Canada. All Westminster systems have struggled with this issue in recent years, and the



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struggle reflects in part a genuine and legitimate concern on the part of the elected executive that the bureaucracy not stand in the way of a new government wishing to implement its electoral platform on which it came to power. The problem, as noted above, comes when elected governments expect public servants to do more than simply implement policies and also to become cheer leaders for those policies. Furthermore, because of trends in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, among others, where staffing responsibilities have devolved in recent years to departments and agencies, those appointed at the highest level on the basis of partisan considerations are in many instances also responsible for appointing their immediate subordinates. In other words, the effects of a politicized appointments process at the highest level will likely have ripple effects at other levels as well. Recognizing the research report Aucoin (2006) completed for the Commission, Gomery (2006, 149) was explicit in recognizing that “the Government of Canada is out of step with other jurisdictions in the way it appoints Deputy Ministers ... Deputy Ministers know that their past and future appointments are made by the Prime Minister according to his or her sole discretion,” and they understand the inherent danger this presents for public service neutrality. The Commission (2006, 152) also recommended that “the Government of Canada should adopt an open and competitive process for the selection of Deputy Ministers.” Canada could achieve a more transparent process for staffing the deputy minister cadre by following the lead of New Zealand. In the New Zealand model the state services commissioner recommends a single candidate for each appointment to cabinet. The model also allows for a democratic safety valve, of sorts, in that cabinet is able to reject a candidate, and even appoint one of its own choosing, so long as the rejection and the name of the rejected candidate is made public. To date only one rejection has occurred (Aucoin 2012). A more independent staffing regime could also include the management and development of the senior executive cadre as a corporate resource of the public service (see Aucoin 2012). This would rectify a blatant exception to “the normative structure of a non-partisan public service” (Aucoin 2012 14; see also Aucoin 2006). The New Zealand model of independent staffing, according to Aucoin, also has the effect of reducing the influence of political staffers. This effect is achieved in the first instance by virtue of ­staffers

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having to operate in the context of coalition government, which means that they cannot roam freely throughout government, even if they claim to be agents of the prime minister. Second, a “senior public service ... staffed and managed independently of the prime minister ... [reduces] the incentive of public servants to do the bidding of political staff in order to endear themselves to those who might influence the progress of their careers” (Aucoin 2012, 186) The Governor General, the Prime Minister, and Discretionary Powers In recent years, one of the most prominent areas where prime ministers have been able to exercise nearly unconstrained power is over the operations of the House of Commons. Aucoin, Jarvis, and ­Turnbull (2011) have recently argued that while the two issues are not unrelated, “the abuse of these and constitutional powers by the prime minister is more damaging to parliamentary democracy than the much publicized practice of recent prime ministers of centralizing government decision making in their own office.” They argue that Canada has allowed for greater concentration of powers related to the functioning of the House under the prime minister than other Westminster countries and has experienced a greater abuse of these powers for partisan purposes as well (Aucoin, Jarvis and Turnbull 2011). Perhaps the most important part of this power is the capacity of prime ministers to exercise the governor general’s discretion with respect to the Crown’s reserve powers, including the powers related to the formation and dismissal of governments. Particular attention should be paid to the prime minister’s powers related to summoning, confidence, prorogation, and dissolution, including changes of government between elections. Aucoin, Jarvis, and Turnbull (2011) cite a steady stream of abuses in these areas. In combination with other executive powers and powers held as party leader, as discussed earlier, the capacity to exercise the discretionary powers of the governor general have been central in the ability of prime ministers to control and ultimately to undermine the House’s capacity to perform its fundamental roles, including to scrutinize government performance and administration, to hold the government to account, and, most importantly, to extend and withdraw confidence as it sees fit. This has eroded the functioning of the parliamentary system of



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r­ esponsible government and its intended constraints on a prime minister’s powers. In large measure this circumstance is owing to the erosion of agreement as to what is required by Canada’s unwritten constitutional conventions that are meant to guide the discretionary powers. As seen at a recent workshop led by Peter Russell to attempt to reaffirm a common understanding of these constitutional requirements, agreement could not be reached on some of the most basic aspects of our parliamentary system (see Russell and Milne 2011). In the absence of having developed clear rules, guidelines, or expectations with respect to the use of the powers, even in the face of constitutional disturbances such as the 1926 King-Byng affair, prime ministers have filled this vacuum in a manner that goes beyond simple partisanship, acting in bad faith and serving no democratic and/ or public purpose. The powers at the heart of this include •

•

•

•

•

•

the power of current party leaders to approve party candidates, combined with the inability of party caucuses to appoint or dismiss party leaders, reducing the likelihood that governing-party backbench MPs will play any kind of serious role in scrutinizing and holding the government to account or constraining the prime minister, especially in committees;1 the power of the government to unilaterally alter the schedule of opposition days to interfere with the opposition’s ability to raise important issues and to withdraw its confidence in the government when it desires; the power of the prime minister to unilaterally decide when to summon the House after a change of government, allowing him to avoid meeting the House when it is not clear the government has the confidence of the House; the power of the prime minister to declare what does and does not constitute a vote of non-confidence; the ability to prorogue Parliament to postpone confidence votes or shut down parliamentary scrutiny; and the ability to secure an early dissolution to avoid confidence votes, shut down parliamentary scrutiny, or secure snap elections when it appears favourable for the government to do so.

The failure to invest most of these powers concretely in the House means that its ability to scrutinize the government and to extend and

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retract confidence as it sees fit is diminished. Instead, prime ministers are able to dissolve or prorogue Parliament at their discretion and to decide when their own government has lost the support of the House of Commons. While according to the Canadian constitution these powers are formally assigned from the Crown to the governor general, past governors general have accepted the prime minister’s advice on these matters, even when a government has lost the confidence of the House. There has been only a single exception: the 1926 King-Byng affair, which is disputed as a constitutional precedent. In contrast, other Westminster systems, like New Zealand or the United Kingdom, have taken concrete steps to constrain the ability to abuse these powers. For example, New Zealand, in its cabinet Manual, has adopted guidelines that prescribe under what conditions and how most of these powers can be exercised. So whereas in Canada when a government loses the confidence of the House, the prime minister has come to enjoy what has been described as a “virtual right” to a dissolution and new election (Aucoin and Turnbull 2004), in contrast in New Zealand if a government loses the confidence of the House, the governor general is to ascertain whether an alternative government can be chosen from the same House. A prime minister who is defeated in the House has no right to demand that the House be dissolved. This reflects what should be well understood as a basic reality of responsible government: that without the confidence of the House the prime minister is just an ordinary Member of Parliament. While Aucoin, Jarvis, and Turnbull (2011) are clear that it isn’t possible or particularly desirable to establish rules for every situation, a complete absence of rules leaves the integrity of the Canadian system vulnerable to abuse. They also make clear that attempting to bolster the role of the unelected governor general as a more effective constraint on the prime minister is equally problematic. First, in the absence of agreement on what the governor general should or should not decide and under what conditions, it is likely to pull the governor general into political conflict. But more importantly, relying on an unelected official to wield these powers is antithetical to democracy. The concentration of those powers in a single individual does not belong in a robust democracy. The principle is that neither the prime minister nor the governor general should decide: the House must decide. These issues take us to the very heart of whether



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the House still matters and what its role should be. Instead, they propose •

•

•

•

that after a general election has occurred, the House of Commons must be summoned within thirty days, as is required by the Australian constitution. This would prohibit a prime minister from avoiding the House when it was unclear that he or should could not command the confidence of the House; that the term of Parliament be fixed at four years – that is, that elections occur every four years on a specific date unless a majority of two-thirds of MPs approve a motion to dissolve Parliament for a new election. This would remove the virtual right of the prime minister to call an election whenever he or she wants, even after the loss of confidence of a majority of MPs; the adoption of a so-called “constructive non-confidence” procedure. Under this procedure, the opposition can bring down the government only with an explicit motion of non-confidence that also identifies the member who would replace the prime minister and would form a new government that has the support of a majority of MPs in the House. The motion must be supported by a simple majority of MPs. This would eliminate the power of the prime minister to dismiss some votes as not actually withdrawing confidence and make clear that we could change governments between elections; and that the consent of a two-thirds majority of the House of Commons be required to prorogue Parliament, so as to restrain a prime minister of a minority or majority government from shutting down Parliament to escape scrutiny or votes of non-confidence (Aucoin, Jarvis, and Turnbull 2011).

Aucoin, Jarvis, and Turnbull (2011) assert that these reforms, especially if adopted alongside additional changes to other executive powers of the prime minister and to powers ascribed to party leaders, are most likely to reduce the capacity to undermine the functioning of the House. They also assert that these reforms are particularly attractive because they can be adopted in such a way that they do not rely on the good faith of the prime minister to be effective. They describe how, for each reform, the House would be able to enforce the democratic objectives of the changes and how they would be effective in either majority or minority circumstances.

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conclusion

Stimulated by Donald Savoie’s work on the concentration of power, this essay has sought to explore how the practices and institutions he identified have evolved and how they fit with more recent trends discussed under the rubric of the New Political Governance (NPG). We have also sought to identify those innovations, in the form of institutions or changes in culture or practices, that could serve as a check or constraint on those in the political executive who wield power, with the assumption that at times the exercise of that power threatens to undermine the institutions of parliamentary democracy. Some of these changes, such as Senate reform, will be difficult to achieve given the limitations of pursuing significant institutional or constitutional change. We have, however, also focused on changes in administrative procedures, with or without legislative changes, and changes in and codification of those conventions governing the discretionary powers of the governor general, exercised currently primarily by the prime minister, with the view to restoring the power of the House of Commons with respect to the functioning of the House, including decisions on when a government is defeated or the circumstances under which the House can be prorogued. From the perspective of political realism, focus on the latter type of reform may be more attractive. However, the end result may be less than satisfactory.

note

  1 Note that powers related to the ability of party leaders to approve party candidates should not be invested in the House, but could be invested in other parts of the party apparatus, most appropriately local riding associations.

references

Aucoin, P. 2012. “New Political Governance in Westminster Systems: Impartial Public Administration and Management Performance at Risk.” Governance 25: 177–99.



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– 2010. “Canada.” In C. Eichbaum and R. Shaw, eds., Partisan Appointments and Public Servants. Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar, 64–93. – 2006. “The Staffing and Evaluation of Canadian Deputy Ministers in Comparative Perspective: A Proposal for Reform.” In Canada, Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities, Restoring Accountability, Research Studies, vol. 1. Ottawa: Public Works and Government Services Canada, 297–336. – 1995. The New Public Management: Canada in Comparative Perspective. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy. – 1990. “Administrative Reform in Public Management: Paradigms, Principles, Paradoxes and Pendulums. Governance 3(2): 115–37. Aucoin, P., M.D. Jarvis, and L. Turnbull. 2011. Democratizing the Constitution: Reforming Responsible Government. Toronto: Emond Montgomery. Aucoin, P., and L. Turnbull. 2004. “Removing the Virtual Right of Prime Ministers to Demand Dissolution.” Canadian Parliamentary Review (summer): 16–19. Baier, G., H. Bakvis, and D. Brown. 2005. “Executive Federalism, the Democratic Deficit and Parliamentary Reform.” In G.B. Doern, ed., How Ottawa Spends 2005–06. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Bakvis, H. 2001. “Prime Minister and Cabinet in Canada: An Autocracy in Need of Reform.” Journal of Canadian Studies 35, no. 4 (winter): 60–79. – 1991. Regional Ministers: Power and Influence in the Canadian ­Cabinet. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bakvis, H., and S. Wolinetz. 2007. “Canada: A Case of Hyper-Presidentialism?” In P. Webb and T. Poguntke, eds., The Presidentialization of ­Politics: A Study in Comparative Politics. Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 199–220. Boston, J., J. Martin, J. Pallot, and P. Walsh. 1996. Public Management: The New Zealand Model. New York: Oxford University Press. Davis, Jeff. 2010. “Bureaucrats Chafing under ‘Unprecedented’ PMO/PCO Communications Control,” Hill Times, 26 July. Democratic Audit of Australia, Australian National University, Report No. 10. Foley, M. 1993. The Rise of the British Presidency. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Greenspon, E. 1999. “Modern Prime Minsters Growing Ever More Powerful, Liberal Insider Holds.” Globe and Mail. MacDermott, Kathy. 2008. Marketing Government: The Public ­Service and the Permanent Campaign. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 163–82. Martin, Lawrence. 2010. Harperland: The Politics of Control. Toronto: Viking Canada. Russell, Peter H., and Cheryl Milne. 2011. Adjusting to a New Era of Parliamentary Government: Report of a Workshop on Constitutional Conventions. Toronto: David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights. Savoie, D.J. 2008. Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in Canada and the United Kingdom. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1999. Governing from the Centre: The Concentration of Power in ­Canadian Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sayers, A., and A. Banfield. 2010. “The Dispersal of Power in Federal States: Canada and Australia.” Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Montreal, 1–3 June. Simpson, J. 2001. The Friendly Dictatorship. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Webb, P., and T. Poguntke, eds. 2007. The Presidentialization of Politics: A Study in Comparative Politics. Clarendon: Oxford University Press. Weller, Patrick. 1994. “Party Rules and the Dismissal of Prime Ministers: Comparative Perspectives from Britain, Canada and Australia.” Parliamentary Affairs 47(1): 133–43. Weller, Patrick, Herman Bakvis, and R.A.W. Rhodes. 1997. The ­Hollow Crown: Countervailing Trends in Core Executives. Basingstoke: Macmillan White, G. 2008. “‘The Centre’ of the Democratic Deficit? Power and Influence in Canadian Political Executives.” Paper presented at the conference Comparing the Democratic Deficit in Canada and the United States, Harvard University, 9–11 May. – 2005. Cabinets and First Ministers. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

4 Communications and Prime Ministerial Power pa u l g . t h o m a s

introduction

This chapter starts from the premise that communications has become a strategic and dominant preoccupation at the centre of the governing process within the government of Canada. Communications has, of course, always been a major part of politics and governing. Increasingly, however, communications considerations related to the development and maintenance of a government’s image, reputation, credibility, and political support with key segments of the electorate are seen to drive and shape priorities, policies, decision making, and actions on both the political and the administrative sides of government. Communications operations across government have become more professionalized, sophisticated, centralized, and political in purpose as they are used to frame issues, explain and defend government actions, manage information, convey the government’s messages to external and internal audiences, and coordinate such messaging in order to ensure discipline and consistency across different domains and levels within the governing process. In exploring how communications considerations have become central to the conversion of politics into policy-making and related implementation activities, this study offers another perspective on how power is exercised at the centre of government, a topic that has long been the focus of Donald J. Savoie’s original and provocative scholarship (Savoie 1999, 2003, 2008). The Savoie Thesis, as it has become known, is that over the past forty years power has become increasingly centralized in the hands of the prime minister and a set

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of “courtiers” who support him. Savoie builds his account of the rise of prime-ministerial rule mainly on the changing external context in which governments operate, on the formal and informal structures of authority inside government, and on the staff and other resources controlled by the prime minister and the leverage and influence that these factors give him in relation to other institutions and actors involved in the political and policy-making process. In all three of his impressive books on prime ministerial power, Savoie recognizes to some extent the communications roles of the prime minister, especially his dealings with the media. However, communications is not an organizing concept applied systematically to how power is exercised at the centre of government. Given the sweeping technological and other changes in government communications activities over the last forty years, there is a need to supplement and refine the Savoie thesis by bringing communications more explicitly and thoroughly into the analysis of prime ministerial power, as Colin Seymour-Ure (2000, 2003) has done in the United Kingdom. This chapter argues that Canada has entered an era of the “permanent campaign,” in which the techniques for winning power have been transferred increasingly to the processes of government. Both long-term trends and short-term events have contributed to a preoccupation in government with the activities of agenda setting, news management, information control, and spin. As a source of news, as a performer of many communications roles, and as a communications manager, the prime minister is central to setting the agenda, selling and defending his government’s actions, managing the media to the extent that this is possible, and controlling the flow of information. The importance of communication to elections and politics more generally is well recognized in the political science and communications studies literature, but a communications perspective needs to become a central component of the scholarly analysis of the governing process. The present study extends research conducted by the author for a commission of inquiry during 2009–10 (Thomas 2010). The absence of any large body of secondary literature on government communications, especially in the Canadian context, presented challenges for both studies. Published reports and on-line government information were consulted, but consistent with the themes of this study, such sources are limited in their comprehensiveness and balance. Using several search engines, media commentaries on



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relations between the prime minister and the media and on government communications in general were identified. Finally, a number of semi-structured, qualitative elite interviews, along with informal discussions, were held with a small number of past and present ministerial advisers and public servants who had first-hand experience and knowledge of the “real world” of communications in government. Over the course of the two studies, twenty interviews were conducted on an off-the-record basis. No claim as to the representativeness of the respondents can be made. In short, this study is exploratory and seeks to make the case that public administration, political science, communications studies, and other disciplines could add to our theoretical and practical knowledge by investigating more thoroughly the communications processes of modern government. Following this introduction, the second section examines the major trends and developments inside and outside government that have changed how policy is designed and delivered, including how governments cope with more complicated and demanding communications challenges than in the past. The third section describes briefly the constitutional and institutional context that shapes the distribution of power and the communications patterns inside and outside government. Whereas government has become more centralized, controlled, and personalized around the prime minister, governance involves dispersed power sharing and seemingly impersonal and not easily controlled forces driving change. This leads to a brief examination in the fourth section of the Savoie thesis and introduces the main argument of the chapter that communications is an underestimated source of prime ministerial power. The next five sections present briefly the key concepts of personalization, agenda setting, media management, spin, “government” versus “political” communications, and the permanent campaign. The remaining sections of the chapter reflect the assumption that context, structures, and leadership all affect how power and communications operate at the centre of the government of Canada. Leaders operate within a particular context, a context that includes the opportunities and constraints of existing structures and processes, but their actions and inactions can modify to some extent those structures and processes. Using the recent example of the two minority Conservative Party of Canada governments of Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006–8 and 2008–11), the tenth and

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eleventh sections examine the roles and institutions involved with ­communications inside government, particularly the roles of the Prime Ministers’ Office (PMO) and the Privy Council Officer (PCO), the two central agencies that most directly and immediately support the prime minister in his role as both a communicator himself and a manager of communications. The twelfth section examines the criticism that the actions and words of the Harper government have created a communications culture and a climate of control, intimidation, and secrecy inside government. The concluding section draws the analysis together and reinforces the argument that we need to develop research and models to explain how communications has become a central tool of politics and governing. t h e c o n t e m p o r a ry c o m m u n i c at i o n s e n v i r o n m e n t

The assumption that guides the analysis to follow is that no single set of factors, whether they are historical and technological developments, changed political and governing structures and approaches, or the individual leadership styles of powerful actors like the prime minister, account fully for the rise in importance of the communications function in the public sector. Understanding its importance requires the recognition of numerous trends and developments that have taken place over the past several decades and that are likely to intensify into the future. In general terms, the external environments in which governments operate have become more congested, complex, turbulent, intense, unpredictable, and risky. There is not the space here to describe fully and in depth the swirling forces and pressures that impinge on governments from the outside. A brief listing of some of the more notable features will have to suffice: The multi-dimensional globalization process has meant an accelerated pace of change, increased interdependence, a blurring of domestic and international affairs, and the instantaneous movement of ideas and issues across national boundaries, owing in large part to the ongoing revolution in information and communications technologies. • Partially in response to globalization and the ICT revolution, a New Public Governance (NPG) approach to the the formulation and implementation of public policy has emerged (Aucoin 2006). •



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There is a debate over whether NPG represents a replacement for old-style governing and public management or, less dramatically, whether it simply represents a shift in the relative reliance on different tools that governments have always used to set directions and to bring about change in society. • Whereas the governance literature emphasizes the impacts of sweeping impersonal global forces leading to the dispersal of power and a lack of control by governmental institutions, the prime ministerial-power literature suggests that the governing process is becoming more personalized, centralized, and controlled by the prime minister and the central agencies that support him in his political and governing roles. • The tension between, or even the paradox of, the fragmented power of the governance model and the concentration of power represented by the prime ministerial model has brought new governing tools into greater prominence in terms of how political goals are translated into bureaucratic action. • Over several decades a political culture has developed in which citizens are less deferential to public officials (especially politicians), and there is a generalized lack of trust and confidence in government as an institution. In response to lost legitimacy, governments have over the past several decades sought to inform and to consult more extensively with citizens, which has brought communications activities more to the forefront of governing. • Under the impact of access to information laws, policy-making and management within government has become more transparent and open to leaks. • Particularly during the last decade, the activities and culture of Parliament and its committees have become more bitterly partisan, negative, and theatrical. • A more aggressive, multi-channel, adversarial, and negative 24/7 media environment has emerged leading to a political culture of scandal that at times inflates routine problems into indicators of widespread abuse and/or gross incompetence. • The new ICTs, including social media, create opportunities for governments to communicate with citizens faster and in more detail than ever before, but government messages are a small part of a tsunami of non-stop messaging, which competes directly and indirectly with the attempts by governments to reach diversified audiences who are generally predisposed to mistrust the source. •

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These broad trends and specific developments have provoked debates over the relationship between government and governance. The concept of governance is contentious; there are many different perspectives on what the process implies for the future roles of governments. There is, for example, considerable academic debate over whether the new governance processes have completely displaced top-down, command-and-control processes used by governments in the past to set directions and achieve change within society or whether we are simply witnessing a shift in the relative reliance on different tools that governments have always used to pursue their policy and political goals. A common theme of the governance literature, however, is that the hierarchical approaches to policy-making and implementation that are characteristic of past are being supplemented and complemented by growing a reliance on markets and networks as instruments of change. This shift implies a dispersal of power and the need for greater communications across organizational boundaries. Bell, Hindmoor, and Mols (2011) have argued that a process in which both government and non-government actors use persuasion to change behaviour in order to achieve their objectives represents an increasingly important mode of governance. They also suggest that persuasion is often used as part of, or in conjunction with, the more widely recognized governance modes of hierarchy, markets, and networks, an interpretation that blurs the boundaries among the different modes of governance. It also brings to mind the literature on policy instruments, one of whose main contentions is the perceived tendency for politicians to rely first and mainly on the least coercive means of intervention to solve social problems (Howlett and Ramesh 2003). The notion of persuasion as a principal tool of new public governance fits nicely with the ideas of the “public relations state” and social marketing as ways of interpreting how the governing process is changing. To a point, governments have recognized the immense challenges of successful two-way communication and persuasion given the crowded, inter-connected, frenetic, competitive, and low-trust environments in which they operate. From the outside it is hard to know for certain, but impressionistically it appears that the “political” purposes of communication have over time come to receive more attention than the “governing” purposes, recognizing of course that those two domains of activity can never be totally separated. As



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discussed below, both offensive and defensive strategies and tactics involving a wide array of communications approaches and techniques have been developed and adopted to serve political and government goals. A specialist community of communicators has emerged and has become institutionalized within government, and it is becoming more professional in its orientation and skills. Before examining these developments further, it is necessary to describe briefly the constitutional and institutional context in which they are occurring. the constitutional and institutional context

Structures that distribute authority and resources and procedures that prescribe who is expected to communicate with whom and about what topics combine to shape, in difficult to track and measure ways, the aims, targets, content, channels, and impacts of internal and external messages. In addition to organizational charts and prescribed processes, there are informal networks of communication and interaction within government and with the outside world. Indeed, in the new communications world, in which governments are highly open to outside influences and rely increasingly on the persuasion of other actors to achieve their aims, the notion of outside and inside environments of governments becomes increasingly artificial because the more numerous and extensive, formal and informal, communications networks span organizational boundaries leading to a sharing of information, power, risk, and accountability (Graber 2003). Communications networks can exist on a number of bases, including on the basis of assigned roles within government, function, shared interests and ideas, power relationships, and friendships. Networks both reflect and shape the cultures (values, beliefs, norms of behaviour) and the climates (the social psychology of interpersonal relationships) both within organizations and in the interactions among organizations. Communications can be deeply and subtly affected by the “taken-for-granted” assumptions and the unwritten rules of the game that operate below the surface of political and administrative life. Political and administrative cultures of government overlap and intersect so that the preoccupations, goals, values, and norms that drive political behaviour have great potential to condition the behaviour of public servants, especially those serving in central ­

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agencies that support the prime minister and cabinet and the deputy ministers who serve the prime minister and their individual ministers within departments. Leadership philosophies and styles at all levels within government also influence directly and indirectly the aims, content, targets, techniques, and tone of communications activities, which are highly diverse. The intersection of structure, leadership, and culture can be seen in the way that the constitutional and institutional arrangements of cabinet-parliamentary government, especially as it operates under contemporary conditions, are inherently centralizing and secretive in their logic. The expectation of a strong initiating executive has been part of Canada’s constitutional order since the country was created in 1867. It has always been recognized that Canada is a vast country in geographical terms, one that is also diverse in regional, linguistic, and ethnic terms. Forming governments and maintaining their unity has always required prime ministers to possess strong political skills, including communications skills, and a willingness to use the “hard” power of formal authority, as well as the “soft” power of attraction, support, and persuasion (Nye 2008). When talking about the contemporary importance of communications as a source of prime ministerial power, we should not forget the superb communications skills of some past prime ministers, especially John A. Macdonald, our first prime minister, who used every communications medium available at the time to build a new country and a new national party. t h e s av o i e t h e s i s o n p r i m e m i n i s t e r i a l p o w e r

There is an ongoing debate over the sources and limits of prime ministerial power, and much of it has arisen in response to the original and provocative scholarship of Donald J. Savoie. This is not the place to discuss in detail the Savoie thesis that power has been excessively concentrated in the hands of the prime minister and a set of courtiers who surround and support him (see Bakvis 2000–1 and White 2005 for some analytical and substantive issues regarding the Savoie thesis). However, in order to discuss the growing significance of communications as a prime ministerial resource, I need to offer my own brief interpretation of the issues involved (Thomas 2003–4). A good starting point, I believe, is to recognize that any prime minister operates simultaneously in at least four ­overlapping and intersecting worlds: the external world of interdependence with



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other governments, non-governmental organizations, and outside actors from various backgrounds; the world of his own party in Parliament and across the country, as well as competition and dealings with other parties; the media world of shifting issues and pressures for instantaneous responses; and the day-to-day world of running government. These four interconnected worlds have become more complicated and challenging, with the result that prime ministers have less control than in the past over the issues that arrive on the institutional agenda of government and how those issues are framed. Furthermore, the required response times with many issues have been shortened dramatically. Critics of the all-powerful-prime-minister thesis point to these wider contextual circumstances as evidence that it is less possible today than in previous­decades for a single individual to be fully in charge of the agenda of government. Bevir and Rhodes (2006) suggest that the seeming paradox of a dispersed governance model and a centralized prime ministerial model reflect, in the United Kingdom case at least, the distorting influence of the “Westminster Model” which serves as a “smokescreen” of the changing nature of power and leadership dynamics both outside and inside government. Once issues are accepted as appropriate for government action, the prime minister can be very influential in determining the nature of policy and administrative responses. As Savoie notes, the prime minister can launch a policy initiative at any time and will decide whether or not to respect the requirements of the “normal” policy process. Other cabinet ministers can propose policy, but normally they must work through the cabinet process, which requires gaining the support of the central agencies that support the prime minister. However, the scarcity of time and attention for issues is the most fundamental constraint on prime ministerial power. On a daily basis, the life of any prime minister is hectic, fragmented, episodic, pressured, and stressful, despite all the efforts of staff to plan and organize activity. No prime minister can arrange to be at every meeting, read every important piece of communication, and participate in every significant conversation that affects what happens in government. Practising political management by exception and delegation to others is unavoidable and essential. These fundamental facts of the central governing process make communication and ­coordination in the inner circles crucial to the effective design and delivery of policy and its implementation, including working through and with the

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public service. Policy must also be explained and defended in Parliament and the media, with affected groups, and to the general public, all in the interest of building understanding and support for government action. t h e p e r s o n a l i z at i o n o f p o l i t i c s ?

Part of the argument for prime-ministerial rule is that contemporary politics has become more personalized in the sense that individual political actors, particularly party leaders and first ministers, have become more prominent at the expense of political parties, institutions like legislatures, organized interest groups, and collective identities of various kinds within the political system. In his book Power: Where Is It? (2010), Savoie argues that powerful individuals matter more than institutional structures, whether in countries, corporations, the media, or politics and government. Restricting the discussion here to the political realm, the personalization or individualization thesis could refer to how politics is presented in the media, to how voters perceive the political process, or to how voting preferences are determined. In her recent book, Lauri Karvonen (2010) offers a large body of evidence and careful analysis of the personalization thesis in a number of European parliamentary democracies. Her conclusion is that even if leaders have become more prominent in elections and government, there is no general trend towards personalization when the thesis is examined along four dimensions of the political process. For example, she raises questions about the popular notion of the presidentialization of parliamentary systems and reminds us that a media focus on individuals is only one dimension of the political process, albeit an important one. As strong as Karnoven’s analysis is, it still leaves open the possibility that ongoing personalization trends are gradually transforming the political process. In Canada, the available literature on the media and politics indicates that the prime minister receives the most coverage and that the “presentational” aspects of his role have become critical to political success. agenda setting and media management

The notion of agenda setting has been studied for four decades by communications scholars and by political scientists. However,



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researchers in various disciplines have worked in relative isolation from one another, with communications studies focusing on how the media shape public opinion and political science studies focusing on how agendas inside government take shape. Reviewing the main studies available from both fields, Walgrave and Van Aelst (2006) concluded that we lacked the knowledge foundation to answer the fundamental question, Under what specific circumstances are the mass media able to boost political attention for issues? Of the nineteen studies they reviewed, almost half established a strong media impact on the political agenda, four attributed a considerable impact, three found only a weak impact and four found hardly any impact (91). These mixed findings were attributed to weak theorization and variable research designs. Despite the theoretical challenges and empirical contradictions found in the academic literature on agenda setting, governments have adopted more numerous, aggressive, and specialized approaches to “news management.” The phrase refers to a strategic process of reading the political environment surrounding an issue and identifying the aims of communication, the audiences who need to be reached, the content and tone of the messages that will achieve those aims, the most appropriate communications channels to be used, and some vague notion of what outcomes would constitute success in their communication efforts. As the media have assumed a more influential role in the policy process, the communications functions within government have become more extensive, professional, specialized, and, at least impressionistically, more politicized (Kozonlanka 2006). In a comparative study of message production in three countries – Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States  – Barbara Pfetsch (1999) found it useful to differentiate between “media-­ centered” news management and “political” news management. Media-centered news management focuses directly on creating positive news coverage and public support. It relies on what are sometimes called “above-line” messages in the form of press releases, speeches, interviews, events, and on-line messages. In contrast, political news management represents attempts to gain advantage over political opponents and/or to defuse criticism. It relies on “belowthe-line” techniques such as spinning, withholding information, offthe-­record briefings, leaks, and trial balloons. Governments try to hide their use of these more manipulative methods because they lead

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to media criticism and a potential loss of public support when governments are portrayed as dishonest and duplicitous. Unfortunately, there is only a limited number of sources on the news management process in the government of Canada, and most of these are rather dated journalistic accounts (Fox 1999; Gratton 1988; Levin 1993; Taras 1998).

“spin” “Spin” has become an emotive term, often used pejoratively to describe activities that are seen to be manipulative and deceitful. There is no universally accepted definition of spin. Brown (2003) defined it as “a systematic and proactive approach to political media relations that seeks to maximize favourable coverage.” Other commentators suggest it is more sinister, involving the deliberate misrepresentation of facts to present a more persuasive but biased or one-sided story (Neil 2009). The term is used more neutrally here to describe deliberate attempts to shape and shade news coverage and public perceptions. It must be recognized that communications professionals, public relations experts, journalists, and other advisers working in government perform essential roles in enabling both politicians and public servants to cope with more continuous, generally suspicious, and negative media coverage of their activities. For politicians there is also the fact that party competition and the parliamentary process are mainly negative in content and tone. Politicians have also adopted positive language, messages, and images in attempts to recapture lost public trust and confidence, but this approach can backfire when “spin” is perceived to be deceptive. There are many techniques and activities that could be described as spin or, more neutrally, as pro-active public relations: • • • • • • •

•

Party and government announcements Publicizing speeches, interviews, articles Reacting to breaking news events Staying on message Driving the news agenda by sustained campaigns Planting stories Releasing negative news at the most opportune time in terms of the media cycle and releasing good news to overshadow bad news Managing expectations

•

•

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Building up leaders and undermining opponents through attack ads Favouring some journalists and intimidating others (Gaber 2002; Pearson and Patching 2008)

This is not an exhaustive list of spin activities, and some are more “above-board” and legitimate than others. At this point, we lack the knowledge to say definitely how much governments in Canada rely on these and other techniques to generate positive coverage, how journalists react to attempts at spin, how effective such activities are, and what impact spin has on the overall health of democracy. g o v e r n m e n t v e r s u s p o l i t i c a l c o m m u n i c at i o n s

The academic distinction between media-centred and political-­ centred messaging corresponds in many ways, but not entirely, to the distinction used in the professional communications community between “government” and “political” communication. The government of Canada has an official communications policy document (last updated in 2006) that provides principles and general guidance on how ministers and public servants should communicate with Canadians for the purposes of designing and delivering programs and services (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 2006). Communication is seen to be multi-directional in nature. Its aims include informing, listening, engaging, and persuading for purposes of governing more effectively. This is different from, and meant to be separate from, political communication, which is intended to promote political parties, ideologies, leaders, and agendas. Although both types of communication have their place in Canadian democracy, no bright line separating them can be drawn in practice. When there is widespread overlap or even the perception of such overlap between professional, non-partisan communications activities for government purposes and the political use of “spin” for partisan purposes, all communications from government suffer a loss of credibility, especially when the audience is already predisposed to mistrust government as a communications source. t h e p e r m a n e n t c a m pa i g n

A blurring of the line between government and political communication increased as Canada entered the era of “the permanent

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c­ ampaign.” The phrase refers to the transfer of such election techniques as polling, focus groups, the use of symbols, brands, and advertising, direct targeted messaging, “opposition research,” and attack ads into the processes of governing. The phrase originated in the United States and reflected the frequency and intensity of campaigning in a system of divided power and weak party structures (Blumenthal 1980). The professionalization of the conduct of election campaigns meant that specialists displaced in large measure the earlier reliance on party members to run national and local campaigns, a trend that came later to Canada. Professionalization also affected the relationship between political parties and the apparatus of the state: parties in office insisted on more “packaging” and “marketing” of their policy “products” to various segments of the “political marketplace” through “branding” and “messaging” that was meant to communicate positive images that appealed to voters as much, if not more, on an emotional rather than a rational level (Westen 2007). There were more attempts to use government advertising to gain short-term political advantage. In summary, the frenzied, headline-grabbing approach of the election period was carried over into the governing process. These trends in the United States have spilled over into Canada. However, without any systematic, empirical studies it is difficult to say precisely when permanent campaigning began in this country, how pervasive it has become within government, and how permanent “the permanent campaign” style of governing will be. Four factors seem to have recently encouraged a fusion of campaigning and governing. The first was four federal elections between 2004 and 2011, with three minority governments before the Conservative Party of Canada won a majority in May 2011. In minority government circumstances, short-term political survival strategies and tactics designed to escape parliamentary defeat and to keep public opinion on side predominated. A second reason for employing political marketing techniques as a staple of the governing process was to cope with a more aggressive, negative and 24/7 media environment. Finally, the personal character, philosophy, and leadership style of the prime minister was another factor that affected the extent to which campaigning became fused with the governing process. Whether they are Conservative or Liberal, all prime ministers are interested in using communication to advance their agenda, enhance their reputation, ensure consistency in messaging, prevent



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communications problems, and deal with negative publicity, which will inevitably occur from time to time. However, among recent prime ministers, Stephen Harper has gone the furthest in insisting on a centralized communications process, with a focus on a limited number of issues and strict control over all messaging. According to Tom Flanagan, former chief of staff to prime minister Harper, this unprecedented centralization of communication is meant to meet the requirements of a “permanent campaign” (Flanagan 2010). c o m m u n i c at i o n s a n d t h e r o l e o f t h e p r i m e m i n i s t e r ’ s office

(pmo)

Political and government communications entails a wide variety of roles, institutions, aims, content, channels, formats, and audiences. The focus of this chapter is mainly on the communications activities at the centre of government, in and around the office of the prime minister. However, this level of communication cannot be separated in theory or practice from communications activities at the departmental level. As part of the strong trend towards the use of communication to gain political advantage, there have been pressures to prioritize and coordinate administrative communications across the wide expanse of government. Since 2006 all government institutions have been expected to follow the communications policy of the government of Canada (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 2006). Written in general terms of principles and values, the policy is meant to give departments and other agencies sufficient flexibility to work professionally and effectively in their individual contexts without undue political interference or micro-management from the centre. In the case of communications, the centre would consist of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), the Privy Council Office (PCO), the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS), Public Works and Government Services (PWGS), and perhaps Library and Archives Canada (LAC). The PMO and the PCO are the two central agencies of greatest interest to this analysis. Both institutions are at the hub of the communications processes that swirl around the prime minister. There are many academic, journalistic, and government sources on the roles and structures of the PCO and the PMO, including three widely quoted books by Donald J. Savoie (1999, 2003, 2008), so this analysis will restrict itself mainly to the communications dimensions of those organizations. The general differences between the two offices

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were stated succinctly four decades ago and are still relevant today: the PMO is partisan, politically active, and operationally sensitive, whereas the PCO is non-partisan, operationally active, and politically sensitive (Robertson 1971). Both the political staff in the PMO and the public servants in the PCO recognize that political and administrative considerations are often intertwined, that prime ministers need both political and professional advice, and that they must work together to produce the best possible governing process. The closeness or distance between the PMO–PCO relationships depends greatly on how the leadership in the two offices understand, relate to, and trust one another. In the analysis to follow the examples will be drawn mainly from the period of the Conservative Party governments of Prime Minister Stephen Harper from 2006 to 2011. The PMO is the location where partisan political concerns and the processes of governing meet most directly. The approximately ninety people who have worked in the Harper PMO are described in official terminology as “exempt staff,” which means they are appointed and serve at the pleasure of the prime minister. The PMO plans and organizes the life of the prime minister, including his schedule, links to the party apparatus, preparations for Parliament, interactions with the media, and the handling of communications in all forms that are “political” and/or “personal.” In short, the PMO staff serves an indispensable role in managing the time and attention of the prime minister by acting as “gatekeepers” in terms of access to the prime minister, directing the implementation of his priorities, and serving as a “switchboard” for communications activities in all forms (Axworthy 1988). Over the years, the person presiding over the PMO has been variously called the principal secretary or chief of staff to the prime minister. In the current PMO serving prime minister Harper, there is both a principal secretary in overall charge and a chief of staff. Several positions in the PMO have a direct or indirect communications role. There is a director and a deputy director of communications, as well as several press secretaries. Other director positions with a significant communications component would be those for policy, issues management, stakeholder relations, priorities, and planning. Critics have accused prime minister Harper of increasing the size of the PMO, but the budgetary figures do not really support this charge. The budget for the staffing and operation of the ninety-member PMO was $9.89 million in 2009–10. It had grown steadily from $2.2



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­ illion in 1975, but when adjusted for inflation the annual spending m has remained in the $7–10 million range (Davis 2010). The PMO may not have grown much in budget and staff terms, but its control may have increased. As Tom Flanagan, a former chief of staff to Prime Minister Harper observed, “The PMO may remain the same size, but still provide greater direction for government communications” (Davis 2010). The increased expenditure of $1.6 million by the PMO over the 2008–9 to 2009–10 fiscal years was, in fact, mostly attributable to more communications staff and to increased travel by the prime minister to communicate to Canadians the benefits of the Economic Action Plan, the government’s response to the economic downturn that began in 2008. It has now become almost a cliché to argue that Prime Minister Harper is obsessed with control over communications and that the centralization in this field is unprecedented compared to other prime ministers. Prime ministers may not respect the media or like individual journalists, but they are obliged to work with them. As a result, there have always been planned, concerted, and extensive efforts by the PMO to maximize favourable publicity, to minimize bad news, and generally to enhance the image, credibility, and favourable approval ratings for the prime minister of the day. Such campaigns have included attempts to use the media to gain political ground, even to co-op them, while finding ways to blunt potential media criticism. From his arrival in office in 2006 Prime Minister Harper seemed to have contempt for the media, especially the Ottawa Press Gallery. Almost immediately he started restricting media access to himself and other cabinet ministers. Harper’s attitude was probably expressed by Tom Flanagan, former campaign manager and chief of staff to the prime minister: “The Press Gallery is a bunch of self-important, preening prima donnas who think they are crucial because they are stationed in Ottawa and they’ve watched ‘All the President’s Men’ too many times” (Wilson 2006). In June 2010, the Canadian Association of Journalists issued an open letter to the prime minister complaining about the following tactics intended to limit media access: holding few press conferences, requiring journalists to register on a list of approved questioners, prohibiting cabinet ministers from answering questions when entering and departing from cabinet meetings, restricting public servants from providing background briefings, and interfering with the access to information process (discussed below). A few journalists

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who clashed with Harper and his staff claimed that it was impossible to do their jobs well because their interview requests were denied and then ended up asking their employer for another assignment. Harper’s directors of communications defended the restrictions by saying the prime ministers was a busy person who had other more important duties than answering “gotcha “ questions from the media. The conflicts and tensions with journalists may not have hurt the Harper government because the public holds the media in almost as low esteem as politicians. Directors of communications and press secretaries in the PMO serve as strategists, advisers, managers, and spokespersons. These have been difficult jobs in the Harper government, in part because of the turbulent minority government period and in part because of the suspicion entrenched in the PMO culture that the media practices “gotcha” journalism based on an alleged liberal and even Liberal Party bias. From the outside, it is impossible to know the extent to which Prime Minister Harper becomes personally involved with media management. There is no doubt, however, that the PMO’s approach to media relations reflects the philosophy of the prime minister and that he is the ultimate judge of whether strategies and tactics are appropriate and effective. The fact that Prime Minister Harper has been served by five different directors of communications in just six years indicates the diffi­ culty of the job and the potential for burnout. Different directors and press secretaries do better than others in handling the media. For example, two weeks into the life of the first Harper government in February 2006, the then Director of Communications, William Stairs, was dropped in favour of Sandra Buckler, who had previously been a vice president of public affairs with a national consulting and lobbying firm. Whereas Stairs had been conscientious but cordial with the media, Buckler adopted a confrontational approach, leading to a period of acrimony with journalists (Martin 2010, 35). Seeking information and comments, journalists complained that at times their telephone calls to Buckler were not returned and that she preferred to communicate through email. Apparently, it was also Buckler’s advice that the prime minister bypass national reporters in favour of speaking to local television and radio stations. The fact that relations with the national media became chilly, if not hostile, did not seem to bother Prime Minister Harper who supported and applauded Buckler’s controlling style.



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The all-controlling approach to public communications and media relations was extended to other cabinet ministers and to the public service. It was during Buckler’s time as director of communications (February 2006 to June 2008) that the government put in place the Message Event Proposal (MEP) system. The MEP was intended to predict and manage how messages would play out in the media as a way to maximize political credit for the government or to prevent damage to its reputation (Martin 2010, Chapter 7; Davis 2010; Blanchfield and Bronskill 2010). To accomplish these aims, nearly all external messaging that could be captured by the media has to receive approval from political staff in the PMO before news releases go out, speeches are given, or interviews are granted. The MEP describes the event or information request, the likely audience, the location, the anticipated headline, and so on. Originally intended to apply only to events involving the prime minister, the MEP system was extended in 2008 to all ministers and departments. To implement this communications control, the Harper PMO enlisted the services of the Communications and Consultations Unit in the PCO (about which more is said below) to coordinate the MEP process. Final approval of all items, however, resided with the director of communications in the PMO and highly sensitive MEPs rose to the level of the chief of staff to the prime minister. According to journalistic accounts, the tightest control through MEPs took place from 2008 to 2010, control through MEPs was relaxed somewhat after 2008, mainly for the pragmatic reason that the PMO could not cope with the flood of MEPs associated with advertising the stimulus plan. the privy council office

(pco)

a n d c o m m u n i c at i o n s

The PCO is the prime minister’s department and the cabinet secretariat. It is headed by the clerk of the Privy Council and secretary to the cabinet. Its employees are career public servants, not politically aligned advisers. By design, the PCO is a small organization relative to the scope of its mandate. In 2010–11, the budget of the PCO was approximately $144 million, and it had 1,040 employees (PCO 2010). Stated simply, the mandate of the PCO is to provide support and advice to the prime minister; to support the collective decision-making processes within cabinet and its committees; to ensure coherence and coordination in the development and implementation

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of policy; and to promote an efficient, effective, and ethical public service. As head of the PCO, the clerk of the Privy Council performs three broad interrelated roles: deputy minister to the prime minister, secretary to the cabinet, and head of the public service. The manner in which the clerk performs these roles depends on the expectations and demands of the prime minister, the issues on the government agenda over a given period, how the incumbent defines his/ her role, and the nature of his/her leadership capabilities. According to a research paper prepared in 2005 for a commission of inquiry, the greatest change in the role of the PCO over the preceding thirty years had been the expectation that the clerk would serve as a mediator and problem solver on behalf of the prime minister (­ Sutherland 2006). How large that role becomes depends on the issues of the day, the quality of the personnel in the PMO, and the trust levels that develop among the prime minister, his principal secretary, and the clerk. Normally, the clerk meets each morning with the prime minister and his principal secretary, with fewer meetings happening when the interpersonal relationships are more distant. In addition to these regular meetings, there is almost constant communication between the political staff in the PMO and the public servants working in the various secretariats that comprise the PCO. In its 2010–11 Report on Plans and Priorities (RPP), the PCO reported that it was spending more money and hiring additional staff to support its increased communications role. “In a media environment that is increasingly diverse and complex,” the RPP states, “there is increased risk of miscommunication.” It goes on to state that “the PCO will continue to mitigate this risk through strategic communications advice in support of the Prime Minister in his role as lead spokesperson for the Government of Canada” (PCO 2010, 24). In charge of communications at the PCO is the assistant secretary to cabinet for communications and consultations. This position has been described in a 2010 study by the Public Policy Forum as one of the ten most difficult jobs in the federal public service (Public Policy Forum 2010). The assistant secretary provides advice on strategic issues and leads government-wide initiatives on communications. Her advice is non-partisan, but her role is to support the prime minister and the priorities of the government of the day. She is responsible for coordinating and ensuring consistency in the messaging of



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thirty-six cabinet ministers, twenty-seven parliamentary secretaries, and the heads of over one hundred departments and agencies. She is also responsible for the coordination across government of the politically sensitive activities of public opinion research, public consultations, the adoption of new communications technologies, media monitoring, advertising, and crisis communications. To perform these daunting responsibilities in a global, turbulent 24/7 media environment, she has the support of approximately one hundred employees, including strategic communications analysts, media analysts, and web and social media experts. In 2009–10, media reports began to appear that the PCO was being politicized, with a particular focus on its communications activities. At one point, it was reported that the wife of a senior official in Harper’s PMO had been appointed as director of communications in the PCO. This may have been just a case of a qualified professional receiving a promotion that she deserved, but tongues wagged inside the PCO and in the media that PCO communications were becoming more political than in the past (Martin 2010, 218–19). About the same time, the Communications and Consultations unit in the PCO was enlisted by the PMO to coordinate the MEPs process. When the Canadian Press broke the story, an official spokesperson for the CCU played down the notion that the line between “political” and “government” communications had been crossed, stating that it had always been the role of the PCO to consult the PMO on communications matters (Blanchfield and Bronskill 2010). However, communications specialists elsewhere in government have complained off the record to journalists that MEPs have significantly restricted their freedom to share information and to respond to inquiries. For them, MEPs reflected a lack of trust in their professional judgment and discretion. They acknowledged the need for governments to manage information flows and not to be blindsided by messages that might arouse controversy. However, the backlogs and delays caused by the MEPs process prevented timely responses, including taking full advantage of instantaneous communications like new social media. Delay also meant that deadlines for journalists were routinely missed, which was said to be neither an unintended nor unwelcome consequences of the MEPs vetting process. Along with other actions by the Harper government, the MEPs process has caused a severe chill in the communications climate of the bureaucracy, leading to a defensive posture by communications

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people. Informally, ­ communication and background discussions, especially with the media, have come to be seen as dangerous and career-­limiting, despite all the fine words about open, accessible and responsive government found in the official communications policy of the government of Canada. After 2008 the PCO received additional dollars and staff to market the Harper government’s $47.2 billion Economic Action Plan, which was intended to counter the recession. The advertising campaign for the stimulus package was initially riddled with images of the prime minister and links to his website. As part of the stimulus spending program, government MPs across the country staged photo ops with oversized cheques with the Conservative Party logo  – rather than a logo of the government of Canada  – being presented to community leaders. In the face of criticism that it was spending public money on self-promotional advertising, the more obvious “political” content was removed. Such criticisms from the parliamentary opposition and the media have always been made, because it is difficult to distinguish between informing citizens about government policies and using taxpayer’s dollars for political propaganda (Rose 2000, 12). In this case, the opposition added the argument that the extensive advertising campaign was wasteful in a time of austerity. The use of government advertising to claim political credit for initiatives has long been standard operating practice by all governments. Separate from government advertising intended to communicate a positive message is political advertising intended to destroy one’s political enemies, and “enemies” is not too strong a word. It reflects the view of former Harper adviser Tom Flanagan that elections are the equivalent of war and that during an era of the permanent campaign, the governing party must be tough, focused, disciplined, and persistent in its political messaging (Flanagan 2007, 274–89). This is made possible by the money provided annually to parties under election finance laws, and in the case of the Conservative Party by its superior fund-raising capacity compared to the other parties. For the first time in Canadian history, the Conservative Party was able, before any election had been called, to run negative attack ads against the new Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff. Because the ads fell outside the campaign period there were no rules on how much could be spent and the opposition Liberals lacked the resources to launch a counter-campaign.



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l e a d e r s h i p , c o m m u n i c at i o n s , a n d c u lt u r e s

Leadership, communications, and cultures are powerful influences in shaping the daily life of public organizations (Schein 2004). The operational philosophy and leadership approach of the prime minister is potentially, but not always, the most influential determinant of the culture that shapes and guides the behaviour of ministers and senior public servants. Cultural messages are sent throughout government by the official and unofficial words and deeds of the prime minister, the political staff who serve him in the PMO, the senior public servants in the PCO, other ministers and senior administrative leaders. Especially in the intense, frenetic, and high-pressure world at the centre of government, everyone comes to recognize the unspoken assumptions and the unwritten rules of the game based on the actions and inactions of the prime minister and those who serve him in the PMO and PCO. In his recent, important book, Harperland: The Politics of Control (2010), journalist Lawrence Martin writes in the concluding chapter, “A Question of Character,” the following: “Driven by the insecurities of a minority, the constraints of a town painted Liberal for thirteen years, and his own inordinate craving for power, Harper imposed an ironclad system aimed at bringing the nation’s capital to heel. Showing no respect for the conventions or checks and balances of the system, he let his thirst for control get out of control” (270). Martin identifies close to seventy alleged abuses of power (he uses the vivid label “March of the Audacities” to describe the actions) by the Harper government, many of which are identified as unprecedented compared even to the centralizing tendencies of previous prime ministers (see Martin 2010, 287–88 for an inventory of alleged abuses). Confirming the importance to political staff of promoting and defending the image and reputation of the prime minister, ­Harper’s director of communication dismissed the ­Martin book as having been written by a “big L Liberal sympathizer.” This counterattack ignored the fact that Martin had earlier written critically about the centralizing actions of Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien and that the most persuasive evidence about H ­ ­ arper’s obsession with control came from remarkably candid interviews with his past and present cabinet ministers and political staffers. As described above, the centralization of communications planning and operations in the PMO and PCO through the MEPs ­process,

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the use of government advertising to gain political advantage, and the restrictions placed on access by the media to events and to public servants as sources for background information were leading examples of the Harper government’s attempt to control the agenda, avoid parliamentary defeat, promote the Conservative Party “brand” and stifle bad news. Many other actions reflected the control mentality that shaped behaviour at the centre of government. Professional, neutral public servants were fired and/or had their reputations attacked when they took positions or made statements that the prime minister and the PMO found to be unacceptable on political grounds. There was also documented evidence of an elaborate colour-coded rating system for handling access to information requests. Based on the source of requests and their potential political sensitivity, access requests had to be sent to ministers’ offices or even to the PMO for clearance rather than being handled by neutral, professional access coordinators in departments. Access coordinators were pressured by ministerial political staff to withhold information and in one case a ministerial assistant ordered a released document to be retrieved (Legault 2011; Thomas 2010). Such control tactics appear to have created a communications climate of intimidation, defensiveness, and caution throughout the public service. The autonomy of communications professionals at the department level that was promised by the system-wide Communications Policy (2006) was undermined and a professional communications community that was beginning to mature and to achieve more respect inside the public service was harmed by the stress on tight message and information control. In fairness to the Harper government, it must be reiterated that it did not invent many of the techniques of message and information control, which had been used by all past governments, albeit not to the same extent. Moreover, Prime Minister Harper is the leader of a merged political party, both halves of which had their own history of internal dissent and long periods of being in opposition, so that a focus on discipline and cohesion was probably to be expected. The minority status of the Harper government from 2006 to 2011 meant a pre-occupation with political survival and election readiness, which contributed to a campaign approach to governing. Having been skewered by the media in the past, the Conservatives believed many elite journalists had their own agenda that involved a “permanent campaign” to make the government look bad. In short



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g­ overnment spin was needed to counter media spin. In a more complicated, dynamic, and demanding environment of multiple communications channels, the government sought to by-pass the media in order to reach Canadians directly with information, particularly on the Internet. Political interference with the access to information process, the Harper government would argue, was the exception not the rule, and when such activity was disclosed, the prime minister immediately directed political staff not to engage in it. conclusions

With the ongoing technological revolution and the emergence of rich, multi-media environments outside and inside government, communications has become central to politics, governing, policymaking, and public management. If a prime minister does not integrate communications considerations into his political leadership, into the daily activities of governing, into the development and implementation of policy, and into his defense of his performance, he risks failure. The prime minister cannot handle the communications requirements of modern government unaided. The exempt staff in the PMO and the public servants in the PCO who support him in political and governmental communications roles perform an essential service and should not be seen as deceitful, unethical manipulators of information and messages. The Savoie thesis is correct. No single individual in government comes close to matching the prime minister in terms of the potential to exercise both “hard power” in the form of ordering particular actions and the “soft power” of attracting support and persuading others to follow his lead. Being at the centre of the communications process and acting as a communications manager present both opportunities and constraints on the prime minister. This chapter has argued that it is valuable in terms of refining and complementing Savoie’s provocative scholarship to apply a communications perspective to the process of governing from the centre. This study has used the five years of prime ministerial rule by the Conservative Party government of Stephen Harper to illustrate how communications can be employed as a prime-ministerial resource for both offensive and defensive purposes. It has now become commonplace to suggest that Harper has centralized power around his office to an unprecedented degree. To this point, that judgment

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about Harper has been reached mainly in journalistic accounts, most notably the compelling analysis presented by Lawrence M ­ artin. ­Martin’s analysis combined interviews with current officials and media reports to construct a composite picture of Harper’s leadership philosophy and style. Given the secrecy that surrounds cabinet and other high-level decision making, the use of elite interviews and media reports are the two main sources available to outside analysts. There are potential problems with such sources, however. Currently serving ministers, political staff, parliamentarians, and senior public servants will likely be inhibited in what they say on record, or they might be speaking to advance a cause, including their own reputation. Former public officials who are no longer caught up in the hurly burly and rivalries of daily political life might be expected to offer more reflective, detached observations. Media reports can be another valuable source; in fact, they provide the main basis for the analysis of the communications practices of the Harper government presented above. However, in relying on media stories to reach the conclusion that Harper is guilty of new excesses in autocratic power, we have to ask whether journalists are over time simply upping the ante in their claims about the abuse of prime ministerial power. Stories about a prime minister who practised shared leadership and allowed far more collective decision making would probably be judged less newsworthy and therefore less likely to make it to air or into print than those that talk about “benign dictators.” This study has been exploratory. It represents a call for more focused and thorough research on communications as a source of prime ministerial power. There are many gaps in our knowledge that scholars in political science, public management, and communications studies need to fill. For example, at this point we cannot say definitively whether the evolving array of communications strategies, approaches, tactics, and tools actually contribute to political success defined in terms of maintaining or increasing voter support. Clearly politicians and their advisers believe that the new communications methods work. They may also believe that a more centralized, controlling approach is necessary given the changed, more challenging conditions of leadership at the centre of government. There appear to be more numerous communications advisors serving Stephen Harper than served previous prime ministers, and the centralized controls over messaging seem to be stricter than in the past. How-



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ever, these changes may only allow Harper to cope ­politically with more complicated, challenging external and internal communications environments. It is unclear whether the prime minister and his communications advisers act in a more controlling manner based on the type of issue involved. Presumably aggressive attempts at political and media management control take place when highly controversial matters are at stake and/or when a government is in trouble and/or when the cabinet and the caucus might be divided. Under contemporary conditions described earlier, governing in Canada has come to resemble a non-stop process of campaign-type actions designed to gain and retain public approval and support. The techniques used for winning office have been applied more and more to the processes of running government. These techniques include greater reliance on ministerial advisers and outside consultants; the extensive use of polling and focus groups for the development and “selling” of policies; the development of sophisticated political communications strategies, including “spin,” targeted messaging, and the use of “opposition research” and negative ads against political opponents; the greater use of advertising, symbols, and brands to convey a positive image of the prime minister and the government; the co-optation of potential criticism by outside groups; the preemption of ideas and actions; and the adoption of defensive strategies such as attempts to manage the media and to restrict the flow of information. When governments have a large, professional public relations machine to tell their story in the most positive way, journalists believe it is their job to question and challenge government communications. In a competitive media environment, there is also pressure on journalists to uncover abuses, blunders, and even run-of-the-mill errors that counterbalance the “spin” of government news releases and photo ops. The media bias towards suspicion, negativity, and sensationalism, combined with the greater transparency made possible by technology and access laws have caused governments to adopt preventative and defensive strategies to avoid negative news coverage. For governments, the media are simultaneously a resource and an obstacle. Attempts to manage the media can only be partial and/ or temporary. Governments try to hide their attempts at media management. When spin tactics are exposed, the “spin doctors” – like directors of communications and press secretaries in the PMO – can become the story and lose their usefulness to the government.

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Effective communication with the public depends on the media, especially television, where most citizens continue to obtain their news about public affairs. Prime ministers cannot live without the media, but it is never easy to live with them. A positive media image will only strengthen an already powerful prime minister, but for the reasons stated above, this has become a greater challenge in the contemporary media environment. Under these conditions, the line between political and governmental communication, once thought to be reasonably discernible and agreed upon, has become blurred and controversial as the preoccupation with generating favourable publicity and avoiding negative news spills over from the political centre of government into the administrative culture of the senior ranks of the public service. The evolving roles and relationships between the PMO and the PCO in shaping and coordinating communications at the centre and across government need to be investigated. We need studies of the roles of directors of communications and press secretaries serving in the PMO, as well as of the assistant secretary to cabinet for communications and consultation in the PCO. The communications community across government has grown and become more professional, and we need studies of the roles played by directors of communications and their staff in the policy and administrative processes. All these investigations would help us to better understand how communications affects the power, responsibility, and accountability of the prime minister, which is a central concern of contemporary Canadian democracy.

references

Aucoin, Peter. 2006. “New Public Management and New Public Govern­ ance: Finding the Balance.” In D. Siegel and K. Rasmussen, eds., Power, Professionalism and Public Service: Essays in Honour of Keith ­Kernaghan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, chap. 2. Axworthy, Thomas S. 1988. “Of Secretaries for Princes.” Canadian Public Administration 31, 2 (summer): 247–64. Bakvis, Herman. 2000–1. “Prime Minister and Cabinet: An Autocracy in Need of Reform?” Journal of Canadian Studies 35 (winter): 60–79. Beeby, Dean. 2011. “Mounties to Investigate Conservative Staffer over Political Interference.” Canadian Press, 14 March.



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Bell, Stephen, and Andrew Hindmoor. 2009. “The Governance of Public Affairs.” Journal of Public Affairs 9 (March): 149–59. Bell, Stephen, Andrew Hindmoor, and Frank Mols. 2011. “Persuasion as Governance: A State-Centric Relational Perspective.” Public Administration 88 (3): 851–70. Bevir, Mark, and R.A.W. Rhodes. 2006. “Prime Ministers, Presidentialism and Westminster Smokescreens.” Political Studies 54 (4): 671–90. Blanchfield, Mike, and Jim Bronskill. 2010. “Harper’s Privy Council Message Control System is Unprecedented, Critics Say.” Canadian Press, 6 June. Blumenthal, S. 1980. The Permanent Campaign: Inside the World of Elite Political Operatives. Boston: Beacon Press. Brown, R. 2003.”Rethinking Government-Media Relations: Towards a Theory of Spin.” Paper presented at the EPCR Conference, Marberg. Bruno, Jessica. 2010. “PCO Spending Increases by $23 Million in Three Years.” The Hill Times, 15 November. Campion-Smith, Bruce. 2008. “How Harper Controls Spin,” Toronto Star, 26 May. Campion-Smith, Bruce, and Tondra MacCharles. 2008. “PM’s Communications Head Steps Down.” Toronto Star, 26 June. Curry, Bell. 2011. “Selling Policy or Party? Opposition Questions ­Tories $4-million Ad Blitz to Promote Budget.” Globe and Mail, 25 March. Davis, Jeff. 2010a. “Bureaucrats Chafing under ‘Unprecedented’ PMO/PCO Communications Control.” The Hill Times, 26 April 2010. – 2010b. “Opposition Parties Attack Feds’ $89-Million Advertising Strategy.” The Hill Times, 5 April. – 2010c. “Cabinet Ministers’ Offices Regularly Interfere in ATI Requests, Says Tory Staffer.” The Hill Times, 22 February. – 2010d. “PMO Budget Largely Stable since 1975.” The Hill Times, 8 February. Ditchburn, Jennifer. 2010. “Two More Tory Staffers Tried to Block Access to Information Requests.” Globe and Mail, 15 December. Flanagan, Tom. 2010. “Something Blue: Conservative Organization in an Era of the Permanent Campaign.” Paper presented to the Canadian ­Political Science Association Annual Meeting, 3 June. – 2007. Harper’s Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Fox, Bill. 1999. Spinwars: Politics and New Media. Toronto: Key Porter Books.

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Graber, Ivor. 2007. “Too Much of a Good Thing: The ‘Problem’ of Political Communications in a Mass Media Democracy.” Journal of Public Affairs 7:219–34. – 2002. “Government Spin: An Analysis of the Process.” Media, Culture and Society 22 (4): 507–18. Grober, Doris. 2003. The Power of Communications: Managing Information in Public Organizations. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Gratton, Michel. 1988. “So, What Are the Boys Saying?”: An Inside Look at Brian Mulroney in Power. Toronto: Paperjacks. Heffernan, Richard. 2006. “The Prime Minister and the News Media: ­Political Communications as a Leadership Resource.” Parliamentary Affairs 59 (4): 582–98. – 2005. “Exploring (and Explaining) the British Prime Minister.” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 7 (4): 605–20. Howlett, Michael, and M. Ramesh. 2003. Studying Public Policy: Policy Cycles and Policy Subsystems. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press. Karvonen, Lauri. 2010. The Personalization of Politics. Colchester, ­England: ECPR Press. Kozolanka, Kirsten. 2006. “The Sponsorship Scandal as Communication: The Rise of Politicized and Strategic Communications in the Federal Government.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31 (2): 343–66. Kumar, Martha Joynt. 2007. Managing the President’s Message: The White House Communications Operation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leblanc, Daniel. 2010. “Don’t Meddle in ATIP Requests, Political Staff Told.” Globe and Mail, 8 February. Legault, Suzanne. 2011. Interference with Access to Information. Part 1, Special report to Parliament. Ottawa: Information Commissioner of Canada. Levin, Allan. 1993. Scrum Wars: The Prime Ministers and the Media. Toronto: Dundurn Press. Libin, Kevin. 2010. “Overbearing Harper Secret to Tory Success.” National Post, 10 June. Martin, Lawrence. 2010. Harperland: The Politics of Control. Toronto: Viking/Penguin Canada. McCann, James A., and Kathryn Dunn Tempas. 2004. “Testing the Permanence of the Permanent Campaign: An Analysis of Presidential Polling Expenditures, 1977–2000.” Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September.



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Neil, Boyd, 2009. “Spin Cycles: A Series about Spin, the Spinners and the Spun.” Canadian Journal of Communications 34, 307–10. Nye, Joseph S. 2008. The Powers to Lead. New York: Oxford University Press. Pearson, Mark, and Robert Patching. 2008. “Government Media Relations: A ‘Spin’ through the Literature.” Humanities and Social Sciences Papers, Bond University. Pfetsch, Barbara. 1999. “Government News Management: Strategic Communications in a Comparative Perspective.” Berlin, Science Centre ­Berlin for Social Research. Privy Council Office. 2010. Report on Plans and Priorities, 2010–2011. Ottawa. Public Policy Forum. 2010. Ten Tough Jobs 2010: Profiles of Leadership Positions in Canada’s Federal Public Service. Ottawa. Robertson, Gordon. 1971. “The Changing Role of the Privy Council Office.” Canadian Public Administration 14, 4 (winter): 487–508. Rose, Jonathan. 2000. Making Pictures in Our Heads: Government Advertising in Canada. London: Praeger. Savoie, Donald J. 2010. Power: Where Is It? Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2008. Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in Canada and the United Kingdom. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 2003. Breaking the Bargain: Public Servants, Ministers and Parliament. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1999. Governing from the Centre: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Schein, Edgar H. 2004. Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Seymour-Ure, Colin. 2003. Prime Ministers and the Media: Issues of Power and Control. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. – 2000. “Prime Ministers’ and Presidents’ News Operations: What Effects on the Job?” In Howard Tumber, ed., Media Power, Professionals and Power. London: Routledge, 151–66. Shane, Kristen. 2011. “Access Czar’s Report on Political Interference in Access Act Could Spark Another House Battle.” The Hill Times, 21 March. – 2010. “Prime Minister Harper Benefits from Unprecedented Tight ­Message Control.” The Hill Times, 21 June. Sparrow, Nick, and John Turner. 2001. “The Permanent Campaign: The Integration of Market Research Techniques in Developing Strategies in

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a More Uncertain Political Climate.” European Journal of Marketing 35, no. 9/10: 984–1002. Sutherland, Sharon. 2006. “The Role of the Clerk of the Privy Council.” In Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities: Restoring Accountability Research Studies, Volume 3, Linkages: Responsibilities and Accountabilities. Ottawa. Taras, David. 1988. “Prime Ministers and the Media.” In Leslie Pal and David Taras, eds., Prime Ministers and Premiers: Political Leadership and Public Policy in Canada. Scarborough: Prentice Hall, 41–53. Thomas, Paul G. 2010. Advancing Access to Information Principles through Performance Management Mechanisms: The Case of Canada. Washington, DC: World Bank Institute. – 2003–4. “Governing from the Centre: Reconceptualizing the Role of the PM and Cabinet.” Policy Options (December–January): 107–12. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. 2006. Communications Policy of the Government of Canada. Available at http://tbs-sct.gc.ca/pubs. Walgrave, Stefaan, and Peter Van Aelst. 2006. “The Contingency of the Mass Media’s Political Agenda Setting Power: Toward a Preliminary Theory.” Journal of Communication 56: 88–109. Welch, Mary Agnes. 2010. “An Open Letter to Canadian Journalists.” Canadian Association of Journalists 10 June. Westen, Drew. 2007. The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. New York: Public Affairs. White, Graham. 2005. Cabinets and First Ministers. Vancouver: UBC Press. Wilson, Jennifer. “Empty Podium: Stephen Harper’s Media Tantrum.” King’s Journalism Review 12 (November). Van Onselen, Peter, and Wayne Errington. 2005. “The Permanent Campaign Comes to Australia: Communications Strategies in the 2004 ­Federal Election.” Christchurch, New Zealand.

5 Establishing the Boundaries of the Public Service: Toward a New Moral Contract ralph heintzman

In four remarkable books, Donald Savoie has identified two key issues for the future of public administration in parliamentary democracies: the increasing concentration of power at the centre of government and the impact of this concentration of power on the relations between elected and non-elected officials and on the culture of the public service. With great insight, Donald Savoie has called the political and bureaucratic culture that emerges from this concentration of power at the centre of government “court government” (Savoie 1999, 2003, 2008, 2010). The diagnosis of court government raises the question of the values and boundaries of a professional, non-partisan public service in this new context.1 A professional, non-partisan public service is required not just for integrity and public trust but even for effective government (Lewis 2008; Heintzman and Marson 2005, 2010; ICCS 2008).2 But this kind of professional public service is put under severe pressure by court government, especially when the latter is driven by what Peter Aucoin calls New Political Governance (NPG), a mix of politicization, tighter central controls by the political executive, and growing emphasis placed on government communications (Aucoin 2006b, 2008a,b). So what are the values that this kind of public service both creates and requires in the new context created by court government and NPG? The public service is obviously a part of the executive. But it is also obviously not part of the political executive: it is chosen differently, it has different functions, legal status, powers, constraints, and, therefore, values. So what is the proper relationship between the two?

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Donald Savoie was prescient in identifying this question of “boundaries” as perhaps the most critical current issue in public administration (Peters and Savoie 2000, 155–357; Savoie 2004). The reluctance of the Canadian federal public service to address it – even when invited to do so (Canada 2002) – was one of its major failings over the last decade and contributed to a number of serious problems, including the sponsorships mess.3 Both ministers and deputy ministers have become accustomed to a very fluid, vague, imprecise approach to the question of the vertical boundaries of the public service and have even come to see it as a virtue (Ehrenworth 2006). But the public service of Canada has also paid a very high price for avoiding this issue, as the sponsorships episode, the Gomery Commission, and more recently, the increasing involvement of public servants in partisan communications activities illustrate (­Heintzman 2010) This price is paid in the loss of reputation, honour, and trust, both internal and external. If it is not to continue to be at risk, the public service of Canada needs better tools and concepts that both equip it to define the vertical boundaries of the public service and require it to respect them. I do not think the public service will be able to renew its moral contract with Canadian citizens until this has been accomplished. And one of the ways to do it is by renewing the moral contract with elected leaders themselves. f o u r a p p r o a c h e s t o e s ta b l i s h i n g b o u n d a r i e s

In this chapter I will review four approaches to establishing the vertical boundaries of the public service. I must regretfully omit other potential options that might deserve equal attention for this purpose in future, such as new governance arrangements within ministerial departments (Aucoin 2007, 2008b; Wilks 2008; Heintzman and Juillet 2012). The first approach is the recent effort to develop a doctrine concerning the constitutional “independence” of the public service. A second approach to defining the proper boundaries of the public service is the way in which the Federal Accountability Act (FedAA)4 (Canada 2006a) implemented the British concept of the “accounting officer.” A third is the proposal to alter the manner of appointment of deputy ministers in order to strengthen their professional independence. And a fourth is the proposal to define and protect

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the boundaries of public service through a Charter of Public Service endorsed by both ministers and parliament. the

“constitutional

i n d e p e n d e n c e ” o f t h e p u b l i c s e rv i c e ?

The first approach to defining the proper “vertical” boundaries of the public service is the recent effort to develop a doctrine concerning the “constitutional independence” of the public service (Sossin 2005, 2006). This effort proceeds from a correct intuition about the need  – especially in the new context of “court government”  – to establish appropriate “boundaries” between the elected and nonelected parts of the executive. But if the public service has its own “personality,” as Donald Savoie has correctly argued, it does not follow automatically that the best way to describe it is as a “constitutional personality” (Savoie 2006, 263, 278). There are at least four problems with this first approach. Jurisprudence The first problem is the common law jurisprudence cited to build such a doctrine. The effort to construct a doctrine of “constitutional independence” has relied on common law cases dealing with the nature of public service obligations to political authority, cases such as Fraser, Osborne, opseu, and so on (Canada 1985, 1987, 1991). These cases deal with the duty of loyalty, freedom of expression, whistle-blowing, and political or quasi-political activities of public servants. And they all turn on a principle or tradition of a public service that is politically neutral or non-partisan. But these cases will not bear the construction the new theory of constitutional independence wants to put on them. Not only do they not establish the “independence” of the public service in this new sense – much less its “constitutional” independence – they actually say exactly the opposite. It is very important to understand what a “neutral” public service means in these decisions. It means a public service that is responsive to the duly elected, democratic government and not to some other agenda, either another political agenda or an agenda of its own. In the opseu decision, for example, both the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court quoted approvingly Mr Justice Labrosse’s conclusion that “public confidence in the civil service

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requires its political neutrality and impartial service to whichever political party is in power” (Canada 1987: par. 99). Or as Mr Justice Cook observed in Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, the duty of loyalty exists to ensure that government can effectively work towards legitimate goals notwithstanding the private opinions of public servants (Alberta 2000: par 40, cited in Sossin 2006, 46). In other words, what these cases establish is not the independence of the public service but its opposite. These cases declare that the public interest requires a public service that can be trusted to execute democratic decision making faithfully, and not to substitute for it some other definition of the public interest. In the Supreme Court’s historic Fraser decision, Chief Justice Dickson went as far as to declare that the public interest in ensuring a public service responsive to democratic will sometimes requires “restraint” upon public servants (Canada 1985: 466)  – the opposite of “independence.” It is, of course, true that, in Fraser, Mr Justice Dickson also set out three exceptions to the normal duty of loyalty, exceptions that have become known as the “Fraser test.” But these Fraser exceptions to the general duty of loyalty and responsiveness cannot legitimately serve the objective for which the proposed doctrine seeks to use them. To employ an analogy, this is somewhat like using the soldier’s duty not to obey an unlawful command to support a theory about the “independence” of soldiers from their command structure. The exception proves the rule. It does not establish a different rule. Rhetorical Strategy In addition to this basic problem, there are three others, all of which might be called problems of language. I will call them issues of rhetorical strategy, vocabulary, and constitutional language. As far as rhetorical strategy is concerned, there are two problems. The first is verbal legerdemain, and the second is verbal inflation. Words are, first, taken out of context, then they are turned inside out, or on their head, and finally they are kicked up a notch or two, to a completely different level of significance. The principle of a neutral or responsive public service found in Fraser, for example, is gradually transformed into a principle, even a “value,” of “independence”; then “independence” becomes a “constitutional norm,” and finally it is kicked up a notch to proclaim a constitutionally based



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role for the public service as “a crucial check on executive authority” (Sossin 2006, 36). In a similar pattern of verbal inflation, an exception to the duty of loyalty that requires public servants to refrain from illegal acts is verbally transformed into an “obligation on civil servants to ensure that the rule of law is respected,” presumably through the public service’s role as a constitutional “check” on the executive (Sossin 2005, 46). The final results of these verbal transformations and inflations are based on, and justified by, their original legal context. But they mean the opposite of what they did in that original context. Vocabulary In addition to these problems of rhetorical strategy, there is a second language problem  – vocabulary. The language of “bureaucratic independence” or of the public service as a “check on Ministerial power” (Sossin 2006, 56) or the repeated negative emphasis on “political interference” in decision making (even “political interference in the budgetary policymaking process”!) (Sossin 2005, 3, 20, 39, 43, 53, 56–7) is not consistent with a proper view of the public service. It is not consistent with the values of the public service in a parliamentary democracy, properly understood. And its generalized use would undermine them. This kind of language does not allow for the necessary balance between competing but equally necessary values. It is correct to insist on the “plural” or multiform character of the executive, in which various parts of the executive are at various degrees of “arm’slength” from ministerial decision making (Sossin 2005, 4; 2006, 36). But of all these parts of the executive, the core public service is the least “independent,” the one that must work closely with, and in a close relationship of trust with, political authority. This language is especially harmful because there are too many public servants already inclined to believe that political decision making is an unwarranted “interference” in the proper business of government. This attitude was one that deeply concerned John Tait, a former federal deputy minister of justice, and it is the reason why his famous report on public service values and ethics made “democratic values” the first of the four families of values (Canada 1996, 2000, 53–8). That is also why they now appear first in the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector (Canada 2012, 2). Because the

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first duty of a public service is “helping Ministers under law, to serve the public interest” (Canada 2003, 7) Anything else is inconsistent with democratic government and with democratic values, as Fraser, Osborne, and all the other decisions rightly affirm. A habit of thought based on the language of “political interference in bureaucratic decision making” would turn public service values upside down. Of course there are some decisions that law or tradition or convention or simply good values and good sense have reserved for unelected officials. And we need to have both elected and unelected officials who understand these boundaries and how to handle them. But this is a two-way street. We also need to know when public servants should not be involved in political activities or advice. In my view this is an equal if not greater problem in the Canadian public service, and it is something the language of “political interference” does not capture at all. Both challenges can and should be addressed in different ways than by developing a language of “bureaucratic independence” in which political decision making becomes thought of as “political interference in public service decision-­making” (Sossin 2006, 26). “Constitutional” Language A fourth problem is the specific use of “constitutional” language. The proposed doctrine seeks to root the search for “bureaucratic independence” in constitutional language: to define so-called “bureau­cratic independence” as a constitutional value or norm or convention. But this effort suffers not only from the flaws of verbal and conceptual inflation just discussed but, more seriously, from removing potential decision making from the political arena, where it should be, and transferring it to the courts instead. When we start to use this kind of constitutional language, we are doing one of two things (noted in Osborne, by the way) (Canada 1991, 87). The first is simply to mean or imply that something is a key feature of our overall system of government. When we use the “constitutional” word in this way we are simply dignifying something, or giving it more weight or importance. The second meaning is that the something in question actually forms part of the Constitution of Canada and is therefore potentially enforceable by the courts or that it is at least something the courts could declare “unconstitutional,” or contrary to a constitutional convention.



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The problem with these two uses is that it is very easy to slide from one to the other. This risk arises as soon as you start to use “constitutional” language. Consider an example. Let’s say a government decided to abolish the merit principle and adopt the American practice of staffing the senior public service on a “spoils,” or partisan, basis. This has been seriously debated in Canada as a legitimate public policy matter, including as recently as the early 1990s (Aucoin 2008a, 26). Would this be an unconstitutional act, one a court would be justified in overturning or at least stigmatizing as “unconstitutional”? I think the right answer must be no. Many provincial governments have staffed the senior public service on a partisan basis over the last decade, and none has been accused of acting unconstitutionally, nor should they have been. This shows the risks of verbal and conceptual inflation that arise from dressing up the issues of public service values, conduct, and boundaries in constitutional terms and language. A neutral, non-partisan, professional public service is an essential pillar of a modern parliamentary democracy. Fortunately that is something that the Canadian electorate also believes. But if, for some reason, they were to decide otherwise, that would surely be their right. We do no service to democracy when we seek to remove decision-making authority from its own realm. We should only do so in the most compelling of cases. And it would have to be done through deliberate constitutional amendment, reflecting the political will of Canadians, and not through the manipulation of common law jurisprudence to make it yield something quite other than it intended.5 Are there ways to address the important issues of public service boundaries other than the inflated constitutional language that propounds a “constitutional norm of bureaucratic independence,” supposedly to be found buried in the case law (Sossin 2006, 29)? I think there are. And, moreover, I think they are better ways. And so, in the end, does the chief proponent of the constitutional approach to the boundaries of public service. For, after building up the constitutional sandcastle of bureaucratic independence, Lorne Sossin eventually discards it, and admits that these are really issues of values and “culture.” So at the end of his research study for the Gomery Commission, he turns, quite properly, not to the constitution but to public service values instead, and to the instruments and practices to support them, including potential legislation (­Sossin

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2006, 64–5). This is the right place to end up, even if it takes a detour to get there. the accounting officer

A second and more promising approach to defining the boundaries of the public service is the flawed implementation of the British concept of the “accounting officer” in the Federal Accountability Act (FedAA) in 2006. In Britain this concept makes deputy ministers “personally” responsible for the financial and general management of their departments. From the point of view of defining the “boundaries” of the public service, the most important features of the concept, as it is practised in the United Kingdom, are the tools that are given to an accounting officer for that purpose, as we will explore below. The difficulty here lies not in the concept of the accounting officer itself, which is admirable and much needed in Canada, but rather in its implementation. As the former United Kingdom Treasury official responsible for British accounting officers remarked perceptively, “it would be dangerous to assume that just because the title of the post is the same, then everything else must be the same too” (Glicksman 2007, 23). In fact, the version of the accounting officer implemented in the FedAA has none of the key features of its British model and several fatal innovations. How did this unfortunate result occur in Canada? And what can be done about it? To answer those questions, we will need to backtrack to consider what is critical about the accounting officer concept and what is not. Because in Canada we have got those backward.6 What is an “Accounting Officer”? In the United Kingdom, an “accounting officer” is an official designated by the Treasury, normally the permanent secretary of the department – in Canadian terminology, the deputy minister (DM) – who is given a “personal” responsibility “for ensuring that: the Estimate(s) presented to Parliament for the department’s annual expenditure are consistent with the statutory powers and with the government’s expenditure plans; and use of resources in the department is consistent with the Estimate(s); and must answer to Parliament for stewardship of these responsibilities.” Accounting officers



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must “make sure that their organisations’ activities achieve high and reliable standards of regularity and propriety.” In addition to specific obligations for financial management, the concept of regularity and propriety is interpreted in a very “powerful” way, “as delivering public sector values in the round,” encompassing “honesty, fairness, impartiality, integrity, openness, transparency, accountability, objectivity, accuracy, and reliability.” These values are to be “carried out in the spirit of, as well as to the letter of, the law, in the public interest, to high ethical standards, achieving value for money” (United Kingdom 2007a, 11, 13, 7; emphasis added). The accounting officer is given specific instructions as to the actions to take if a minister proposes a course of action inconsistent with these values. The deputy minister (permanent secretary), as accounting officer, is instructed to consult with the Treasury if time permits and to seek a written instruction from the minister before proceeding. If such instruction is given, the accounting officer is to copy the direction to the comptroller and auditor general, who will normally draw the matter to the attention of the Public Accounts Committee To Whom Are Accounting Officers Accountable? One of the most vexed questions in Canada has been confusion and controversy about the accountability of accounting officers. Much of the discussion in Canada (including in the second Gomery Report) has been premised on the assumption that British accounting officers are “accountable” to the Committee of Public Accounts (PAC). This is an understandable interpretation, especially since British language and practice have themselves evolved in recent years and are not now as clear as they once were. United Kingdom Treasury documents now say, for example, that, formally, “the Accounting Officer is someone who may be called to account in Parliament for the stewardship of the resources within the organisation’s control” (United Kingdom 2007a, 17). Before 2007, the Treasury’s instructions said instead that the accounting officers bore “the personal duty of signing the accounts (for the department) ... and, by virtue of that duty, the further duty of being a witness before the Committee of Public Accounts to deal with questions arising from those accounts” (United Kingdom 2001, 1; emphasis added.) The evolution of British language suggests the United Kingdom Treasury may itself be in

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the process of forgetting the nineteenth-century origin of the term “accounting” officer in the financial sense of the word (“accounts”) and may be sliding (wittingly or not) toward a new political or governance meaning (“accounting for”) (United Kingdom 2007a, 9). But the slide has not gone very far. Even within this new British language, it is not clear the words necessarily mean what Canadians are inclined to draw from them, in the context of our own debates. First of all, it is worth noting that in the United Kingdom the relationship between accounting officers and the PAC does not arise from any legislative provision. The Government Resources and Accounts Act provides only that accounting officers for each department shall be appointed by the Treasury, without describing the role in detail (United Kingdom 2000, ss. 5(6)–(8)). Second, a close reading of the Treasury guidance about the accounting officer role shows it still uses the language of giving “evidence,” “answering questions,” and being a “witness,” rather than the full language of “accountability,” in describing the relationship between the accounting officer and the PAC (United Kingdom 2007a, 20) This is the language of what in Canada we call “answerability,” not accountability (Canada 1996, 2000, 9–10).7 Accountability involves two necessary elements: giving an account and being held to account (United Kingdom 1996b, cited in United Kingdom 2007b, 12, par. 26). Where these two are not both present, accountability cannot be said to exist. Officials can be held to account only by those from whom they hold their mandate, appointment and/or authority and who are therefore in a position to take action if the authority is not properly used. Accounting officers are designated by the Treasury, receive their instructions from the Treasury, and report to the Treasury. It is therefore to the Treasury that they owe their primary accountability qua accounting officers, not to the PAC, to whom they only “answer” or “give an account,” as witnesses.8 When United Kingdom officials talk about an accounting officer being “accountable” to the PAC, they are talking “loosely,” as a former United Kingdom Treasury officer of accounts puts it (Glicksman 2007, 25). For some reason the Canadian debate on these matters has almost completely overlooked the primary relationship between the Treasury and the accounting officer. This is doubly unfortunate as this relationship can and should be a critical fulcrum for good public service management. As the Royal Commission on Financial Management and Accountability (the Lambert



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commission) observed as long ago as 1979, Parliament’s ability to hold ministers accountable depends on “an increased capacity on the part of Ministers collectively and individually to hold departments and agencies fully accountable for the efficient and effective discharge of their responsibilities” (Dwivedi 1982, 157). How Does the Accounting Officer Role Change the Role of Ministers? The proper answer to the question of how the accounting officer role changes the role of ministers is, not at all. Contrary to the assumption of the second Gomery Report, the accounting officer role does not alter the role or accountability of the minister. Nor should it. Those who assume or argue that the accounting officer role does and should relieve ministers of accountability for the management of their departments do not seem to appreciate that the only result would be to deprive Parliament of someone to hold politically responsible for management. If Parliament “were to hold public servants more directly accountable,” the Task Force on Public Service Values and Ethics correctly observed, “this would inevitably undercut the authority and responsibility of ministers” (Canada 1996, 2000, 11). This is constitutionally unacceptable. Parliament must have a political representative who can be accountable, in Parliament, for both policy and management in each department. So the accounting officer role should not and does not detract from ministerial accountability. (Glicksman 2007, 24) “Ministerial Directions” As already noted, the most important feature of the accounting officer concept – for defining the “boundaries” of the public service – involves the tools that are given to the “deputy minister” for that purpose, especially the clear instruction from the United Kingdom Treasury to request a “ministerial direction” for any administrative action for which an accounting officer is not prepared to accept “personal” responsibility (United Kingdom 2007a, 19–20). In other words, the accounting officer role, properly conceived, gives deputy ministers the tools to draw a line in the sand and to define where the boundaries of public service values and action end and those of political accountability take over.

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One of the persistent myths (not just in Canada) is that such “ministerial directions” rarely occur (Ehrenworth 2006, 3). In fact, they occur quite regularly. In the 25 years from 1981 to 2005, there were 37, or an average of almost 1.5 per year (Franks 2006, 173). But even this impressive, long-term regularity can understate the frequency in certain periods. For example, in addition to the widely reported Hawk trainer ministerial direction, there were 15 other ministerial directions between 1998 and 2003, or an average of more than 2.6 a year (United Kingdom 2002a, 2002b, 2003). There was apparently another flurry of ministerial directions in 2009–10. Nine requests for direction letters were made by United Kingdom DMs in 2009 and another four in the first four months of 2010 (Sherman 2010; AccountancyAge 2010).9 But “ministerial direction” letters are only the tip of the iceberg, because for every ministerial direction, there were almost certainly many cases where accounting officers requested such a letter and ministers decided not to proceed.10 Accounting officers report that ministers will not normally even consider a course of action until assured that it has the concurrence of the accounting officer. Clearly, then, these are tools whose power lies not only – or even primarily – in their use but in their potential use. Therefore, even the relative regularity of ministerial directions – and the far greater regularity of cautionary notes from the deputy – greatly understate the impact of the accounting officer toolbox. They can also distort understanding, by, among other things, exaggerating the impression of conflict between the minister and the deputy. “Friction” between the Deputy and the Minister? Yet another persistent myth in Canada is that the accounting officer role does or will create friction, conflict, and suspicion between ministers and their deputies (Ehrenworth 2006, 3–4). But conversations with senior British officials, including accounting officers, suggest that in the United Kingdom the accounting officer role and its related responsibilities do not normally introduce friction or suspicion in the relationship between the minister and the “deputy minister.” On the contrary, accounting officers report that ministers expect the deputy to play this role and often seek his or her guidance in this capacity. Indeed some British officials have suggested that the accounting officer function actually reduces tension



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between ­ministers and deputies and provides a source of comfort and reassurance to ministers (Glicksman 2007, 24).11 The persistent misconception in Canada about potential friction between ministers and deputies derives largely, in my view, from a misunderstanding of the accounting officer principle, a misunderstanding that characterizes it negatively, as a resistance to wrongdoing or to political “interference,” rather than positively, as an assertion of public service values and of their boundaries. Saying “No”? Or Defining Boundaries? Perhaps the most unfortunate and harmful misunderstanding about the accounting officer role that has shaped Canadian debate is the misconception that its function is to prevent bad things from happening, or to prevent rule-breaking, rather than to give deputy ministers the tools and the requirement to define and respect the boundaries of public service values. There are two issues here. One is the problem of defining a negative rather than a positive role for accounting officers. The other is the failure to recognize that this is a two-way street. The accounting officer principle, properly understood, allows the public service to “draw a line in the sand,” but in a very different sense than Lorne Sossin, for example, proposes. It does not prevent “political interference in public service decision-making,” nor should it. But it allows the public service to draw a line that demarcates those things for which it can be called to give an account and those for which it cannot. Mr Justice Gomery was rightly appalled that no one could be found to take clear accountability for actions in Public Works and Government Services and that the minister and the deputy both assigned responsibility to each other. The “doctrine of mutual deniability,” as J.E. Hodgetts put it, “lay at the heart of the sponsorship affair” (Hodgetts 2007, 538). Where such ambiguity about accountability exists, the circumstances are ripe for maladministration, or worse. Justice Gomery was therefore quite correct to zero in on this “grey zone,” the imprecise boundary between elected and nonelected officials, as the major lesson from the sponsorships affair. But the accounting officer principle, properly understood, does even more than clarify who is accountable for what, important though that is. It does not simply allow the public service to draw

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a line for ministers; it requires the public service to draw a line for itself. This is equally important for the future health and integrity of the public service, and it is in no way captured by the language of “political interference.” The debate in Canada has been distorted by the assumption that the essence of the accounting officer principle is the ability to “say no” to ministers, or to prevent “political interference in public service decision making.” On the contrary, the essence of the accounting officer principle is the obligation to “say no” to oneself, that is to say, to recognize and stay within the boundaries established by the values of the public service. Unless they are or become part of what is already a wider public controversy, most ministerial directions in the United Kingdom are of a relatively routine nature. As far as I am aware, the United Kingdom auditor general, for example, has not been moved to launch an investigation as a direct result of any of the recent ministerial directions, since 1997. Sometimes a ministerial direction may be sought simply because a deputy minister does not believe the public service has the authority to act on its own, even though the decision itself could reasonably be held to be in the public good, as in the ministerial directions related to the benefits integrity projects in 1998 and 1999, involving a decision to pay irregular benefits pending retrospective legislation (United Kingdom 2002a). Even in the two high-profile (and therefore untypical) cases highlighted by C.E.S. Franks – the Hawk trainer ministerial direction of 2005 and the Pergau Dam ministerial direction of 1991 – the deputy minister was not objecting to the proposed course of action on grounds of wrongdoing (2006, 218–27). In both cases the deputy had to decide whether these were courses of action that he could recommend as a professional civil servant. When he had satisfied himself that he could not, he asked for a specific ministerial direction, thus drawing a line between what could be decided on the basis of public or civil service values of propriety, regularity, and value for money and what must be decided on other grounds, including political considerations and values. But once he had drawn the necessary line and had received ministerial direction, neither deputy minister had any difficulty in carrying out the ministerial decision. In other words, the accounting officer principle does more than clarify accountability. It is, first and foremost, a self-denying ordinance for the public service. It tells a deputy minister where he or she can go, and where they cannot, without explicit ministerial ­direction.



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It draws a line and establishes the boundaries within which the public service must remain. This principle is the important one for the Canadian public service. And it is not simply the same thing as “saying no” to wrongdoing or to so-called “political interference.” It is, equally, the ability to recognize when, as a pubic servant, you are about to cross a line you should not cross. Canadian public servants have traditionally prided themselves on providing loyal service to successive governments, and up to a point, this is a fine principle, an expression of their democratic values. But the Canadian public service has become so accustomed to working closely with ministers and to seeing that as a virtue that it may not notice when it is crossing a line or the cost of doing so, especially the cost in trust: the trust lost in the eyes of Canadian citizens and even in the eyes of public servants themselves (Heintzman 2010). The cost is obvious in the case of something like the sponsorships scandal. But consider five other examples which show the increasing involvement of public servants in communications activities with a highly partisan flavour. First, from 2006 to 2009 Government of Canada websites had a strongly partisan flavour, with banner headlines using the political slogan “Canada’s New Government.” This may seem a relatively minor infringement of neutrality, but remember: it occurred even on the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) website – the very central agency responsible for governmentwide management policy and principles, including the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Service and the Communications Policy – and so paved the way for graver abuses. A second case is the now infamous example of the Economic Action Plan website. As a Globe and Mail editorial commented, “even China’s one-party government would be impressed with the number of pictures of Mr. Harper and his loyal ministers salted into what is supposed to be a neutral place for Canadians to find out how they can benefit from a federal program” (Globe and Mail 2009; emphasis added).12 A third example is a spate of highly partisan departmental press releases, replete with political commentary, including a Department of Justice release (about the appointment of five new senators) that accused the opposition of obstructing and “gutting” the government’s “law and order” bills (Canada 2010). A fourth example is the involvement of the public service (led by the PCO) in the preparation of thousands of “Message Event Proposals” (or MEPs), crafting ­political ­messages

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for both political actors and public service officials. MEPs, as one writer put it, “have blurred the time-honoured separation of nonpartisan public servants and political staffers and sidelined seasoned government communicators, sapping morale across the public service” (Blanchfield 2010). And a fifth example is the direction from the Privy Council Office, beginning in 2010, that federal government communications and websites were no longer to refer – in the public service’s traditional, neutral, and non-partisan terminology – to the “Government of Canada” but rather henceforth to the “Harper Government,” a usage already employed in the Economic Action Plan website (Cheadle 2011c, d, e).13 Public servants are now deeply involved in these kinds of partisan communications directives, activities, and materials, and in maintaining the websites where they appear, even central agency websites. But the 2003 Values and Ethics Code required public servants to serve with “objectivity and impartiality,” and stated they must “maintain the tradition of the political neutrality of the Public Service” (Canada 2003, 8). And the Communications Policy declares it is the policy of the government of Canada to “safeguard Canadians’ trust and confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the Public Service of Canada” – for the obvious and correct reason that “Canadians value an independent, professional Public Service”  – and that therefore “public service managers and employees are expected to provide information services in a non-partisan fashion consistent with the principles of parliamentary democracy and ministerial responsibility” (Canada 2006d, Principle 9). Clearly, public service involvement in partisan communications activities and directives is not consistent with the concept of a neutral, professional, non-partisan public service. In fact it is flagrantly in conflict with both the letter and the spirit of these two key government policies that support such an objective. “Communications” is, of course, a tricky area for public servants, because it is the place where political and public service values rub against one another. But precisely because these are such borderline issues, the “boundaries” in this area need to be more carefully established. Public service leaders need new tools to help them, first, to recognize and then to manage this frontier. It is shocking, as the Globe and Mail (2009) remarked, “that so many of our elected officials fail to grasp the folly of fusing state and party.” It is far more shocking if public servants play any role in creating this confusion.14



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This is an example of where the accounting officer role, properly implemented, (and a Charter of Public Service, discussed below) could play critical roles, drawing a clear line where public service values end and others take over. A federal deputy minister of Industry recently described himself and his fellow deputy ministers as “serially monogamous in our loyalty to the government of the day” (Dicerni 2012; also Talbot 2007). This disastrous misconception may help to explain some of the regrettable incidents explored in this essay. But it is not an acceptable definition of a professional, non-partisan public service. A public service cannot be, and cannot be seen to be, a neutral, non-partisan, professional institution by being equally partisan with each successive government. Serial monogamy is the same thing as “serial promiscuity” (Wilson and Barker 2003; Aucoin 2006a, 327; Lindquist and Rasmussen 2012). It is not a solution for creating a strong public service institution, respected for its integrity both internally and externally. The Federal Accountability Act 2006 The Conservatives’ 2006 election platform correctly diagnosed the problem: “the lines between ministers and non-partisan civil servants have been blurred,” it said, “and clear lines of accountability need to be re-established” (Conservative Party of Canada 2005, 13; 2006, 13). But its solution, embodied in the Federal Accountability Act (FedAA), instead perpetuates the confusion about the nature of accountability – and about who should be accountable for what and to whom – confusion that had been apparent in documents prepared before the election by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), by the previous Liberal government, by the Gomery Commission, and even by the Conservative Party itself while still in opposition. As a result the FedAA is skewed negatively toward rule-breaking rather than positively toward defining the boundaries of public service values and action. Confusion about Accountability The problems with the Federal Accountability Act’s attempt to implement the accounting officer concept in Canada begin with the very definition of the role itself. The FedAA defines an accounting officer’s role as to be “accountable before the appropriate committees of the Senate and the House of Commons” for four things:

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organizing the resources of the department, maintaining effective systems of control, signing the accounts, and any other duties assigned by law in relation to the administration of the department (Canada 2006a, s. 259: 16.4(1) and (2)). In the light of the previous discussion, there is clearly a variety of defects in this formulation, but the chief defect is the essence itself: to be “accountable before the appropriate committees of the Senate and the House of Commons.” In British practice, accounting officers receive their mandate from the Treasury. This mandate is to uphold certain public service values and to sign the accounts of the department on behalf of the Treasury. As a result of this primary role, they also incur a duty to be a “witness” before parliamentary committees, and to “answer” to Parliament for stewardship of these responsibilities. The Canadian formulation, by contrast, overlooks what should be the primary role of accounting officers and from whom they should receive this mandate. The FedAA missed the opportunity to define a proper management accountability relationship between accounting officers and the executive (represented by the Treasury Board). And it creates instead the mistaken impression that accounting officers can and should be “accountable” to Parliament, rather than “witnesses” before it, or “answerable” to it. Not only that: it actually establishes this as their primary role, as accounting officers. The drafters of the law were too clever by half. They thought they had solved the problem of misplaced accountability by two devices: by using the words “accountable before” rather than “accountable to” (Canada 2006a, s. 259: 16.4(1) and (2)) and by defining the “obligation” incurred by this “accountability” as an obligation “to appear” before parliamentary committees and “to answer questions” (Canada 2006a, s. 259: 16.4(3)). But this legal legerdemain, which tries to take away with one hand what it grants with the other, cannot repair the damage. In its response to the PAC report, the previous Liberal government had correctly identified that using the language of “accountable before” is both meaningless and misleading: “If accountability before Parliament means the rendering of a factual account of what was done and answering questions to provide information and explanations before a parliamentary committee,” said the Martin government, “it is difficult to see how that would differ from the existing system whereby deputy ministers are answerable to parliamentary committees”15 (Canada 2005a, 3). By using the word “accountable” in this way the FedAA changed



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­ othing, as Prime Minister Harper confirmed in December 2006 n (Canada 2006e, 5).16 But it sowed a confusion that no amount of emphasis on the subtle distinction between “before” and “to” can mitigate. In the minds of parliamentarians, justifiably, deputy ministers are now “accountable” to them for the administration of their departments, and this is their primary role, as accounting officers. In addition to being a lost opportunity to establish a critical accountability relationship within the executive, the Accountability Act has already created misunderstanding, conflict, and frustration, including the “duelling protocols” described below (Franks 2009). “Drawing the Line” Rather than give Canadian deputy ministers the simple and proven tools for “drawing the line” between public service and political accountability that are in the hands of British accounting officers, the FedAA makes three fatal errors. The first is to frame the accounting officer’s powers exclusively in the context of disagreements between the minister and the DM (as discussed in the next section, below). The second is that the only kind of disagreement to which the DM’s accounting officer powers apply is a disagreement about “the interpretation or application of a policy, directive or standard issued by the Treasury Board.” The third error is that  – even within a field thus arbitrarily limited to Treasury Board policies alone – the FedAA establishes a cumbersome two-step procedure. In the event that a deputy is “unable to agree” with his or her minister, the accounting officer shall “seek guidance in writing” from the secretary of the Treasury Board, and if that does not resolve the issue, the minister must “refer the matter to the Treasury Board for a decision” (Canada 2006a, s. 259: 16.5(1) and (2)). Since this awkward procedure was proposed neither by the Conservatives while in opposition nor by the Public Accounts Committee in its 2005 report on the accounting officer principle, it seems that the government drew this idea from the previous Liberal government’s proposals in its submission to the Gomery Commission (Canada 2005b; 2005c, 10) The Conservative government adopted the substance of the previous Liberal government’s approach but substituted its own – now misleading – label. This is an outstanding case of misleading advertising. Whether in its Liberal or Conservative guise, this approach has at least seven flaws. It does not have the economy, simplicity, or strength of the British procedure; it radically narrows the field within which

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accounting officer judgment may be exercised; it disempowers the deputy minister; it does not give him/her the tools to clarify accountability or to define the boundary of public service values; it reinforces centralization of decision making in a public service already overly centralized; it tilts the decision-making process toward ministers; and it will therefore not be used. Most of these defects are rooted in mistaken assumptions about the essence of the accounting officer principle, negative assumptions that emphasize rule-breaking and disagreement rather than positive assumptions that emphasize defining the boundaries established by public service values. An Approach Skewed, Negatively, toward “Disagreement” and Rule-Breaking The FedAA approach is based on the mistaken assumption that the accounting officer role is to prevent rule-breaking. As a result it casts the accounting officer’s tools negatively, in the context of disagreements over rules, rather than in a context for positively asserting key public service values (Canada 2006a, s. 261: 16.5).17 No positive principles of any kind are invoked in the Canadian act’s description of the accounting officer. Because the drafters’ attention was focused in the wrong place and on the wrong thing: on the supposed “accountability” relationship with Parliament, rather than on the positive role of accounting officers in the apparatus of good government – their positive role in “delivering public sector values in the round” (in the United Kingdom terminology), in upholding the boundaries established by these values, and in determining where “administrative space” ends and “political space” begins (Canada 2006c, 130–1).18 “Improper” is not an absolute, and depends on context. The Canadian debate seems to have overlooked that what is certainly “improper” for a public servant to recommend may not always be “improper” for a minister to direct – and that a public service should always remain within its own universe of values, even when providing loyal service to the government of the day. This is what too many Canadian public servants (and former public servants) have failed to appreciate. Yet it is fundamental to the accounting officer role, and explains why British accounting officers normally have no difficulty in carrying out a ministerial direction and do not regard such a direction as prima facie evidence of improper conduct. Ministers and DMs should and do approach public administration from



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very ­different perspectives and values, and it is “not surprising,” as a former United Kingdom Treasury officer of accounts observes, that “from time to time a Minister takes a different view from the Accounting Officer” (Glicksman 2007, 25). Both the relativity of the concept of “improper” (depending on political or public service perspectives) and the impracticality of the way in which the FedAA pretended to implement the concept of the accounting officer were clearly illustrated by the situations reported to have arisen in Transport Canada and Infrastructure Canada in the wake of the federal budget of 2009, and in Industry Canada and FedNor (the Northern Ontario development agency for which the minister of industry is also responsible) prior to the 2010 G8 summit. In the first case, the political value of ensuring rapid expenditure of funds allocated in the budget put extreme pressure on the deputy minister of transport, who was also responsible for infrastructure spending. His efforts to ensure appropriate standards of regularity and due process apparently created great tension, perhaps even a rupture of relations between him and his minister, a notorious political partisan and close confidant of the prime minister ­(Ivison 2009; Hébert 2009). The elaborate procedures provided in the Accountability Act were of no use in managing this apparent conflict between political and public service values, whereas if the deputy minister had possessed the simple tools available to British accounting officers, the problem could have been immediately resolved through using a direction letter by which the minister assumed public and political accountability for expedited diligence in spending budget funds to combat the recession. This would have been analogous to the United Kingdom ministerial directions in 1998 and 1999 mentioned above, involving a decision to pay irregular benefits pending retrospective legislation. The Industry Canada/FedNor case is similar to the Transport/ Infrastructure Canada case, but the reverse: because, in this case, officials appear to have been excessively compliant. Thirty-three projects were selected from a list of two hundred and forty-two proposals for infrastructure spending in the Parry Sound-Muskoka region in preparation for the G8 summit.19 However the auditor general could find no documentation on the selection process or determine why these projects were selected (Canada 2011, 38–9). Neither the Summits Management Office at Foreign Affairs and International Trade nor Infrastructure Canada were involved in the selection

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­ rocess and could provide no documentation. They simply adminp istered projects already selected and recommended by the minister of industry. The claim that public servants played no role at all in the selection process has since turned out not to be the whole truth (Bryden 2012). Even if it were otherwise, the question remains as to how public service officials could accept to implement spending proposals that did not meet minimal procedural requirements. Industry Canada, FedNor, and Infrastructure Canada officials seem to have cooperated not only in the administration of the G8 Legacy Infrastructure Fund in such a manner as to leave no paper trail, but also to circumvent the due process requirements of the government’s own Policy on Transfer Payments, as the Auditor General pointed out (Canada 2011, 39). If they did these things, they were also in breach of the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Service. Deputy ministers who cooperated – or allowed any other officials to cooperate – in this manner would have been in breach not only of these policies but also of their own obligations under the Code and the general obligations for accounting officers under the FedAA. These are the lamentable results of “serial monogamy.” Except for the absence of a paper trail, the ministers’ wishes for shortcuts in these two cases were not necessarily “improper,” from a political perspective. A public service might not have had any difficulty implementing such approaches, once subject to clear and public political direction. But it would have been “improper” – that is to say, contrary to public service values – for a public service to recommend such shortcuts, or even to implement them, except under explicit and public political direction through which the ministers formally and publicly accepted accountability for them. The essence of the accounting officer role is to ensure that public service advice will only be given to ministers within a restricted range of values and perspectives appropriate to “administrative space,” and to ensure that, when such advice is not followed (for considerations that may be entirely legitimate, within “political space”), there is no ambiguity about who is responsible for the decision, and thus about where the “vertical” boundary of the public service may be found. appointing deputy ministers

The reported conflict of political and public service values in Transport/Infrastructure Canada and in Industry Canada/FedNor in 2009



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also illustrates the importance of a third proposal to clarify the vertical boundaries of the public service by modifying the procedures for the appointment of deputy ministers (DMs). Because deputies are the link between elected and non-elected officials, they not only draw the line between the public service and political authority, they embody it. How the embodiments of the boundary are appointed is therefore of the greatest importance for the boundary itself and how it is maintained. Accounting officers will be more or less able to play their role in an effective way, depending on the manner of their appointment. But even more fundamental, the manner of appointment of DMs and the behaviours that flow from it shape the broader culture of the public service. They shape the very values of public service the boundaries are meant to protect and strengthen. There are two issues here. The role of the prime minister but also the role of the clerk of the Privy Council. The Role of the Prime Minister The prime minister has, of course, a legitimate democratic role to play in the appointment of deputy ministers. But the way that legitimate role is currently structured potentially limits the ability of DMs to “draw the line,” establishing the vertical boundary of the public service in a way that adequately reflects the values of the public service and its proper role. The Sponsorship Program was the paradigm case illustrating the difficulty for a deputy minister to assert appropriate principles of sound public administration when his or her appointment is at the pleasure of the prime minister. In that case, the very program in which irregularities were occurring was a program the prime minister had deliberately and explicitly maintained under his own personal authority. As appointments are currently structured and with the tools currently available, it would have required an unusually strong and principled deputy minister to oppose the very person who controls his or her fate The way in which the prime minister’s role in appointments can potentially limit the ability of DMs to play their own proper roles was also illustrated by the reported conflict between political and public service values following the federal budget of 2009. The abrupt departure of the clerk of the Privy Council in early May 2009 was widely reported to be a fallout from this conflict of values and to reflect the desire of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to

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ensure an even greater level of responsiveness to political needs than the departing clerk  – widely viewed, ironically, as a very zealous servant of the incumbent government20 – had been able or willing to achieve (Campion-Smith 2009; Ivison 2009; Radwanski 2009; ­Travers 2009). The reported conflict between political and public service values in the spring of 2009 thus illustrates not only the impracticality of the way in which the FedAA claimed to implement the concept of the accounting officer in Canada but, equally, the importance of the appointment procedures for deputy ministers. Requesting a direction letter by which the minister and government would have assumed public and political accountability for expedited diligence in spending budget funds would only work if the DM felt himself or herself protected from summary dismissal for upholding public service values. The swift resignation of the deputy minister of transport in the wake of the clerk’s departure shows how closely security of tenure and the boundaries of the public service are linked. If a clerk, let alone a deputy minister, cannot continue in office once they are perceived to function on the basis of values different from those of elected officials, the vertical boundary between political and public service values can never be drawn. The Role of the Clerk But the current role of the Clerk himself (or herself) also shapes the culture of the Canadian public service in ways that are contrary to sound public administration and to the public interest. Because the prime minister normally and properly acts on independent advice, it is in fact the clerk who normally controls appointments and promotion at the deputy level. And because deputy ministers’ careers are directly controlled by the clerk of the Privy Council, it is natural if not inevitable for them to look to the clerk as their de facto “boss,” the person whose preferences and priorities are to be respected above all. As Donald Savoie observes, “One should never underestimate the power of appointment” (2010, 141). The evidence before the Gomery Commission highlighted some drawbacks of leaving such a power in the hands of the clerk, especially as long as he or she continues to play a triple role that includes being deputy minister to the prime minister. The commission found, correctly, that a “fundamental source of the errors and mismanage-



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ment associated with the Sponsorship Program was the failure, at the deputy minister level, to fulfil assigned management responsibilities and duties” (Canada 2006c, 115). It also found that a deputy minister’s relationship with the clerk can be an important obstacle to carrying out his or her responsibilities faithfully and properly. In fact, when the deputy and the assistant deputy minister of Public Works and Government Services attempted to put some order in the Sponsorship Program, they received a call from the deputy clerk of the Privy Council that clearly implied they should back off and should not interfere in political direction of the program by the Prime Minister’s Office (Canada 2005e, 157). As the Gomery Commission correctly noted, the inability or disinclination of a deputy minister to resist this kind of interference in his or her proper role is directly related to the clerk’s role in the selection, appointment, appraisal and promotion of deputy ministers. As the Gomery Report put it: Deputy Ministers know that their past and future ­appointments are made by the Prime Minister according to his or her sole discretion, after receiving the advice of the Clerk. There is a danger that they will feel a greater sense of loyalty to these two individuals than to the Ministers with whom they have to work on a daily basis. Divided loyalties of this kind do not promote a single-­minded dedication to the welfare of the department to which the Deputy Minister has been assigned. The most important loyalty of all, of course, should be to the public interest. (Canada 2006c, 149) The state of mind described by the Gomery Report is by no means unusual. It is entirely natural for deputy ministers to regard the clerk – not their minister – as their real boss, explicitly or implicitly. The potentially corroding effect of this hierarchical relationship is illustrated, again, by the examples of growing public service involvement in partisan communications activities described earlier. From somewhere in late 2009 or early 2010, communications officials in federal departments began receiving instructions from officials in the Privy Council Office (PCO) directing them to substitute the partisan expression “the Harper Government” in all their websites and other departmental communications, for the traditional, non-­partisan terminology of the “Government of Canada” (Cheadle 2011c, 2011d,

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2011e).21 PCO officials who gave these instructions were in violation of both the Values and Ethics Code and the Communications Policy. But consider the position of the DM whose officials received them. They were coming from the “boss” who controlled his or her performance assessment, pay-at-risk, prospects for promotion, and future career – even whether there would be one. And that “boss” was in even greater violation than his own officials, because the 2003 code stated that all DMs – let alone the “Head of the Public Service”!  – have a “particular responsibility to exemplify” public service values, to “infuse these values into all aspects of their organizations” and to ensure their organizations “comply at all times with both the spirit and the specific requirements of this Code” (Canada 2003, 14). But the corroding effects of the appointment of deputy ministers by the Clerk of the Privy Council go well beyond these kinds of wrongdoing. They are far more subtle and wide-reaching. They shape the entire culture and behaviour of the federal public service in ways that are ultimately inconsistent with a professional public service dedicated to the public interest. As already noted, Donald Savoie has aptly named the culture that emerges from this concentration of power at the centre of government “court government.” The behaviour it encourages is the behaviour of “courtiers” seeking to ingratiate themselves with those at the centre who control their careers, not the behaviour of independent public servants. As Savoie notes, “They will pay particular attention to the wishes of the one who has the power to appoint, dismiss or appoint them.” This inevitably reduces willingness to take the risk of speaking truth to power “for those who would wish a more senior appointment or a plum foreign posting” (Savoie 2008, 312). The centralization of power (especially the power of appointment) at the top of the public service also has a ripple effect downward that profoundly affects some of the public service’s core values, especially its critical capacity to speak truth to power at all levels, not just at the top. Already a decade ago the Tait report expressed concern about an apparent decline in the ability of the Canadian public service to “speak truth to power,” not just in relation to ministers but internally as well: between the various levels of the public service itself. If “public servants are not as ready as once they might have been to put forth honest views or engage in critical debate for fear of being seen to be ‘offside’ or untrustworthy,” the Tait report argued,



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this should be matter for deep concern for the public service, because “honest dialogue and exchange leading to clarification and insight” are critical to the ability of a public service to offer the sound, professional advice on which good government depends (Canada 1996, 2000, 48–9). In the decade since the Tait report, anecdotal evidence suggests that the decline it detected has continued and that the honest expression of views is now more difficult than ever. Of course the growth of this kind of “climate of fear” has something to do with political circumstances and with the uncertainties and insecurity inherent in political transitions (Savoie 1993; Cameron and White 2000; Zussman 2008). But neither anecdotal nor more systematic evidence points to this as the major source of the problem. For example, a study of new executive recruits to the federal public service reported their common perception of a climate of “fear,” a fear that seems to come from the public service itself: Interestingly, none of the interviewees ever mentioned “political interference” in this regard. Their concern was not about politicians playing havoc with the public service. The fear and selfcensorship they are referring to was completely internal to the public service, and basically unaffected by the colour of the government of the day according to some interviewed. The public service seems more prepared to speak “truth” to politicians than to each other. (Larson and Zussman 2006, 12) Another recent report on a series of sixteen sessions of discussion with dozens of longer-serving public service executives also identified a climate of fear and self-censorship: The most elusive sense that permeated the discussions was one of latent fear. This had nothing to do with any sort of edicts but rather some form of self-censorship that has become habitual, it would seem, as a survival instinct in a world where critical thinking and sharp exchanges are no longer valued as they used to be. (Hubbard and Paquet 2008, 18) One of the recent executives in the first study identified a source of the problem: “The competitiveness is amazing. People are planning their next career move, and trying to find out what the DM

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wants to hear before saying anything. This is dysfunctional” (Larson and Zussman 2006, 12). What this points to is a pyramid of power and ambition in which too many executives look fearfully to the DM, and too many DMs look in turn to the clerk. Exactly the “court government” identified by Donald Savoie. But exactly the opposite, as the authors of the first study note, to “one of the core values of the ‘independent, politically neutral public service’... its deemed ability to give fearless advice – sometimes called ‘speaking truth to power’” (ibid.). The authors of the second report suggest at least one of the sources of this problem and one of its possible solutions. “This culture of distrust has much to do with the evolution of the nexus of moral contracts,” they suggest. “Moral contracts need to evolve constantly with circumstances and they need to be kept in mind, to be in the forefront of our consciousness, if they are to be so re-negotiated” (Hubbard and Paquet 2008, 20). Clearly one of the elements of a new moral contract between the elected and nonelected arms of government should be the manner of appointment of deputy ministers. Alternative Approaches Fifteen years ago, the Tait report suggested that Canada should “examine the role played by the State Services Commission of New Zealand, especially in the appointment and dismissal of chief executives” (Canada 1996, 2000, 25). Ten years later, the need for reform was again identified, correctly, by the Gomery Commission. Drawing the obvious conclusion from the evidence presented to it – that the roles of the prime minister and the clerk in DM appointments create “divided loyalties” that are not consistent with a “singleminded dedication” to the public interest – the commission recommended that the government of Canada should adopt an open and competitive process for the selection of deputy ministers, similar to the practice in Alberta. In the Alberta model, the deputy minister of the Executive Council (the equivalent of the federal clerk) chairs an interview panel (including stakeholders) that makes recommendations to the relevant minister. The final recommendation is made to cabinet by the minister, and a veto power is reserved for the premier (Canada 2006c, 150–1). In a study prepared for the Gomery Commission, Peter Aucoin recommended a similar but slightly different reform. He recom-



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mended instead that responsibility for the appointment and performance evaluation of deputies be assigned in law to a new Deputy Minister Commission chaired by the clerk and including both senior deputy ministers and at least two members from outside the public service (Aucoin 2006a, 297–336). With the addition of outsiders, this would be very much like legislating the current process by which the Committee of Senior Officials (COSO), chaired by the clerk, reviews and assesses deputy ministers and potential deputy ministers. Both these reform proposals share a common defect. They do not address one root problem, which is the role of the clerk. Indeed they would reinforce it and hence reinforce “court government.” Although Aucoin’s proposal was clearly inspired by the New Zealand model of the State Services Commissioner, it fails to accomplish the critical feature of the New Zealand model – to separate the role of secretary to the cabinet or deputy to the prime minister from the role of appointing and evaluating deputy ministers. The outstanding feature of the New Zealand system is that the latter function is given to an entirely independent officer who does not stand in a hierarchical, power relationship between the deputies and political authority. What is the best way in Canada to accomplish the same objective as the New Zealand model? One apparently plausible option would be to give the appointment role for DMs to a new Public Appointments Commission similar to what was provided for in the FedAA. But this option has four serious defects. First, the FedAA version was left deliberately powerless. Its role would have been merely to “oversee, monitor, review and report on the selection process” for government appointments (Canada 2006c, s. 227: 1.1(1)). Second, the intended malleability of this commission was clearly illustrated when the prime minister nominated a partisan person to head it and – after such an inappropriate nomination was rejected by a parliamentary committee – has since declined to implement this provision of the FedAA (Martin 2010, 68–9). Third, even if it had more executive authority than the FedAA provided, such an approach would keep DMs separated from the rest of the public service. One objective of such a reform should be to reintegrate DMs into the universe of public service values whose boundary they embody.22 Fourth, even if it was more independent than either the Gomery or the Aucoin proposals or than the FedAA’s Public Appointments

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Commission, c­reating a new commission for the appointment of DMs would offend the principle of institutional economy. In Canada we already have the institution of the Public Service Commission (PSC), which has just celebrated a century of defending the “contested ideal” of an independent, neutral, merit-based public service (Juillet and Rasmussen 2008). The obvious way to clarify the vertical boundary between elected and non-elected portions of the Canadian government is to complete the reforms of 1918 and simply raise the appointment authority of the PSC from the ADM level, where it now stops, to include DMs also. The Public Service Commission should have the legal authority to hold internal or public competitions for DM positions, to interview candidates, and to make a recommendation to the prime minister (or cabinet). As in New Zealand, the prime minister (or cabinet) should have the authority to ask for another recommendation, or even to make a unilateral appointment, but this decision must be accompanied by a public statement and explanation of the action.23 The Harmful Impact of Private Sector Models One obstacle to moving forward with such a reform is created by the inappropriate mental models that have been allowed to accumulate in the minds of public officials over the past twenty years, especially the mental model of the private sector. Because of this unconscious mental model, even many public sector leaders assume that a public service must have a CEO, that the prime minister – and the clerk as his or her deputy – play the roles of CEO for the public service, and that the clerk must therefore have all the tools of a CEO, including the appointment of “subordinates” such as deputy ministers. This implicit but erroneous assumption was what led to the designation of the clerk as “Head of the Public Service” in the Public Service Reform Act of 1992. Its continuing influence can also be seen in the letter about the Gomery report sent to the prime minister in March 2006 by a large number of senior public and private sector leaders. The signatories to the letter simply take it for granted that a public service must have a CEO and base their opposition to changes to the manner of appointment of deputies on that assumption.­ (Ehrenworth 2006, 3) However the assumption is wrong. As if to demonstrate the error of such a premise, the UK government decided in the fall of 2011,



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to split the three roles played by the Canadian clerk, dividing the functions of secretary to the cabinet, head of the civil service and permanent secretary of the Cabinet Office among three separate individuals. In addition to other duties, the new head of the civil service will manage the DM cadre and advise on senior level appointments jointly with the cabinet secretary. (UK 2011, 3). The messiness of this shared responsibility for DM appointments suggests it is unlikely to last in this current form. But if the UK has not yet got the answer right, it is at least asking the right question.24 Neither a government nor a public service is a corporation. Looking for a CEO in government is as inappropriate as looking for a prime minister or a Clerk of the Privy Council in a corporation.25 The latter exercise might only be amusing, but the former is gravely damaging to good governance. Government is the expression of a democratic contest. It seeks to advance contestable public goods on behalf of a body of citizens who are bearers of rights and duties in a framework of democratic community. It is therefore the custodian of a solemn public trust. For all these reasons the structuring principle of governments is not centralized command – as these shallow views take for granted  – but rather the careful balancing of competing voices and authorities. Unlike private organizations, governments are deliberately structured in a “plural” or multiform manner, so that many functions are carried out independently, at arm’s length, from those who control the levers of power (Sossin 2006, 36). Many things that in a private corporation might be within the control of a CEO – staffing, for example – are deliberately put beyond the control of a prime minister and should also be beyond the control of a clerk. “[I]t is considerably easier to speak truth when buttressed by formal processes and structures,” Donald Savoie observes, “than it is to confront powerful individuals, whether the prime minister or the clerk of the Privy Council, particularly when it is these two individuals who decide who makes it to the top of the public service” (Savoie 2010, 238). Precisely because one role of a public service is to provide fearless professional advice about contestable public goods, it must be governed in a manner promoting rather than discouraging the ability to speak candidly, honestly, soberly, and without fear of power, both within the public service itself and across the vertical boundary between the public service and elected officials. Current governance arrangements in Canada, including the manner of appointment of deputy ministers, are not well designed

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to do this. They make the boundary harder to identify and maintain. Providing for other and better ways to make these appointments must be part of a new moral contract between the elected and nonelected arms of government. a c h a rt e r o f p u b l i c s e rv i c e

A fourth proposal to define and protect the vertical boundaries of public service is to establish a Charter of Public Service endorsed by both ministers and Parliament. This, too, is not a new idea. It goes back at least to the Tait report, which concluded fifteen years ago that “a statement of the great principles of public service endorsed by the Government and Parliament of Canada is now required as a foundation and reference point for public service values” (Canada 1996, 2000, 61). The Tait report’s recommended “statement of principles or code,” embodying a three-way moral contract between Parliament, ministers, and the public service, subsequently came to be labelled a “Charter of Public Service” (Heintzman 1999, 2001). The concept was endorsed by Donald Savoie in 2003 and again recommended by the external Working Group on the Disclosure of Wrongdoing in 2004 (Savoie 2003, 274–5; Canada 2004, 28–30). The concept of a Charter of Public Service was also the subject of a research report by Kenneth Kernaghan for the Gomery Commission and subsequently formed one of the Commission’s recommendations in its final report (Kernaghan 2006; Canada 2006c, 67). By that time, a commitment to establish such a charter had already been included in the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act, unanimously approved by Parliament in 2005 (Canada 2005f, Preamble). The need for and the potential of such a charter can be considered from at least three angles. A Charter of Public Service and Public Service Values The first angle is the need for an appropriate source and foundation for public service values, a foundation that only an instrument like a Charter of Public Service can provide. Public service values require such a source because a public service does not exist for its own sake. In a parliamentary democracy, a public service exists to support and serve legitimate democratic governance. So a public service



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cannot and should not give itself its own mission and values. Public service values should be established through dialogue: dialogue between public servants themselves (as the federal public service has been doing since the Tait task force), and also dialogue with others, including elected leaders. But final decisions must be reserved for those with legitimate constitutional authority. Any other approach would be inconsistent with the public service’s own democratic values. The walk would contradict the talk. Such a democratic foundation for public service values began to be achieved in the 2003 Values and Ethics Code for the Public Service, which already incorporated a “Statement of Public Service Values and Ethics,” as recommended by the Tait report. (Canada 2003, 5–18) Because the code and its Statement of Values were adopted by the Treasury Board, rather than simply proclaimed by the public service itself, they already go some of the necessary distance to provide a legitimate foundation for public service values, rooted in democratic governance. In April 2012 the 2003 code was replaced by a new Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector, required by the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act (2005). (Canada 2012) This new code was submitted to parliament before adoption by the Treasury Board. This additional step and the legislative basis for the new code both go some further distance to provide the necessary democratic wellspring for public service values. But they cannot go the whole way, because this kind of code is a still only a one-way street. It sets out the expectations for public servants. But it cannot, by definition, set out the corresponding commitments from the elected partners in governance, commitments that are also needed to set the framework for a public service dedicated to the public interest. To do this requires a two-way, not a oneway street. The values of public service must be rooted, implicitly or explicitly, in a “moral contract” with legitimate constitutional and political authority, beginning with ministers. Ministers and the Public Service The second angle from which to view the need for and potential of a Charter of Public Service is the moral contract between ministers and the public service. The 2003 Values and Ethics Code for the Public Service went part of the way toward this new moral contract committing ministers to support a non-partisan, professional, merit-

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based public service, dedicated to the public interest. It underlined the responsibility of ministers “for preserving public confidence in the integrity of management and operations within their departments and for maintaining the tradition of political neutrality of the Public Service and its continuing ability to provide professional, candid and frank advice.” It also established that no one – not even a minister – may ask a public servant “to act in a way that is inconsistent” with public service values and gives public servants the tools to enforce this provision (Canada 2003, 6–7, 14, 36). A Charter of Public Service should certainly carry forward and strengthen these kinds of provisions. It should also borrow language and concepts from models in other countries that can help define and strengthen the vertical boundaries of the public service by setting out the ministerial side of the new moral contract. One of the best models is the original United Kingdom Civil Service Code adopted in 1996. This code committed ministers, for example, “not to use public resources for party political purposes, to uphold the political impartiality of the Civil Service, and not to ask civil servants to act in any way which would conflict with the Civil Service Code.” It also committed them “to give fair consideration and due weight to informed and impartial advice from civil servants, as well as to other considerations and advice in reaching decisions” (United Kingdom 1996).26 These kinds of obligations should be an important part of an eventual Canadian Public Service Charter. A Canadian charter could also borrow from the four governmental and ministerial obligations toward public servants included in the New Zealand Statement of Commitment by the Government to the State Sector issued in 2001 jointly with a parallel Statement of Government Expectations of the State Sector. The twin New Zealand documents are noteworthy as they set out key values expected of public servants but also make “a reciprocal commitment by Ministers” (New Zealand 2001a). The New Zealand Statement of Commitment by the Government to the State Sector recognizes “the close working relationship and mutual dependence between Government and the State Sector” and acknowledges frankly that “the performance of the State Sector will be substantially influenced by the actions and processes of Ministers, acting collectively and individually.” It therefore makes four ministerial commitments toward the public service, including the obligations to “acknowledge the importance of free, frank and comprehensive advice,” to “provide



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clear guidance about policy directions and outcome priorities” and to “treat people in the State Sector in a professional manner” (New Zealand 2001b; Kernaghan 2006, 83–4). Drafters of a Canadian Charter of Public Service could also draw on the thinking of the Public Administration Select Committee of the British House of Commons, which has recommended a “new public service bargain” to be enshrined in an instrument similar to the proposed Canadian Public Service Charter. The United Kingdom committee suggests such an instrument should express both legitimate civil service expectations and legitimate corresponding ministerial expectations – a two-way moral contract. The former include safeguarded access to ministers and the right to give – even “unpalatable” – advice; extension of the accounting officers’ role to advise more widely on procedure and propriety; and the right not to be made public scapegoats when things for which they are not responsible go wrong. Legitimate political expectations include the right to expect professional and committed service to their governing objectives, poor performance dealt with effectively, and a robust system of performance management, and also the expectation that civil servants will have the skills and experience to enable them to support ministers efficiently (United Kingdom 2007b, 23, pars. 65–6).27 But provisions of this kind still touch only two sides of the triangle. They provide only for a two-way contract, between ministers and public servants. They cannot make members of parliament selfconscious partners in this objective. For this purpose, a three-way moral contract is necessary to ensure that all three partners in the governance process are formally committed to upholding public service values, maintaining the integrity and the boundaries of the public service, and governing their own actions accordingly. Parliament and the Public Service Thus the third angle from which to consider the need for and potential of a Charter of Public Service is the moral contract between the public service and members of parliament. Only a charter involving parliamentary approval can make members of parliament selfconscious partners in upholding a non-partisan, professional public service. This is necessary for many reasons but, above all, because the increasing interaction between public servants and parliamentary committees (including but not limited to the accounting officer

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role) requires an explicit agreement on the basic ground rules. The Tait report suggested that such a charter could “set out the principles that govern relations between public servants and Parliament, especially parliamentary committees.” Already fifteen years ago, the Task Force noted that “this is an area where public service values and conventions have been subject to great pressure ... and a public statement of principles endorsed by the Government and Parliament could greatly help to put things on a clearer footing” (Canada 1996, 2000, 61). More than a decade later this need is, if anything, even more urgent. In the wake of the Gomery Report and the Accountability Act, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and the Privy Council Office (PCO) have been jousting over establishing the ground rules for the appearance of the new so-called “accounting officers” before parliamentary committees (Thomas 2008a; Franks 2009). Each has issued its own separate guidelines (Canada 2007a,b). This conflict is entirely understandable – and even inevitable, as already explained – given the deceptions and misrepresentation in the drafting of FedAA. But it is neither helpful nor realistic. Neither of them can do this job alone. Such ground rules are essentially about boundaries: the boundaries established, first of all, for public servants – boundaries that must be respected if the public service is to be a respected institution, trusted by ministers, by parliament, and by Canadians. But also, therefore, by definition, boundaries for ministers and for members of parliament, too. Boundaries of language and behaviour beyond which they may not go if they are to keep their side of the bargain, in support of an ethical and professional public service dedicated to the public interest. The PAC cannot establish boundaries and guidelines for public servants, who are servants of the Crown, not of parliament. The PCO cannot establish boundaries and guidelines for members of parliament. Nor can it commit parliament to respect and uphold the boundaries established for public servants. “Joint ownership” (as J.E. Hodgetts put it) is essential if the boundaries and principles are to be respected and upheld by all three partners in governance (2007, 540). Together the PAC and the PCO documents provide many of the principles to be included in a charter. But now they must be jointly incorporated in a common charter binding both. What Franks (2009) has called the “unfortunate experience of the duelling



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protocols” could scarcely have provided a more compelling illustration of the need to clarify the boundaries of the public service, nor of the unavoidability of doing so through a more explicit three-way moral contract. To Legislate or Not to Legislate? Should such a charter take a legislative or a non-legislative form? A Charter of Public Service could be incorporated in an actual statute, or it could merely take the form of a resolution of the House of Commons, for example. The Tait report was silent on this choice, though its language might lead one to conclude it assumed some non-legislative form (Canada 1996, 2000, 61). The Working Group on the Disclosure of Wrongdoing seems to have favoured a legislative route to achieve “a new ‘moral contract’ between the elected and non-elected arms of government” (Canada 2004, 30). In his study for the Gomery Commission, Kenneth Kernaghan appeared to lean to a non-legislative form for the charter (2006, 108). But the Gomery Commission itself explicitly recommended “legislation to entrench into law a Public Service Charter” (Canada 2006c, 67). The commitment to establish a charter included in the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act (2005) is silent on the form, but the twin facts that the Martin government did not adopt the Working Group’s preference to use this legislation to establish the “moral contract” and that it situated the commitment to establish such a charter in the statute’s non-binding preamble both suggest that it favoured a non-legislative approach. Tom Axworthy also favours a non-binding parliamentary resolution (Axworthy and Burch 2010, 56). There are plausible arguments on both sides. The main issue is whether or not to use a statutory form that would give an increased supervisory and interpretive role to the courts or whether to keep the moral contract between the elected and non-elected as precisely that: a purely “moral” contract contained within the conventions of Canadian parliamentary democracy. Even the idea of a parliamentary resolution arouses opposition from many prudent souls who fear the way in which judicial activism might hijack such a “statement of principles” for other purposes. The decision on form may be guided in part by content. If the charter provides an opportunity to repair some of the damage of

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the FedAA and to re-establish the accounting officer role on a more satisfactory basis, for example, or to establish a more satisfactory basis for the appointment of deputy ministers, then it would require the form of a statute. If it remains merely at the level of principle, it could take a non-legislative form. But the real issue now lies elsewhere. The decade since the Tait report has witnessed a continuing deterioration in Canadian political culture. The decline has not been a slide into corruption (despite what many Canadians believe) but rather a degraded attitude to public institutions. It may once have been gratifying for Canadians to boast that they enjoyed (contrary to what John Adams wished for the United States) a government of men, not of laws: that an unwritten, parliamentary constitution provides a superior, flexible instrument for promoting the public good, one in which political leaders are “ruled not by a list of laws but by the high code of personal honour” (Martin 1955, 97, 203–5; Farthing 1957, 126). But in the first decade of the millennium, Canadian political leaders have shown, on the contrary, that they will now often “stoop to conquer.” Attacks on  – and unrestrained partisan exploitation of – public institutions and officials have become elements in a pursuit of political power unconstrained by convention. Honour being in shorter supply, law begins to look like a reasonable alternative to many observers. D ­ onald Savoie himself argues that the vertical boundary between political and administrative space should now be defined “in binding and enforceable legal norms” (Savoie 2008, 337–40). Even if a doctrine of the constitutional “independence” of the public service is neither defensible nor desirable, the current state of Canadian political culture provides strong support for the argument that the vertical boundary of the Canadian public service  – “an important national institution, part of the essential framework of Canadian parliamentary democracy” (Canada 2003, 5)  – should now be clearly established by a statutory Charter of Public Service. A Canadian charter could and should be the vehicle to resolve most of the issues discussed in this chapter. It should describe the kind of professional, non-partisan public service that ministers and members of Parliament commit to uphold, and it should require the public service to embody those same values. To make these commitments concrete, the charter should amend the FedAA to bring the accounting officer more into line with its British model. It



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should amend the Public Service Employment Act to give the PSC ­responsibility for recommending DM appointments. It should establish the ground rules for relations between parliament and public servants, reconciling the key principles in the “duelling protocols.” And it should also establish rules for public service involvement in government communications, prohibiting participation henceforth in any such activities with a partisan character. Following the precedent of the Ontario Government Advertising Act of 2004, it should go further, to ban government communications with a partisan flavour altogether (Ontario 2004).28 At the time of writing, there does not appear to be any movement to implement parliament’s formal commitment (in the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act) to establish such a charter. But doing so in a timely way is not only a legal commitment. It is an important addition to the edifice of good government, by the contribution it can make to the now urgent task of clarifying and strengthening the boundaries established by the values of public service. t o wa r d a n e w m o r a l c o n t r a c t : e s ta b l i s h i n g b o u n d a r i e s

Since his first major books on public administration (Savoie 1990, 1994), Donald Savoie has shown an uncanny intuition for the big issues, those everyone sees but no one else can say. More important, he has shown the courage to say them. Despite his close relations with the powerful in both the bureaucratic and the political worlds, he has not hesitated to speak truth to power. In other words he has not just written about public administration, he has embodied its most important values – both as a senior practitioner and as a distinguished scholar. He has walked the talk. His most important insight is about the growing concentration of power at both the political and the public service levels and the consequent need to redefine the boundaries between them through a new public service bargain  – a new moral contract  – embodied in legislation. The Tait report linked the need for such a new moral contract between elected and non-elected to the central issue of public trust. “The future of the public service will be determined in large measure,” A Strong Foundation argued, by the level of trust it will be able to sustain in its mission as an important public institution. In our view a high level of trust

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can only be maintained through a consistent attention to ­public ­service values. This will be even more true as public servants come to hold their accountabilities in more public ways ... If public service values are affected by the declining legitimacy of government, they can also help to restore it. The legitimacy of public institutions will be enhanced by a renewed pride and self-confidence on the part of public servants themselves, a confidence that can only come from refocusing on the character of public service as a public trust. But this is a step that public servants cannot take alone ... [They cannot take it alone because] what is needed is something that goes beyond the public service itself, something that helps link it to the broader framework of parliamentary government in Canada. (Canada 1996, 2000, 58, 60) The bottom line for the public sector is not a financial bottom line. Its bottom line is trust. The trust of public sector employees, the trust of elected leaders, and the trust of the people of Canada. The public service of Canada needs to reclaim that trust by renewing the moral contract with all three. It has begun to do so with employees through work on public service values and, now, through initial and promising work on employee engagement (Heintzman 2007, 2009). It has also begun to renew the moral contract with Canadians through world-leading accomplishments in public sector service delivery (Marson and Heintzman 2009). But another priority must also be to renew the moral contract with ministers and with parliament by establishing both the vertical boundaries of the public service and the tools to uphold them more effectively. It is very unlikely this can be accomplished through a doctrine of “constitutional independence,” and it would be ­undesirable to do so, even if it were possible. Because the boundaries of public service are rooted in its values. They can and should be maintained only by a continuing democratic consensus – a moral contract – in support of such values. This kind of moral contract, concretely defining and maintaining the boundaries of the public service, will be more effectively implemented through the accounting officer principle, properly applied, through new arrangements for the appointment of deputy ministers, and through a Charter of Public Service, together with other potential measures such as new governance arrangements in departments.



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This third contract is critical to renewing the other two. Unless public servants and citizens believe that clear boundaries for public service values and action have been established and that there is full agreement with elected leaders on how to do so, the public service of Canada will not earn – or perhaps deserve – trust and confidence in its non-partisan professionalism, a professionalism that is essential both to effective government and to parliamentary democracy.

notes

  1 This question has many dimensions, both “horizontal” (between the various parts of the broad public sector, and between it and other sectors) and “vertical” (between the elected and the non-elected parts of the executive). In this chapter, I propose to discuss only the “vertical” boundaries, between elected and non-elected officials.   2 A recent quantitative study of the US federal government by David E. Lewis has shown empirically that the replacement of career professionals by partisan appointees “hurts performance across the government, sometimes dramatically and to catastrophic effect”: “Some insulation from political control is necessary to make the bureaucracy effective – to help it cultivate expertise, develop long-term perspective and planning effectiveness, and to provide the institutional memory that keeps the government running from election to election” (Lewis 2008, 202).   3  The “eight-point plan of action” released by Prime Minister Chrétien on 11 June 2002 made specific reference to the United Kingdom Accounting Officer as a precedent Canada would examine to strengthen “public service management and accountability for public funds” including “mechanisms for more explicit accounting of departmental affairs by deputy ministers.” But because of internal public service opposition, nothing came of this prime ministerial invitation (Canada 2002, 8). Similar opposition led to the fiasco of the Federal Accountability Act (2006) described later in this chapter.   4 In this chapter I will use the short-form expression FedAA to distinguish this act from the Financial Administration Act, commonly known as the FAA.   5 The attempt to squeeze a doctrine of the “constitutional independence” of the public service out of these common law cases seems to confirm in spades former McGill law dean Rod Macdonald’s lament that the “substantive law of public administration that previously focused on

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  8

  9

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i­nstitutional design and the choice of governing instrument has been transformed by law teachers who do not reflect on when, why or how judges should have the last word. For them, administrative law means advanced civil procedure in the guise of constitutional review ... [Public law teaching] becomes illustrating that courts have the constitutional authority to take all manner of decisions, for all manner of reasons, in all manner of cases – and arguing that they should do so” (2007, 78, 81). For very different views, see Jarvis (2009) and Franks (2009). Comparisons between Canada and the United Kingdom are complicated by the fact that the two countries now reverse the meanings of accountability and responsibility. In Canada the first is the harder term, whereas in Britain it is the one whose implications for office holders are less stringent. Compare the Tait Task Force report, for example, to the March 2007 report of the United Kingdom House of Commons Select Committee on Public Administration, Politics and Administration: Ministers and Civil Servants (United Kingdom 2007b, 11, par. 25). In one place, United Kingdom Treasury documents do refer to the Committee of Public Accounts “holding the government and its public servants to account for the quality of administration,” but it is not clear whether “civil” servants are intended and, if so, whether this language has been used with care. In any event, it would be impossible in the case of “civil” servants, as the text argues (United Kingdom 2007a, 8). Paul Thomas suggests some five elements that compose the “essence of an accountability relationship.” Only one of these could be said to apply to the relationship between an accounting officer and PAC (Thomas 2008b, 37). The flurry of ministerial directions came in the last months of the Labour government. Five in 2009 were apparently made by the business secretary, including two about a car scrappage scheme. Others apparently involved spending decisions about the restructuring of local authorities, providing insurance for troubled banks, repatriation flights for British hostages in Iraq, and defence contracts, consultancies, and procurement decisions, including a decision to start “cutting steel” for two new super-aircraft carriers. Other spending decisions were said to include a £13bn contract for tanker aircraft, £240m for school building contracts, difficulties at the Student Loans Company, and a £600m computer project for a new personal pensions scheme (Sherman 2010; AccountancyAge 2010). In April 2005, I was informed that a “ministerial direction” had recently been requested by a permanent secretary in a major British department. When I inquired six months later, it appeared the minister in question had decided not to issue the direction. This is almost certainly the usual



11 12

13

14

15

16 

17 

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­ utcome of cautionary notes from the deputy. Interview with UK Cabinet o Office official, April 2005. Interviews with United Kingdom Cabinet Office officials and with United Kingdom accounting officers, June-July 2002. It is a relief to learn that a briefing prepared by Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) officials responsible for the Federal Identity Program in September 2001 apparently recommended against an exemption from the program’s requirements for the Economic Action Plan website. However this recommendation was, it seems, overturned by more senior officials (Cheadle 2011a; La Presse 2011). The Canadian Press identified some 698 appearances of the “Harper Government” moniker on Government of Canada websites in the year ending March 2011. (Cheadle 2011d) PCO officials were apparently uneasy about implementing the Economic Action Plan website with its flagrantly partisan character, and Prime Minister Harper was informed about their “misgivings” at the time of the January 2009 Budget (Cheadle 2009; Martin 2010, 219–20). This unease does them credit and shows that they had not lost all sense of their obligations as public servants. It is all the more significant, therefore, that their superiors (like TBS superiors) did not protect them from having to act in ways contrary to both the Values and Ethics Code and the Communications Policy. Unfortunately the Gomery Commission does not appear to have understood this key point made to it by the Martin government, and simply added to the confusion by recommending that deputy ministers should be “accountable in their own right for their statutory and delegated responsibilities before the Public Accounts Committee” (Canada 2006c: 100, 200). Emphasis added. In his December 2006 letter about the Gomery Report and the FedAA, in reply to prominent private sector and former public sector executives, Prime Minister Harper said that “the fundamental accountability between a Minister and Parliament and between a Minister and his or her Deputy Minister have not been altered in any way” (Canada 2006e, 5; emphasis added). This erroneous emphasis on “disagreements” had already been made by the Gomery Commission (in several key passages, but not in others, as noted below) (Canada 2006c, 105), by the Public Accounts Committee (Canada 2005b, Recommendation 3), and by the previous Liberal government (Canada 2005a, 3; Canada 2005d, 19). In contrast to some other parts of its report, the Gomery Commission got the vocabulary and the issue right on these pages.

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19  Of the 242 project proposals submitted, 33 projects were put forward by the Minister of Industry to the Minister of Infrastructure for consideration, and 32 were subsequently approved and funded. One project was later withdrawn by a municipality. 20  Despite his role as “Head of the Public Service,” Lynch apparently felt no compunction about signing a 2 April 2009 briefing note to the prime minister about the “marketing” of the Economic Action Plan “of which the website is a key component” (Cheadle 2011b). 21  Interviews with senior Government of Canada communications officials, 23 March 2010, 25 January 2012. 22  A reform already partially accomplished in the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act (Canada 2005f). 23  A matter yet to be resolved is whether the PSC should also assume the related responsibility for annual performance evaluation of deputy ministers, as part of its role in determining promotions and future appointments, or whether this role should be given instead to the Treasury Board as part of its “management board” responsibilities, especially if the accounting officer role is reconstructed along the lines already suggested above. 24  In addition to those responsibilities shared with the Cabinet Secretary, the Head of the Civil Service (who is also a serving departmental DM) will “be the ‘public face’ of the Civil Service, internally and externally; lead on the governance and capability of the Civil Service as chair of key governance bodies; lead the Top 200 with responsibility for succession planning, induction, training and reward and as chair of the Senior Leadership Committee; lead on Civil Service workforce issues including overall planning, recruitment, reward, industrial relations, compensation scheme, pensions reform etc; and take primary responsibility for Civil Service propriety, and be the guardian of the Civil Service Code” (United Kingdom 2011: 2–3). I am grateful to Tony Dean for making this document available to me. See also the report of the United Kingdom House Commons Select Committee on Public administration on the new arrangements for the roles of the Head of the United Kingdom Civil Service and the Cabinet Secretary (United Kingdom 2012). 25  For a very different view, see Dean (2011, 2012). See also Dutil (2008) and Bourgault (2007, 2008). 26  Unfortunately a misguided effort to make the United Kingdom code more “relevant” led to its rewriting in “more everyday language” a decade after its introduction (letter from the cabinet secretary and chief civil service commissioner, 6 June 2006) (United Kingdom 2006). The



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revisions stripped the code of much of its initial value as a statement of the ­relationship between the public service and ministers (the “the constitutional framework within which all civil servants work”), including reference to these ministerial obligations toward the civil service. On 11 November 2010, the civil service provisions of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 came into force. The legislation places the civil service values on a statutory footing and includes the publication of a Civil Service Code (United Kingdom 2010). 27  Following recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life in 2003 and the development of a draft bill by the Public Administration Select Committee in 2004, the United Kingdom government produced its own draft bill in November 2004, followed by consultation on the bill until February 2005. The Public Administration Select Committee again reiterated the need for such legislation enshrining a new moral contract – or bargain – in its third report of session in 2006–7 (United Kingdom 2007b, 38–44). However the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act eventually adopted in 2010 made little use of the Select Committee’s thinking other than to provide a retrospective legislative basis for the Civil Service Code revised in 2006. 28  The Ontario Government Advertising Act, 2004, establishes standards for government advertising, forbids advertising with any kind of partisan flavour, and requires the office of the auditor general to review paid advertising in advance of its public release to ensure it is free of partisan content (Ontario 2004).

references

AccountancyAge. 2010. Labour Spent “against” Accounting Officer Advice. 19 May. http://www.accountancyage.com/aa/news/1808854/ labour-spent-accounting-officer-advice#ixzz1LueKsUTe. Alberta. 2000. Union of Provincial Employees v. Alberta. Alta. D.J. 1030. Aucoin, Peter. 2008a. “New Public Management and New Public Governance: Finding the Balance.” In David Siegel and Ken Rasmussen, eds., Professionalism and Public Service: Essays in Honour of Kenneth ­Kernaghan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 16–33. – 2008b. “New Public Management and the Quality of Government: Coping with the New Political Governance in Canada.” Paper ­prepared for the Conference on New Public Mangement and the Quality of ­Government, University of Gothenburg Sweden, 13–15 November.

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– 2007. “Management Boards for Government Departments: Addressing the ‘Governance of Management’ Vacuum.” Unpublished manuscript, July. – 2006a. “The Staffing and Evaluation of Canadian Deputy Ministers in a Comparative Westminster Perspective: A Proposal for Reform.” In ­Canada 2006b, vol. 1, 297–336. – 2006b. “The New Public Governance and the Public Service Commission.” Optimum Online 36, 1 (spring): 33–49. http://www. ­optimumonline.ca/article.phtml?id=252. Axworthy, Thomas S., and Julie Burch. 2010. Closing the Implementation Gap: Improving Capacity, Accountability, Performance and Human Resource Quality in the Canadian and Ontario Public Service. The Centre for the Study of Democracy in the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University. January. Blanchfield, Mike. 2010. “Documents Expose Harper’s Obsession with Control.” Toronto Star, 6 June. Bourgault, Jacques. 2007. ‘‘Les facteurs contributifs au leadership du ­Greffier dans la fonction publique du Canada.’’ Canadian Public Administration 50, no. 4 (winter): 541–71. – 2008. “Clerks and Secretaries to Cabinets: Anatomy of Leadership.” In Dutil 2008, 41–81. Bryden, Joan. 2012. “Memos Contradict Clement’s Claims about G8 Fund.” Globe and Mail, 24 January, A10. Cameron, David R., and Graham White. 2000. Cycling into Saigon: The Conservative Transition in Ontario. Vancouver: UBC Press. Campion-Smith, Bruce. 2009. “Trouble at Transport: Clashes over Spending.” Toronto Star, 20 June. Canada. 2012. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector. http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx? id=25049. The Code came into effect on 2 April. – 2011. Auditor General of Canada. Spring 2011 Report. Chapter 2: G8 Legacy Infrastructure Fund. Ottawa: Office of the Auditor General of Canada. http://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/docs/parl_oag_201104_ 02_e.pdf. – 2010. “Ministers Welcome New Senators to Help Support Law-andOrder Bills.” Department of Justice, 29 January. http://www.justice. gc.ca/eng/news-nouv/nr-cp/2010/doc_32473.html. – 2007a. House of Commons, Standing Committee on Public Accounts. Protocol for the Appearance of Accounting Officers as Witnesses before the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. March.



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– 2007b. Privy Council Office. Accounting Officers: Guidance on Roles, Responsibilities and Appearances before Parliamentary Committees. 14 March. http://www.pco-bcp.gc.ca/default.asp?Language=E&Page= informationresources&Sub=publications&Doc=guidemin/accountguideonrole2007_e.htm. – 2006a. Federal Accountability Act, 55 Elizabeth II 2006, Statutes of Canada 2006, Chapter 9. – 2006b. Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program & ­Advertising Activities (Gomery Commission). Restoring Accountability: Research Studies. Ottawa: Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada. – 2006c. Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program & Advertising Activities. Restoring Accountability: Recommendations. Ottawa: Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada. – 2006d. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. Communications Policy of the Government of Canada, “Policy Statement,” Principle 9. http:// www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=12316§ion=text. This latest version of the Communications Policy came into effect on 1 August. – 2006e. “Letter from Prime Minister Stephen Harper to Sheldon ­Ehrenworth.” 14 December. – 2005a. Government Response to the Tenth Report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, August 2005. http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/ report/gr-rg/2005/0817_e.asp. – 2005b. House of Commons. Governance in the Public Service of ­Canada: Ministerial and Deputy Ministerial Accountability. Report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. May. – 2005c. Government of Canada. Management in the Government of Canada: A Commitment to Continuous Improvement, “Submitted by the President of the Treasury Board – For Discussion.” October. Part 2: Accountable Government. http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/spsm-rgsp/cci-acg/ cci-acg_e.asp. – 2005d. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. Review of the Responsibilities and Accountabilities of Ministers and Senior Officials – Meeting the Expectations of Canadians, October, 19. http//www.tbs-sct. gc.ca/report/rev-exa/ar-er-PR_e.asp. – 2005e. Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program & Advertising Activities. Who Is Responsible? Fact Finding Report. Ottawa: Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada. – 2005f. Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act. Statutes of Canada, chapter 46.

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– 2004. Public Service Human Resources Management Agency. Working Group on the Disclosure of Wrongdoing. Report. Ottawa: Public Works and Government Services Canada. – 2003. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. Values and Ethics Code for the Public Service. http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pubs_pol/hrpubs/tb_851/ vec-cve1-eng.asp#_Toc46202803. The Code came into effect on 1 September. – 2002. Privy Council Office. “Prime Minister Announces New ­Ethics Guidelines for the Ministry and New Appointment Procedures for ­Ethics Counsellor.” Press release on an “Eight Point Plan of Action on Government Ethics.” 11 June. www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/ ­webarchives/20060127091847/http://www.bcp.gc.ca/default.asp?­ Language=E&Page=archivechretien&Sub=newsreleases&Doc=ethics. 20020611_e.htm. – 1996, 2000. Task Force on Public Service Values and Ethics (Tait Task Force). A Strong Foundation. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development. – 1991. Osborne v. Canada (Treasury Board) (1991) 2 S.C.R. 69. – 1987. Ontario (Attorney General) v. opseu, (1987) 2 S.C.R. 2. – 1985. Fraser v. Public Service Staff Relations Board, [1985] 2 S.C.R. 455. (“Fraser”). Cheadle, Bruce. 2011a. “Harper’s Economic Action Plan Website Got Approval despite Violating Rules.” Canadian Press, 5 January 2011. – 2011b. “Documents Show Economic Action Plan Marketing Blitz a PMO Production from the Get-Go.” Canadian Press, 24 February. – 2011c. “Tories Rebrand ‘Harper Government’ in Place of Government of Canada.” Canadian Press, 3 March. – 2011d. “No ‘Formal Directive’ on Use of ‘Harper Government,’ Just Direction, Says PCO.” Canadian Press, 7 March. – 2011e. “E-mails Cite ‘Directive’ to Re-brand Government in Harper’s Name.” Globe and Mail, 7 September 2011. http://www. t­ heglobeand mail.com/news/politics/e-mails-cite-directive-to-re-brand-governmentin-harpers-name/article2157102/. – 2009. “Top Bureaucrats Objected to Government Ad Campaign, Sources Say.” Canadian Press, 8 October. Clark, Campbell. 2009. “‘The Buck Stopped Nowhere’”: Inside Foreign Affairs, No One in Charge to Act on Colvin’s Warnings.” Globe and Mail, 18 December. Conservative Party of Canada. 2005. Federal Accountability Act. Ottawa: 4 November.



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– 2006. Stand Up for Canada. Federal Election Platform 2006. Dean, Tony. 2011. “Why the Civil Service Needs a Chief Executive.” The Guardian. Public Leaders Network. 19 October 2011. http:// www.guardian.co.uk/public-leaders-network/blog/2011/oct/19/ why-civil-service-needs-ceo. – 2012. “Why the Civil Service Still Needs a Full-Time Chief Executive.” The Guardian. Public Leaders Network. 11 January 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/public-leaders-network/blog/2012/jan/11/ civil-service-still-needs-chief-executive. Dicerni, Richard. 2012. “Deputy Minister’s Notes for His Appearance before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry Science and Technology.” 19 June. http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ic1.nsf/ eng/07194.html. Also published as “Parting Thoughts of a Deputy.” Canadian Government Executive 18, no. 7 (September), 19. Dutil, Patrice, ed. 2008. Searching for Leadership: Secretaries to Cabinet in Canada. University of Toronto Press and Institute of Public Administration of Canada. Dwivedi, O.P. 1982. “On Holding Public Servants Accountable.” In O.P. Dwivedi, ed., The Administrative State in Canada: Essays for J.E. Hodgetts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 151–75. Ehrenworth, Sheldon. 2006. “Letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper signed by Sheldon Ehrenworth and Some 58 Other Persons from Both the Public and Private sectors.” 3 March. http://www.pm.gc.ca/grfx/ docs/gomery_toaupm_e.pdf. Farthing, John. 1957. Freedom Wears a Crown. Toronto: Kingswood House. Franks, C.E.S. 2009. “The Unfortunate Experience of the Duelling Protocols: A Chapter in the Continuing Quest for Responsible Government in Canada.” In O.P. Dwivedi, Tim A. Mau, and Byron Sheldrick, eds., The Evolving Physiology of Government: Canadian Public Administration in Transition. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 2009, 118–50. – 2006. “The Respective Accountabilities of Ministers and Public Servants: A Study of the British Accounting Officer System and Its Relevance for Canada.” In Canada 2006b, Research Studies, vol. 3: 157–230. Glicksman, Brian. 2007. “The Role of Accounting Officers: A Perspective from the United Kingdom.” Canadian Parliamentary Review (autumn): 22–6. Globe and Mail. 2009. “Stimulus Cheques: Hypocrisy Blue and Red.” 16 October.

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Hébert, Chantal. 2009. ‘‘Les commandites, prise deux?’’ Le Devoir, 11 May. Heintzman, Ralph. 2010. “Loyal to a Fault.” Optimum Online 40, no. 1 (March): 48–59. – 2009. “Measurement in Public Management: The Case for the Defence.” Optimum Online 39, no. 1 (March): 66–79. http://www. ­optimumonline.ca/article.phtml?id=325. – 2007. “Toward a New Moral Contract: Reclaiming Trust in ­Public Service.” Optimum Online 37, no. 3 (fall): 33–48. http://www. ­optimumonline.ca/article.phtml?id=286. – 2001. “A Strong Foundation: Values and Ethics for the Public Service of the Future.” Isuma: Canadian Journal of Policy Research 2, no. 1 (spring): 121–6. – 1999. “A Strong Foundation: Values and Ethics for the Public Service of the Future.” Presentation to the International Summit on Public Service Reform, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 10 June. Heintzman, Ralph, and Luc Juillet. 2012. “Searching for New Instruments of Accountability: The New Political Governance and the Dialectics of Democratic Accountability.” In Herman Bakvis and Mark D. ­Jarvis, eds., From New Public Management to New Political Governance, ­342–79. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Heintzman, Ralph, and Brian Marson. 2010. “Linked In: Research Proves that People, Service and Public Trust Are Linked.” Canadian Government Executive 16, no. 1 (January): 12–14. – 2005. “People, Service and Trust: Is There a Public Sector Service Value Chain?” International Review of Administrative Sciences 71, no. 4 (December 2005): 549–75. Hodgetts, J.E. 2007. “Royal Commissions and Public Service Reform: Personal Reflections.” Canadian Public Administration, 50, no. 4 (winter): 525–40. Hubbard, Ruth, and Gilles Paquet. 2008. “Cat’s Eyes: Intelligent Work Versus Perverse Incentives: APEX Forums on Wicked Problems.” Optimum Online 38, no. 3 (August): 1–22. ICCS. 2008. Erin Research, Citizens First 5. Toronto: Institute for CitizenCentre Service Delivery. Ivison, John. 2009. “Pragmatist Falls Victim to Partisans: PMO Fingerprints All over Lynch Resignation.” National Post, 8 May. Jarvis, Mark D. 2009. “The Adoption of the Accounting Officer System in Canada: Changing Relationships?” Canadian Public Administration 52, no.4 (December): 525–47.



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Juillet, Luc, and Ken Rasmussen. 2008. Defending a Contested Ideal: Merit and the Public Service Commission of Canada, 1908–2008. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Kernaghan, Kenneth. 2007. A Special Calling: Values, Ethics and Professional Public Service. Ottawa: Public Service Human Resources Management Agency. – 2006. “Encouraging ‘Rightdoing’ and Discouraging Wrongdoing: A Public Service Charter and Disclosure Legislation.” In Canada, Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities (Gomery Commission), Restoring Accountability: Research ­Studies, vol. 2. Ottawa: Public Works and Government Services ­Canada, 73–114. Larson, Peter, and David Zussman. 2006. “Canadian Federal Public Service: The View from Recent Executive Recruits.” Optimum Online 36, no. 4 (December): 2–20. Lewis, David E. 2008. The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lindquist, Evert, and Ken Rasmussen. 2012. “Deputy Ministers and New Political Governance: From Neutral Competence to Promiscuous Partisans to a New Balance?” In Herman Bakvis and Mark D. Jarvis, eds., From New Public Management to New Political Governance: Essays in Honour of Peter C. Aucoin. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 179–203. Macdonald, Roderick A. 2007. “Post-Charter Legal Education: Does Anyone Teach Law Anymore?” Policy Options (February): 75–83. Marson, Brian, and Ralph Heintzman. 2009. From Research to Results: A Decade of Results-Based Service Improvement in Canada. Toronto: Institute of Public Administration of Canada. Martin, Chester. 1955. Foundations of Canadian Nationhood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Martin, Lawrence. 2010. Harperland: The Politics of Control. Toronto: Viking Canada. New Zealand. 2001a. Hon. Trevor Mallard, Minister of State Services, Government Responds to Standards Board Report. http://executive. govt.nz/minister/mallard/state/pr.htm. – 2001b. Minister of State Services, Statement of Government Expectations of the State Sector and Statement of Commitment by the Government to the State Sector. http://www.ssc.govt.nz/display/document.asp? navid=152&docid=3514&pageno=11#P928_62039

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O’Neill, Jennifer. 2009. “Colvin Contradicts Ex-Boss on Testimony to Committee.” Ottawa Citizen, 17 December. Ontario. 2004. Government Advertising Act, 2004. S.O. 2004, Chapter 20. http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/statutes/english/elaws_ statutes_04g20_e.htm. Peters, B. Guy, and Donald J. Savoie. 2000. Governance in the Twenty-first Century: Revitalizing the Public Service. Montreal and Kingston: Canadian Centre for Management Development and McGill-Queen’s University Press. Presse, La. 2011. “Les libéraux fédéraux raillent les conservateurs.” 7 January, A11. Radwanski, Adam. 2009. “Guy Giorno, foot soldier.” globeandmail.com. 8 May. Savoie, Donald J. 2010. Power: Where Is It? Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2008. Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in Canada and the United Kingdom. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 2006. “The Canadian Public Service Has a Personality.” Canadian Public Administration 49, no. 3: 261–81. – 2004. “Searching for Accountability in a Government without Boundaries.” Canadian Public Administration 47, no. 1: 261–81. – 2003. Breaking the Bargain: Public Servants, Ministers and Parliament. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1999. Governing from the Centre: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1994. Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – ed. 1993. Taking Power: Managing Government Transitions. Toronto: ipac . – 1990. The Politics of Public Spending in Canada. Toronto. University of Toronto Press. Sherman, Jill. 2010. “Top Civil Servants Protested about Labour Spending in Final Months.” The Times, 19 May. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/ news/politics/article2516175.ece. Sossin, Lorne. 2006. “Defining Boundaries: The Constitutional Argument for Bureaucratic Independence and Its Implication for the Accountability of the Public Service.” In Canada 2006b, volume 2: 25–72. –2005. “Speaking Truth to Power: The Search for Bureaucratic Independence in Canada.” University of Toronto Law Journal 55: 1–59. Talbot, Colin. 2007. Quoted in United Kingdom 2007b: 9, par. 16.



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Thomas, Paul. 2008a. “Political-Administrative Interface in Canada’s Public Sector.” Optimum Online: The Journal of Public Sector Management 38, no. 2 (21–29 May). – 2008b. “The Swirling Meanings and Practices of Accountability in Canadian Government.” In David Siegel and Ken Rasmussen, eds., Professionalism and Public Service: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Kernaghan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 34–62. Travers, James. 2009. “Another Victory for Hired Guns.” Toronto Star, 9 May. United Kingdom. 2012. House of Commons, Select Committee on Public Administration. Leadership of Change: New Arrangements for the Roles of the Head of the Civil Service and the Cabinet Secretary. Nineteenth Report of Session 2010–12. 17 January 2012. http://www. ­ publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmpubadm/1582/ 158202.htm. – 2011. Cabinet Office. Candidate Brief and Job Specification for Head of the Civil Service. October. – 2010. UK Acts. Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. 2010 Chapter 25. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/25. – 2007a. HM Treasury, Managing Public Money. London: The Stationery Office. – 2007b. House of Commons, Select Committee on Public Administration. Politics and Administration: Ministers and Civil Servants. Third Report of Session 2006–7, 15 March 2007. London: The Stationery Office, 26 March. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ cm200607/cmselect/cmpubadm/122/12205.htm. – 2006. Cabinet Office. Civil Service Code. June. http://www.civilservice. gov.uk/about/values/cscode/index.aspx. – 2003. UK Hansard, 23 June: Column 617W. – 2002a. UK Hansard, 8 May: Column 253W. – 2002b. UK Hansard, 10 June: Column 1937W. – 2001. HM Treasury.The Responsibilities of an Accounting Officer, July. – 2000. UK Acts. Government Resources and Accounts Act 2000 (2000, Chapter 20). http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/00020–a.htm#5 1996a. Cabinet Office. The Civil Service Code (1996). http://www.leeds. ac.uk/law/teaching/law6cw/min-5.htm. – 1996b. House of Commons, Public Service Committee, Second Report of Session 1995–96, HC 313–1. Wilks, Stephen. 2008. “Board Management of Performance in British Central Government.” In Holy Grail or Achievable Quest? International

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Perspectives on Public Sector Performance Management. n.p.: KPMG International., 125–38. Wilson, Graham, and Anthony Barker. 2003. “Bureaucrats and Politicians in Britain.” Governance 16 no. 3: 349–72, cited in Aucoin 2006, 327. Zussman, David. 2008. “Governance: The New Balance Between Politicians and Public Servants in Canada.” Optimum Online 38, no. 4 (December): 28–37.

6 Categorizing Senior Officials: Toward a Classification of Typologies j a c q u e s b o u r g a u lt

introduction

In many of his books and groundbreaking studies on power, ­Donald Savoie has made comparisons about power, influence, and decisions involving senior civil servants. This approach has given me the impetus to examine the numerous typologies and classifications of senior officials that exist in the literature.1 My purpose in this chapter is to review typologies of senior civil service ranks and senior civil servants and to see, given the many dimensions of senior civil service studies, whether it is possible to integrate and link these multiple typologies. Are there really clusters of countries defined by these typologies, or are the typologies so different that they produce very different results even within the same country? What do those typologies reveal in terms of the evolution of the study of senior officials? t y p o l o g i e s : w h at t h e y a r e a n d w h at t h e i r va l u e a d d e d i s f o r u n d e r s ta n d i n g s i t u at i o n s

A typology is a means of classifying and ordering collected materials and situations according to specific criteria. Aristotle was one of the earliest exponents of typologies (Schnapper 2005, 15), and Durkheim made regular use of them. They serve to structure a ­ research domain (Jenson and Lépinard 2009, 185), and they are “useful tools for exploring concepts and delineating their properties, especially when these imply the interaction between two or more variables to produce a classification scheme” (Peters 1998,

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17). ­Typologies are supposed to reduce the apparent complexity of a phenomenon (Coenen-Hunter 2007). They are as much part of the “end of a theory” as they are part of its beginning, since they contribute to the actual development of the theory. When I studied for my law degree, I was constantly reminded that practising law is an ongoing process of classification. To some extent, this is true for all the human activities. “Robust” typologies require certain fundamental characteristics: homogeneity of the cells according to the criteria chosen, mutual exclusiveness of the categories and cells, exhaustiveness of the whole group of cells, and, at the same time, a reasonable number of cells – a typology with most of its cells containing only one case may be of little help, while a typology with too many cells would be more of a description than a typology.2 Typologies have their limitations. They provide a “static view of factionalism,” and they “cannot capture group dynamics and explain the process of change” or “provide convincing answers to key research questions” (Boucek 2009, 456). Faced with a great variety of types of distinctions, researchers may be quite pessimistic about the possibility of developing efficient, integrated theories of organizations (Killman 1983). In addition, advances in the field and in knowledge may make typologies time-limited (Jenson and Lépinard 2009, 198), since research may fall between different categories. Finally, it could be said that typologies oversimplify the richness of the research material. After considering seven factors that could help with classifying senior officials (expected roles, the degree of career integration, political sympathies, reasons for appointment, tenure of the appointment, tenure within the government, performance-related contracts), Pollitt and Bouckaert wrote, “Unfortunately, scholars have failed to agree on a single, robust way of classifying these important differences [and have been] unable to find any suitable scale or classification” (2004, 50–1). Many researchers who have endeavoured to achieve some degree of generalization and at the same time escape the rigidity of typologies have preferred to use a term other than “typology”: for example, “model” (Peters 1988), “image” (Aberbach 1981), “configuration”3 (Heady 1996b) or “tradition”4 (Painter and Peters 2010). In this essay I do not pretend to offer the perfect typology but try instead to develop an integrative approach. I will start at the



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analytical level (namely, public administration within the regime; relations with political institutions; typologies of politicization; the politicization of public administration; typologies of relations with political masters; typologies of expected roles; typologies of management of senior officials; and typologies of senior civil service politicization as a factor facilitating the implementation of new public management (NPM). Then I will attempt to integrate the various classifications of countries.5 the institutional approach

Typologies of Integration within the State as a Political Regime First, there is institutional integration within the state as a “political regime” (Heady 1996b) of public administration, including the civil service. The idea is that the place of public administration within the state affects the status and the role of senior officials: from this perspective, we see five types of civil service associated with two basic types of political regimes. The socialist regimes established on the basis of Marxist-Leninist theory see the state and its bureaucracy as serving the ruling party according to the dictates of the communist party model (e.g., in the former USSR, modern China, Vietnam, and Cuba). This approach places the state as the servant of the ruling party in the journey toward an ideal communism, where, with the disappearance of social classes, the state would no longer be needed (Heady 1996d). The civil service of the state is subservient to the party, civil servants are politicized, bureaucrats’ careers depend on political compliance, and bureucrats move ahead by taking on responsibilities within the party structure, as well as within the state apparatus. The party tries to oversee the bureaucracy, but with the functional merging of party personnel and the bureaucracy, those dual hierarchies that were supposed to monitor each other, there are few limitations to bureaucratic initiatives and power. Nevertheless, clans within the party struggle for power may affect a bureaucrat’s chances of reaching and staying at the pinnacle of state power or the party apparatus. Some scholars may extend the scope of this approach to include all types of dictatorships, military regimes, and “single party democracies.” Since the effects on public administration and senior o ­ fficials are not the same, observers such as Heady, Painter, and Peters

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­ ropose classifications reflecting such distinctions. For example, p Heady (1996c, 210) classified the institutional situations into four major types: ruler trustworthy (constitutional dictatorship), party-­ controlled (communist countries), policy-receptive (liberal democracies), and collaborative (military supremacy): not all “one-party democracies” belong to socialist regimes. It remains to be seen what an “institutional situation” is, but this realpolitik typology has the merit of including a wide variety of situations that have little in common with the Northern democracies. Second, there are the liberal democracies with their different institutional systems, such as the spoils system of bureaucracy. The state supersedes politics, but politics makes the governing body of the state – including the head of state, who is also chief of the executive – change from time to time (e.g., every four or eight years, or after one or two terms in the United States). Designed to facilitate the implementation of a political agenda through a more responsive bureaucracy and to ensure a turnover of power elites, the system, in its pure form, provides for political appointments at the top and offers little guarantee of career advancement or tenure. Today, accommodations are made owing to the need for continuity and the effect of collective bargaining. Overall, in the United States only positions at the seven or eight highest ranks of the civil service will be affected by a change of president.6 Some people are political appointees, while others are civil servants belonging to the senior executive service (SES). Very few incumbents of positions in the higher ranks expect to keep their position if there is a change of government or even a policy change. Many Latin American countries have followed the US model, although in some cases careers are more secure than in the United States. Depending on the cases and the point in time, much discussion may take place since some of them may be considered real but others as fake liberal democracies. “Clientelism” is also a factor that may affect not only politicians but also senior officials into those countries.7 The third, fourth, and fifth types also exist within the liberal regimes. Type three is the career bureaucracy within the liberal democracies. In France and most of the other continental European countries (up to the end of the twentieth century), there is a career for civil servants: they are recruited to spend their whole professional lives in public service (since pantouflage to the private sector is seen as the exception); they are prepared to work as generalists; and they



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enjoy a secure status. Although some senior civil servants come from outside the bureaucracy, most rise through the ranks. Moreover, most political officials come from the bureaucracy, so researchers have concluded that a state elite occupies the political and administrative loci of power (Rouban 2004, 98). Instead of referring to the politicization of the bureaucracy, some observers talk of the bureaucratization of politics (Bodiguel and Quermonne 1983). Fourth, within the liberal democracies, there is the professional civil service.8 Members of this group are supposedly recruited for a specific competency and for a specific position, and they are appointed for an indeterminate period: civil servants keep their job as long as they perform it well and as long as there is a job to do. At the highest ranks, senior officials serve “at pleasure.” Informally, it is understood that the professional civil service benefits both the state and the individual, and some rules and practices have been borrowed from the career system to attract and retain good candidates at all levels (Savoie 1994, 34). This system, reflecting the Westminster type of political regime, exists to a certain extent in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. The fifth case is constitutional bureaucracy. However, there is no consensus on this type. One school of thought argues that the civil service is a state institution with constitutional authority to protect the public interest and that it would therefore be entitled to challenge or disobey the political authorities in the event of a fundamental disagreement jeopardizing the continuity of the state or its legitimacy. Sossin (2006), for instance, contends that the civil service is conventionally permanent, which allows it to resist what it sees as major political decisions against the “public interest.” Aucoin (2006) has proposed an appointment process to provide independence for senior officials in Canada. Some commentators have used the concept of autonomous bureaucracies, and constitutional bureaucracies may fit into this constellation of bureaucracies, in opposition to the concept of instrumental bureaucracies (Knill 1999, 114). In all liberal regime types except constitutional bureaucracy, appointments to the highest positions are discretionary and politically decided. They are made by the chief of the executive branch or under his influence. In some cases, senior officials have little hope of keeping their position in the event of a change of government. Painter and Peters (2010) have shown that relations between the state and civil society depend on “traditions” (a term c­ombining

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g­ eographical, historical, and cultural considerations). Those traditions are at some point translated into formal and informal institutions. In this regard, Bekke and Vander Meer (2000) state: “Civil service systems can be viewed as systems of institutionalized structures, norms, and procedures that mediate the mobilization of human resources in the service of the state” (2000, 288). Painter and Peters (2010) identify nine major traditions in the world, including four major Western administrative traditions: the pluralist (Anglo-­ American), the interventionist (Napoleonic), the organicist (Germanic) and the “organicist/welfarist/open government” (the Scandinavian tradition). Each of them affects public service legitimacy and, accordingly, the role of senior officials. Typologies According to Political Institutions and Political Contexts How institutional factors operate may affect how senior public servants play their role to exert significant political influence. This is the thesis that Dogan espoused in his exploration of fourteen European countries with different institutional arrangements. He notes that the same factors do not play the same role in all countries (1975, 9–12). In his pioneering study, Dogan divides the European mandarins into two major types: the traditional type (ambassadors, prefects, and military leaders) and the modern type (directors). The difference between the two types is that modern mandarins come from more modest social backgrounds, have had more diversified training experiences, and tend to work in the capital (1975, 16–17). According to Dogan, six factors seem to favour senior officials’ influence, notwithstanding any legal status they may enjoy: centralized administration (France) creates power in the capital, which is where senior officials are powerful; instability in government allows senior officials to fill the vacuum (Italy, Finland, and France under the Third and Fourth Republics); incompatibility between ministerial posts and parliamentary seats (Germany and the Netherlands) gives more power to senior officials advising ministers; participation in ministerial secretariats (Belgium) means that senior officials occupy all seats of power; the prefecture system (France, Italy, and Spain) makes it possible to exercise bureaucratic power across the country; the single-party system means that central authority



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goes unchallenged (Spain, in 1975, some authoritarian regimes, and ­communist ­countries). Counter-examples occur where senior officials remain influential and where multiple parties still make for a strong cohesive central government, with or without a coalition situation. Examples of such situations include Norway, Austria, and Denmark.9 ­Christensen notes that Danish senior civil servants’ influence result from of an increasing demand by politicians for politically attuned officials (2006, 1017). With respect to the effect of context, Bodiguel and Quermonne (1983, 258–9) propose a categorization of the civil service in France. It provides some elements that may be useful for examining other counties, such as the United States and Germany. The authors make a context-based distinction between permanent managers, political civil servants, and senior officials. 1 Permanent managers, performing rather technical functions, are intrinsically linked with the permanent structure of the state. They provide state continuity, they are neutral, and they are instrumental in policy-making. 2 Political appointee civil servants are members of a grand corps, are assigned on a discretionary basis, and fulfill a political mission as members of the minister’s secretariat, in the party structure, or in political roles such as members of parliament/deputies or mayors. 3 Senior officials on career assignments are also members of a grand corps and are given an administrative position as a normal assignment or until they become political appointees following a change in government. As an exogenous influence, context affects positions within the main typologies. It causes some senior civil servants to move from career positions to political appointee positions. I therefore suggest that in France there is a political lists civil service: in any grand corps, one is likely to find a list of individuals representing the full spectrum of political sensitivities in France, including sub-groups from any given party. In turn, any government may find within the grand corps the civil servants – and, in most cases, the ministers – with the political sensitivity deemed necessary in the circumstances. Germany also has senior officials that may combine political taint and expertise. Fleischer (2011) explains that although top German

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civil servants are political appointees (and mostly party members), many of them come into office by promotion, climbing up the career ladder inside their ministry and gathering a certain amount of expertise before their promotion. Fleischer also observes that some other administrative state secretaries are recruited from a different ministry or the Chancellery, as division head, which provides a good training for this highest bureaucratic position.10 Italy provides, in some circumstances, ministers from the senior official ranks (e.g., the Monti cabinet in 2011). Typologies Based on Politicization Criteria To distinguish developed from less developed regimes, Heady proposed five political characteristics and five administrative ones: “The role of the bureaucracy in the political process is fairly clear. The desirability of a line of demarcation between both  ... is accepted” (1996b, 204). Practices may have changed since then with the strong push for bureaucratic responsiveness and the emergence of politicization as a concern throughout the literature. Much has been written about the politicization of senior officials. Peters and Pierre propose a useful basic definition of the term: “the substitution of political criteria for merit-based criteria in the selection, retention, promotion, rewards, and disciplining of members of the public service” (2004, 2). Politicization has been often described very negatively, but political sensitivity on the part of bureaucrats is the price to be paid for democracy. According to Bekke and Van Der Meer (2000, 275), “civil service systems are embedded in wider political and social context,” and politicization of the civil service is one of the answers to the integration problem and is one item in an extensive repertoire of instruments of public service control (2000, 282). Peters and Pierre observed that all political systems include bureaucratic political positions. The real question is where the dividing line between the political and the apolitical should be drawn (2004, 288). We know that there will always be a grey area and that trust will always be an issue at this particular level of the administrative-political pyramid. The lower you draw the line between political and permanent positions on the pyramid, the more serious the problem of trust will be. Pollitt and Bouckaert came to the same conclusion: “Rank-and-file public officials feel little kinship with



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or identification with the politicized high flyers” (2004, 51–2). The more levels of politicization you have, the more likely you are to have strong divisions within the structure. The United States has come up with a practical solution to the problem: the percentage of political appointments at each level may vary with needs. But delays in nomination and confirmation processes, added to rapid turnovers of political appointees (eighteen to twenty-four months), hampers the president’s capacity to exert efficient control on administration (Light 2008, 415; 2007, 415). All discretionary appointment decisions made by the chief of the executive or the cabinet are “political,” since they are made by a political body to fill a politico-administrative position and are made with some political intent, though the intent is not always clear. First, the political appointment may be resented as an injustice: one individual gets preferential treatment by means of public funds. Second, it is seen as unfair to competent civil servants who could have been selected for a well-paid, challenging job. Third, it sends the message that you have to be affiliated with a party to access the higher levels. Fourth, as Savoie contends, “court” government provides courtiers with fast access to power at the cost of the quality of decision making (2008: 16–17; 231–2). Fifth, it creates a suspicion that the one who got the job may not be competent, may not be competent enough, or may not be the most competent person to do the job. Finally, there is a fear that the person appointed may not be independent anymore and may not be in a position to protect the public interest by denying inappropriate requests from his or her political masters and their friends. Politicized bureaucrats may tend to be overprotective of their political masters in the face of bad news, even when they are objective and realistic enough to foresee the dangers. Politicization may come in three main forms: partisan, ideological, and functional. Partisan politicization means that someone is preferred and selected mainly for his or her links with the party in power: the person is or was a party member or activist, a candidate, an organizer, a bagman, or an executive assistant to the minister or to an MP or deputy. The appointee would provide advice to a minister who was determined to protect the party and his/her friends and to the minister or the premier as a political leader rather than as an institutional leader. The person’s role also involves facilitating patronage benefiting the party, appointing or facilitating the

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appointment of party relatives, and awarding contracts. A ­partisan could be a “competent person” (with diplomas, experience, and so forth), although observers tend to associate partisanship with incompetence. Partisan decisions about programs and operations tend not to follow the rational plan developed by the experts or to respect the need for discretion. Ideological politicization arises when the selection results from general or specific views about an issue or a group of issues. It refers to policy-making and program decisions. State policies cover a broad range of issues and unfold in many strategic, tactical, and operational decisions. Governments may want to establish a new policy whose putative value is controversial. They think that having someone strongly invested in the issue will facilitate policy design, adoption, and full implementation. Ministers cannot pay continuous attention to all developments, and they do not want to be caught flatfooted in public debate. Politicians with strong views about an issue or policy want similar thinking from senior officials (Peters and Pierre 2004, 2). A senior official with strong personal views about issues coupled with experience and policy knowledge assures busy politicians that sufficient, timely attention will be paid to any sensitive problem or debate. Here the word ideological conveys a number of meanings: about the role of the state relative to the private sector, the death penalty, abortion, the role of the centre relative to regions, positions on immigration, taxes, assistance for regions or individuals, and so on. A person who has no affiliation with a party or a prime minister may nonetheless be a political-ideological appointee in cases where the person is publicly known for his or her strong views. Hennessy describes Prime Minister Thatcher looking for senior officials with the same views on the fundamentals of the role of the state as “one of us.” The ideological passion Thatcher brought to civil service (Hennessy 1989, 627) characterized how she would choose senior officials: “she is not concerned with, and I can vouch for the fact that she does not seek to ascertain, the political views or sympathies (if any) of those who are recommended ... But his [Sir Frank Cooper’s] description of the pragmatic way in which her greater than usual interest in top appointments has been accommodated is the clue to the way in which the appearance of politicisation has arisen”(632–3). Functional politicization occurs when non-partisan senior officials performing their normal role indirectly affect perceptions of the­



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ruling party’s or the prime minister’s performance. In this sense, functional politicization is unavoidable, according to Dogan, ­quoting Suleiman (1975, 5). Senior officials are there to offer sound advice, to pay close attention to decisions, to protect ministers, to implement decisions, and so on. In doing so, they make the government look better. They also help the economy, issuing cheques for grants and subsidies, and they make policies and build highways, all of which make the government look good. Their situation becomes more sensitive and more open to charges of partisanship or patronage when a decision is made deliberately in advance of elections or during an election campaign or when a project just happens to be funded in the minister’s riding. There are several levels of intensity for functional politicization leaning toward partisan politicization. These levels include upgrading government party visibility by issuing cheques and press releases through media events, and so on; preparing answers for the minister that are more or less technical, political, and partisan; suggesting ways of shelving a report; determining the right time to release a report or its findings; and deciding what a minister should be made aware of. Peters and Pierre (2004) explain how enhancing managerialism may contribute to increased politicization. The type of politicization they refer to could just as easily be functional or partisan politicization for the sake of central control and agenda integration: for example, a push for greater efficiency and performance may mean less accountability, more independent agencies, more committed recruitment, and so on (283–9). As Savoie (1999) notes, it is increasingly difficult to prevent senior civil servants from performing tasks that political aides used to do. Conversely, it is well known that political aides always tend to intervene into bureaucratic affairs. A distinction must be made between the situations above and those where the appointee is not a member of the party but benefits from a personal relationship with a prime minister or the leader, situations where the person went to the same university, is a friend or a relative, or comes from the same small town. Observers tend to confuse personal favors with politicization. Bodiguel and Quermonne (1983, 255) asked this question: Are senior officials a responsive instrument of or a proactive strength of political power? Of course, they came to the conclusion that in France they are generally both (Rouban 2004, 96).

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According to Bekke and Van Der Meer, there is a “growing osmosis between political and administrative systems  ... The more the general ethos is compliance with political system, the less is the need for politicization and control” (e.g., by cabinets) (2000, 281–2). This view is consistent with the “breaking-the-bargain” and “court-­ government” views of Savoie. Observers may raise concerns about the new soft and subtle forms of agenda politicization that managerialism (for partisan or functional politicization) and corporate government (for functional or ideological politicization) may entail. Political masters may never be completely reassured about their aides’ political responsiveness, and this is why there is competition and clashes even between those (political or bureaucratic) aides. If this is true, it is possible that the functional politicization of bureaucrats is only a step towards partisan politicization. t h e p o l i t i c i z at i o n o f t h e w h o l e a d m i n i s t r at i o n : c o n f l i c t i n g i m p l i c at i o n s f o r s e n i o r o f f i c i a l s

Some specialists have inferred the role of senior officials from the typology of the whole public service. Jain and Peters provide good examples for this approach. According to Jain (1974, 299), the politicization of the whole public service is reflected in four groups of indicators, generating a typology based on the intensity of politicization. He examines five cases (the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, France, and India) and uses specific criteria to measure the degree of politicization, as opposed to the “desirable neutrality” of the civil service (298). The criteria include the decision process (relating to the administration’s active involvement in decision making), political competition (the administration defining the public interest and acting as a partisan political-support mechanism for government),11 the political implementation of decisions (no role demarcations between political leaders and the administration), and public image (the administration’s identification with the party in power and its ideology). With those criteria in mind, Jain identifies four types of bureaucracies, all of which affect the type of senior official needed. Following Jain, as we move across the table from a depoliticized bureaucracy to a fully politicized one, the senior official’s role in relation to the politicization conundrum could shift from “guardian” to “servant”, to “advocate,” and then to “political partisan.”

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Table 6.1 Politicization of Bureaucracies (Jain) Dimensions of Analysis

Depoliticized Bureaucracy

Semi-Politicized Bureaucracy

Committed Bureaucracy

Fully Politicized Bureaucracy

Degree of bureaucratic influences in decision-making process (relation between political executive and bureaucracy) Degree of involvement in political activity

Neutral, anonymous, apolitical

Political executive dominates bureaucracy to make decisions along party lines

Bureaucracy committed to party programs

Bureaucracy’s usurpation of political power for party ends

Denial of all political activity

Right to vote and join party after resignation or retirement

Membership of political party and participation in party meetings

Political interference in civil service work

No interference, full operation of merit system.

Formal interference in service matters, “spoils system”

Public image

A group of devoted impartial professionals, respect for public service.

Limited internal interference in individuals’ promotion, transfer, etc. Bureaucracy –tendency to perpetuate itself. Serving their own ends. No high esteem

Full political activity. Party and official positions interchangeable Bureaucracy – recruitment of party “cadres”

Bureaucracy toeing the party line. Political conformity of top officials. Image of a politically corrupt bureaucracy

Bureaucracy serving the interests of ruling party and at one with party ideology

Typologies of Roles in Relations with Political Masters There is no shortage of typologies of roles for senior officials. ­Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman (1982) proposed the first typology concerning participation in policy-making. Campbell (1989) subsequently expanded on it. Then came new typologies by Peters (1988 and 1998) regarding participation in social conflicts, by Lodge, and finally by Hood and Lodge (2006) concerning arrangements between politicians and bureaucrats. Concerning policy-making, in 1982, Joel Aberbach, R ­ obert Putnam, and Bert Rockman published a pivotal study entitled ­ Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies. It presented the findings of six national surveys and proposed a resulting typology in

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the form of “images” of relationships. The focus of their approach is on individuals rather than institutions: their work is “not about bureaucratic and political institutions, but about bureaucrats and politicians ... as individual policymakers” (1982, 3). The countries surveyed were the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. They came up with four images: 1 Perfect role separation. In the United States, formally, the minister is the sole decision maker, and civil servants – although they may be political appointees or members from the senior executive service – just have to execute and implement. 2 The facts and interests image. In communist regimes (the book was published well before 1989), civil servants provide expertise, while politicians contribute ideology and reflect the pressures exerted by society. 3 The energy equilibrium image. In the United Kingdom and Canada, politicians represent the unorganized interests of the society, while civil servants participating in policy-making tend to arbitrate between the interests of specialized pressure groups. 4 The perfect symbiosis. This image would occur in France and Japan, where politicians and civil servants would perform alternately one role or another. However, the definition of this hybrid model needs to be qualified. In the United Kingdom and in Germany (party members), “political outsiders, and irregulars” take positions usually reserved for civil servants. According to the authors, this could explain the power of central agencies in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland. Campbell (1989) expanded on the typology of Aberbach et al., covering a broader range of national cases and including Canada, Australia, Japan, and Germany. Specifically, his goal was to refine the energy-equilibrium image by proposing three more images: 1 Reactive bureaucrats such as high flyers in central agencies and Canada’s deputies under Trudeau or Japan’s officials advance their own careers by participating in the policy-making process. They have to espouse policy principles and contribute to policy development, adoption, and implementation. 2 Proactive bureaucrats associate themselves with the agenda and goals of the political masters of the day so that their career



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will advance more rapidly. Here Campbell is referring mostly to central-agency senior officials who could move to the front line and take the heat for unpopular decisions. They include central-­agency officials during Trudeau’s years, state secretaries in ­Germany, career civil servants in the former central policy review sector of the United Kingdom government, and “career officials” in the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Treasury. 3 Amphibian bureaucrats are very comfortable operating in the political arena. They deal politically with technical policy issues and anticipate the administrative effects of policies. They are “public careerists” in US central agencies, “promoter-type” state secretaries in Germany, political advisers in the Australian PM’s office, and members of “policy units” in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) of the Canadian government. Peters developed a set of five models (1988, 149–59) to describe the relationships between politics and bureaucracy on the basis of potential conflicts they may contribute to, owing to their position. They are important in policy-making, offering advice, and making decisions. The models are 1 formal separation between politics and administration, where senior officials must obey the political authority (the United Kingdom); 2 the village life model, where civil servant and politician are both part of the same power elite and share values and goals through socialization and recruitment (continental Europe); 3 the functional village life model, presenting a number of segmented power elites, each with its own goals and interests and each with special relationships with pressure groups in the domain of the policy area concerned. Conflicts occur between economic elites (the United Kingdom); 4 the adversarial model, which covers situations with unpredictable outcomes where there is a conflict between political masters and senior officials for power and control over policy (the United States); 5 the administrative state model, where the apathy of grassroots politicians gives supremacy to civil servants and generates no conflict between the two groups (France).

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Figure 6.1: Jain and Peters, presentations of politico-administrative relations

This typology deals less with country situations and more with situations of power conflict. Thus, one country could present a variety of situations reflecting several models. It is striking that the Peters and the Jain typologies have certain elements in common: Jain’s depoliticized bureaucracy may equate to Peters’ formal separation, and the the next two types in Jain’s conundrum (semi-­ politicized and committed) may be found into Peters’ village life and functional village life categories (figure 6.1). Jain does not cover the adversarial or the administrative state, while Peters does not deal with the fully politicized category. Both tend to avoid the presentation of extreme positions in their conundrums. Jain is more concerned with partisan politics, while Peters seems to reflect more on issue politics. One of the most recent and well-known approaches is the theory of bargains, first developed by Schaffer (1973). A “bargain” is the sum of mutual (explicit and implicit) arrangements between political authorities and the civil servants at the highest level: for example, politicians offer some degree of tenure, salaries, and anonymity in exchange for advice, loyalty, commitment, and so forth. Hood (2001) presents five types of bargains divided into two general categories: systemic and pragmatic bargains. This typology was revised in 2006 (Hood and Lodge) and in 2011 (special issue of Public Policy and Administration edited by Annie Hondeghen).12 Systemic bargains are based on social or constitutional arrangements and are divided into two subtypes: inter-societal (in Belgium, representative bureaucracy acquires power as a source of social cohesion) and Hegelian (in Germany, career bureaucrats embody the public interest and enjoy good material conditions). Pragmatic bargains are divided into three subtypes: the Schafferian bargain (in the United Kingdom, loyal and competent bureaucrats benefit from tenure, policy influence, and anonymity), the hybrid bargain (in France, competent senior officials who are loyal to the minister or the party are influential but could be publicly criticized), and the managerial-regulatory bargain (in the United States, senior officials chosen by their political



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masters enjoy administrative autonomy but may bear some of the blame for mishaps). As mentioned, Hood’s typology was revised by Hood and Lodge (2006). They propose more objective categorization criteria or dimensions: “Such bargains can vary in several dimensions – such as comprehensiveness, enactedness, individualism, as well as in the number of parties involved in the deal and the position in politics that public servants claim or accept” (20). The model includes social characteristics, autonomy, and responsibility as criteria for classification. Thus there are two general types comprising eight bargains: the trustee (public servants behaving as autonomous agents) and the agency (public servants acting as servants of their political masters). There are two sub-types of trustee bargains: representational (public servants representing society, as in the German federal service) and tutelary (public servants acting as elite leaders, as in East Asia). The representational bargain could be either consociational (as in the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland, with representation of the major groups in society) or selective (with virtually exclusive representation of one or more dominant elite groups in society). The tutelary bargain could be represented as moralistic (with ethical exemplars like the mandarins or the Confucian scholar tradition of Imperial China) or legal-technocratic (with specialists at the top of the pyramid, as in Germany). In the second general type, agency bargains, public servants enjoy little political autonomy. Depending on whether public servants are given direct responsibility with the agreement of politicians, there may be delegated bargains or directed bargains (directed by politicians). The delegated bargain may be complex or simple. It is a complex bargain when the public servant is an agent of multiple principals or across levels of government (as in the United Kingdom). A simple bargain occurs when, as in New Zealand, a senior official functions with operational responsibility under a unique web of leaders. The directed bargain (French cabinets and the Whitehall bureaucracy) takes two forms: the serial loyalist and the personal loyalist. The first involves public servants transferring loyalty to their elected masters (as in the Schafferian bargain in the Westminster system; see Savoie (2003, 60–1) on the traditional bargain broken in Canada). The second occurs in Germany and Britain when civil servants show loyalty to individuals rather than to parties.

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Figure 6.2  Bargains Model

The proponents of the bargain typology aim for exhaustiveness, and one of its strengths is that it covers a long period of public service history. The weakness of the typology lies in the non-mutual exclusiveness of the cells. One situation could belong to two or more cells, since the typology encompasses different types of criteria: for example, a civil servant could be part of a representative bureaucracy and at the same time be categorized as a personal loyalist. Typologies of Expected Departmental Roles for Senior Officials As well as working upwards toward his or her political “master,” the bureaucrat also must work within a department, functioning as an administrator. This task also has a number of different interpretations.13 The Senior Official as Guardian: Administering the Public Interest Senior officials performing the guardian role and mandarins have much in common: knowledge, strong views, a sense of the state, and influence. The term “mandarin” has been used quite recently to describe senior officials in the modern world (Dogan 1975; P ­ ollitt and Bouckaert 2004; Hubbard and Paquet 2012). “In China and the countries under Chinese influence in the two last m ­ illennia, a



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mandarin was a civil servant who had been well trained in special schools since childhood. Strictly selected through rigorous exams, he developed a particular mode of thinking and would serve the emperor, protectorate, or king (Poisson 2004, 51, quoted by ­Bourgault and Dunn 2013). As part of a state elite functioning as a caste, the mandarin would exert a powerful influence on political and administrative decisions. The guardian type is based on a clear distinction between the backgrounds, status, and roles of the minister and of the department or agency head. The guardian’s role applies in multiple domains: administrative order, the department as an institution as well as an organization, the public interest, and the public purse. It guards against any situation where private interests, led by politicians or a particular community, would override the public interest. The Senior Official as Guru Gurus are influential because they are experts who have acquired indepth knowledge through their qualifications, their careers as specialists, and their national and international networks within the policy field. In the welfare state, new public policies were blossoming in all domains, and senior officials, as experts, had to understand the content of such issues and master policy development. Political leaders, often ignorant of those new fields of knowledge, needed the specialists for the purpose of developing policies, making technical decisions, representing the country, participating in task forces with industry, and so on. The Senior Official as Promoter Actively engaged in the government’s political directions and agenda, senior officials in the role of promoters are in a battle against red tape, time, and individual’s particular interests in delivering results. The department they manage and direct is merely a tool for delivering expected results. At the highest level, the promoters’ role is to actively push the government agenda as if it were their own professional project. They will address political seminars, conferences, pressure groups, and the media and, of course, spearhead government projects within the department. They invest themselves completely in the fortunes of the government of the day. At the lowest level, their role is to disseminate the message across society.

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The Senior Official as Manager In the context of a growing public management culture and evergreater expectations from the bureaucracy on the part of society, the quest for legal compliance no longer suffices as a performance target. With the rising popularity of value-for-money audits, regimes with new disclosure requirements, and other accountability mechanisms, sound management becomes more critical to public administration. Because they attract more public attention, management issues draw more attention from the politicians. “The advent of the head as a manager, then a trustee, then a contractor came about with the rise of managerialism in the latter part of the twentieth century, in the wake of New Public Management. In this approach, based on the status of the CEOs of private companies and practiced in the U.K. during the Thatcher era and in New Zealand, the head is less permanent and more likely to be hired in a limited contractual relationship with government” (Bourgault and Dunn 2013). The official cedes much of his or her policy-advice role to sources outside the department. The Senior Official as Leader “Senior officials have always been leaders in their department. Leadership based on statutory authority has moved towards leadership by vision, engagement, mobilization, care for people, and personal example” (Bourgault and Dunn 2013). There are a number of different leadership roles to be performed by senior officials (Bourgault 2003). The leadership communication process has changed over the years from bottom-up (senior official representing the department in dealings with the centre) to top-down. Corporate approaches involve departmental leadership, since senior officials are expected to sell and implement the government agenda and spark enthusiasm for it. Leadership is to be performed not only within departments but also at the corporate level. Governments tend to value the corporate culture-oriented approach more. Typologies of Management of Senior Officials In 2008, the OECD published a study by Parrado-Diez, the purpose of which was to “examine how the senior civil service is managed because it draws attention to two sets of tensions: (i) how centralized or decentralized the management of senior civil servants should be



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and what role should be played by central organizations and departments and agencies when HRM functions are devolved (Savoie 1999, 42–3); and (ii) how to avoid political interference in managing the system” (OECD 2008, 24). Eleven OECD countries are covered by the study. The classification criterion is the degree of independence from the executive authority enjoyed by senior officials. Three degrees of status are considered by Parrado Diez (9–25). Recruitment to the independent higher public service is based solely on merit and competition, although appointment is made by the political authority. In countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, the system is said to be protected by a “commissary” reporting to parliament or the head of state. In principle, there should be no political interference with senior officials’ duties, although the “blame game” may be played from time to time, which is a formalistic sign of transparency. The commissary jurisdiction does not include senior officials in every one of those countries. Officials are recruited to the dependent higher public service on a discretionary basis and only by ministers. There is no oversight or monitoring system for reporting to the authorities or an independent institution. France, Italy, and Spain have public services of this type. Political advisors tend to intervene constantly in the process of policy implementation. Now they want to make the managers more accountable for results. The semi-dependent higher public service is illustrated by the US system with political appointees and career appointees. Powers of oversight are in principle exercised by the Office of Personnel Management, which reports to the president. In addition, some audit functions are assigned to the Government Accountability Office, acting under congressional authority. Ketelaar, Manning, and Turkisch (OECD 2007a, 14–15) reported on the rise of performance-based arrangements for senior civil servants in ten OECD countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Mexico, the United States, Korea, and New Zealand). Linking the performance regime to contextual and institutional factors, they came up with a classification in which most senior civil service’ appointments are considered political or hybrid (Belgium, New Zealand, Denmark), hybrid–political (the United States), or administrative (the United Kingdom). Political ­interference in personal decisions goes from strong (the United States, Italy) to nil.

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Table 6.2 Politicians’ Intervention in Senior Civil Servant HR Issues in OECD Zone (2006) 

Strong

Weak

Country

Appointments

Revocations

Promotions

US Italy Mexico France Poland Belgium Sweden New Zealand Korea Denmark UK

Strong Strong Average Average Average Average Average Weak Weak Weak Nil

Strong Strong Average Average Average Average – Average Weak Weak Nil

Strong Strong Strong Average Average Average – Weak Weak Weak –

Typologies of Senior Civil Service Politicization as a Factor contributing to npm Reform Implementation Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouckaert published a seminal study comparing NPM reforms and their implementation in twelve countries (Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Considering factors that could affect reform implementation and arguing that “it makes sense to concentrate on features that, prima facie, seem likely to affect the process of management reform” (2004, 40), they focused on the relations between politicians and senior officials. As table 6.3 shows, five factors they considered as affecting reform adoption and implementation were state structure, executive government, minister-mandarin relationships, the administrative culture, and the policy advice process. For the purpose of our exercise we may focus on relations between ministers and mandarins. Pollitt and Bouckaert based their observation on the criteria of separation of elites and politicization of senior officials, since a convergence of views about the reforms may be a function of common belonging and politicization, which increases responsiveness. While only Belgium, France, and Italy are described as having relatively integrated elites, they, together with the United States, show an important level of politicization. As for the countries with separated elites, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden demonstrate more politicization than Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.

Unitary, centralized coordinated Federal

Unitary, formerly centralized, coordinated

U.K.

France

US

Sweden

Unitary, centralized, mildly fragmented Unitary, decentralized

Unitary, increasingly decentralized Unitary, fairly fragmented

New Zealand

Netherlands

Italy

Germany

Canada Finland

Federal Unitary, decentralized, fairly fragmented Federal, coordinated

Federal, coordinated Federal

Austria

Belgium

State Structure

Country

Intermediate

Intermediate

Majoritarian

Intermediate

Majoritarian (until 1996)

Consensual

Coalition

Intermediate

Majoritarian Consensual

Consensual

Majoritarian

Executive Government

Table 6.3 Pollit and Bouckaert’s Views on Politicization in Relation to Reforms

Integrated, fairly politicized

Separate, very politicized

Separate, not politicized

Separate, increasingly politicized

Separate, not politicized

Separate, fairly politicized

Separate, fairly politicized Politicized

Separate Separate, fairly politicized

Separate, mildly politicized Politicized

Minister/Mandarin Relationship

Predominantly Rechtsstaat

Public interest

Originally legalistic, but has changed to corporatist Public interest

Originally very legalistic, but has changed to pluralistic/ consensual Public interest

Rechtsstaat

Rechtsstaat

Public interest Tending to Rechtsstaat

Rechtsstaat

Public interest

Administrative Culture

A broad mixture: corporatist processes bring in academic experts and trade unions Mainly civil service until 1980s. Recently, think tanks, consultants, political advisers Very diverse: political appointees, corporations, think tanks, consultants Mainly civil service

Mainly civil service

A broad mixture: civil servants, academics, other experts

Mainly civil service (plus a few academics) A broad mixture

Mainly consultant and universities Mainly civil service Mainly civil service

Mainly civil service until 1980s

Diversity of Policy Advice

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The authors’ point is that reform required a concerted effort by politicians and senior officials (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2004, 51–2). They make a useful distinction between ownership and interests in the case of France, where the expected ownership of reforms does not always materialize, because interests are deemed more important. Politicization may create more ownership for politically generated reforms, but the momentum will not survive a change of government, and in a context of politicization, low-ranking bureaucrats may not identify very easily with the reform concerned. Since the senior civil service is a factor in NPM acceptance and implementation, are NPM effects and senior civil service management factors in NPM implementation? The two go together for three types of reasons: institutional reasons (cooperation), cultural reasons (cognitive resistance to change), and corporate-bureaucratic interests (effects on day-to-day life). Considering corporate-­bureaucratic interests, we have to ask what NPM means for senior officials. It could encompass any or all of the following: Selection of mandarins open to society Contractual engagement for senior officials • High (and sometimes competitive) levels of basic compensation • Individual performance appraisal based on results • Performance pay (a significant part of compensation based on performance appraisal) • More managerial autonomy • Corporate management with the central-government agenda as a driver • Inclusive governance for policies • A series of audits with public disclosure of results • Professional responsibility of senior officials for results achieved • Some degree of personal accountability of senior officials to Parliament • •

For institutional (constitutional or legal) reasons, some reforms are difficult to implement or will be introduced at the cost of a lengthy public debate, since they involve career status, executive powers, the parliamentary process, ministerial responsibility, and so on. Culturally, those trained to adopt a technical approach, such as jurists, engineers, and scientists, made it to the top through a commitment to their career and respect for traditions. They may not anticipate the desire for change, and they may focus only on the



Categorizing Senior Officials 163

­disadvantages of NPM. Traditions may have established a “sense of the state” (Rechtsstaat culture) or a culture of public interest, at least in words (!), and a positioning of the state as arbitrator. All this would be jeopardized by NPM “improvements.” Finally, NPM may make senior officials’ lives more difficult and less attractive because of new constraints, more stress, and less protection. It requires a totally new perspective, one that people accustomed to the traditional approach do not easily master. They may not grasp the new features of NPM, such as competitive levels of compensation and administrative autonomy, and as a result they may find themselves in a weaker position. For this reason or by dint of a mandarinate public-interest approach, senior officials are described by some as having a de facto veto power over reforms (Schnapp 2001, 4). Since the most integrated and politicized countries did not implement more radical reforms more rapidly (e.g., France) and since other countries with a different context proceeded otherwise (New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden), one may submit that the mandarinate’s separation and politicization are not the sole predictors of the success of reforms: other factors come into play and the mandarin’s influence could just as well be a factor in the resistance to reforms. De Visscher and Hondegem conducted a number of studies in five countries on the evolution of Hood and Lodge’s public sector bargains for senior officials following the advent of NPM (see table 6.4). They focused on changes in rewards, competency, loyalty, and responsibility. Their work tends to show that public service bargains are in a process of evolution in the five target countries – a process of change that is not at all radical (see also Jarvis 2009) but includes more managerialist components. Bargains become more complex because they are composites of multiple factors. As Painter and Peters (2010) and Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004) had already observed, cultural factors are a constant in the change process, affecting the duration, the rate, and the ease of implementation of change. Discussion: A Cross-Category Examination from a Country Perspective One interesting part of a cross-category examination might be to track several countries to see under which typologies they appear alike and under which they appear different (see table 6.5). After

Table 6.4 Effects of Managerialism on Public Sector Bargains for Senior Officials Country

Before npm

After npm (as of 2009)

Belgium: Secretary General (De Visscher, Hondegem, Montuelle, and Van Dorpe 2011) Canada: Deputy Minister (Bourgault 2011)

Mix between a “trustee” (consociational) and an “agency” (serial loyalist) bargain.

Emergence of a “hybrid” public service bargain, instead of the expected “managerial” bargain.

Schafferian bargain, with a combination of “pyramid and escalator.” Career (professional-type) hierarchist-type position with respect to political leaders. Already had performance review and some performance pay. “Pyramid and escalator” bargain.

Changes in intensity. Deputy ministers’ profiles and practices have become more managerialized. Push toward entrepreneurship and individualism has been offset by an increasing number of systemic controls

Denmark: Permanent Secretary (Hansen and Salomonsen 2011)

Netherlands: Secretary General (Steen and Van der Meer 2011) United Kingdom: Permanent Secretary (Van Dorpe and Horton 2011)

Consociational bargain.

A Schafferian bargain, with a combination of a “pyramid and escalator” and a “noblesse oblige” reward bargain; a “sage” type of competency bargain and a partnership loyalty/responsibility bargain.

Advisory aspect of public service bargain. Reward: minor elements of managerial bargain. Competency: “sage” and “wonk” bargain and variant of “delivery” bargain. Loyalty and responsibility: still a “partnership” bargain. Shift towards a managerial bargain. New hybrid public service bargain. No more noblesse oblige. “Pyramid and escalator” bargain being replaced by a type of “turkey race” bargain. For career, a go-between bargain, in which boundary-spanning skills are very important, combined with elements of a “delivery” bargain. Partner bargain makes room for executive type. Emergence of a “hybrid” public service bargain, instead of a ­­full-blown “managerial” bargain.



Categorizing Senior Officials 165

looking at all the attempts in table 6.5 to categorize senior officials and their relationships with their political masters, we can confirm that it is impossible to come up with just one typology encompassing all the elements of the several typologies studied, just as it is impossible to provide a single typology of all the characteristics of all animals. One can classify animals by origin, family, reproductive process, height, or fur or hair color, but one single typology cannot cover all characteristics and factors and at the same time reflect the fundamentals of a true typology. Classification is predicated on a hierarchy of typologies. Typologies must be based on a single set of criteria. Each of the studies examined here was conducted with a specific perspective or purpose in mind, one that was not necessarily compatible with the perspectives or purposes of the other studies. For example, the amphibian image developed by Campbell could apply to both the United States and France. Yet the United States has strong elements of a spoils system and France of a career system, and France has, according to Hood, a hybrid bargain, while the United States apparently has a managerial-regulatory bargain. sets of typologies

From all the studies, we have identified seven families of characteristics that may affect each other but cannot easily be placed in the same typology. The order in which the characteristics are presented below may be seen as an attempt to classify and propose a hierarchy of typologies: Relations with the state (the political regime) Politicization • Roles in relation to civil society • Roles in relation to politicians • Roles within a department • Career management • Relations with reforms • •

It is open for discussion whether politicization, for example, should be ranked lower in the hierarchy at the fifth level, since it would be the result of the types of roles performed. Probably the “political system,” which includes societal, historical, and constitutional factors, generates a requirement to benefit from the attributes of a

Table 6.5 Purpose of Typologies Who

When

Purpose

Countries

Jain

1974

Provide criteria (a model) to measure politicization

Dogan

1975

Aberbach et al.

1982

Explain the growing political influence of mandarins Study bureaucrats and politicians as individual policymakers with four images of relations Provide nuances for Image 4 (the perfect amphibian)

India France United States United Kingdom Western Europe

Campbell Peters

1988

Explain interactions between political executives and bureaucracy Describe configurations of variables affecting relations between politicians and senior public servants Observe evolving aspects of politicization in a number of countries

Heady

1996b

Peters and Pierre

2004

Pollitt and Bouckaert

2004

Describe senior officials’ status and roles as factors facilitating implementation of NPM reforms

Hood and Lodge

2006

Ketelaar, Manning, and Turkisch

2007

Create a typology of arrangements (bargains) between senior civil service and political society Propose a typology of how senior civil service is managed

Britain France Germany Italy Netherlands Sweden United States Same as Aberbach et al., plus Japan Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, United States France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Ireland Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, United States Australia, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, United Kingdom, United States United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain, France, Japan, Trinidad Korea, United States, Poland, United Kingdom, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Belgium, France, Denmark, Sweden

Note: Bekke and Van den Meer (2000) compare types and degrees of politicization in eight countries (the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain) but do not develop an elaborate typology. The publication by Aberbach et al. (1982) led to many studies, including those of Eldersveld on Dutch elites and Eldersveld and Siemienska on elites in Poland and the United States.



Categorizing Senior Officials 167

­ oliticized senior bureaucracy. The conditions under which modern p governments perform may require a certain form of politicization that, while not necessarily partisan, will certainly be functional and probably sometimes ideological.14 Table 6.6 represents an effort to integrate typologies and categories by country and to determine to what extent clusters of countries may possibly emerge. Do we really find clusters of countries when countries are defined by these typologies, or are the typologies so different that they produce very different results? There are many caveats relating to this exercise. The following observations may be made: 1 With respect to the time of observation, the practices of a particular government or a trend may create a deceptive impression when someone classifies a country and the situation has changed. The case of the United Kingdom before, during, and after the Thatcher era is an obvious example. Campbell (1988), reflecting on the Trudeau era in Canada, and Savoie (1999) explain how Canada’s senior civil service changed over time in terms of separation from politicians. 2 Typologies do not all tackle exactly the same subject: an examination of the administration, the civil service, the bureaucracy, and senior civil servants may produce different, even contrary, results from one country to the next. 3 Typologies are designed for various reasons and with different purposes in mind, and they are associated with different observation tools. “The variables chosen should depend on the problems being researched and the kinds of predictability sought” (Heady 1996b, 209). This is probably why they produce results that are so difficult to integrate and combine. 4 It is difficult to reconstruct the rationale for a typology after the fact and from an outsider’s perspective. As Edgar Morin put it, “What is complex cannot be represented completely or understood through just one image.” 5 Observations may vary with the observer’s personal lens: for instance, what is meant by strong political power and nonpartisanship, as Dogan (1975) puts it, for France in 1975? For many observers, if the former is more obvious than the latter, what is “strong political power” when the political sphere is occupied by the bureaucracy? Or is it that the political sphere is

NLP

NLP NLP

NLP

NLP NLC

NLC NLC

NLC

NLC

NLS

Australia

Canada New Zealand

UK

Denmark Belgium

Italy Netherlands

Germany

France

US

Relations with the State

P, F, FVL

I, F, ASM

F, D, FVL

P, F, ASM P, S, FS

F, D, FS, P, C, VLM

F, D, FS,

F, D, FS, F, D, FS,

F, D, FS,

Politicization Bourgault (pif) Jain (dscf) Peters

Table 6.6 Senior Officials by Country and Typology

PML

P

G

P GM

P P

GML

GML ML

GML

Roles in Relation to Politicians

A

A, EEP

S

A FI

EEr FI

EEr

EEr Sy

EEr

Roles in Relation to Politicians: Image of Relationship

PL

S, PL

Lt

PL T

Lt C

SL

SL DS

T

Roles in Relation to Society

D (Y)

D (N)

I (N)

D (S) S (N)

S (S) D (S)

I (Y)

I (S) S (Y)

I (Y)

Career Management (npm: y/n/s/i)

Politicized Separate, fairly politicized Separate, politicized Integrated, politicized Separate, very politicized

Not addressed Separate Separate, not politicized Separate, not politicized Not available Politicized

Politicization in Relation to Reforms

Explanation of Symbols

NL: Neo- liberal P: professional C: career S: spoils

Table 6.6 (continued)

FS: Formal separation VLM: Village life model FVL: Functional village life A: Adversarial model ASM: Administrative state model

D: Depoliticized SC: Semi-­ committed FP: Fully politicized

P: Partisan F: Functional I: Ideological

G: Guardian P: Promoter M: Manager L: Leader

A: Amphibian S: Separation Sy: Symbiosis EEr: Energy Equilibrium reactive EEp: proactive FI: Facts and Interests

T: Tutelary C: Consociational Lt: Legal-­ technocratic, selective SL: Serial loyalist PL: Personal Loyalist DS: Delegated simple (Managed according to NPM principles: Yes-No-Some-In progress)

D: Dependent S: Semi-­ dependent I: Independent

Politicized, Separate Integrated

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strong because it benefits from the competencies of a high-class bureaucracy? This is why the definitions matter so much. 6 Each country has found a particular place for its senior civil service function that is compatible with its other institutions, its history, and its culture. Each has implemented solutions that were relevant to what was believed to be appropriate for the country at the time. “European countries have belonged to a specific environment, but each has developed its own identity,” say Bekke and Van der Meer, in justifying the need for a historical-­institutional approach to describing any national civil service (2000, 275). Some of our country classifications based on a single typology (cf., Peters 1988) may be challenged, since a country may belong to multiple environments, categories do not always come with precise measurement tools, and therefore subjective judgments are inescapable. Depending on the order in which we constitute them, the clusters in table 6.6 may vary a little. Based on the order in the table, the first cluster consists of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Denmark (no surprise here). Continental Europe, excluding France, makes up a second cluster, while France and the United States form a third. For the first two clusters, some common traditions provide the rationale for the convergence, which is not the case for the last cluster. conclusion

This chapter has provided an opportunity to work on assembling, classifying, and integrating a number of typologies. There may be more to do on this front. With respect to the question of the practicability of a unique general typology, the answer may be that, given the complexity and uniqueness of the numerous national situations and the variety and number of factors affecting social behavior any institutional responses, such a typology does not seem to be a realistic proposition. The result of any attempt to develop a general typology may be no more than the observation of a few general trends that transcend national specificities. We have reviewed developments in the study of typologies of senior officials and have found that over the years the focus of research has shifted from the politicization issue, to the role and influence of chief administrators on ministers, and finally to the impact of the



Categorizing Senior Officials 171

managerial approach on the status and role of senior officials. Specifically, politicization has not disappeared as an issue. In fact, it now shares the limelight with the managerial approach, and its sphere of action has changed from partisan HR management to political responsiveness (Peters and Pierre 2004, 5, 287). Beyond the typologies described here, four major issues are now affecting senior officials’ roles: control from the centre, their influence on corporate and departmental decision making, the new forms of politicization, and the way NPM affects their jobs and status. These issues neatly encapsulate what Savoie has foreseen in his work. The issues have evolved over time: first there was the partisan politicization issue; then came the issue of political influence, followed by influence from the centre, the impact of NPM, and the management of senior officials’ careers. Again, this evolution reflects the evolution of debates about public administration in general, and any reflections on the role and status of senior officials cannot be isolated from those on public administration as a political institution. A number of observations and conclusions may be drawn from this review. Of course, contextual factors (coalition and minority governments, major crises, scandals) and individual factors (the personality of a prime minister, minister, or senior official) may affect the extent to which the conclusions apply. Senior officials play a variety of political roles while managing their respective departments: within the state, the government, the cabinet, the civil service at large, and civil society; in their relations with pressure groups; and in terms of socio-economic representation. For senior officials, the “entrepreneur” (delivery) and “integrator” functions are growing in importance and are becoming critical to the survival of an individual’s career. The politicization of senior officials is gaining in complexity. It is no longer defined solely in terms of partisan versus non-­partisan activity. There are various forms of politicization, and functional politicization is gaining in importance and scope. There are also various of manifestations of functional politicization, since senior officials are now doing many things that political assistants used to do in the past. And politicization is gaining in subtlety, notwithstanding the mechanics of managerialism. To the eyes of both the political and the administrative clans, a deep difference of opinion is interpreted as politicization, which implies that decisions made or actions taken by the other clan are illegitimate.

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Across the world, political appointees are now relatively more competent than they were in the early 1960s, a development that reflects the upgrading of education and skills in civil society. However, the less strategic positions are likely to be filled by less competent political appointees. There is always a grey area in all hierarchies where political appointments meet career appointees: it could be at the very top of the hierarchy or lower down. The lower it is, the more people are involved in the competition to the bitter end, and the more problems and challenges may ensue. Political and administrative centres are playing a greater role in a context of greater expectations on the part of the public, on the one hand, and the complexity, interdependence, and unpredictability of public issues, on the other. The minister, with individual exceptions, is becoming a player of lesser importance at the centre than the influential political brokers. This affects the way in which the senior official’s role is being played. The chief executive (the president or the prime minister) decides de facto what the power path will be under his reign, that is, what the hierarchy of the various brokers’ networks will be; there will be two convergent hierarchies, the political one (of ministers and advisors) and that of the civil servants. There will always be a stronger player between the political secretariat of the chief executive and the general secretariat of the government (e.g., the PCO and the PMO in Canada; the secretary general of the president in France, versus the same for the prime minister; and so on) and between the chief of staff and the clerk, although they have to work together in practice. Moreover, and as a general observation, the political actor currently seems to override the administrative actor, either by exerting influence or by occupying the position of highest-ranking civil servant. This may be interpreted as a growth in politicization and/or as a revival of democratic levers. As of 2011, NPM reforms have not yet made very significant changes to the status of senior officials or the way in which they work together, although the reforms have strongly influenced what they pay attention to while managing their departments. There is a clear tendency to manage the mandate and the career of senior officials in a deliberate and purposeful manner. At the same time and paradoxically, the work of the senior official as a vocation is disappearing: in general, self-interest plays a greater role (this is not a moral judgment but an observation). As a general rule, senior officials are less



Categorizing Senior Officials 173

likely to sacrifice themselves and their careers if they feel that their general working conditions are poor.15

notes

  1 The author wishes to express his gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for funding this research project and to Stéphanie Viola-Plante and Stephane Hovington, our research assistants, to the participants in the Bouctouche Seminar in honour of Donald Savoie (June 2011), to Guy Peters for his sound comments, and to Malcom Williams for the linguistic revisions. The author remains solely responsible for any error or incongruity.   2 Typology classifies things according to their characteristics into classes or types. A taxonomy is a particular classification according to a structure or a scheme, with subtypes according to a logical, deductive approach.   3 “The configuration approach for shared attributes may encompass in few cells a large fraction of the population.” The factors are “relation to the political regime; socio-economic context; focus for personnel manage­ment; qualification requirements; sense of mission” (Heady 1996a, 207–11).   4 Traditions are multi-dimensional and include geographical, historical, and cultural considerations (Painter and Peters 2010, 19).   5 Of course, with this type of approach comes the risk of forgetting major contributions to typologies. Despite my best efforts, I may have omitted one or more contributions. I am therefore open to suggestions for amendments.   6 The highest levels of the hierarchy have the highest percentage of political appointees. The Pendleton Act of 1833 addressed the spoils system for front-line employees and middle managers by instituting a merit base for recruitment and barring partisan firing and demotions.   7 The term ‘‘clientalism’’ refers to a dependant relationship with a given clientele or set of interests.   8 It is important to distinguish this situation from the other two contexts in which the term “professionalism” is used: (1) there is the profession as a craft recognized by statutes and, in some cases, leading to an exclusive practice or to positions reserved for people who have earned a specific degree or diploma or who have passed specific examinations; (2) there is professionalism based on the professional values of the public service, including the moral obligation and space to speak truth to power ­fearlessly, as outlined by Ken Kernaghan (1983, 9). Silberman (1993)

174

 9

10 11 12 13 14

15

Executive Power and Public Administration

­ istinguishes between two types of Weberian bureaucracies: Japan, France, d Germany, and Spain have an organizational orientation since they recruit for a career, while the United Kingdom, Canada, and Switzerland recruit for a specific job. He points out that meritocracy does not protect in any absolute manner against politicization and that open recruitment may also provide for the staffing of positions on merit (18). Danish governments have been minority governments for many years, which may be seen as a sign of institutional fragility. But from 2001 to 2011 there was a strong government because of a loyal party supporting the minority government. In September 2011 a new minority government took office, and some observers think it may be a more fragile government. The political changes and the NPM movement have not reduced the senior officials’ role as the main advisers to the ministers (Hansen and Salomonsen 2011, 206). Fleischer notes also a brief trend in the 1998 government of Schröeder (SDP and Greens) to appoint some administrators from the Länders. For exemple, Bodiguel and Quermonne (1983), La haute fonction publique sous la Ve République, 258–9. Public Policy and Administration, April 2011, 26. This discussion is adapted from Bourgault and Dunn (forthcoming 2013) and Dunn and Berling (2009). The conditions that make government more fragile are as follows: the required speed of response, the interfaces between issues, the effects of globalization, the obligations of transparency, media attention, public expectations, and the strength of pressure groups. All require a capacity for political responsiveness and prompt reaction on the part of government. This may conflict with the “sound reflection” and long-term public interest analysis that a strong professional bureaucracy should provide. The concept is wider than that of compensation alone, although, exceptionally, some higher officials will publicly oppose their political masters on matters of principle, as happened in Canada over the past ten years: examples include opposition concerning Statistics Canada, the Nuclear Control Commission, and Afghan prisoner transfers.

references

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Christensen, J.G. 2006. “Ministers and Mandarins under Danish Parliamentarism.” International Journal of Public Administration 29: 997–1019. Coenen-Hunter, J. 2007. “Classifications, typologies et rapport aux valeurs.” Revue européenne des sciences sociales 45, 138: 27–40. Dahlstrom, C. 2009. Political Appointments in 18 Democracies, ­1975–2007. QoG, Working Papers Series, 2009(18), University of Gothen­burg, Institute of Quality of Governments. De Visscher, C., A. Hondegem, C. Montuelle, and K. Van Dorpe. 2011. ”The Changing Public Service Bargain in the Federal Admin­ istration of Belgium.” Public Policy and Administration 26 (2):167–88. Dogan, M., ed. 1975. The Mandarins of Western Europe: The Political Role of Top Civil Servants. Toronto: Sage/John Wiley & Sons. Dunn, C., and G. Berling. 2009. “Les sous-ministres des gouvernements provinciaux canadiens comme figures archétypales.” Téléscope, Québec 15(1): 65–78. Eldersveld, S., and J. Siemienska. 1989. “Elite Conflict Orientations in Polish and US Cities.” International Political Science Review 10(4): 309–29. Evans, P., and J. Rauch. 1999. “Bureaucracy and Growth: A CrossNational Analysis of the Effects of Weberian State Structures of Bureaucracy on Economic Growth.” American Sociological Review 64 (4):748–65. Fleischer, J. 2011. “Steering from the German Center: More Policy Coordination and Fewer Policy Initiatives.” In Carl Dahlström, B. Guy Peters, and Jon Pierre, eds., Steering from the Center: Strengthening ­Political Control in Western Democracies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 54–79. Hansen, Morten Balle, and H. Salomonsen. 2011. “The Public Service ­Bargain of Danish Permanent Secretaries.” Public Policy and Administration 26, 2 (April): 189–208. Heady, F. 1996a. Public Administration: A Comparative Perspective. 5th ed. New York: Marcel Dekker. – 1996b. “Administration in More Developed Nations: General Characteristics and ‘Classic’ Administration Systems.” In F. Heady, ed., Public Administration: A Comparative Perspective. New York: Marcel Dekker, 202–35. – 1996c. “Configurations of Civil Service Systems.” In A.J.G.M. Bekke, J.L. Perry, and Th. A.J. Toonen, eds., Civil Service Systems in Comparative Perspective. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 207–26.



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– 1996d. “ Administration in More Developed Nations: Some Variations in Administrative Systems.” In F. Heady, Public Administration: A Comparative Perspective. New York: Marcel Dekker, 236–89. Hennesy, P. 1989. Whitehall. New York: Free Press. Hood, C. 2001. “Relations entre ministres/politiciens et fonctionnaires: l’ancien et le nouveau marchandage.” In G.B. Peters and D. J. Savoie, Gouvernance au XXIe siècle: revitaliser la fonction publique. Les Presses de l’Université Laval. Hood, C., and M. Lodge. 2006. The Politics of Public Service Bargains: Reward, Competency, Loyalty and Blame. New York: Oxford University Press. Hubbard, Ruth, and G. Paquet. 2012. The Black Hole of Public Administration. University of Ottawa. Jain, R.B. 1974. “Politicization of Bureaucracy: A Framework for Measurement.” Res Publica 16(2): 297–302. Jarvis, M.D. 2009. “The Adoption of the Accounting Officer System in Canada: Changing Relationships?” Canadian Public Administration 52, 4 (December): 525–47. Jenson, J., and É. Lépinard. 2009. “Penser le genre en science politique: Vers une typologie des usages du concept.” Revue française d’administration publique 2 (59): 183–201. Kernaghan, K. 1983. Canadian Public Administration: Discipline and Profession. Toronto: Butterworths. Ketelaar, A., N. Manning, and E. Turkisch. 2007. “Performance-Based Arrangements for Senior Civil Servants OECD and Other Country Experiences.” OECD Working Papers on Public Governance, no. 5. Paris: OECD Publishing. Kilmann, R.H. 1983. “A Typology of Organization: Toward Parsimony and Integration in the Organizational Science.” Human Relations 36 (6): 523–48. Knill, C. 1999. “Explaining Cross-National Variance in Administrative Reform: Autonomous versus Instrumental Bureaucracies.” Journal of Public Policy 19(2): 113–39. Light, P. 2008. “A Government Ill Executed: The Depletion of the Federal Service.” Public Administration Review 68, 3 (May–June): 413–19. – 2007. “Recommendations Forestalled or Forgotten? The National Commission on the Public Service and Presidential Appointments.” Public Administration Review 67 (3): 408–17. OECD. 2008. “The Senior Civil Service in National Governments of OECD Countries,” by Salvador Parrado Diez. Working Papers on Public ­Governance. Paris: OECD.

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– 2007a. “Performance-based Arrangements for Senior Civil Servants: OECD and Other Country Experiences,” by A. Ketelaar, N. Manning, and E. Turkisch. Working Papers on Public Governance, 2007/5. OECD Publishing. doi:10.1787/160726630750. – 2007b. “Study of the Political Involvement in Senior Staffing and on the Delineation of Responsibilities between Ministers and Senior Civil Servants, “ by Alex Matheson, Boris Weber, Nick Manning, and Emmanuel Arnould. Working Papers on Public Governance, 2007/6. Paris: OECD. Olsen, J. 2008. “The Ups and Downs of Bureaucratic Organization.” Annual Review of Political Science 11, 13–37. Painter, M., and G.B. Peters. 2010. “Administrative Traditions in Public Administration.” In Martin Painter and B. Guy Peters, eds., Tradition and Public Administration. New York: Palgrave, MacMillan, 19–30. Peters, G.B. 1998. Comparative Politics: Theory and Methods. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. – Comparing Public Bureaucracies: Problems of Theory and Method. University of Alabama Press. – 1987. “Politicians and Bureaucrats in the Politics of Policy-Making.” In J.E. Lane, Bureaucracy and Public Choice. London: Sage Publications, 256–82. Peters, G.B., and J. Pierre. 2004. Politicization of the Civil Service in Comparative Perspective: The Quest for Control. London: Routledge. Poisson, Emmanuel. 2004. Mandarins et subalternes au nord du Viêt Nam. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose. Pollitt, C., and G. Bouckaert. 2004. Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rouban, L. 2004. “Politicization of the Civil Service in France: From Structural to Strategic Politicization.” In G.B. Peters and J. Pierre, eds., Politicization of the Civil Service in Comparative Perspective: The Quest for Control. London: Routledge. Savoie, D. 2008. Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in Canada and the United Kingdom. IPAC. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 2004. “The Search for a Responsive Bureaucracy in Canada.” In G.B. Peters and J. Pierre, eds., The Politicization of the Civil Service in Comparative perspective: The Quest for Control. London: Routledge, 138–58. – 2003. Breaking the Bargain: Public Servants, Ministers, and Parliament. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.



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– 1999. Governing from the Centre: The Concentration of Power in Canadian Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1994. Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Schaffer, B. 1973. The Administrative Factor: Papers in Organization, Politics and Development. London: Frank Cass. Schnapper, D. 2005. Compréhension sociologique: Démarche de l’analyse typologique. Paris: PUF. Schnapp, K.U. 2001. The Influence of Ministerial Bureaucracies and Decision Making: Three Models. Paper presented at the First General Conference of ECPR, University Kent at Canterbury, 5–8 September 2001. Silberman, Bernard S. 1993. Cages of Reason: The Rise of the Rational State in France, Japan, United States and Great Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sossin, L. 2006. “Defining Boundaries: The Constitutional Argument for Bureaucratic Independence and Its Implications for the Accountability of the Public Service.” Commission of Inquiry into the Sponsorship Program and Advertising Activities (the Gomery Commission), Research Studies, vol. 2 (March): 25–72. Steen, T., and F. Van Der Meer. 2011. “Public Service Bargains in Dutch Top Civil Service.” Public Policy and Administration 26 (2): 209–32. Van, R., and C.B. Weder. 2001. “Bureaucratic Corruption and the Rate of Temptation: Do Wages in the Civil Service Affect Corruption and by How Much?” Journal of Development Economics 65:307–31. Van Dorpe, K., and S. Horton. 2011. “The Public Service Bargain in the United Kingdom: The Whitehall Model in Decline?” Public Policy and Administration 26 (2): 233–52.

7 Thirty Years of Public Management Reforms: Has There Been a Pattern? christopher pollitt

introduction

Donald Savoie has always been a bold writer and speaker, a man with an instinct for the pithy thrust and the colourful phrase. In his spirit, therefore, I begin with my answer, unadorned, to the question posed in the title of this chapter and subsequently return to the scene of the crime in order to explore the foundations of that answer. the answer

The answer is yes, there has been a discernable pattern to the public management reforms that have swept over so many of the European and North American countries (not to speak of elsewhere) in the three decades since 1980. Six prominent elements of this pattern are set out below. First, public management reform itself (hereafter PMR) has become a more prominent political topic. It has emerged from the dusty backrooms of administrative change to feature, sometimes at least, as a major agenda item in party manifestos and government programs (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011, chapter 1). It has acquired its own national and international networks and communities, which embrace not only public servants themselves, academics, and a few politicians, but also, with increasing voice and influence, management consultants (National Audit Office 2006; Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall 2002; Saint-Martin 2005).



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Second, the New Public Management (NPM) ideology of treating government as if it were a business has informed many changes in many countries (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011, passim). More recently NPM has been partly diluted and partly merged with other streams of reform ideas. It is not, as some have alleged, “dead” (Dunleavy et al., 2006b), but it has evolved (Hood and Peters 2004). We will come to all that later. Third, the widespread popularity of NPM ideas does not mean that the developed world has converged on the NPM paradigm. In fact, the impact of NPM ideas has been highly variable, for reasons I will enumerate. And other, rival models have gradually become discernable, although each seems as slippery and potentially inconsistent as NPM itself (Goldfinch and Wallis 2010; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011, chapter 1). Fourth, we should note one very common element. It is that reform talk is often much more ambitious than the formal decisions that eventually get taken and that there is then frequently a substantial implementation gap between what was decided and what finally gets put into operational practice. This is captured in the now widely used stages model of talk, decisions, practice, and results (Pollitt 2002, 2007a; Goldfinch and Wallis 2010). This feature carries the strong implication that in our assessments we need to be careful to treat like with like: to compare talk with talk and practices with practices, and not confuse the different stages. The pattern of talk may well be a poor guide to the pattern of practice. Fifth, evaluations of PMR have been ambiguous or unconvincing in many cases where they have been attempted. In even more cases – in fact probably in most cases  – no credible evaluation (and certainly no independent, scientifically designed evaluation) has been carried out (Pollitt 1995, 2009; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011, appendix B). PMR has frequently been more an act of faith than a piece of evidence-based policy-making. The recent explosion of international comparative indicators of good governance (and the like) has not fundamentally changed this state of affairs. Sixth, instances of cycling or alternation in PMR are not uncommon (Pollitt 2008, 51–9). Decentralizing measures are followed, after an interval, by centralizing measures. Intensive and detailed performance measurement is succeeded by a phase during which reformers say that measurement and audit must be lightened and operational management freed from the unreasonable burden of

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monitoring. This is certainly not a universal pattern, but it occurs fairly frequently (and has recently been sanctified in managementspeak as “re-balancing”). It appears to be connected with the long ago observed fact that public administration faces a number of inherently difficult trade-offs, where opting for one direction brings benefits but also, inevitably, penalties, so that, after a while, the penalties seem to loom large while the benefits become too familiar and taken for granted, so that a new generation of reformers turn back to the opposite direction (Hood 1976; Hood and Jackson 1991; P ­ ollitt and Bouckaert 2011, chapter 7; Simon 1946). d e e p e n i n g t h e a n s w e r  – 1  – t h e g r o w t h o f p m r

Why has PMR become such a prominent topic? Few writers have focused on this question, but we may hazard a few suggestions. Almost every party with a hope of power that contests elections in Western European and North American states now feels obliged to say something about PMR. Each has to aspire to “run things better.” Historically speaking, that is a recent development. In the 1950s and 60s party manifestos were not full of PMR; they were full of promises of substantive new programs and polices. Management reforms (or “machinery of government” changes, as they were sometimes called) were usually regarded as rather dry, technical issues  – not something either headline writers or most politicians needed to take much interest in. However, as a number of political scientists and sociologists have noted, since the 1970s politics in the West have become less ideological and substantive but more “technical” and “presentational.” The welfare state has been built, and now the job is restraining its unaffordable further growth or even managing a gentle decline. Public management has become not simply an adjunct to other policies, but a policy in itself (Barzelay 2001). How things are to be organized becomes almost as important as what things are to be done. And how things are to be presented is also crucial – policies can no longer be expected to speak for themselves; they must be designed and presented so as to catch the current public mood, as revealed by professional polling and focus groups, and channelled and amplified by the mass media: “One of the key implications of this emphasis on government as technique is to contest those models of government that wish to view it solely  – or even mainly – as a manifestation of values, ideologies, worldviews, etc.”



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(Dean 1999, 31). Management, of course, is identified with both dimensions of technique – first, with how to squeeze every last drop of output from every dollar spent and, second, with how to market policy ideas and decisions in ways that will maximize acquiescence and minimize opposition. In addition, power is draining away from the nation state  – upwards, to international networks, and in some cases downwards, to regional or local bodies (though this should be understood in a nuanced way, not as a zero sum game – e.g., Held 2004). So for national politicians “technical politics” means projecting the idea that you can do more with less; that you can cut out waste and increase efficiency. Hence, during the 1980s the huge explosion, on both sides of the Atlantic, of concern with “management” in general and “efficiency” in particular (Pollitt 1990). In a book that celebrates the coming of age of public management as a policy question, Barzelay wrote that “beginning in the 1970s, the potential for policy change in the area of public management increased, as economies suffered stagflation and public perceptions of bureaucracy became more negative” (Barzelay 2001, 1). Since that time we have seen a new community – one might almost say industry – come into being. It is a cross-sectoral, international network of public management “experts,” people based in governments or agencies or consultancies or occasionally in academia and who more and more frequently move between these different roles. They swap ideas, compete for contracts, and attend conferences together. They draw on an extensively common and rapidly changing stock of generic management ideas (Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall 2002). They feed on a continuous flow of lucrative contracts from governments (National Audit Office 2006). More and more governments have set up one or more specialist management reform units, such as the Prime Minister’s Public Service Delivery Unit (UK), the Public Management Department of the Finnish Ministry of Finance, the French Directorate General for State Modernization, the Norwegian Ministry of Government Administration and Reform, and so on. Members of these organizations may themselves have consultancy experience, or they may become consultants afterwards, trading on their experience gained near the heart of government reforms (for multiple examples of this interpenetration, see Barber 2007). More profoundly, these units and departments help to institutionalize “modernization” and “reform,” continuously putting

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forward programs and targets, drawing attention to new management ideas and techniques and generally keeping the rest of central government on its toes (for a vivid account of how intrusive this can become, see again Barber 2007). Such international networks are, of course, immeasurably facilitated by the advent of the Internet. Nothing like this existed in the 1950s or even the 1960s. All this has constituted a kind of “multiplier” effect. A community has grown up in whose interest it is to create new ideas and techniques, and therefore further reform. There is nothing necessarily sinister about this, even if it can often be construed as a form of self-interest. It is simply that more and more people take up public sector roles after some training in “management,” and more and more consultancies depend on winning and subsequently sustaining contracts to facilitate reform (Saint Martin 2005). For example, the United Kingdom public sector spent approximately £2.8 billion on consultants in 2005–6, a 33 percent increase on what the level had been only two years previously – in fact central government spent more on consultants per employee than did comparator private sector firms (National Audit Office 2006, 5, 15)! d e e p e n i n g t h e a n s w e r  – 2  – t h e b u s i n e s s o f g o v e r n m e n t

The language of public administration has changed enormously over the past three decades. One main trend  – at least in Anglophone countries  – has been towards the widespread adoption of titles, terms, and concepts from the world of private-sector business. Thus departments and agencies that wish to do something now have to present a “business case” for it; numerous senior public service positions are now designated as “chief executive”; organizations are expected to “benchmark” and “business process re-­engineer”; civil service training curricula are saturated with sessions on “leadership” and “innovation” (Pollitt and Op de Beeck 2010). One peak in this trend came in 1997, when the then US vice president, charged with a major reform of the federal civil service, published a glossy, cartoon-­festooned booklet entitled Businesslike Government: Lessons Learned from America’s Best Companies (Gore 1997). It is easy to forget how foreign this kind of terminology would have sounded forty years ago, when the public service had its own terms for most of these roles and activities. “Citizens and businesses expect the same levels of access and personalization from public services as they



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receive from leading private sector organizations such as ­Amazon and Tesco. They expect to be able to access information from multiple locations and in ways that suit them rather than the providers” (H.M. Government 2010, 9). This love affair with a “businesslike approach” may, or may not, have come to an end with the business-induced global financial crisis of 2008–9 (it is too early to be sure – and we should note the United Kingdom government’s praise for supermarket management, above, postdates the crisis). Yet even if it has been badly dented, this way of thinking has now penetrated so many public sector organizations, and has been promoted to an entire generation of public service managers, so its effects will surely not disappear overnight. Furthermore, it is not only that business thinking has been ingrained in minds, business practices have also been embedded in standard operating procedures, including budgeting and accountancy rules (Newberry and Pallot 2005) and personnel regulations: “In almost all [EU] Member States the differences between civil servants and other public employees and civil servants and private sector employees have become fewer. Still, a few member states stick to the traditional patterns and maintain at least some traditional features. Other Member States have almost entirely aligned the working conditions within the public service and between the public and private sector” (Demmke and Moilanen 2010, 139). Another development that has gathered pace over the past quarter century has been the evolution of critical, large-scale public IT systems that are essentially supplied, maintained, and run by forprofit transnational corporations: “[G]overnments no longer run their own IT functions. To get their systems built, developed, and managed they increasingly rely on the global IT industry, specifically the giant ‘systems integrator’ companies such as Electronic Data systems (EDS), IBM-Accenture, Cap-Gemini-Ernst and Young, Lockheed Martin and their like” (Dunleavy et al., 2006a, 1). In short, business-like practices are now embedded in the warp and weft of many (but not all) public services in many (but not all) countries. Whether this is something to be celebrated, cautiously welcomed, or deeply regretted remains an on-going debate. One further aspect of government-as-business thinking should also be mentioned. Just as public servants have been enjoined to think of themselves as service providers, working to a business plan, so governments have frequently redefined citizens who use public

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services as consumers. Again, this has been controversial, at least in academia, and many words have been spent delineating the differences between “citizens,” “clients,” and “consumers.” One research project showed how in the United Kingdom in the decade after New Labour came to power in 1997 the government had advanced the concept of a “critical citizen-consumer” as a key figure in a number of its sectoral policies. Evidence that such a paragon actually existed – at least in large numbers – was not, however, forthcoming. Surveys seem to indicate that the public can be quite discriminating between different circumstances and contexts and do not particularly want to be treated as actively choosing, information-seeking rational decision makers in many of their interactions with public authorities (Clarke et al. 2007). d e e p e n i n g t h e a n s w e r  – 3  – l i m i t e d c o n v e r g e n c e o n n p m

Some influential voices have claimed that there has been convergence and that that convergence has been towards the NPM model. Here are just three examples of that – the first a leading American professor, the second an equally well-known Australian, and the third a more recent academic overview: “The movement has been so striking because of the number of nations that have taken up the reform agenda in such a short time and because of how similar their basic strategies have been” (Kettl 2005, 1). “There are various ideas of what is involved in public management reforms. However, as the process has continued there has been convergence as to what is involved in the reforms” (Hughes 2003, 51). “[N]o doubt NPM represented a global trend that affected public sector decision making worldwide” (Gualmini 2008, 75). This is an interpretation from which I beg to differ. I can understand why, looking at the surface policy commitments in certain countries at certain times, observers might arrive at the conclusion that convergence was taking place. But I would argue that either a wider (geographic) and/or a deeper (implementation-focused) analysis would lead in a very different direction. There are at least three reasons why many governments chose to resist or only reluctantly or selectively embrace the trend to NPM. We could call these “reach,” “grip,” and “motivation.” Some national governments have limited reach, in the sense that their constitutional and structural position does not permit them to carry out wide-­



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ranging reforms right across the public sector. They cannot “do” blanket NPM even if they want to. There are powerful sub-national authorities with their own powers and ideas, and it is unlikely that at any given moment all these will be of the same ideological orientation or policy preference as their central governments. Germany and the United States are prominent examples (and, indeed, in such countries it may well be local governments that are the leading standard-­bearers for PMR). So in these countries, unlike, say, in France or the United Kingdom, it is hard for a central government, however enthusiastic, to transform the whole of the public sector. In fact, internationally, comprehensive, synchronized public sector reform is rare almost to vanishing point. Governments also vary in terms of their grip, that is, in terms of how firmly and effectively they are able to transmit their demands and instructions down their own vertical hierarchies. In some cases transient or minority governments face powerful public sector unions or strong professional groupings and are unable to carry through radical change. Some recent Belgian federal governments would fall into this category, as would some Nordic coalition governments. In other cases – such as the Thatcher and Blair administrations in the United Kingdom – a single-party government with a substantial majority and disciplined party support lasts for many years and is able to face down union and professional resistance. Finally, there is the question of motivation. Some national governments have been effusively enthusiastic about NPM ideas, others have been cautiously welcoming, and others still have actively resisted them. Thus one could number the Reagan and G.W. Bush presidencies and the Thatcher premiership, as strongly pro-NPM, while many of the Nordic governments since 1990 have been cautiously and selectively welcoming of some NPM instruments  – for example by accepting performance management but resisting the widespread application of market mechanisms within basic public services ­(Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011). At the other end of the scale the Mitterand presidency in France and the EU Commission under Santer were regimes that were distinctly critical of “Anglo-Saxon” ideas. Subsequently the Kinnock Reforms (EU Commission) and the Sarkozy administration in France proved somewhat more receptive to certain NPM concepts, but in each case the “conversion” was both muted and heavily “translated” into the local institutional circumstances (Bezes 2010; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011).

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If we take all three reasons together  – reach, grip, and motivation – one can see that New Zealand 1984–93 and the United Kingdom 1979–2010 were rather exceptional. They were among a quite small group of countries where reach, grip, and motivation all permitted, or encouraged, a general movement in an NPM, business-like direction. They were not, as some commentators believed, prototypes of a wave that would sweep across the globe. They were certainly the origins of a wave, but one that encountered a series of very different sea shelf and coastal formations, so that in some places it came ashore like a tsunami while in others it was reduced to a mere murmur and hardly noticed or was even excluded by cultural and institutional seawalls. One can hardly call NPM a global phenomenon when, for many years, it had such limited effects on central governments in states as important as France, Germany, and Japan. Yet in 1992 Osborne and Gaebler had famously written that “[i]f the rise of entrepreneurial government is an inevitable shift rather than a temporary fad  ... one would expect it to happen in other nations [than the United States] as well. And to a startling degree, it has. A similar process of transformation is underway throughout the developed world” (1992, 328). Since then, whatever plausibility this theory of converging transformation may once have had has evaporated. We have accumulated a small mountain of scholarly studies showing how NPM has been adapted, translated, diluted, superseded or downright rejected by a large number of countries (e.g., Barzelay and Gallego 2010a, b; Bezes 2010; Christensen 2009; Christensen and Lægreid 2001; Goldfinch and Wallis 2010; Kickert 1997, 2008; Kuhlmann 2010; Ongaro 2009; Pollitt 2006, 2007a; Smullen 2010). A major recent study of civil service reforms in the twenty-seven EU states arrived at the conclusion that “different historical traditions and cultures as well as HR systems have a considerable impact on public management modernisation paths and on the outcomes of HR reforms” (Demmke and Moilanen 2010, 243) NPM, of course, is no longer “new.” Indeed, it has been referred to as “middle aged” (Hood and Peters 2004) or even “dead” ­(Dunleavy et al. 2006b). Just as some earlier writers hailed a convergence towards NPM, some more recent commentators have proclaimed a “progression of paradigms,” with traditional bureaucracy leading to an NPM phase, which in turn gave way to a post NPM phase variously characterized as networks, joined-up government, and,



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most ­pervasively, “governance” (Pollitt and Hupe 2011). “The need for effective governance of  ... interactions, and therefore for new forms of public management such as network steering will increase” (Kickert et al. 1997, 190). Or “it has been argued here that the NPG [New Public Governance] has become the dominant regime of public policy implementation and public services delivery” (Osborne et al. 2010, 414). However, it seems that “the problems which exist with persistent arguments for a NPM convergence also exist for the successor ‘postNPM’ myth” (Goldfinch and Wallis, 2010, 1100). Once more, certain trends – real enough in certain periods in certain countries – have been amplified, simplified, and generalized so that they can be presented as a common international direction. Once again, the precise empirical domain and technical content of these trends is often left vague while large claims are nevertheless advanced for their relevance (for early and more recent examples of this approach, see, respectively Kooiman 1993 and Osborne 2010). Until we can clearly distinguish what is governance and what is not and until we can count the number and density of networks in different countries and sectors and how these have changed over time, we should exercise caution in our claims for convergence. Even more challenging, it would be desirable to be able to link “governance” and “networks” to outcomes and to establish whether and why these approaches produced better results than traditional bureaucracy or NPM. Very little of the “governance” literature seems to meet these criteria. Much of it polarizes between high-level, abstract, rather disembedded process models and very local and specific case studies. There is a big gap in the middle. d e e p e n i n g t h e a n s w e r  – 4  – ta l k , d e c i s i o n s , p r a c t i c e s , r e s u lt s

Those who conduct empirical field research into public management reforms quite often find that “the reform” (whatever the particular example may be) changes steadily the further one moves from the original debate to the government white paper or ministerial speech and then through local implementation and on to the final results. It is challenging for governments to keep a tight hold on reforms as they percolate out from the ministry to the further reaches of operational units and sub-national levels of government. Indeed, it is not

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unusual for reforms simply to run out of steam and fail to reach the front line at all. Back in 1994 Savoie published a widely read comparison of the Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney administrations in which he pointed out that many of the Mulroney government’s public management polices had failed to carry through implementation to achieve their proclaimed objectives (Savoie 1994). Very common, also, is the situation in which a new initiative makes a brief impact but, after a few years, all trace of it has disappeared. A few years ago colleagues and I rang round European public service quality initiatives that had been presented at international quality conferences two and four years previously. In an uncomfortably high proportion of cases our respondents said that they knew nothing about the initiative we were talking about or that it had finished now. Table 7.1 helps us to understand why the spread and impacts of NPM (or any other fashionable model) may sometimes be exaggerated. Basically, it is quicker and easier to research the headlines of talk and decision than to go out into the field and look in detail at operational practices and final outcomes. Thus, for example, a quick survey of official documentation shows that executive agencies in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands all have performance indicator systems. This could be seen as an example of convergence, with a strong NPM flavour (performance measurement and results-oriented management are central planks in the NPM model). However, detailed fieldwork reveals that these indicators are used in very different ways and with different consequences in the four countries (Pollitt et al. 2004). Similarly the Guamini quotation at the start of the section on convergence (above) is based on a survey of government legislation, so it refers only to our “decision” stage, not to practice or results. Before leaving this point we should note that the Talk-Decision-Practice-Results framework has several implications for comparative analysis. Inter alia it suggests that we should try to compare like with like (decisions with decisions, or results with results). Comparing (say) talk and decisions in country A with practice in country B is potentially misleading (and unfair). d e e p e n i n g t h e a n s w e r  – 5  – fa i t h a n d e v i d e n c e

In 1995 I published an article that argued that in many cases no serious evaluation had been attempted of many of the main NPM

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Table 7.1 Researching Public Management Reforms Stage

Description

Research?

Talk

More and more people are talking and writing about a particular idea (e.g., contracting out). The authorities (governments, public boards, etc.) publicly decide to adopt a particular reform.

Quick and cheap. Monitoring what people are talking and writing about is fairly straightforward. Again, quick and cheap. The public decisions of the authorities can usually be located quite quickly (on the Net, often without leaving one’s desk). Probably requires expensive and time-consuming fieldwork. This needs both funding and access. Final outcomes are frequently difficult (and expensive) to measure. Even more frequently there is an attribution problem; i.e., one cannot be sure how much of the measured change in outcomes can be attributed to the reform itself, as opposed to other factors.

Decision

Practice

Results

Public sector organizations incorporate the reform into their daily operational practices. The results (outcomes) of the activities of public agencies change as a result of the reform.

Source: After Pollitt (2002).

reforms and, further, that such evaluations as had been instituted had been unable to reach convincing conclusions on such basic issues as efficiency gains and changes in effectiveness (Pollitt 1995). The title was ‘Justification by Works or by Faith?’ Given that at the time I thought I was doing little more than stating the obvious and backing it up with an analysis of a few well-known studies, I was surprised at how widely the article was subsequently cited. At the time of writing, in mid-2011, a major EU Framework Project is investigating the impacts of NPM reforms across the EU (www.cocops.eu). The project is far from complete, but early findings based on a meta-analysis of academic and practitioner documentation from most EU states is that the number of studies that convincingly connect data on changes in efficiency or effectiveness to specific management reforms is modest indeed (Pollitt and Dan 2011). Evidently the sixteen years in between the 1995 study and COCOPS in 2011 have seen relatively little change in this particular respect. There are good reasons why convincing evaluations are so thin on the ground. These are both technical and motivational (Pollitt

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2009). Technically, reforms are often composed of many different, if related, interventions and may well take place at the same time as other changes, so sorting out exactly which intervention or combination of interventions produced exactly which results can be a formidable undertaking. Furthermore, results often develop over time, so that an evaluation conducted at reform plus one year may yield a different picture from a later evaluation at reform plus three years. For example, a downsizing and refocusing reform may yield poor results after twelve months, when staff are still worried and resentful and the positive results of the refocusing have yet to come to fruition. Given more time, however, staff will become accustomed to the new regime and will have learned and honed the new procedures, giving a much better set of results overall. Ideally, also, an evaluation would commence well before the reform, so as to collect a full set of data on the ex ante situation, for later comparison with the ex post. In practice this is seldom achieved. Another desideratum of classic evaluation – a control group – is even rarer (although occasionally one may find “natural experiments,” such as when performance measurement regimes diverge in England, Wales, and Scotland (Bevan 2010)). Motivationally, politicians are not necessarily comfortable with the elongated time scales involved in most large-scale administrative reforms. They may hope to gain kudos from the original reform announcement and launch, but how many of them expect to be around in, say, five years time when the full range of impacts will be much clearer? Further, if they are experienced in such matters, they may well suspect that the results will include unexpected as well as expected effects and that the overall impact will turn out to be less pure and less radical than the promises made at the time of the reform launch. The motivation to invest in systematic long-term evaluations is therefore less than overwhelming. At the same time both politicians and management consultants are members of professions that must always have something new to say (Goldfinch and Wallis 2010, 111–12). Several scholars have traced how past failures can be forgotten in the bright new dawn of the next round of reform (Brunsson 2006; Sundstrom 2006). Others have shown how in those countries where the barriers to reform are relatively low, politically driven reforms can arrive helter-skelter, with little chance to learn much in depth from the previous reform before it is replaced by the latest idea (Pollitt 2007b).



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None of this is to say that experience and evidence is wholly ignored. The relative absence of high-quality formal evaluations is not the same thing as an absence of learning. Learning does go on, but seldom in textbook fashion. Programs deemed, however accurately or inaccurately, to have been failures become the things to be avoided in the next round of reform. Trial and error does seem to be a common learning mode, even if the trials are political trials and the errors are often media-amplified dramas. Neither is the sparsity of formal evaluations unique to NPM-type reforms. If we look at networking, partnership, and governancetype reforms, we find a similar story. To begin with, definitions of networks and governance are multiple and slippery, and methods for counting and measuring networks and network interactions are either primitive or wholly absent (Pollitt and Hupe 2011). Only a few papers of the many papers using these concepts manage to conduct what might be regarded as an orthodox scientific analysis of outcomes (e.g., Meier and O’Toole 2001). Studies of the outcomes of network governance are particularly thin on the ground. Apart from the famous Meier and O’Toole studies of Texas school districts (e.g., Meier and O’Toole 2010), even the few worthy attempts that have been made contain measures of “outcomes” that are both subjectively perceptual and heavily laden with process-like elements (such as “involvement of actors” and whether innovative ideas are developed during the project – Klijn et al. 2010). One kind of evaluation that has blossomed since the beginning of the twenty-first century is in international comparisons of general aspects of government, such as “good governance,” “bureaucratic quality,” “transparency,” and so on (Pollitt 2011). Comparing general features of governance in different states is complex and difficult. That has not stopped analysts producing large numbers of purportedly comparative indices of various aspects of government and governance (e.g., Accenture 2008; Advisory Group on Reform of Australian Government Administration 2009; OECD 2009). The World Bank’s World Governance Indicators (WGIs) have probably been the best-known measures (Arndt 2008), but one source lists more than four hundred indicators (IADB 2007). The United Kingdom has arguably the world’s most serially reformed public sector, and it was notable that a 2008 Cabinet Office report gave great prominence to international comparisons, including a preface from the then prime minister in which he said he wanted “every element

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of our public services to be the best in the world” (Cabinet Office 2008, 7). Some well-informed commentators see this growth in international comparison as an almost irresistible force or, at the very least, one unlikely to be stemmed in the near future (Hood et al. 2008). Unfortunately, however, the popularity of these league tables has made only a modest contribution towards helping us understand how effective particular types of management reform have been. This is because the measures tend to be highly aggregated, and these aggregate “results” cannot usually be traced back to specific reforms. Sometimes, indeed, the aggregate is itself a somewhat incoherent jumble of inputs, processes, outputs, and outcomes, the overall meaning of which is very hard to discern (Pollitt 2010). d e e p e n i n g t h e a n s w e r  – 6  – c y c l i n g a n d a lt e r n at i o n

In a long-term study of administrative reforms in the US federal government, Light noted a strong tendency for oscillations and alternations (“tides”) around certain basic trade-off issues (Light 1997). Similar cycling can be seen in the history of United Kingdom reforms. In 1988 the Thatcher government launched a major restructuring program to carve out large blocks of operational activity and place them in executive agencies that would be “at arm’s length” from ministerial departments (James 2003; Pollitt et al. 2004). During the ensuing decade more than 130 new agencies were set up, and at the peak they collectively employed more than 70 percent of United Kingdom civil servants. In 2002 an official review by the Blair government concluded that this multiplication of agencies had brought improvements but that it had increased the distance between ministries and operational management and led to a loss of policy coordination (Office of Public Services Reform 2002). A number of agencies were then merged with each other or drawn back into departments or at least subject to tighter ministerial control (Talbot and Johnson 2007). The 1980s impulse to decentralization had been replaced with a desire for more central control and co-ordination. Within the thirteen-year life span of the Blair/Brown New Labour administration (1997–2010), central government’s approach to performance measurement swung from moderate to intense and back again, so that by the end the government was officially distancing itself from its former period of intense central targetry and



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­ roclaiming the need for professional service deliverers to have p greater freedom to take their own decisions and set their own targets (Cabinet Office 2008). The coalition government that succeeded them took this rhetoric further, denouncing their predecessor’s performance measurement regime as inhibiting local innovation and declaring a “bonfire of targets.” Soon, however, new frameworks of “milestones” and “standards” appeared, and operational managers could be forgiven for thinking that in practice they still had a great deal of upwards performance reporting to do. Whilst the metaphor of cycling does serve well to describe certain movements in public management reform, it should not be interpreted too literally. When a system cycles between centralization and decentralization that does not mean that it returns to exactly the same point that it had reached some years before. If there is an alternation between an urgent priority for increased efficiency, and then, later, an equally strong emphasis on accountability and transparency, that does not mean that in the later part of the alternation efficiency sinks back to where it was before the efficiency drive. Thus, for example, the drive for efficiency in phase one may well raise efficiency, but it does not have to fall back (or certainly not the whole way back) during the succeeding phase two focus on accountability and transparency. Thus, over time, even if attention swings between two (or more) prime goals, the levels to which they are achieved continues to increase over time (Pollitt 2008, 56–9). Transparency in 2011 is generally far greater than it was twenty or thirty years ago, even if there are some fallings back and some deliberate attempts to reverse to the trend (Roberts, 2006). reflections

A pattern there is, but what is perhaps just as significant as the pattern itself is what it is not. Thus, despite the claims of some observers, there is not a clear pattern sweeping through the world in a succession of paradigmatic stages – NPM, networks, governance, or anything of that nature. Neither is there a stable pattern of evidencebased progress: most states do not appear to have launched carefully evaluated reform programs, then modified them in the light of the findings, then moved on to a higher level. Indeed, careful, formal evaluation has been the exception rather than the rule, and where it has occurred it has usually been inconclusive.

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On the other hand a purely fashion-driven model does not fit very well either. Fashions there have been (and continue to be), but in each case the fashion is less than universal, with important states resisting the latest version of modernity or advancing their own alternatives. And there is evidence of some empirical learning, even if it is patchy and discontinuous. New Zealand and the United Kingdom both retreated from the extreme fragmentation induced by the NPM reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. The United States changed its organizational procedures for handling emergencies after Hurricane Katrina. None of these were fashion moves – on the contrary, they represented learning from unsatisfactory experiences. Formal evaluations may not have been the driving force in these cases, and such evaluations as there were may have fallen a long way short of the models advanced in evaluation textbooks, but there were some, and there is no reason to assume that they played no part at all in the shifts of direction. What we see, therefore, is a story of fashion-influenced trial and error, with some strong currents but no global tides. It is a forwardlooking story, in which more attention has often been paid to the demands of today and the promise of tomorrow than to the experience of yesterday (Pollitt 2007b, 2008). It is also, for the most part, the story of a series of processes, rather than a story of discrete events. PMR almost always takes time, and the precise nature of a given reform almost always evolves somewhat as it goes along. That is why scholars need to study the process over time rather than relying too heavily on the statements and claims made at the launch of each reform. It is important to bear in mind the limitations of the particular level of analysis at which this essay is pitched. This has been a slightly stratospheric overview, seeking and finding large but rather crude patterns over a considerable period of time. It may well be that an analysis conducted at a more detailed level would uncover different patterns, in the same way that an overview of an anthill may show chaos, but a tighter focus on, say, soldier ants, will yield a much clearer pattern to their activities. There is, for instance, a good case for research at the level of specific tools. Work done on (inter alia) TQM and performance-related pay have already revealed suggestive regularities (Joss and Kogan 1995; Perry et al. 2009; ­Zbaracki 1998). What such studies tend to show is not that TQM or PRP always have the same effect (far from it) but rather that it may be possible to



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identify certain contextual features that significantly raise or lower the probabilities of successful implementation. Thus we can begin to develop patterns of tools-plus-contexts, which may help us understand the kinds of circumstances in which particular categories of result are more or less likely. In some cases such an analysis may indicate that a tool is fairly robust, in the sense that it usually produces at least some results across quite a wide variety of contexts. In other cases, however, a tool may depend on so many unusual or difficult conditions being in place that it is likely to work well only in rare and highly favourable conditions (PRP may fall in this category). This has been an exercise in peering through an awful lot of trees to try to discern the shape of the wood. It is obviously possible to make a selection of key elements different from the six set out at the beginning of this essay. I would argue that these six are, however, fairly firm and well-evidenced. They are an important part of the big picture, if not all of it. With three decades of hindsight the pattern we see is one of an enterprise that has been both uncertain and imprecise. Significant successes have been recorded but have been balanced by many failures. Overblown and subsequently disappointed claims for prospective achievements have not infrequently earned the mistrust of both citizens and public service staff. A new industry has grown, but the areas of useful knowledge and technique that it has assembled are offset by the continued presence of oversimplification, insensitivity to context and history, and, in a few cases, downright snake oil marketing. Public management reform may have become a policy sector in its own right, but its theoretical underpinnings appear to be disjointed, its evidence base is very patchy, and its political identity remains as yet unsure.

references

Accenture. 2008. An International Comparison of the United Kingdom’s Public Administration. London: Accenture. Advisory Group on the Reform of Australian Government Administration. 2009. The Reform of Australian Government Administration: Building the World’s Best Public Service. Canberra, Commonwealth of Australia, October. Andrews, M. 2010. “Good Government Means Different Things in Different Countries.” Governance 23 (1): 7–35.

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Arndt, C. 2008. “The Politics of Governance Ratings.” International Public Management Journal 11 (3): 275–97. Barber, J. 2007. Instruction to Deliver: Tony Blair, Public Services, and the Challenge of Achieving Targets. London: Politico’s. Barzelay, M. 2001. The New Public Management: Improving Research and Policy Dialogue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Barzelay, M., and R. Gallego. 2010a. “The Comparative Historical Analyses of Public Management Policy Cycles in France, Italy and Spain: Symposium Introduction.” Governance 23 (2): 297–307. – 2010b. “The Comparative Historical Analyses of Public Management Policy Cycles in France, Italy and Spain: Symposium Conclusion.” Governance 2 (2): 209–23. Bevan, Gwyn. 2010. “Impact of Devolution of Health Care in the UK: ­Provider Challenge in England and Provider Capture in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?” Journal of Health Services Research and Policy 15 (2): 1–2. Bezes, P. 2010. “Path Dependent and Path-Breaking changes in the French Administrative System: The Weight of Legacy Explanations.” In M. Painter, and G.B. Peters, eds., Tradition and Public Administration. ­Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 158–73. Brunsson, N. 2006. “Mechanisms of Hope: Maintaining the Dream of the Rational Organization.” Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Cabinet Office. 2008. Excellence and Fairness: Achieving World Class Public Services. London: Cabinet Office. Christensen, J. 2009. “Danish Public Management Reforms before and after NPM.” In J. Goldfinch and S. Wallis, eds., International Handbook of Public Management Reform. Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar, 279–99. Christensen, T., and Laegreid, P., eds. 2001. New Public Management: The Transformation of Ideas and Practice. Aldershot: Ashgate. Clarke, J., J. Newman, N. Smith, E. Vidler, and L. Westmarland. 2007. Creating Citizen-consumers: Changing Publics and Changing Public Services. London: Sage. Dean, M. 1999. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Demmke, C., and T. Moilanen. 2010. Civil Services in the eu of 27: Reform Outcomes and the Future of the Civil Service. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.



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Kickert, W. 1997. “Public Governance in the Netherlands: An Alternative to Anglo-American ‘Managerialism’” Public Administration 75, 4: 731–52 – ed. 2008. The Study of Public Management in Europe and the US: A Comparative Analysis of National Distinctiveness. Abingdon: Routledge. Klijn, E.-H., B. Steijn, and J. Edelenbos. 2010. “The Impact of Network Management on Outcomes in Governance Networks.” Public Administration 88 (4): 1063–82. Kooiman, J. 1993. Modern Governance: New Government-Society Interactions. London: Sage Kuhlmann, S. 2010. “New Public Management for the Classical Continental European Administration: Modernization at the Local Level In Germany, France, and Italy.” Public Administration 88 (4): 1116–30. Light, P. 1997. The Tides of Reform: Making Government Work, ­1945–1995. New Haven: Yale University Press. Meier, K., and L. O’Toole. “Beware of Managers Not Bearing Gifts: How Management Capacity Augments the Impact of Managerial Networking.” Public Administration 88 (4): 1025–44. – 2001. “Managerial Strategies and Behavior in Networks: A Model with Evidence from US Public Education.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 11 (3): 271–93. Mulgan, G. 2009. The Art of Public Strategy: Mobilizing Power and Knowledge for the Common Good. Oxford: Oxford University Press National Audit Office. 2006. Central Government’s Use of Consultants. HC 128, Session, 2006–2007. London: The Stationary Office Newberry, S., and J. Pallot J. 2005. “A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing? Wider Consequences of the Financial Management System of the New Zealand Central Government.” Financial Accountability and Management 21 (3): 263–77. OECD. 2009. Government at a Glance 2009. Paris: OECD. Office of Public Services Reform. 2002. Better Government Services: Executive Agencies in the Twenty-first Century. London: Cabinet Office. www.civilservice.gov.uk/agencies. Ongaro, E. 2009. Public Management Reform and Modernization: Trajectories of Administrative Change in Italy, France, Greece, Portugal and Spain. Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. Osborne, S., ed. 2010. The New Public Governance: Emerging Perspectives on the Theory and Practice of Public Governance. London and New York: Routledge/Taylor and Francis.



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Osborne, D., and T. Gaebler. 1992. Re-inventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. Perry, J., T. Engbers, and S. Jun. 2009. “Back to the Future? Performancerelated Pay.” Public Administration Review 69 (1): 39–51. Pollitt, C. 2011. “Moderation in All Things: International Comparisons of Governance Quality.” Financial Accountability and Management. 27 (4): 437–57 – 2010. “Simply the Best? The International Benchmarking of Reform and Good Governance.” In J. Pierre and P. Ingraham. eds., Comparative Administrative Change and Reform: Lessons Learned. Festschrift for Guy B. Peters. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 91–113. – 2009. “Structural Change and Public Service Performance.” Public Money and Management 29 (5): 285–91. – 2008. Time, Policy, Management: Governing with the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press. – 2007a. “Convergence or Divergence: What Has Been Happening in Europe?” In C. Pollitt, S. Van Thiel, and V. Homburg, eds., New Public Management in Europe: Adaptations and Alternatives. Basingstoke: ­Palgrave/Macmillan, 10–25. – 2007b. “New Labour’s Re-Disorganization: Hyper-Modernism and the Costs Of Reform – A Cautionary Tale.” Public Management Review 9 (4): 529–43. – 2006. “Performance Management in Practice: A Comparative Study of Executive Agencies.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 16 (1): 25–44. – 2002. “Clarifying Convergence: Striking Similarities and Durable Differences in Public Management Reform.” Public Management Review 4 (1): 471–92. – 1995. “Justification by Works or by faith? Evaluating the New Public Management.” Evaluation 1, no. 2 (October): 133–54. – 1990. Managerialism and the Public Services: The Anglo-American Experience. Oxford: Blackwell. Pollitt, C., and G. Bouckaert, G. 2011. Public Management Reform, a Comparative Analysis: NPM, Governance and the Neo-Weberian State. 3d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pollitt, C., and S. Dan. 2011. “The Impacts of the New Public Management in Europe: A Meta-analysis.” December (www.cocops.eu)

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8 The Future of Public Administration b. guy peters

The past several decades have been ones of substantial and continuing change in the public sector (Aucoin 1990; Peters and Savoie 2000). These individual reforms are far too numerous to enumerate and evaluate here, although the changes are usually encapsulated in terms of the New Public Management (Christensen and Laegreid 2007). While these market-oriented reforms of New Public Management (NPM) were the most commonly discussed aspects of reform, there also have been numerous attempts to make the public sector more participatory and democratic, including notable efforts within Canada to enhance many aspects of “citizen engagement” in the processes of governing (Wyman, Shulman, and Ham 2000). These reforms have produced some demonstrable benefits for the public sector and for citizens. Although citizens in many countries remain skeptical about government or in many cases have merely grown even more skeptical (see Norris 2011) about the performance of the public sector, there do appear to have been some improvements in the services delivered (Rouban 2001). If nothing else, the emphasis on performance and “serving the customer” that has been central to the New Public Management has enabled the public to see somewhat more clearly how well services are being provided and how much those services are improving over time.1 Instruments such as performance management may be flawed in many ways ­(Pollitt 2009; Bouckaert and Peters 2002), but again they also emphasize the need for the public sector to deliver services effectively. The emphasis on citizen engagement and the associated involvement of social actors in making and implementing public policies (Torfing et al. 2010) has also improved the democratic performance of many administrative

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systems. Most of these opportunities for ­participation are relevant primarily for organized groups in the civil society, but there are also opportunities for individual involvement with the output side of the public sector. Given the declining relevance of conventional forms of participation in many countries, there has been some shift toward the administrative system as a locus of democracy (Peters 2010). While this form of democracy does not necessarily replace conventional democratic participation, opportunities to participate directly with the bureaucracy do complement those other forms. This chapter will attempt to locate future directions for public administration in the context of even broader changes in the political system, and especially the executive branch of government. Such an ambition is suitable for a book honoring the contributions of Donald Savoie to public administration. Donald Savoie has certainly been interested in the quotidian aspects of public administration, but he has always conceptualized these administrative details in the light of the broader political and social context within which they were occurring. Especially in his more recent writing (2008, 2010), Savoie has been attempting to understand what has been happening with parliamentary democracy as parliament and the office of prime minister have changed significantly and the role of public administration has changed in response. It is always crucial to remember that public administration is indeed public. The public bureaucracy is a central component of the political system, rather than merely a technical and managerial activity (Olsen 2008). The public bureaucracy is linked intimately to the political executive (Peters 1987; Jenkins 2008), both as it provides advice to those political leaders and as it is responsible for implementing the programs of ministers and other political executives. Further, the public bureaucracy remains, even after the increased use of non-­ governmental actors, the principal source of contact between the state and members of the public. Public administration therefore becomes the mechanism through which the public receives subtle and perhaps not so subtle indications about the way in which governments regard their position as citizens and as “customers” (Serra 1995). c o n f l i c t s i n r e f o r m i n g p u b l i c a d m i n i s t r at i o n

Much of the discussion of public administration during the past several decades has been, in essence, directed at promoting change from



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the bottom up. All the reforms associated with New Public Management, as well as most of the “governance” reforms, have tended to emphasize the importance of lower-echelon public servants and the connection between civil society and government. Although the New Public Management has placed some emphasis on the role of managers, and even the senior managers, when viewed from the perspective of senior political officials the emphasis has been on individuals much further down in the governing system. The ultimate ambition of the approach is to enhance quality in the provision of public services. Indeed, part of the political logic of the New Public Management has been to denigrate the role of political leaders and to extol the presumed capacity of public managers to provide more effective leadership for, and control over, public policy. These reforms have included diverting a good deal of the activity for providing public services to non-governmental actors and to relatively autonomous agencies within the public sector (Verhoest 2005). These reforms, and associated decentralization within the public sector itself, have tended to move power out of the centre of government and apparently minimize the control that politicians have over policy. The alternative pattern of reform in the public sector, one that has emphasized the participation of citizens directly in administration and policy-making, has had some of the same consequences for the capacity of political leaders to steer public policy. This includes a variety of mechanisms for involving the public in decisions, e.g., participatory budgeting (Tellier 2011), and for enhancing the involvement of lower-echelon employees in the operations of their organizations (Vigoda and Golembiewski 2001). Both these reforms have enhanced the democratic quality of public administration, but they also have tended to enhance the autonomy of public organizations. The administrative reforms of the past several decades have had the rather unanticipated consequence of attempting to empower a number of actors in the administrative process. These changes have in various ways and through various means been intended to empower senior managers, lower echelon administrators, clients, and ordinary citizens. As we have pointed out previously (Peters and Pierre 2000), these reforms have tended to empower everyone and in the process may have laid the basis for political conflicts within organizations and between organizations and their publics. Further, the reforms have tended to disaggregate the public sector to the extent that the

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inherent difficulties of coordination within the public sector become exacerbated, and collective governance even more constrained than under the traditional formats for governing. p u b l i c a d m i n i s t r at i o n f r o m t h e t o p d o w n

As already noted, a great deal of reform in public administration appears to have been conducted in isolation from the political context within which that administration functions. At the same time that administrative systems have been reformed, the political executive has itself been undergoing a range of significant changes in its structures, in its functions, and also how it interacts with public administration (see Dahlström, Peters, and Pierre 2011; Hood and Lodge 2008). Further, and perhaps most importantly, the role of the political executive within the political process has been changing, especially within parliamentary systems.2 The Changing Executive The recent transformations of the political executive in parliamentary systems is usually referred to as the “presidentialization” of these systems (Poguntke and Webb 2007; Bevir and Rhodes 2006). In this political context presidentialization means that prime ministers have ceased to be “primus inter pares” (“first among equals,” if they ever really were) and instead have come to dominate their cabinets and the political process more generally. This “presidentialization” of politics3 in parliamentary systems has been associated not only with the trappings of political power – expanded staffs, media officers and media attention – in these offices but also with the growth of real powers. The capacity of prime ministers to control policy-­ making within cabinet has increased in many political systems, as have decree powers to govern autonomously in some instances (Carey and Shugart 1998). Prime ministers have gained control of much of the apparatus of decision making in cabinet and parliament and also have control over their political parties. The desire of individual politicians to retain their positions and hopefully climb up the career ladder makes them relatively easy to control by the party leadership, and thus majorities in parliament can be solidified. That pattern of dominance by premiers is accentuated by the tendency of major political



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parties in parliamentary systems to become “cartel parties” (Katz and Mair 2009). That is, they have become even more concerned with maintaining office and in the process minimizing their representational roles. In coalition systems this tendency can extend to downplaying the role of opposition in parliament so that the party can be considered a reliable coalition partner.4 Further, as holding office becomes more important, the costs of defection for any individual politician become greater. The basic argument then is that parliamentary democracies have been translated into cabinet democracies, and cabinet democracies have become prime ministerial democracies. The political focus on these executives has tended to alter the internal dynamics of governing and to make parliamentary accountability more difficult. Although there are some tendencies for change in that direction, there are marked differences across political systems. The majoritarian Westminster systems appear to have gone the furthest in that direction, while more consensual regimes with coalition systems have changed less. Even among those systems, however, there are differences. Systems with a Ressortsprinzip, such as Germany or Denmark, grant individual ministers structural power to make decisions on their own, while those such as Sweden impose a stronger sense of the unity of governments. Thus, within government itself, ministers, and especially prime ministers, have acquired substantial political power, as well as power over the internal machinery of government. In addition to their role in managing the political process, they have also built policy capacity that is distinct from that which conventionally had been run through the civil service. The proliferation of SPADs (special advisers) in government is one manifestation of the attempt to politicize policy-making and to use political “spin” in the management of governing. Importantly, much of the role of these advisors is partisan political rather than political-analytic, so that “spin” is indeed a major part of the role (see Eichenbaum and Shaw 2010). The administrative reforms over the past several decades also have influenced the nature of political executives. On the one hand, the emphasis on management as opposed to policy advice within these reforms has denigrated and downgraded the policy capacity of the senior public service in many countries. Management has improved in many cases, but that has been bought by creating a civil service that often is less capable of providing “frank and fearless,” and wellreasoned, advice to their nominal political masters. Therefore, those

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political executives have had to rely more on their own sources of advice, and that advice has become increasingly politicized (Fawcett and Gay 2010). In addition, the emphasis on public participation in governing and policy-making has tended to create some more competitors for influence over policy, and an increased range of policy ideas that may be considered in the policy process. The political executives may have their own spin doctors hard at work, but there are other political organizations, and even more civil society organizations, at work also trying to gain control over the discourses used to define and to control policy. The democratization of administration and other policy processes therefore also tends to weaken the capacity of political executives to control policy, even as they appear ever more powerful within the structures of government themselves. Finally, the disaggregation of the political and bureaucratic executives into numerous autonomous agencies, as well as the use of the multiple means for non-governmental organizations in delivering public services, have had a significant effect on the capacity of political executives to control public policy. This effect can be most obvious at the implementation stage of the policy process, but is also true during formulation of policy.5 This “decentering” of government has provided another source of policy direction and also creates that many more autonomous actors within the process that determine choices. Given the above changes, the centre of government has been engaged in a number of efforts to build not only policy capacity but also the capacity to coordinate and integrate the policies and programs being implemented (and developed) by more devolved structures. This has meant developing formal structures or procedures to handle these issues (Runio and Kekkonen 2011; Smith 2011) or simply emphasizing the need to “recreate the centre” of the system. No matter what the character of the response, there has been a perceived need to restore important aspects of the political power of the centre. At the extreme, the movement toward greater direct participation by the public in policy-making and the use of more or less autonomous actors has been manifested in “interactive governance” ­(Torfing et al. 2010). In numerous political systems, especially those in Northern Europe, a number of policy areas are heavily influenced (some would argue dominated) by social actors who are capable



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of making and implementing public policies by cooperative means, rather than by the more hierarchical means usually associated with the public sector. This mechanism for making and delivering services tends to place even greater barriers in the way of political elites who want to steer governance. The separation of the two groups of executives  – political and bureaucratic – represents yet another case of mutual empowerment in governing. Within the political executive, cabinets and especially prime ministers have definitely been empowered. They have built powerful political and governing institutions around themselves and appear capable of controlling much of the action within the political side of governing. At the same time, within the bureaucracy, New Public Management reforms, as well as democratizing reforms, have tended to empower many more actors. Both these groups believe that they have the legitimacy and the capacity to govern and to govern well. At the same time, however, they also express some perceived problems in the state of contemporary governance. This tendency to identify governance problems has been especially true for political executives, who have expressed their perception that many aspects of governing are beyond their capacity to control. The public administrators involved in this process at times express concerns over their loss of influence over policy and also (somewhat paradoxically) about the demands to manage policy. As Richard Rose (1976) noted, there are numerous constraints on the capacity of political leaders to control the remainder of the political system. These included the lack of policy expertise, management skills, and time on the part of the political executives. In the decades that have followed the publication of Rose’s book, the difficulties in governing from the centre may have, if anything, increased, as policy problems and the delivery systems associated with them have become increasingly complex. The development and use of policy “shops” in the executive has varied across time, with the period of presidentialization being marked as much by political as by genuine policy advice. Further, there was no guarantee that the remainder of the department would want to go along with the policies of a minister. One of the prevailing stereotypes of public administration is that of a collection of permanent officials who have their own ideas about policy and who are not about to be swayed by the wishes of their political masters. That stereotype is generally overstated quite ­dramatically,

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but yet it must be said that departments do have their perspectives on policy and will attempt to move their ministers in particular directions, at times saving the minister from his or her own best instincts. That stereotype becomes even less valid as the administrative and policy-delivery systems become more de-centered and more autonomous. This general decline in the apparent capacity of political executives to control their ministries has experienced several recent counter-trends, brought on in part by the economic crisis beginning in 2008. One has been a general centralization of government, perceived to be necessary to cope with the disruptions of that crisis. In the extreme, the power of central actors such as prime ministers and ministers of finance has been strengthened by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. Perhaps less obviously, the number and autonomy of agencies and other decentralized structures has been reduced as governments attempt to ensure their capacity to work together. In this rather paradoxical world of the contemporary political executives, many are attempting to find ways of controlling policy in the same way in which they can control their own offices. Interviews with several leaders in central agencies in a range of countries indicate that chief executives find it difficult to exercise the type of control over governance that they expected to be capable of prior to election. They have a great deal of power within their own political executive, but that power appears to run into the sand once they attempt to motivate the remainder of the executive. knitting together strands of change

These diverging patterns of governance and the role of public administration create an important paradox of governance in the contemporary world. On the one hand, the continuing expansion of the use of non-governmental actors in governing and delegation to sub-national political systems have meant that the political leadership in governments are “steering at a distance” (Kickert 1995), and the chains of control that exist in contemporary governance have become attenuated. On the other hand, cabinets and especially prime ministers have come to dominate the political institutions of government, so that power within the political system has gravitated upward to the peak of the political executive.



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The paradox, then, is that prime ministers appear to have, and indeed do have, immense power within the executive, but at the same time they often have diminished power over the remainder of the political system. This paradoxical position of the political leadership in contemporary government has both democratic and administrative consequences. The democratic element of is to some extent an extension of problems that have existed in parliamentary regimes for some time. As Rose pointed out, when we go to the polls on election day, we may think that we are selecting policies, but there have been many barriers to that model of democracy actually functioning. And those barriers have, if anything, been increasing as a function of administrative reforms (see Dahlström, Peters, and Pierre 2011). Even with the power and the trappings of power that ministers and especially prime ministers have created for themselves over the past several decades, they may be at a greater disadvantage now in making public policies. The centre of government has always been political, but if anything it has become even more political. That is, the twenty-four hour news cycle, the increased transparency of governing because of media, and the focus on prime ministers tend to drive political concerns to the top of the list and issues of good policy (especially long-term policy) and good governance somewhat further down the list of priorities. The “Court Government” metaphor that Savoie developed captures this rather inward-looking style of a good deal of contemporary governing. If the above arguments about the seeming disjuncture of power and policy within the executive branch have any validity, then the civil service, and especially the senior civil service, faces some major challenges. While this institution has always been central to governing, it is even moreso now, as it must somehow “knit” together disparate strands of the contemporary governance system into a more coherent and integrated format for governing. This must be done in a manner that preserves some of the gains from improved management but that can add to that policy direction and can emphasize “the primacy of politics.” The civil service traditionally has been the central lynchpin connecting the political elements of the executive branch with the administrative. In a more traditional version of governance than we typically see now, administrative elites such as deputy ministers or permanent secretaries were crucial in that linkage, conveying the political authority of the minister downward into the remainder

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of government and conveying ideas and the “departmental view” upwards to the political echelons. These officials required the confidence of both groups of actors to be successful and had to function as honest brokers between the wishes of the political master and the established routines and policy wishes of the department. This role of linkage between the top and the bottom has been to some extent degraded by the politicization within the administrative system and the increasing use of political officials to perform this task of connecting the levels within the public sector.6 That politicization takes many forms (Peters, forthcoming) but in all instances involves the substitution of political values for those of the civil service and the loss of the autonomy and professionalism of the civil service. The emerging demands on the civil service in these processes of linking the political and the administrative will be even more important. And that must be done within a context in which there is greater separation, structurally and behaviorally, between the two segments of the executive. And in addition, it must be accomplished in an era in which many of the participants in public administration have become somewhat more autonomous in general, and therefore more resistant to being given direction whether through the civil service or through political officials coming from the prime minister. Soft Steering One mechanism for addressing the needs of maintaining many of the gains of managerial reforms while allowing for greater political steering is the development of “soft steering.” The concept of “soft law” has been developed to describe (among other cases) patterns of governing within the European Union (Mörth 2004). This idea of “soft law” is analogous to Salamon’s (2001) discussion of the “new governance,” meaning that rather than relying on command and control instruments for governing, a shift toward less directive means of social control in government is occurring. ­Salamon’s discussion was primarily in the context of popular resistance to “command and control” policy instruments, but the logic may be extended to other forms of direct intervention. By “soft steering” we mean the use of instruments such as benchmarks, voluntary agreements, negotiated settlements, and a range of other instruments that allow the participants in the policy-­making



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process, and especially those involved in implementation, to have some latitude in how they translate general government goals into action. These actors, therefore, are being steered, but they have mainly the general directions for their action determined rather than the details. The use of soft steering enables political leaders to influence, if not control, policy, while at the same time maintaining the autonomy of many actors to make their own decisions about how exactly to achieve the goals that are set. This balancing of autonomy and control may be difficult to maintain in a manner that is agreeable to all the participants. Organizations and managers will always complain about the control being imposed by the political leadership, while political leaders may complain about the “shirking and sabotage” of the administrators (Brehm and Gates 1997). Priority Setting Another mechanism for steering from the centre without engaging in direct command and control mechanisms over the processes, or politicizing the administrative process, is to implement a “priority setting” style of governance. That is, rather than attempting to make detailed choices about policy and the administration of programs, the centre of government may focus more on the principal priorities of government and allow the organizations involved to make more of their own decisions about implementation. The attempts of some political leaders to respond to the New Public Management through bringing back together a range of programs and structures that had been disaggregated through the reforms of NPM have paraded under a number of banners – Joined Up Government, the Whole of Government, Restoring the Centre – but have shared a common theme of attempting to produce more coherent solutions to public policy problems (Pollitt 2003). This means that governments establish their major priorities and then link the various programs and ministries into those more encompassing goals. The coordination strategy is an important mechanism for asserting the priorities of the centre on the remainder of government, but it goes only so far in permitting those leaders to impose their political priorities.7 If governments can move from a more passive coordination approach to a more strategic approach, then they are more capable of imposing their goals on the policy system, but again through less directive means. Not only will such an approach

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­ rovide opportunities for policy leadership for political executives, p but it will also provide greater opportunities for attempts at comprehensive solutions to policy problems. The senior civil service would play a central role in translating the strategic directions from the political leadership into action. Strategic statements about policy and government remain just that  – statements  – unless they are implemented. The senior civil service then must translate what may be rather abstract policy preferences into effective action. That implies not only providing leadership to their own organizations but also working across structures to provide more comprehensive governance and policy direction for the government as a whole. The Golden Thread Yet another means of approaching the general issue of soft steering is to use a “golden thread” to attempt to exert effective control without excessive intervention into processes that are intended to be more autonomous. This term has been used by the Danish Ministry of Finance (see Jensen 2006) to identify their strategy of maintaining relatively few lines of control over devolved processes, especially those devolved to networks of social actors (see Sorensen and ­Torfing 2007). Although the threads available to the MoF are relatively few, they are powerful and do enable a good deal of steering of the policies and programs. To some extent the same strategy has been applied in steering the numerous devolved agencies that have become common in administrative structures around the world. The research that has been done on these organizations, and their autonomy indicates that while they may be granted substantial autonomy in a number of areas, their controlling organizations  – usually a ministry  – maintain control over some aspects of the budget or of finance or perhaps of policy so that the agencies that were designed to be autonomous can function in that manner while at the same time also conforming to the more general policies of the government. Performance Management Although performance management has been closely linked with the agenda of the New Public Management, it also can be seen as



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a ­component of the return to steering from the centre. On the one hand, the emphasis on performance does tend to drive the actions of organizations and individuals within the public sector. This mechanism can be conceived as a means of imposing rather stringent controls over the employees in the public sector and of using fear as much as more positive motivations to affect the behaviors of individuals. A somewhat less directive conceptualization of performance management is also feasible. While much of the traditional practice of public management has been rather hierarchical and directive,8 performance management can be used as a means of providing general policy directions while simultaneously permitting individuals and their organizations to make decisions about the means of achieving stated goals. Performance management can be seen as specifying broad policy goals and then permitting a good deal of latitude in how they are achieved. For example, one of the policy goals of a sitting government may be to improve “customer” service in a policy area. This goal may be achieved through investing heavily in information technology or through investing in personnel, with managers and their political masters having some opportunity for choice. As well as being able to provide softer versions of steering to the public sector, performance management has the potential to assist in enhancing the accountability of the administrative system. Most conventional forms of accountability have tended to share with conventional forms of governance a directive and detailed character. That style of accountability certainly has its purposes, but it can also focus on political embarrassment and even the minutiae of administration, rather than asking bigger and more important questions about overall performance and about the improvement of performance. As with the basic logic of soft steering, this form of “soft accountability” may in the end produce equally effective results. s u m m a ry a n d c o n c l u s i o n s

The academic separation of disciplines and sub-disciplines at times masks important linkages in the phenomena occurring in the “real world.” In the case discussed here, the failure of scholars interested in the political executive and those interested in public administration tends to separate the two sides of a very important coin

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in ­governing.9 For effective governance, these two elements of the ­executive branch of government must be able to work together effectively. They are partners in both making and implementing public policies even though much conventional discussion of public administration has tended to emphasize their separation rather than their integration. When one does begin to consider these two elements of the executive branch together, the individual developments over the past several decades present a rather paradoxical, and indeed even contradictory, picture. On the one hand, the “presidentialization” of parliamentary governments has tended to emphasize the importance of prime ministers in controlling parliament and cabinet, and portrays these leaders as dominant figures in the political landscape. While this literature on prime ministers may exaggerate the powers, and the changes in powers, of prime ministers, it is important to note the changing character of political executives. On the other hand, the administrative literature, with its stress on the autonomy of many public organizations, seems to say that prime ministers may have become the Gullivers of their political systems – presumed giants bound by numerous small constraints so that they are really not as effective as they might appear. For the purposes of this essay, most of those constraints arise from the de-centering of many governance processes and the autonomy granted to many other organizations within the executive branch. Thus, these seemingly dominant figures within the policy process may actually not be capable of translating their wishes into effective action to the extent that they could when there was a more traditional conceptualization of the role of the public service. When we do put these two trends within the public sector together, there appears to be a disjuncture between these two realities and a practical need to bring the two trends together. The basic argument therefore is that there is a need for some actors or institutions to knit together the executive into a more coherent instrument for governance and that the civil service is the most appropriate institution for that purpose. To this point in the process of transformation, much of the reaction from the centre of government has been to attempt to utilize direct political control over other parts of government.10 That strategy has produced both normative objections and empirical weaknesses in managing the public sector and has tended to further denigrate the traditional functions of the civil service.



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The implications of these transformations of both politics and administration for the senior civil service are to some extent to restore some of its traditional role as the link between the political executives and the processes of implementation and service delivery. That role of linkage, however, has become even more difficult with the increased involvement of market and social actors in the processes of governing. The senior civil service has always been in the middle, but now it is even more in the position of balancing a range of competing pressures and demands. This is, perhaps, even greater justification for emphasizing the maintenance of a career and stable civil service. Stressing the importance of the senior civil service is not to deny “the primacy of politics,” but in some ways it is a means of confirming that primacy. That is, emphasizing the importance of the civil service linking the policy choices of governments to implementation permits some of the soft steering of the administration discussed above. The role of the senior public service may be altered from direct control toward those softer mechanisms of control, but the fundamental linkage required for administering the system is little altered. It is a question of steering more cleverly, and more softly, rather than not steering at all.

notes

  1 The transformations of “citizens” into “customers” has decidedly negative normative implications for democracy, but this basic emphasis on providing services does have more positive implications.   2 This is the recent manifestation of a long-term change. See, for example, Graubard (1967).   3 This term as applied to parliamentary systems is a serious misnomer. Presidents are in many ways weaker officials than are prime ministers, especially contemporary prime ministers. Presidents generally lack controls over their legislative branches and hence are less capable of making definitive policy decisions than are prime ministers – especially prime ministers in majoritarian political systems such as (usually) the United States or Canada. See Peters (1997)   4 An increasing amount of the work of opposition, therefore, is carried out by flash parties often built around a single issue and around an individual, perhaps not running in more than one or two elections.

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  5 It is crucial to remember here that “mere implementation” is not that but is crucial for shaping the nature of the policies being delivered. The policy as implemented is arguably much more important than is the policy that resides in formal papers in cabinet or parliament.   6 This linkage role has been played by political appointees in systems such as France and Belgium that have extensive ministerial cabinets (Brans and Pelgrims 2006). While many of these officials in the cabinets come from administration, they quickly adopt a political role serving their minister.   7 Fritz Scharpf (1994) argued that governments engaged in negative coordination, in which the actors involved knew what each other was doing, and in positive coordination, in which they had that knowledge and attempted to cooperate. A strategic approach would extend beyond even the positive approach to coordination to ask questions about the capacity to integrate policies around comprehensive and longer-term goals of the political system.   8 Even much of the New Public Management appears to assume rather directive and hierarchical forms of control within the public sector. If the managers are to be allowed to manage, or perhaps are even made to manage, then they need to have the instruments through which they can exercise their control.   9 Our colleague Donald Savoie is one of the relatively few scholars who works on both sides of this academic divide. 10 This politicization of the public sector has become more pervasive than one might expect in the presumably neutral administrative systems found in most industrialized democracies.

references

Aucoin, P. 1990. “ Administrative Reform in Public Management: ­Paradigms, Principles, Paradoxes and Pendulums.” Governance 3:115–37. Bevir, M., and R.A.W. Rhodes. 2006. “Prime Ministers, Presidentialism and Westminster Smokescreens.” Political Studies 54:671–90. Bouckaert, G., and B.G. Peters. 2002. “Performance Measurement and Management: The Achilles Heel of Administrative Modernization.” Public Performance and Management Review, 359–62. Bouckaert, G., and S. Van der Walle. 2003. “Quality of Public Service Delivery and Trust in Government.” In A. Salminen, ed., Governing Networks. Amsterdam: IOS Press.



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Brans, M., and C. Pelgrims. 2006. “Comparative Observations on Tensions between Professional Advice and Political Control in the Low Countries.” International Review of Administrative Sciences 72:57–71. Brehm, J., and S. Gates. 1997. Working, Shirking and Sabotage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Carey, J.M., and M.S. Shugart. 1998. Executive Decree Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Christensen, T., and P. Laegreid. 2007. Transcending New Public Management: The Transformation of Public Sector Reforms. Aldershot: Ashgate. Connaughton. B. 2010. “Glorified Gofers, Policy Experts or Good Generalists: A Classification of the Roles of the Irish Ministerial Adviser.” Irish Political Studies 25: 347–69. Dahlström, C., B.G. Peters, and J. Pierre. 2011. Governing from the Centre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Eichbaum C., and R. Shaw. 2010. Partisan Appointees and Public Servants: An International Analysis of the Role of the Political Adviser. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Fawcett P., and O. Gay. 2010. The United Kingdom. In C. Eichbaum and R. Shaw, Partisan Appointees and Public Servants: An International Analysis of the Role of the Political Adviser. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Graubard, Stephen R., ed. 1967. A New Europe? Beacon Press. Hood, C., and M. Lodge. 2008. The Politics of Public Service Bargains: Reward, Competency, Loyalty and Blame. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, K. 2008. Politicians and Public Servants: Implementing Change in a Clash of Cultures. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Jensen, L. 2006. Desn Store Koordinator. Copenhagen: Jurist og Okonomi. Katz, R.S., and P. Mair. 2009. The Cartel Party Thesis: A Restatement, ­Perspectives on Politics 7:753–68. Kickert, W.J.M. 1995. “Steering at a Distance: The New Paradigm in Dutch Higher Education Policy.” Governance 8:135–57. Mörth, U. 2004. “Soft Law in the European Union.” Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Norris, P. 2011. Democratic Deficit: Critical Citizens Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olsen, J.P. 2008. “The Ups and Downs of Bureaucratic Organization.” Annual Review of Political Science 11: 13–37. Peters, B.G. Forthcoming. “Forms of Politicization.” In S. Vanhoonacker, ed., Politicization and the Civil Service. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

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pa r t t w o

Regional Development

9 Why Regional Development Policies Are (Mostly) Ineffective and Why It Does Not Matter mario polèse

For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. Attributed to H.L. Mencken

This essay might equally have been titled “The Elusive Quest for the Right Regional Development Policy.” My purpose is to explain why regional development policies in Canada and elsewhere have generally failed to produce desired results but also why in the end it does not matter and why, accordingly, regional development programs are here to stay. This chapter is in part the story of a personal journey. I have been in the field of regional development for some forty years, mostly as an academic but also as a policy researcher and advisor to various agencies, departments, and levels of government. The reader will forgive me for lacing my account with references to personal experiences, for they also – and not just cold scientific research – have shaped my outlook. Let me begin by explaining what I mean by regional policy or, alternatively, regional development programs (sometimes with the adjective “economic” in the middle), terms I shall employ interchangeably, and also what I mean by success or failure. The objective of regional policies, traditionally, has been to redress what are seen to be undesirable trends in the geography of economic development. In Canada, Atlantic Canada has long been seen as the ­stepchild of Confederation (at least until the recent Newfoundland

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oil boom), with historically above-average unemployment, below average growth, and below average incomes. The desire to reduce regional disparities in income and employment are generally a key element of regional programs, at the heart, for example, of the European Union’s regional policy, which eats up about a third of the EU budget.1 Donald Savoie has long been a critical observer of regional development policies in Canada, particularly as they relate to Atlantic Canada (Savoie 1986, 1997, 2001, 2006). Some of the points I will make overlap with Savoie – notably on the role politics – but I come at the issue from a different perspective, as a regional economist by training and a long-time resident of Quebec. My criterion for judging the effectiveness of regional economic development programs – federal, provincial, or local – is their success in altering the relative standing of communities, hopefully for the better. Targeted communities, implicitly, are lagging behind or are otherwise economically disadvantaged compared to the rest of the nation. An improvement in their relative performance is, by the same token, equivalent to a reduction in regional disparities. A program may well be effective in stimulating local economic development – say, by facilitating access to capital for business start-ups – but will have only a limited impact on the relative standing of lagging communities if it is being applied across Canada. Success or failure can also look very different depending on the onlooker’s geographical perspective. Economic disparities may well be falling at one level but not at another, as we shall see shortly. I begin with a brief look at historical trends. As we shall see, the glass is both half full and half empty, which already tells us something about the effectiveness of regional development programs. a b r i e f l o o k at h i s t o r i c a l t r e n d s

An abundant literature exists on the evolution of regional disparities within nations. The general consensus, certainly among mainstream economists, is that economic growth and economic integration will in the long run reduce per capita income disparities between regions (Barro and Sala-i-Martin 1995; Coulombe 2000, 2007; Puga 1999). The historical evidence largely supports this view. For all industrialized nations where data is available, income or product disparities have fallen sharply since the Second World War. Figure 9.1 shows long-term trends for Canada and the United States. Regional income



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Figure 9.1  Evolution of regional income inequality, US and Canada 1900–2005. Indicator: ratio of the per capita income of the two richest states (provinces) over that of the two poorest. Sources: BEA (online), Statistics Canada (periodic)

disparities have fallen in both nations over the last century. In the United States, the ratio between average per capita income in the two richest states and in the two poorest has fallen from 3.2 in 1900 to 1.4 in 2000; in Canada, the ratio between the two richest and the two poorest provinces has fallen from 2.7 in 1930 to 1.3 today.2 Both the United States and Canada witnessed extraordinary economic growth over the last hundred years. Each economy has become progressively more integrated as railways, highways, telephone lines, air traffic, and  – more recently  – high-speed Internet connections criss-cross the nation. People, goods, information, and capital move far more freely today than a century ago. Economics 101 tells us that wages and prices will tend to equalize as barriers to trade and to the movement of capital and people fall, and this is exactly what has happened, cyclical swings notwithstanding The European experience since World War Two points in the same direction. Income differences between the first member nations of the EU (formally, the European Economic Community) have fallen

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Figure 2  Population 15 years of age and over, four regions, 1987 =1.00

sharply since the 1950s. Per capita income levels in Germany and in France are today pretty much the same. Regional income disparities within Western European nations declined significantly between 1950 and 1980 (Barro and Sala-i-Martin 1995), the period of most rapid growth and integration. Recent trends suggest a resurgence in disparities in some nations, in part a reflection of the 2007–9 global recession; note the resurgence in disparities in figure 9.1 during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Such fluctuations do not invalidate the long-term positive relationship between national economic growth and reduced regional disparities. The trend lines for North America and Europe contain two messages. First, it is difficult to see any obvious link with public policy. Canada did not have a regional policy (by whatever name) aimed at the reduction of regional disparities before the 1960s and the United States never had one. The United States has nothing equivalent to Canada’s system of equalization payments. Second, given sustained economic growth, technological change and the normal workings of the market will naturally produce a reduction in regional ­welfare differences. In Canada, inter-provincial differences in per capita ­



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Figure 3  Unemployment rate compared to Canadian average (Canada = 1.00), four regions, 1987–2009

income have continued to decline and are now at a historical low. Alberta is currently the outlier with “abnormally” high incomes generated by high oil prices (still in effect at the time of writing). Figures 9.2 and 9.3 paint a more somber picture and send a very different message. I have purposely chosen four regions in Quebec and Atlantic Canada (also the parts of Canada I am most familiar with) that have a history of economic woes and have at various moments been the object of targeted policy initiatives by senior levels of government.3 All four are typical resource-based regions in fairly remote locations.4 Grand Falls in Central Newfoundland saw its pulp and paper mill close in 2008 with the loss of some thirteen hundred jobs. Cape Breton’s principal economic mainstay has long been its coal and steel industries, which at their height employed more than fifteen thousand workers, that is, until the closure of the steelworks and the last coal mine in 2001. The Gaspé region in Quebec saw the closure of a large paper mill in 1999, followed shortly thereafter by the closure of a copper mine and smelter. Northeast New Brunswick, which includes the Acadian Peninsula, was hard hit by the collapse of groundfish stocks in the late 1980s and the

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accompanying moratorium (which also affected the two previously named regions), and it is further threatened by the imminent closure of a zinc mine (about nine hundred jobs) and smelter (some five hundred jobs at stake). As figures 9.2 and 9.3 illustrate, the general reduction in regional disparities across Canada and the “normal” workings of the market have not been of much help to these four regions. All have seen their populations systematically decline over the past twenty-five years and systematically register unemployment rates well above the national average. If anything, the prosperity of other parts of the nation has simply served to accelerate the out-migration of the young in search of better job opportunities, which may be good for the young but does little to improve the development prospects of the regions concerned. In short, the general reduction in regional inequality does not mean that all communities win. The forces of urbanization and polarization are also part of the process of longterm economic growth. (For a fuller discussion of the issues see Polèse 2009.) There will always be laggards, regions that trail behind the rest of the nation. More to the point, the last fifty years have seen a succession of theories, each purportedly with the solution for revitalizing declining or lagging communities, only to be shown lacking later on. That is the story I shall now tell, one which is not necessarily flattering for my fellow academics and myself. g r o w t h p o l e s : a ta l e o f a c a d e m i c h u b r i s a n d political naïveté

The history of regional development policies is in large measure the story of academic fads. In the 1960s, when I was a young student in regional science at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, growth poles and multipliers were all the rage, but they have fallen out of fashion since. This was the heyday of econometrics and of mathematical modelling, made possible by new, powerful mainframe computers. Much of my time was spent learning linear programming, which I have mercifully since forgotten. The key to generating regional development (as measured by jobs and income) was investing in strategic “propulsive” industries, which, via their forward and backward linkages, would propel the local economy forward. I well remember the huge input-output table of the Philadelphia regional economy  – prominently displayed on a corridor



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wall – which would help policy-makers make the right investment and expenditure choices. Economic development was essentially a matter of constructing up-to-date, state-of the-art, input-output tables and then targeting the investments that produced the biggest multiplier effect. The direct, indirect, and induced employment (and income) effects of any investment or expenditure could be precisely predicted and traced through the entire economy. For academics, or academics in the making like myself, it was proof that the subject of regional development could be “scientifically” addressed, given the proper tools of economic analysis and econometrics. Call it hubris, if you will. The concept dominated the regional policy landscape for at least two decades, with the approximate high point in the 1970s, and it is still in vogue in some quarters. It is worth considering in some detail why the idea of growth poles failed, or more accurately, why, while not being entirely wrong, it is of only limited value for regional policy purposes.5 The reasons lie both in the fundamental flaws of the (academic) model and in the workings of democratic political systems. A Faulty Model Beginning essentially in the 1950s, regional economists, economic geographers, and other academics rightly observed that economic growth was inevitably accompanied by urbanization. Industries, jobs, and people increasingly clustered around big cities, giving rise to the parallel concept of “agglomeration economies,” that is, economies in which gains are derived from the geographic concentration of firms and people.6 The origins of the growth pole concept go back to an article by the French economist, François Perroux, written more than a half a century ago (1955). Perroux was soon followed by other academics, among whom were Albert Hirschman (1958), John Friedmann (1966, 1972), Benjamin Higgins (1971), whom we shall meet again, Jacques Boudeville (1972), and Walter Isard (1959), who was the founder of regional science as an academic field of enquiry. Perroux noted that a growth in demand for the products of certain industries generated more jobs and income than others because, as noted earlier, their forward and backward linkages with other industries were more developed. Thus, a dollar spent on automobiles might also generate local demand for steel, aluminum, plastics, and so on, and thus “trickle down,” so to speak, throughout

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the entire national economy, generating jobs in numerous sectors (provided, however, that the relevant industries were present in the national economy). Perroux’s initial insight was a-spatial, not necessarily linked to a particular place on the map. However, it did not take long to make the a priori logical, but not necessarily justifiable, leap to a spatial (regional) interpretation, which gave us growth pole theory as taught in numerous economics, geography, and planning departments at the time. The same reasoning could, it was argued, be applied to the geographic targeting of public investments and expenditures. The basic arguments can be summarized as follows. Inter-industry linkages are necessarily denser in big cities than in small places. The predicted local multiplier effect will be correspondingly higher in the former. It thus makes sense to target the biggest cities. In addition, such spatial targeting will further strengthen the underlying agglomeration economies that are essential for economic growth, of which dense input-output relationships (between sellers and buyers) are a key element. No regional or national economy can hope to grow without an industrially diversified and interconnected urban centre. Such urban centres needed to be buttressed. More to the point – and staying true to the initial insight – the effects of these growth-inducing investments in urban centres would, so the argument went, “trickle down” the entire economy to all places and regions. Cities so designated became growth poles whose growth and development would serve to revitalize lagging and disadvantaged regions. A parallel prescription was the strengthening of linkages between designated growth poles and other places so as to maximize the trickle-down effects to other regions. The secret, in a nutshell, was targeting the right growth poles (cities) and the right industries. Although highly simplified, the preceding paragraph captures the conventional wisdom of the time fairly well. In Canada, arguably the best-known (some would say, most notorious) example of growth pole theory applied to public policy was a report submitted in 1970 to the now defunct Department of Regional Economic Expansion (DREE) by three faculty members at the time of the Department of Economics at the University of Montreal – ­Benjamin Higgins, ­Fernand Martin, and André Raynauld (Higgins, ­Martin, and Raynauld 1970). The report, since then known in Quebec simply as le Rapport hmr, it rapidly became the symbol of everything that was wrong with centrally conceived regional development



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­ olicies, whether coming out of Ottawa or Quebec City. Some forty p years later, the mere mention of the villainous Rapport hmr can still provoke outpourings of anti-Montreal, anti-Ottawa, anti–Quebec City diatribes in regions like the Gaspé, an experience to which this author can personally testify. What provoked such ire? Simply, the report’s central recommendation, true to growth pole theory, was that the primary focus of DREE in Quebec should be on strengthening the Montreal economy and that this in turn was also the best means for reinvigorating peripheral economies like the Gaspé through predicted trickle-down effects and reinforced linkages with Montreal. To people in the Gaspé and similar regions, the message was crystal clear: federal government investments would henceforth be primarily directed to Montreal. Whether the federal government did indeed redirect its investments in the province towards Montreal is immaterial. What was clear, however, is that the trickle-down effects never came; the Gaspé continued on its downward spiral for the next three decades (recall figure 9.2). Targeting Montreal was not necessarily unjustified, given its economic travails at the time. But expecting such targeted investments in the province’s presumed growth pole to also lift up other regions in the province was entirely unrealistic. Any trickle-down effects, if indeed there were any, were most probably confined to a fairly limited geographical radius around Montreal (on this point, see Polèse and Shearmur 2003). In addition, there is little evidence that the focus on Montreal had any discernable effect on that city’s economic trajectory; throughout 1970s and 1980s the city’s economy continued to underperform relative to comparable city-regions, and it was finally overtaken by Toronto as Canada’s primary economic powerhouse. I know of no case where growth-pole-inspired policies produced the desired results, either in jump-starting an urban economy or in disseminating growth effects to lagging regions. Why did growth poles not work? Some reasons are more technical than others, flowing from the intrinsic limits of the model. As noted above, Perroux’s initial insight was based on input-out analysis, which is an essentially a-spatial tool.7 The multiplier results will tell the analyst in what industry employment (or income) is generated in the economy, but not where. Taking a hypothetical Montreal-Gaspé example, an increase in the demand for aerospace equipment produced in Montreal (initiated by the federal government, say) will reverberate throughout the entire Quebec economy, industry by

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industry, but will have very little effect on the Gaspé economy, unless that region is home to subcontractors to the aerospace and related industries, which is highly unlikely. Indeed, the end result may be an acceleration of the region’s decline as wages rise in Montreal and more Gaspesians leave to work in the city’s now-booming aerospace plants and nearby subcontractors. The supposedly “logical” leap from a-spatial to spatial reasoning was, in short, a mistake. In all fairness, I was no more far-sighted at the time than my eminent mentors and colleagues. However, the aspatial-spatial confusion is a relatively minor issue. More important was (and remains) the confusion between static and dynamic economic analysis, an error still all too prevalent today. Input-output models and their associated multipliers were derived from Keynesian-inspired models, often incorrectly dubbed “growth” models. Keynes’ model of the economy, the dominant framework at the time, was development in reaction to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Its primary objective was to demonstrate the positive employment-enhancing effects of public investments as a countercyclical measure in times of inadequate aggregate demand. The model was (and remains) essentially “static.” That is, the predicted employment and income multipliers are founded on existing technologies and economic structures, an essential condition for the estimation of technological coefficients (i.e., what industry x buys from industry y). All this is probably overly technical for some readers, but the upshot is this: input-output models are fundamentally static tools, limited to the estimation of one-shot income and employment effects and not much more. Economic growth is an entirely different matter, since it necessarily implies changing technologies and economic structures. Such things are far more difficult to put into elegant mathematical equations. Confusing multiplier effects with economic growth was (and again remains) at the root of much of the misuse and misunderstanding surrounding growth poles and associated concepts. An equally fundamental error was (and again remains) the confusion between outcomes and causes. Urban concentration is a necessary outcome of economic growth, but not necessarily a cause. Artificially stimulating urban concentrations through public investments, even massive investments, will have little effect unless other conditions are also present. The growth potential of places is not solely a matter of size and the quantity of public infrastructures.



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It would be nice if things were so simple. Indeed, as I am wont to say in my classes in regional economics, if the answers were simple, then declining or otherwise disadvantaged regions would not exist. Even big cities can falter, as Detroit and Manchester attest (I shall return to them), not to mention, again, the past travails of the Montreal economy. The roots of economic success cannot be easily reduced to one or two variables. For public policy to truly alter the economic fundamentals of a designated growth pole would require investments and institutional changes over many decades on a scale beyond the means and the political will of most governments, certainly in democratic societies. Politics: The wot (Why Only Them?) Principle This brings us to the second major flaw, political this time, of growth-pole-inspired strategies, whose origins lie in a naïve (or perhaps, more kindly, overly optimistic) view of what governments can do and why they do it. This flaw, which I shall dub the Why Only Them rule, or WOT for the sake of brevity, is common to all policies that imply spatial targeting and to which I shall often return. The WOT rule is not difficult to understand and also not very original, really basic political science 101. Simple politics makes it impossible for governments to systematically invest public funds in one place only, to the detriment of all others. If several cities are designated as growth poles, which is what happened in France in the 1970s, then in the end none will be; that is, no designated city will be systematically favoured over another. Public infrastructure investments follow demand and voters. Few things are more embarrassing to politicians than white elephants: a half-empty industrial park, an abandoned airport, or an underused highway. The WOT rule applies most strongly to political systems where members of the legislature (Parliament, National Assembly, Congress  ...) are directly elected by local constituents, generally on a first-past-the-post basis. That, of course, is the system in effect in Canada both at the federal and at the provincial levels. Quebec again provides a good case study. In 1966, very much inspired by French thinking (after all, that is where the growth pole idea originated), Quebec City introduced a new territorial administrative framework, which divided the province into nine administrative regions (not counting the North), each with its “regional capital,”

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the planned focus for future public investments. Thus, for the newly created Lower Saint Lawrence-Gaspé administrative region, the city of Rimouski was to be the regional capital – a growth pole it was hoped – that would revitalize the regional economy. For a time, the Quebec government held true to the original plan of concentrating public services and investments in a limited number of designated urban areas. The six regional campuses of the new state university system (l’Université du Québec, created in 1969) were located in designated regional capitals. However, the predicable backlash from those not so favoured was not long in coming. In the Abitibi region, the town of Val-d’Or begrudged Rouyn-Noranda, the designated regional pole, its university campus. In the Lower Saint Lawrence-Gaspé administrative region, Rivière-du-Loup and Gaspé (the town) were predictably jealous of Rimouski’s good fortune. The size of the Montreal administrative region, some 60 percent of the province’s population, did not sit well with the political elites of included urban centres who felt that their voice and needs were drowned out by the weight of the city of Montreal. What was bound to happen happened. Quebec City changed the system in 1987, going from nine to sixteen administrative regions (again, excluding the North). The Montreal administrative region was divided into five regions, each with its administrative centre. Thus, Laval, basically a bedroom community, became a distinct administrative region, a far cry from the initial objective of delineating “scientifically” defined planning regions. But such is the power of politics; the mayor of Laval was (and still is) a political heavyweight. The Gaspé region was detached from the Lower Saint Lawrence, which makes more sense, with the town of Gaspé now as its administrative centre. Although, mercifully, no new regional universities were founded, all Quebec universities have since been authorized to open affiliated university campuses across the province. The WOt rule is also useful in understanding the evolution of regional policy at the federal level, although the link with growth poles is less explicit. When in 1990 the Mulroney government abolished the Department of Regional Industrial Expansion, whose mandate covered all of Canada, it chose to replace it with four regional development agencies (RDAs) with clearly delineated regional mandates, each with the status of a federal department and its own minister: ACOA, DÉC, FedNoR,8 and Western Economic Diversification



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Canada. The successive dismantling of DREE and DRIE, the latter having absorbed the former, was in effect an admission that topdown approaches for directing growth towards particular places, an implicit assumption behind growth poles and similar policies, had failed. The creation of four RDAs marked a less directive approach, with the non-negligible benefit of decentralizing decision-making powers to regional entities. Thus, the head office and minister’s office of ACOA were located in Moncton, New Brunswick. This structure has remained largely unchanged. However, the four RDAs have since been expanded to six with the addition of FedDev and CanNor.9 Arguably, the creation of FedDev in 2009 was motivated not primarily by politics but rather by the economic travails of Southern Ontario, hard hit by the 2007–9 recession, which devastated the auto industry. CanNor is more clearly a political initiative. More to the point, all of Canada is now covered by federal RDAs. No region can claim that it is being ignored. Please do not misunderstand me. I’m not arguing that federal RDAs are not doing useful work (more on this later) but rather that all regions are now on an essentially equal footing as far as federal regional development policy is concerned. All six RDAs basically have the same mandate with very similar tools and programs. Stated differently, one should not expect current federal regional policy to significantly alter the relative competitiveness and standing of Canadian communities. Indeed, one can reasonably ask whether the term “regional policy” still applies. c l u s t e r s : a c o n t i n u at i o n o f t h e s a m e s t o ry

In the 1980s and 1990s clusters came into vogue, thanks in no small part to the marketing skills of Michael Porter (1998, 200), who noted that related industries tend to locate together. The key to success, it follows, is identifying clusters for which the region purportedly holds a competitive advantage, then building on their strengths with targeted public investments. One region might have a health cluster, while another might have a fashion or aerospace cluster. Clusters remain highly popular among economic development strategists. However, cluster-based strategies contain an inherent flaw. Today’s winning cluster may be tomorrow’s losing cluster. All clusters carry the seeds of their own destruction; to use a hackneyed turn of phrase, all cluster strategies should carry a warning label: “use

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only in small doses.” Building a development strategy on a targeted set of industries is as risky as an investment portfolio concentrated in a few industry stocks. The use of adjectives such as “targeted” or “strategic” does not make it any less risky. If history has taught us anything, it is that politicians and civil servants are even worse at picking winners than investment gurus and bankers, which is saying a lot. Clusters are particularly risky when aimed at relatively small or sparsely populated regions. For a large city such as Montreal, several clusters may be promoted simultaneously, thus spreading the risks. But even in Montreal, the weight of the aerospace sector  – arguably the largest cluster, with Bombardier as the star player, a presence strongly supported by public policy – is not without risk. The growing competition from emerging nations (notably Brazil and China) and the movement south of assembly plants (to Mexico most recently) raises the spectre that parts of the aerospace industry may perhaps go the way of the automobile industry. And therein lies a lesson. The automotive sector in Ontario was Canada’s prime example of a winning cluster avant la lettre, openly supported by public policy at the time (of which the 1965 auto pact was a major lynchpin), much to the dismay of Quebec and other provinces. What has happened since is well-known and need not be retold, with Southern Ontario now the mandate of a federal RDA, as noted earlier. The Quebec government has for several years been pursuing an active cluster policy in the Quebec North Shore and Saguenay regions (dubbed La Vallée de l’Aluminium), based in no small part on subsidized energy sales by Hydro-Quebec to the large plants that dot the landscape. At the time of writing, the future of aluminum smelting in the area looks promising, but the day will inevitably come when this is no longer true. A large urban area like Montreal can survive the collapse of an industry, even a major one. The Montreal area lost some seven thousand jobs in telecommunications manufacturing between 2001 and 2006 after the burst of the dot com bubble and the ensuing collapse of Nortel, but without a noticeable effect on overall labour market indicators. It is unlikely that the Quebec North Shore and Saguenay regions would fare as well, since both are sparsely populated and far from major markets. Cluster policies have their uses, but they are not necessarily applicable everywhere. Clusters, almost by definition, refer to fairly dense agglomerations of



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industries and talent, an attribute of larger, more densely populated places. Betting on specific cities – growth poles – is not terribly risky, but betting on specific industries is, especially where the industry is the only game in town and may be stunting local business start-ups by crowding out other possible industries (more on this later). However, the basic flaw with cluster-based reasoning as an academic model is the same as for growth poles. Here again, causes and outcomes are confused. Clusters are the normal, predictable outcome of market forces, driving certain firms to co-locate in order to draw advantages from what economic geographers call localization economies, a sub-class of the agglomeration economies alluded to earlier. These localized advantages may be shared infrastructures, a specifically skilled labour force, the exchange of information, or any number of things (for a technical explanation see H ­ enderson 2003). The point is this: just as with growth poles, the “artificial” creation of clusters rarely works. Cluster strategies make sense where the objective is, so to speak, to give an extra edge to clusters that, manifestly, are already succeeding through, for example, public investments in technical schools, worker retraining, and infrastructures, and even then if care is taken not to put too many eggs in the same basket. And as with growth poles, politics – the WOT rule presented earlier – will limit the capacity of the state to explicitly target specific industries and places. In the following paragraph, I shall briefly recount the story of Montreal’s Cité du Multimédia, which illustrates both the WOT rule at work and the pitfalls of promoting artificial clusters. The example is urban, but the analogy with regional strategies is not difficult to make. A joint municipal-provincial initiative, but with the province as the chief driving force, the construction of Montreal’s Cité du Multimédia began in the late 1980s. The idea was to jump-start a hightech multimedia cluster in a rundown city neighbourhood not far from Old Montreal, in turn stimulating the wider local economy. Incoming firms locating in a new, publicly funded, high-tech complex were granted generous tax breaks, notably a 30 percent tax writeoff on wages over a ten-year period. Predictably, firms came. But then things started to turn sour. Firms and communities elsewhere – true to the LEB rule  – predictably asked why this particular location was favoured and not them. More to the point, this publically anointed cluster did not correspond to any natural advantage. The city’s most dynamic multimedia firms, specifically in the computer

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gaming industry, were flourishing elsewhere. The star firm, Ubisoft with some four thousand employees, was located on St-Lawrence Boulevard, which was rapidly turning into the city’s “natural” multimedia cluster. The favours accorded firms locating in the Cité du Multimédia were seen, not unjustifiably, as unfair competition and, pushing the argument even further, as undermining the advantages of the natural cluster that was in the process of emerging. By the same token, other cities (Sherbrooke, Quebec City, etc.) accused the province of undermining their nascent multimedia sectors by luring firms to Montreal. Again, what was bound to happen happened. The province was forced to extend equivalent fiscal privileges to other places, funding Cités de la nouvelle économie in at least ten other cities, making the program even more costly but also defeating its initial intent. Privileges were also subsequently extended to the greater Montreal area, robbing the Cité du Multimédia of its initial advantage within the metropolitan area. The city is now left with a state-of-the-art building with subsidized firms, but in the wrong location, and one may well ask what will happen when the last tax credits expire. The vacancy rate rose in 2010 from 7.5 percent to 36.7 percent after two firms left when their credits expired. According to the latest available information, the building now stands half empty. The province has since abrogated the tax credits that specifically target the Cité du Multimédia. Here again, please do not misunderstand me. I am not arguing against cluster strategies as a matter of principle. There is a happy ending to the story, although not in Montreal, where it began. When the fiscal privileges of the initial program were extended to other locations, Quebec City (the municipal administration, that is) chose to apply them to a location, the neighbourhood of St-Roch, that was already in the process of turning into a multimedia mini-­cluster: an area increasingly favoured by artists and other brainy types (similar to St-Lawrence Boulevard in Montreal), a natural magnet for software development and related computer firms. The municipal administration also applied the program in a more flexible manner, allowing firms to choose their buildings (within a designated area), rather than forcing them into a specific building with a pre-defined leasing agreement. Computer service firms have since flourished in St-Roch, a true success story. However, not to be too optimistic, one may ask what will happen when the current fiscal privileges expire.



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e d u c at i o n : d o i n g t h e r i g h t t h i n g f o r t h e w r o n g reasons

The rise of the knowledge economy has understandably given rise to a growing emphasis on education, which is seen as a key tool for promoting the development of disadvantaged communities. But nothing is less sure. The emphasis on education is of course a good thing. Obviously, an educated population is a positive asset. But it is also an asset that can be lost, a reminder of the porous nature of regional economies. The villain in this tale is the inherently selective nature of migration. Persons with higher levels of education are more mobile and correspondingly more likely to move if better opportunities arise elsewhere. Investing in education can backfire as a local development tool. Much depends on the characteristics of the community. A region or a community with poor employment prospects is doing the right thing in promoting the education of its young; but it is also increasing the chances they will leave, which may be good for the individuals but does little to improve the growth prospects of the communities they leave. The positive effects of education on local economic development are in part a function of size. The relationship between a high proportion of university graduates and growth is generally positive for large urban places. Glaeser (1994) and Glaeser and Saiz (2003) have convincingly demonstrated the positive nature of the relationship for US urban areas. Once climate is factored out (an important predictor of growth for US cities), the initial share of graduates is by far the most powerful predictor of subsequent growth. But the relationship does not necessarily hold for smaller places. For Canada, ­Shearmur and Polèse (2007) find only a very weak link once smaller places are included. Smaller places, as a rule, have lower proportions of college graduates. For some this may be a handicap, but not necessarily for all. For many smaller communities and peripheral regions, the best for hope for growth will often lie in medium-tech industries or other economic activities that do not necessarily require a high density of college graduates. Smaller places and peripheral regions are more often competing on raw costs (wages, real estate ...) and access to resources and markets, rather than on education. As long as migration continues to be selective (which it is likely to remain), education will remain a double-edged sword, depending on whose welfare one wishes to maximize. Here we come to one of

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the classic dilemmas in local economic development. Investments in education are counterproductive for the community if they stimulate out-migration, but not for the individual. The dilemma is further heightened if education is financed, at least in part, at the local level. A deputy minister of education of the province of Nova Scotia once commented to me in frustration: “Half of my money serves to subsidize Ontario, paying for kids who will pack up and move to Toronto.” But then, should Nova Scotia cease to educate its sons and daughters? In this game, Ontario (and more recently Alberta) are the free riders, importing graduates whose education was financed by Nova Scotia taxpayers. On the other hand, Canada’s system of equalization payments exists in part to compensate for this disequilibrium. But the dilemma remains no less true at the local level. This dilemma was brought home to me on a recent visit to Sydney-­ Glace Bay (on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia) in the context of an OECD study on the impact of higher education on local economic development in Atlantic Canada (Garlick et al. 2007). Among other places, the study team visited the campus of Cape Breton University (CBU). The local community had fought hard to create a fullfledged university, and the province undoubtedly saw the university as an essential tool to revitalize the local economy. CBU is a fairly young institution, having obtained its university charter in 1980 and its current name in 2005. On the campus, with the help of the local student association, the team interviewed a number senior-year students, asking each what he or she planned to do upon graduation. All, without exception, answered that they would leave Cape Breton, including the student association president and all members of his board. When asked why, the answer was always “the lack of job opportunities” or some variant thereof. Again, the same dilemma: should Nova Scotia have chosen not to locate a university on Cape Breton Island? I would be hard put to answer that the province did the wrong thing. Universities are often seen as catalysts of development. CBU has manifestly not been a catalyst. But CBU is hardly an isolated case. Staying in Nova Scotia, St Francis Xavier University, a fairly prestigious undergraduate institution (former prime minister Brian ­Mulroney is an alumnus), is located in the small town of Antigonish. It is the town’s principal economic base, adding to its charm. Antigonish is the very portrait of a small university town. However, the presence of the university with its one thousand graduates ­annually



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has not generated any other industries, certainly nothing major. For a university to generate economic growth  – that is, beyond direct employment effects – other conditions need also to be present. The high-tech clusters and spin-offs that have developed around certain universities are almost always the result of specific conditions, among which is location in or near a large urban centre. KitchenerWaterloo, home to RIM (Research in Motion), inventor of the Blackberry and arguably Canada’s best-known high-tech success story, clearly owes much of its success to the presence of the University of Waterloo, which explicitly chose to focus on computer sciences and engineering. But then Kitchener-Waterloo is an agglomeration of some half-million inhabitants located about an hour’s drive from Toronto. Cornell, one the world’s foremost universities,10 located in the town of Ithaca in upstate New York (which is not really close to anything), is a good example that a university by itself, even a very prestigious one, will not automatically trigger a flurry of spin-offs or an inflow of industries unless other factors are also present. Ithaca, even more so than Antigonish, is the very model of an attractive university town, with a bohemian lifestyle and truly impressive parklike campus majestically situated above Lake Cayuga. Yet Ithaca has not attracted much of an inflow of talent beyond the core group of professionals directly associated with the university. Ithaca has not spawned a major industrial research cluster; at least I found no trace of one when I visited the place. Cornell, like St Francis Xavier, is essentially an importer of students and an exporter of graduates, itself a welcome local economic base, but with little further impact on the local economy. In short, Ithaca, like Antigonish, is favoured neither by size nor by location. The excellence of its university has visibly not been sufficient to offset the disadvantages of distance from a large urban centre. The lesson here is that the effects of education on local economic development is conditioned by the size, location, and economic base of the host community. The perception that only highly educated, high-tech, and trendy places have a future in the knowledge economy is unfortunate, a point to which I shall return shortly. Returning to education in general, it is essential not to confuse the good of the community with that of the individual. Education, including post-secondary education, is almost always a good investment for an individual. It goes without saying that provincial and local

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g­ overnments should encourage the education of their citizens. However, the dilemma facing provinces and localities will not go away. As the knowledge economy expands, the young will understandably demand ever more education, which, if not locally provided, gives them an added impetus to leave and, all too often, not return. f r o m s m o k e s ta c k c h a s i n g t o p e o p l e c h a s i n g

The last three decades have seen two fundamental changes in policy emphasis. Some might wish to go so far as to speak of paradigm shifts: first, from “hard-” to “soft-based” strategies and second, from nationally to locally based strategies. I shall begin with the former. The shift towards so-called soft factors (quality of life, culture, creativity, innovation, etc.), a corollary of the policy focus on education discussed above, is in part the predicable outcome of the rise of the service-based knowledge economy. Human capital is now the rare resource, not physical capital. Smokestack-chasing is definitely passé. “Factory” has almost become a dirty word. People-chasing (certain types of people, that is) is the now the name of the game. We are a far cry from inter-industry input-output tables and multipliers that nurtured growth pole theories. Whereas before, investment in “strategic” industries was expected to generate employment opportunities that would then attract people, it is now the other way around: simply attract the “right” people and good jobs will follow. The logical policy conclusion: communities need to focus on investments and other actions that make them a magnet for young, educated, and talented individuals, for they are the drivers of today’s knowledge economy. There is some truth to this; a complaint often heard in lagging regions is the difficulty of attracting qualified workers, with the flip side being the propensity of educated individuals to leave, as noted earlier. The people-chasing paradigm is generally associated with Richard Florida (2002a,b), arguably the most successful locale-specific economic development guru at the moment. Florida’s notion of a socalled “creative class” struck a cord. The adjective “creative” was a stroke of genius, whatever one may think of its scientific foundations (who is not creative?). Attract creative people and they will, by definition, create. What more is there to say? However, the secret of Florida’s success is his claim to have found the recipe for attracting the creative class. Many readers will be familiar with Florida’s



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recipe, which boils down to a mix of Bohemian life-style, tolerance of diversity, and a rich and varied cultural scene. For city-regions, San Francisco and Vancouver spring to mind. Florida is perhaps not entirely mistaken in pointing out the relationship between knowledge-­intensive clusters and unconventional life-styles. ­Florida’s intuition harks back to the earlier insights of urban guru Jane Jacobs (1969), who also lauded the economic virtues of diversity and lively street scenes. Returning to policy implications, the creative-class paradigm has lead to a focus on the arts as engines of economic development. If a community is to attract “creative” individuals, it needs a worldclass symphony orchestra, top-notch museums, an avant-garde theatre and music scene, and so on. The creative-class paradigm has clearly had an effect on public policy priorities.11 In Montreal, the three levels of government have recently committed some 120 million dollars to the Quarter des Spectacles, currently under construction, which includes a new concert hall among other things. Do not get me wrong. I’m not ideologically opposed to public investments in the arts. Where I do part company with Florida and his followers is when public expenditures on the arts and on culture are touted as a means of promoting local economic growth. I become even more sceptical when the argument is transposed to smaller cities and even to peripheral communities. Perhaps the relationship can be shown to be valid for big cities, although even that is contested by other academics (Glaeser 2005; Hall 2000). As with previous academic fads, the problem runs much deeper. The basic problem is again the direction of causality, confusing causes and outcomes. Is a vibrant cultural scene a cause or a consequence of local prosperity? The answer is by no means self-evident. Let us take a US example. Atlanta, one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the United States, does not owe its success to an initial above-average endowment of educated workers, world-class universities, museums, and cafés. But if Atlanta keeps on growing, we may reasonably predict that it will in time house a highly educated population and also spawn top-notch universities and cultural institutions, and perhaps even trendy neighbourhoods where the bohemian classes can hang out. But will these assets in turn ensure further growth? Perhaps, but then again perhaps not, since they were not necessary in the first place to spark growth. In Canada, we could easily apply the same reasoning to Calgary. It’s difficult to

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escape from circular reasoning. The surest way to attract talent is to be a growing community with plentiful job opportunities and high wages. Not terribly helpful. More cynically, it can argued that the creative-class paradigm is in effect a lobbying strategy – and a highly successful one at that – by certain groups to convince the public sector to spend money on bicycle paths, museums, and other things they value (Shearmur 2007), a game essentially played between big city elites for the benefit of those who consider themselves to be part of the creative class (rarely the poorest segments of the population). The evidence is indisputable: artsy types and other members of the creative class, however defined, are overwhelmingly concentrated in and around the largest cities, and there is little evidence that this is about to change. For Canada, Olfert and Partridge (2011) observe not only the predictable concentration of cultural occupations in the four largest metropolitan areas but also the persistence of location choices. Markusen and Schrock (2006) observe very much the same thing for the United States. The principal concentrations of “creative” types outside large cities (differences in definition between researchers notwithstanding) are generally found in natural-amenity-rich locations near those same large cities; in Canada, north of Toronto in the “cottage country” Muskoka Lake area or north of Montreal in the Laurentians, with towns like St-Adèle and St-Agathe being typical examples. Examples are rare outside the weekend recreation and extended commuting sheds of large metropolitan areas. In other words, it is unlikely that investments in bicycle paths, urban aesthetics, green spaces, and local cultural infrastructures – although entirely desirable for their own sake – will suddenly make Timmins, Sydney, or Grand Falls, NL, magnets for the creative class, however defined. More to the point, there is little statistical evidence of a positive relationship between a community’s share of cultural workers (and other creative types) and that community’s subsequent growth. ­Olfert and Partridge (2011), looking at data from 1981 to 2006, fail to find a consistent relationship for Canadian communities. For nonmetropolitan communities in the United States, McGranaham et al. (2011) do observe a positive relationship, but one that disappears once natural amenity variables (mountains, water, sunshine ...) are entered into the equation, raising once again problems of circular causation, or endogeneity, in the language of econometrics. Stated



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differently, if sun, surf, and mountains are attractive to young “creative” professionals – not exactly an earthshaking discovery – what is the true explanatory variable? Is it the “creative” attributes of the individuals coming in or the natural attributes that attracted them in the first place? There is not much communities can do about their geography, bringing us back to the harsh reality of Canada. The role of natural (or built) amenities in attracting and holding “creative” types is also a useful reminder of the pitfalls of transposing ideas developed in particular contexts (big cities, the Sunbelt, etc.) to other quite divergent contexts. Perhaps some communities on the BC Pacific Coast or in the BC interior (the Okanagan, the Kootenays ...) can hope to build an economic base founded on the attractive power of their natural setting, but they are a small minority in Canada. It is unlikely that quality-of-life-based strategies – no matter how inherently laudable and appreciated by local residents – can succeed in altering the economic fundamentals of places like Timmins, Sydney, and Grand Falls, NL. f r o m n at i o n a l t o l o c a l : c o m m u n i t y e c o n o m i c development

A parallel school of thought has come to dominate the policy landscape over the last three decades. Anchored in a bottom-up perspective, it can include a fairly wide range of strategies, which I shall group under the general heading of “community economic development” (CED). The term “local” can replace “community”; but the underlying philosophy is the same. The creation in the late 1980s of Canada’s four Regional Development Agencies (RDAs), since expanded to six and alluded to earlier, has its roots in this school of thought.12 CED, as an alternative economic growth strategy, arose in part in reaction to failed smokestack-chasing strategies and taxpayer handouts, an entirely understandable reaction to plant closures and relocations, plants that had not so long ago been the beneficiaries of government assistance. The various plant closures mentioned in the introduction are typical examples. All, to our knowledge, were controlled by outside interests. The unhappy paper mill in Grand Falls, NL, was, for example, the property of Abitibi-Bowater, headquartered in Montreal. Plants controlled by outside interests are inherently

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fickle. Thus, the obvious conclusion: the only truly reliable foundations of sustained economic growth are local, based on the community’s strengths, know-how, and ability to nurture home-grown businesses. After all, who but the locals are best equipped to identify local investment and growth opportunities? Back in the 1970s when the idea first became popular, CED was also the natural corollary of the “small is beautiful” movement (Schumacher 1973) and the accompanying mantra that small businesses were the fountainheads of economic growth, a perspective still very much alive today. It is difficult to argue with the value of public polices that seek to facilitate start-ups and help small business grow. Qualities that are generally associated with successful CED strategies are strong local leadership, public-private partnerships, and collaboration between local stakeholders. CED-based strategies can cover a wide range of activities, everything from advocacy, organization, and networking to individual counselling, plus different types of financial support: seed money (usually small amounts), loan guarantees, loans (generally on a last-recourse basis), infrastructure support, and so on. The vehicles by which such aid is delivered can also vary greatly. The focus is on “local” and on “community”; however, this means that the organizational structures are generally hybrid in conjunction, for example, involving the local chamber of commerce, although funding will generally be largely public (from senior levels of government, provincial or federal). The most common form is a non-profit organization, duly incorporated, with the mandate to promote local economic development. Whatever the organizational structure, the underlying assumption is that the community will in the end succeed, if it can get its act together. The ultimate source of success lies at home. Canada, like the United States, has seen a veritable flowering of local development corporations of all stripes and shades since the 1980s. Every province has its alphabet soup of organizations. Quebec has its Community Futures Development Corporations (CFDCs), Community Business Development Corporations (CBDCs), and Centres Locuaux de Développement (CLDs). The principal source of funding for the first two is Ottawa through its Quebec RDA (déc) and the provincial government for the latter, testimony that in Quebec we like to do things twice.13 Local development corporations have continued to ­ multiply, accompanied by the predictable rhetoric on the virtues of



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community-­­based economic development. The reasons behind the continued popularity of CED are not difficult to understand. The concept appeals to both sides of the political spectrum. On the left, the bottom-up philosophy of community-based development conjures up all kinds of positive vibes. Local development corporations so inclined will stress community organization, solidarity, poverty reduction, and social objectives. Those on the right are drawn to the small-business and entrepreneurial ethos implicit in CED. It sends the message that the responsibility for success (or failure) resides primarily with the community, not with the state, which also makes it attractive to senior levels of government. The role of government is essentially limited to funding, leaving the daily workings of economic development programs to the locals who are, one hopes, pleased to be administering such funds (with the hoped-for electoral payoffs). Again, please do not misunderstand me. I am not suggesting the local development corporations are not doing valuable work. I have seen local development officers at work in Quebec, Atlantic Canada, and Northern Ontario. I can testify that all – certainly those I have met – are tireless workers in the service of their communities, cajoling, advising, and generally doing everything possible (within the limits of the respective programs) to help aspiring entrepreneurs succeed. The tools at their disposal have generally been adequate, at least this has been my reading, although, as one might expect, calls for more funding have been common or, alternatively, calls for greater leeway in the use and/or approval thresholds of existing funds. One of the virtues of the locally administered programs funded by federal RDAs is that they cover a wide array of policy tools, continually up-dated, that with a minimum of imagination can, in most cases, be adapted to local conditions. As I have often been reminded, a truly promising, well-presented project (business plan) will always find funding. It’s not as if Canada’s financial institutions lacked funds. One of the functions of local development corporations is precisely to steer aspiring entrepreneurs to the appropriate institutions and programs. By the same token, most local development officers spend considerable time and energy promoting networks, cooperation, and business relationships in general. In the communities I have visited, networking was certainly not the problem. After having observed several local development corporations at work, I am honestly at loss to imagine what more they could do.

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Why then are some communities continuing to decline and why do unemployment rates remain stubbornly above the national level (recall figures 9.2 and 9.3)? The answer, as with so many apparently “simple” solutions, is that CED looks only at one side of the story: local enterprise and community action. Of course, local leadership, cooperation, and entrepreneurial drive are positive qualities, to be promoted and encouraged. But that is only half the story, if indeed it is part of the story at all. I would argue that all communities in Canada have comparable proportions of locals with leadership qualities and private and public actors committed to the betterment of their communities. The problem is rarely community lethargy. The inhabitants of the Acadian Peninsula or of Cape Breton are not congenitally less entrepreneurial than Torontonians. Indeed, I would venture that in those places the level of community commitment and personal drive is often higher than elsewhere, precisely because the challenges are so great. The problem, in the end, can be summed in a phrase often repeated to me by local development officers: “the problem is not a lack of good people (potential entrepreneurs) but of good projects.” It would be nice if geographic and economic fundamentals could be transformed by community commitment and positive thinking alone. They are, I repeat, certainly desirable traits, but they can go only so far. Grand Falls will always be smaller and more distant from markets than Toronto (or any community in southern Ontario). Investment opportunities will always be less in some places than others. Local start-ups and projects that fail hardly send out encouraging signals to aspiring local entrepreneurs. News travels fast in small communities. As economists are wont to say, these are “market signals.” The local entrepreneurs I have met during my field visits were to a person acutely aware of the handicaps under which they were working. In not a few cases, they openly admitted that that they would do better if they were located elsewhere, in a larger urban area or closer to markets. But they stayed because they were committed to their community (and good for them for doing so). The fact remains, however: no amount of commitment and entrepreneurial drive will alter the relative chances of success of starting up a business in Cape Breton compared to doing so in Toronto. Local development organizations may help to improve the odds somewhat, but even the most generous (those with the deepest public pockets) will not long support a business venture that in the end does not turn a profit.



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A Brief Parenthesis on the Intrusive Rentier Syndrome In Canada, many communities face a particular challenge that further hampers the effectiveness of CED-based development strategies. In Polèse and Shearmur (2002), my colleague Richard Shearmur and I introduced the concept of the Intrusive Rentier Syndrome to help explain why many local resource-based economies in Quebec and Atlantic Canada have consistently failed to diversify into other industries. The idea is fairly straightforward; it is a regional adaptation of what economists call the Dutch Disease, with reference to the epoch when the Dutch guilder (before the euro) was suddenly driven up in value following the discovery of North Sea oil, undermining the international competitiveness of Dutch merchandise and service exports. All of Canada is, arguably, currently in the grips of the Dutch Disease with a dollar whose value is determined not so much by the competitiveness of its firms as by the price of oil, driving up the value of the Canadian dollar beyond what objective productivity figures would warrant. But my focus here is on the regional version of the Dutch Disease. The term “rentier” refers to firms, generally large and highly capitalized, that are able to earn a premium (a “rent” in economic parlance) owing to a particularly rich local resource, be it trees, hydro power, oil, or something else. In Eastern Canada, large paper mills, aluminum plants, and smelters are typical examples. They are “intrusive” (no insult intended; this is economic shorthand) because they drive up local wages, undermine the competiveness of other sectors, and create a mindset that is not necessarily conducive to business startups and innovation. Much of the evidence is admittedly impressionistic. However, local resource-based economies have, as a rule, found it more difficult than others to nurture business start-ups in export industries outside the high-wage resource sector, leaving communities continually vulnerable to fluctuations in international demand with successive booms and busts, a typically Canadian conundrum. The effects of the intrusive rentier syndrome will often linger long after the resource base has disappeared. While the boom lasts (as currently in Alberta) the local economy is essentially pricing itself out of the market for non-resource industries. Why start up a computer chip plant (for US markets) in Calgary? The plant operator must incur not only incur high transport costs but also higher wages and real estate prices than are incurred elsewhere. Come the i­nevitable

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bust – recall the closing of mines and paper mills cited at the outset of this chapter – the expectations and work habits acquired during the time when the paper mill or mine was in full swing will continue to shape the mindset of the community. Anyone who has visited the Sydney-Glace Bay area will know what I mean. During field visits, this was sometimes referred to as the “lunch box” mentality: father and son expecting to work in a large firm at relatively high wages with the associated employment benefits. It is difficult to begrudge such work expectations. But this hardly makes for an environment in which CED-based strategies are likely to succeed. None of this will come as a surprise to informed readers and hardened economic development officers. They know that no magic pill exists for turning troubled communities around. Local economic development is a messy affair by its very nature, which is perhaps self-evident. The power of locally initiated policies to change the relative standing of communities is even more limited than that of senior governments. However, the long history of economic development strategies contains a powerful message: nothing really changes if all places adopt similar strategies, which is a reason why policies driven by academic fads in the end generally have little visible impact. If all communities engage in currently fashionable people-chasing policies (sprucing up their downtowns, supporting cultural infrastructures, and so on), their relative standing will remain unchanged. And in any spending contest the rich (or big) will always be able to outspend the poor (or small). Toronto and Montreal will always be able to put more money into symphony orchestras and green spaces than Timmins and Gaspé. w h y i t d o e s n ’ t m at t e r

In the end it doesn’t really matter that regional development policies (federal, provincial, or local) are largely ineffective in fundamentally changing the spatial trajectory of economic development. It doesn’t matter for two reasons: (1) their effectiveness is in any case impossible to measure, and (2) they are unavoidable and – I shall argue – a positive component of the larger economic and social policy tool kit of modern democratic societies. I shall begin with the first. No methodology exists for rigorously measuring the impact of regional development policies. This is not unique to regional develop-



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ment but common to all policies whose impacts are diffuse and for which causality is difficult to prove. We have observed (recall figures 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3) that regional policies do not seem to have had any visible impact on broad regional trends, which has led most economists to conclude that they are ineffective. This conclusion is not entirely warranted. As is often the case in the social sciences, it is impossible to apply clinical and experimental methodologies that rigorously establish causality. Economists and others have no choice but to fall back on statistical relationships from which one can, hopefully, “deduce” causality; but the relationship is never entirely direct. Even if a statistically significant relationship were to be found between, say, federal dollars spent per capita in a region and lower unemployment rates, this would not allow one to state definitively that the former “caused” the latter. The true cause might well lie elsewhere. The analyst cannot do an experimental control run – that is, study the situation without the aforementioned federal spending – to see how unemployment rates would have behaved in its absence. More to the point, we lack the tools for rigorously measuring the development impacts of local development organizations, a continuing headache for federal RDAs and local economic corporations in general. No method exits for rigorously verifying whether jobs purportedly “created” by regional development spending would not have emerged anyway or whether the businesses helped would not have succeeded regardless. Again, we cannot do a controlled study to see what would have happened in the absence of public support. The problem is amplified by the natural tendency of all parties to overstate impacts: the entrepreneur will of course say that financial aid is essential to his (or her) success; the economic development officer, by the same token, has every reason to report that the firm’s success (for example, jobs “created”) was a direct outcome of public support, and so on. Such assertions are difficult to contradict, but neither can they be proven. The predictable corollary of this fuzziness is a never-ending debate surrounding public accountability, which in Canada often pits federal RDAs and similar programs against the auditor general14 and the Privy Council. “Misunderstanding” would perhaps be more appropriate than “debate.” The auditor general, with an accountant’s perspective, wants measurable outputs. Politicians and senior civil servants ideally would like the same thing. In the public administration apparatus, the result has been a philosophy – still very much in

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vogue at the time of writing – founded on so-called Results-BasedManagement (RBM). Agencies and departments are asked to report quantifiable results, which a priori seems entirely logical. Public agencies must of course be held accountable and hard results measured where possible. But in the case of RDAs and many other programs, the result (sorry for the pun) has often been a succession of largely useless reports with performance indicators (outputs, outcomes, results ...) that do not adequately convey what services are really being delivered and that in my opinion betray a misunderstanding of why regional economic development programs exist, which brings me to my final point. Regional development programs exist because they meet a perceived need. As long as employment opportunities are unevenly distributed across the land and as long as disappearing jobs and community decline is a problem that continues to haunt certain parts of Canada (which seems a certainty), voters will understandably look to senior levels of government to do something. Whether that something succeeds in reversing economic trends is immaterial, if only (as explained earlier) because causal links are impossible to verify. By the same token, the fact that communities continue to decline cannot be used as proof that regional development programs are not delivering useful services. Perhaps things would have gone even worse without them, but that, of course, cannot be demonstrated either. Senior governments cannot simply walk away, even if they would like to. The current Conservative government, previously a vocal critic of regional policy, has expanded the number of RDAs, as noted earlier. By their presence in communities, local economic development organizations are a signal that senior governments are not indifferent to the fate of troubled communities, which in itself serves a valuable function. All that can be asked of local development organizations is that they deliver the most useful possible services – in support of local entrepreneurs – given current know-how. In ending, let me repeat my conviction that they are indeed doing useful things on the ground to promote economic development. Consequently, it can be argued (but, again, not proven) that collectively – through their presence in hundreds of communities across the land – they have had a positive impact, even though they have visibly not succeeded in significantly altering regional economic trends.



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notes

  1 European regions whose GDP per capita falls 25 percent (or more) below the UE average are eligible for special aid covering a broad range of economic development programs.   2 The author’s calculations; sources are BEA (online); Statistics Canada (periodic).   3 The four regions are “Economic Regions” as defined by the Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey, the source for figures 9.2 and 9.3 (Statistics Canada Annual). For easier reading, the names of three regions were changed. Thus, Notre Dame–Central Bonavista Bay = Central Newfoundland; Campbellton–Miramichi = Northeast NB; Gaspésie-Îles-de-la-­ Madeleine = The Gaspé.   4 For an in-depth analysis of the economics of peripheral regions in Eastern Canada, see Polèse and Shearmur (2002).   5 For a parallel perspective on the rise and fall of growth poles, see Parr (1999, 1999a).   6 See Polèse (2009, 33–49) for a non-technical explanation of agglomeration economies.   7 This is not strictly accurate, because interregional input-output tables have been developed in some cases. However, these did not yet exist at the time of Perroux’s work. Statistics Canada has developed such a table linking Canada’s ten provinces and territories, but this remains a spatially very aggregate level, of little use for pinpointing the impact of investments for specific communities.   8 Respectively, Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Développement économique Canada pour les regions du Québec, and the Federal Economic Development Agency for Northern Ontario. The latter, to my knowledge, does have the full status of a federal department.   9 Respectively, Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario; Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency. 10 Webometrics ranks Cornell as the tenth best university in the world, ahead of any European University: www.webometrics.info/index.html. 11 As an aside, Richard Florida was invited to speak on two recent occasions by the Montreal Board of Trade and affiliated associations at which the author had the pleasure of being present. 12 The author plead guilty to being an early proponent (Coffey and Polèse 1984)

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13 As another aside, in Quebec the boards of directors of the federally and the provincially funded local development corporations are sometimes made up of largely the same people, especially in small communities, and housed in the same building. Depending on who is visiting during any week – the federal or the provincial minister – the appropriately coloured flag will be toted out. 14 An example is the 1995 auditor general’s report, for which I acted as a consultant and from which I draw the following quote (my translation from the French): “The FBRD (Q) ... had few relevant and useful indicators for monitoring the key outputs of its programs and for making periodic evaluations. The information given Parliament is insufficient for it to evaluate whether the Department has fulfilled its legislative and operational obligations.” Report of the Auditor General of Canada to the House of Commons. Chapter 19 – Federal Bureau for Regional Development (Quebec). Ottawa, November 1995, 19. Note: FBRD (Q) is the former name of the current RDA.

references

BEA (on line). Bureau of Economic Analysis, US Deptartment of Commerce. www.bea.doc.gov/bea/regional. Boudeville, J. 1972. Aménagement du territoire et polarisation. Génin: Paris. Barro, R.J, and Sala-i-Martin X. 1995. Economic Growth. 2d ed. New York: McGraw Hill. Coffey, W.J., and M. Polèse. 1984. “The Concept of Local Development: A Stages Model of Endogenous Regional Growth.” Papers of the Regional Science Association 55:1–12. Coulombe, S. 2007. “Globalization and Regional Disparity : A Canadian Case Study.” Regional Studies 41 (1) : 1–17. – 2000 “New Evidence of Convergence across Canadian Provinces: The Role of Urbanisation.” Regional Studies 34 (8): 713–25. Florida, R. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, and Everyday Life. Basic Books: New York. – 2002a. “Bohemia and Economic Geography.” Journal of Economic Geography 2 (1) Friedmann, J. 1972. “A General Theory of Polarized Development.” In N. Hansen, Growth Centers and Regional Economic Development. Free Press: New York.



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– 1966. Regional Development Policy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Garlick, S., G. Davies, M. Polèse, and F. Kitagawa. 2007. Supporting the Contribution of Higher Education Institutions to Regional Development – Atlantic Canada. Paris: OECD. www.oecd.org/dataoecd/35/59/ 38455547.pdf. Glaeser, E.L. 2005. “Review of Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class.” Regional Science and Urban Economics 35 (5): 593–6. – 1994. “Cities, Information, and Economic Growth.” Cityscape 1 (1): 9–77. Glaeser, E.L., and A. Saiz. 2003. “The Rise of the Skilled City.” Discussion paper no. 2025, Harvard Institute of Economic Research. http://post. economics.harvard.edu/hier/paper_list.html. Hall, P. 2000. “Creative Cities and Economic Development.” Urban ­Studies 37, no. 4: 639–49. Henderson, V. 2003. “Marshall’s Scale Economies.” Journal of Urban ­Economics 53:1–28. Higgins, B. 1971. “Pôles de croissance et pôles de développement comme concepts opérationnels, Revue européenne des sciences sociales.” 24:89–108. Higgins, B., F. Martin, and A. Raynauld. 1970. Les orientations du développement économique régional dans la province de Québec. Ottawa: Department of Regional Economic Expansion. Hirschman, A.O. 1958. The Strategy of Economic Development. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Isard, W. 1959. Industrial Complex Analysis and Regional Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jacobs, Jane. 1969. The Economy of Cities. Vintage: New York. McGranahan, D., T. Wojan, and D. Lambert. 2011. “The Rural Growth Trifecta: Outdoor Amenities, the Creative Class and Entrepreneurial Context.” Journal of Economic Geography 11:529–57. Markusen, A., and G. Schrock. 2006. “The Artistic Dividend: Urban Artistic Specialization and Economic Development Implications.” Urban Studies 43 (10): 1661–86. Olfert, M.R., and M. Partridge. 2011. “Creating the Cultural Community: Ethnic Diversity vs Agglomeration.” Spatial Economic Analysis 6 (1): 25–55. Parr, J. 1999. “Growth-pole Strategies in Regional Economic Development Planning: A Retrospective View. Part 1, Origins and Advocacy.” Urban Studies 36 (7): 1195–1215.

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– 1999a. “Growth-pole Strategies in Regional Economic Development Planning: A Retrospective View. Part 2. Implementation and Outcome.’’ Urban Studies 36 (8): 1247–68. Perroux, F. 1955. “Note sur la notion de pôle de croissance.” Économie appliquée, 1–2 (January–June). Polèse, M. 2009. “The Wealth and Poverty of Regions: Why Cities Matter.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Polèse, M., and R. Shearmur. 2003. “ R.I.P-H.M.R : À propos du concept de pôle de développement et des stratégies de développement économique des régions québécoises.” Canadian Journal of Regional Science 26 (1): 66–86. – 2002. The Periphery in the Knowledge-Based Economy: The Spatial Dynamics of the Canadian Economy and the Future of Non-­ Metropolitan Regions in Quebec and the Atlantic Provinces. Montreal: INRS, and Moncton: CIRRD. www.ucs.inrs.ca. Porter, M. 2000. “Location, Competition, and Economic Development: Local Clusters in the Global Economy.” Economic Development Quarterly 14 (1): 15–34. – 1998. “Clusters and the New Economics of Competition.” Harvard Business Review 76 (6): 77–90. Puga, D. 1999. “The Rise and Fall of Regional Inequalities.” European Economic Review 43(2): 303–34. Savoie, D. 2006. Visiting Grandchildren: Economic Development in the Maritimes. University of Toronto Press. – 2001. Pulling against Gravity: Economic Development in New Brunswick during the McKenna Years. Montreal: IRRP. – 1997. Rethinking Canada’s Regional Development Policy: An Atlantic Perspective. Moncton: Canadian Institute for Research on Regional Development. – 1986. Regional Economic Development: Canada’s Search for Solutions. University of Toronto Press. Shearmur, R. 2007. “The New Knowledge Aristocracy: A Few Thoughts on the Creative Class, Mobility, and Urban Growth.” Work, Organization, and Labour 1 (1): 31–47. Shearmur, R., and M. Polèse. 2007. “Do Local Factors Explain Local Employment Growth? Evidence from Canada, 1971–2001.” Regional Studies 41 (4): 453–71. Schumacher, E.F. 1973. Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered. New York: Harper (paperback edition, 1989).



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10 Revisiting Grandchildren: Building Regions in the Maritimes j a m e s b i c k e rt o n

In 2006, Donald Savoie published Visiting Grandchildren: Economic Development in the Maritimes, the last of his many books on regional development. As Canada’s pre-eminent authority on regional development policies, Savoie’s scholarly contributions have included numerous articles, book chapters, and book-length studies on a wide range of topics pertinent to regional development, including intergovernmental relations in this area (Savoie 1986, 1992), the design and functioning of particular federal programs or agencies (Savoie 1981, 2000), and the economic development efforts of particular provinces and political actors (Savoie 2001). He also has produced comparative studies (1990; Higgins and Savoie, 1997) and government-invited reports (1987, 1990, 2003, 2005), and he has undertaken frequent “interventions” in the form of policy and political commentaries. visiting grandchildren

Visiting Grandchildren is a title taken from then federal opposition leader Stephen Harper’s 2004 comment that the Maritimes some day would be “less a place where you visit your grandparents and more a place where you visit your grandchildren” (Savoie 2006, x). Savoie’s objectives for the book were several: to foster a greater understanding of the economic challenges facing the region, to promote greater public debate, to provide public policy prescriptions, and to encourage new research. Though unstinting in its praise for individual leaders who have initiated or supported efforts to reduce



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regional disparities in economic growth and prosperity over the years, Visiting Grandchildren is unsparing in its criticism of political and bureaucratic structures and processes that have resisted or frustrated these efforts. The general argument is that the present economic situation of the Maritime provinces, while partially attributable to accidents of geography and history and partially due to the region’s own shortcomings in failing to pursue some of the measures that would help to address its problems, is primarily a product of national policies, national policy-making mechanisms, and federal political institutions. Simply put, in both their design and their operation the latter have been unresponsive, insensitive, or hostile to the economic needs and circumstances of the Maritimes. The basic foundation of Savoie’s thinking on the negative role of the Canadian state in the history of Maritime development is presented in the form of a series of linked propositions. First, the key to explaining differences in regional economic performance is the degree of regional integration into wider systems. According to Savoie, this would normally permit a long-run “ratchet effect” over time, whereby diverse regions took turns at high growth, with the slow-growth region of one period becoming the high-growth region of the next. Inter alia, to reduce disparities between the economy of the Maritimes and those of central Canada and the northeastern United States, the Maritimes must be better integrated into the national and cross-border economies. Second, state policies are just as important as the market in determining both the degree and the various forms of regional integration into larger economic, social, and political systems. Third, the Canadian state for the past century or more has blocked or thwarted the full integration of the Maritimes into the national economy, primarily by imposing a policy framework and discrete economic and industrial policies perceived and defined as “national” by political and bureaucratic policy-­makers, while in fact being concerned almost exclusively with the vitality and competitiveness of Canada’s dominant economic region (the Windsor-Quebec City corridor and, more particularly, the TorontoMontreal-Ottawa nexus) (Savoie 2007, 14). This problem of regional development thwarted by a particular national governance structure is a systemic one, fixable only through systemic reforms, rather than the efforts (however well-intended) of particular or stand-alone agencies, policies, and programs. That Savoie arrives at this conclusion after a long career of studying and

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critiquing these state intiatives reveals a fairly profound level of frustration and disappointment with their limited impact. Accordingly, he thinks more fundamental institutional reform is required to finally bring an end to the Canadian state’s complicity in the historic pattern of uneven regional development. Barring such reform – concerning the likelihood of which Savoie is not optimistic – the region should seek more political, fiscal, and bureaucratic autonomy from Ottawa. Though Visiting Grandchildren is not explicit about exactly how a strategy of greater autonomy for the region would be put into effect or to what purposes it would be put, there are some indications of Savoie’s thinking on these matters in his recommendations regarding a long-term regional development strategy for the Maritimes. He suggests that the Maritimes should seek to disengage from the system of transfer payments that currently keeps it in thrall to the federal status quo. The system of social transfers merely discourages needed adjustments within the region by fostering a dependency mindset that dis-incentivizes internal reforms and sustains conditions that discourage an upwelling of endogenous entrepreneurialism, as well as a sustained inflow of exogenous investment. This advocacy of greater “marketization” in the form of lower wages and taxes, smaller government, and further regional integration (if not outright political union) is a contentious, provocative, and to date politically unattractive position. Yet it is easily possible to imagine future scenarios where governments within the region might be forced to embrace at least some version of it; moreover, a general political distaste for it does not by itself render it incorrect or wrong-headed from a development point of view. In this connection, it seems worthwhile to propose an alternative perspective on regional development processes in the Maritimes. Rethinking both “region” and “development” is a logical place to start. These are complex, multi-dimensional, and contested concepts, and how we define and understand them necessarily will affect both the spatial and the policy parameters of any inquiry into regional development. As well, the role of integration, institutions, and identities in regional development – given a somewhat monochromatically negative interpretation in Visiting Grandchildren – can be revisited and reinterpreted to suggest a more complicated history and mixed set of outcomes than those proposed by Savoie. Finally, this revised interpretive framework can be applied to the ­development history of



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two sub-regions within the Maritimes – Acadia and Cape ­Breton – in order to demonstrate its utility for constructing an alternative development narrative, especially with regard to the role of the ­Canadian state. region

How should the region be conceptualized from a development point of view? To begin, it is a geographical space. But beyond that there are many meanings that have been attached to it and many approaches used to understand it. According to Keating, it may relate to an identity; it often has a cultural element; it may sustain a distinct society and a range of social institutions. It can be an economic unit or a unit of government and administration. And all these meanings may coincide, to a greater or lesser degree (2004, xi). As a concept both simple and highly ambiguous, the region is often a contested area territorially and functionally. “Spatially, it exists between the national and the local and is the scene of intervention by actors from all ­levels, national, local, regional, and now supranational. Functionally, it is a space in which different types of agency interact and – especially when it is weakly institutionalized – a terrain of competition among them” (Keating 1997, 17). While frequently used when referring to intermediate levels of political representation or governance, it may be demarcated not by political boundaries but by particular cultural or economic characteristics. The latter use of the term denotes “a territorial entity having some natural and organic unity or community of interest that is independent of political and administrative boundaries” (Stevenson 1980, 17). Not surprisingly, then, social scientists define region using different criteria, which led Simeon to argue that “regions are simply containers and how we draw the boundaries around them depends entirely on what our purposes are: it is an a priori question, determined by theoretical needs or political purposes” (1977, 293). Since the concept of region is so malleable, political entrepreneurs have sought to shape the definition of region to reflect their values and interests (Keating 1997, 17). So, while we can continue to say with some assurance that the concept of region is closely associated with territorial space, it also must be understood as a social, economic, and political construction. In this sense, region is the historical work of human actors and actions. Regions are

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not static, unchanging, and geographically determined; they are the continuous creation of human history, the product of complex interactions. Following from this, a region can be defined as a social construction within a territorial boundary. It is a territorial entity distinct from either the local or the nation-state level that constitutes an economic, political, administrative, and/or cultural space within which different types of human agency interact and toward which individuals and communities form attachments and identities. Regionalism is the manifestation of values, attitudes, opinions, preferences, claims, behaviours, interests, and/or attachments that can be associated with a particular region. The strength and cohesiveness of a region and its associated regionalism – the political and social salience of regional attachment and identity  – will vary according to the extent of its organic unity, community of interest, and degree of institutionalization. Regions exist alongside and are nested within other regions and nations (and sometimes supra-national collectivities), and these various levels of territorial affiliation and identity are often complementary or mutually reinforcing, but they may also be competitive, or even antagonistic. The character of inter-regional relationships depends on factors that include institutional and fiscal arrangements, redistributive policies, economic linkages, cultural factors, historical grievances, and so on; factors that are dynamic and subject to change over time. uneven regional development

Development, like region, is a concept fraught with complexity and multiple meanings (which are sometimes contradictory). First and foremost, it must be understood as a historical process whose meaning at any point cannot be abstracted from historical processes without an attendant loss of understanding of the myriad reciprocal relationships that co-determine development. Attempts to define development as a predetermined set of economic factors and conditions divorced from their context in space and time – for instance by narrowing its focus to a few variables that can be directly related to economic growth – empties the concept of much of its meaning. Development is, in fact, a much broader and more complex process than this, denoting structural change and possessing a qualitative dimension. Recognizing this, the Atlantic Provinces Economic



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Council has defined it as “a process by which all members of society gain access to an expanding number of opportunities for personal and collective growth” (APEC 1973, 8). To be even more specific, development can be defined as an ongoing historical process that advances a society toward inclusive access to a broad and expanding range of goods and services and the opportunity for all individuals to fully realize their own human capacities and potentials within a sustainable physical and social environment conducive to a high quality of life. A process of development, then, hinges on the growth of economic production and consumption, as well as diversification, technological innovation, and structural changes in the economy. However, the process of development is by no means limited to this economic dimension and cannot continue to advance without other actors and relationships besides those directly associated with a capitalist market economy. In broad terms these other actors and relationships, which interact reciprocally with the economy and each other, can be grouped into the categories of “state” and “civil society.” The state is understood here as the complex of governing institutions that imposes order upon, and rule over, sovereign territorial units, constituting an interrelated set of actors without which the economy could not exist and with which it perpetually interacts. Civil society refers to the citizenry, acting both as rights-bearing individuals and through groups, associations, and social networks. Over time, the size, complexity, and overall impact of civil society on both the state and the economy has grown through extended protections and entitlements for citizens and through enhanced means and mechanisms for interest representation and identity formation. Development is a highly uneven process across both space and time. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the industrializing states of the Western world were transformed by the political, social, and economic integration produced by the sweeping changes associated with the consolidation of nation-states, bureaucratic modernization, and industrial development. Diverse regions at uneven levels of development were incorporated into these emergent national political economies, though not on equal terms. Location, initial resource endowments, transportation links, the population base, and previous rounds of investment in productive capacity and infrastructure were all relevant factors in determining the advantages or disadvantages accruing to regions in subsequent phases of

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growth and development. The migration of labour to ­growing urban and industrial centres and the stimulus this gave to new rounds of investment produced agglomeration effects that reinforced the initial advantages of some regions while draining capital and human resources from others, leading to their further differentiation ­(Massey 1978). Politics and state policy have played a central role in all this. National politicians initiated, planned, and supervised the incorporation of lands and peoples into consolidated nation states. It was through politics that the policy frameworks that supported and directed national development were installed and maintained, legitimized with nationalist visions, symbols, and rhetoric, and broadly supported on the basis of the promise of security and economic prosperity. Regionalist resistance to this process was encountered, though confined for the most part to periodic episodes of political contestation through social movements or regional political parties. In the postwar era of economic expansion and relatively full employment, the residents of less-developed regions generally benefited, like other citizens, from the redistribution of income enabled by progressive tax systems and the public provision of basic health and social services. Economic growth and social spending did alleviate poverty, while equalization schemes in federal states like Canada contributed to the standardization of public services across regions. Important though these redistributive mechanisms were, they did not eliminate regional disparities in economic growth, per capita income, and unemployment rates. In short, it is not surprising that uneven regional development has been a feature of Canada’s development process; it would be more surprising if it were not. However, the chronic and long-term nature of the disparities that have differentiated the Maritimes as a region represents a particular form of uneven spatial development that has attracted the focused analysis of scholars like Donald Savoie and others who both preceded him and followed in his wake. We can now turn our attention to the key themes and issues addressed by Savoie in his examination of economic development in the Maritimes. While acknowledging the risk of oversimplification, these themes and issues can be compressed into three categories: integration, institutions, and identities.



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Integration Integration is crucial to economic development in terms of regional access to and participation in national and international markets. Historically, Savoie argues (in line with many regional historians) that the Maritimes were initially drawn into a national market after Confederation (and away from the international markets within which they had previously been active) through national transportation and tariff policies. Subsequently, however, their access to this market was severely limited by changes in these same national policies, as well as by other state actions and non-actions deemed by Savoie to be regionally discriminatory. Denuded of capital and skilled labour and hobbled by a disadvantageous location within the Canadian market, a significant development gap soon separated the Maritime region from the rest of Canada, and this gap has yet to be closed. Savoie’s prescription (though perhaps now a lament) is that full economic integration of the region has required and continues to require long-term government initiatives that recognize this regional history and incorporate the regional perspective in their design and operation and by doing so effectively address regional economic needs and potentials. Incomplete national integration under terms that were biased against regional economic prospects was fundamentally problematic because the Maritimes had effectively traded – for the presumed security and opportunities of provincial status – the autonomy to pursue other prospective modes of integration into markets outside the region. Viewed in historical perspective, the question of whether Confederation was an astute choice of development path is no longer a vexing one for most Maritimers. However, the argument is still to be made (as Savoie so effectively does) that integration into the national market could have occurred in a different fashion, to the greater benefit of all. In any event, beyond this question there are other perspectives on the integration question that should also enter into a comprehensive analysis and assessment of regional development, and these perspectives are less rooted in historical grievance. They concern, first, the postwar political and social integration of the Maritimes into a national development context and, second, the terms and conditions of the even more recent integration of the region into a global economy.

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Development, as previously discussed, is a multi-dimensional historical process that goes well beyond the growth of production and consumption to encompass a wide range of other societal values and conditions such as democracy, stability, social equity, inclusion, and sustainability. These values are interrelated with economic growth, and arguably, in whole or in part, they are prerequisites for ­sustained economic growth, rather than a simple by-product of economic growth or considerations that stand apart from the historical process of development. The social integration of Maritimers into the national development context occurred particularly in the postwar period with the creation of national social programs that embodied a significant measure of redistribution and extended citizenship to include a degree of social as well as political and legal equality. As well, income security, health and education services, and other social measures were an essential part of the Canadian state’s response to (and facilitation of) the transformation of Canada’s economy to an urban, service-based, and consumer-driven one dependent on a large middle class and primarily mental as opposed to manual labour. Political integration was enhanced by the constitutional entrenchment and extension of citizen rights in 1982. Not only did this increase stability and cohesion by strengthening the court system as a national institution and providing Canadians with an overarching citizenship based on rights, survey data suggests that it also significantly strengthened Canadians’ sense of national community and identity. The economic, social, and political benefits that accrued to Maritimers from this pattern of social and political integration may not be as clearly measurable as national or regional economic growth, but they are no less real or essential to the overall development process. There were also development implications arising from another aspect of the terms of political integration of the Maritimes. The Canadian federal system provided provinces with considerable autonomy based on constitutionally protected jurisdiction over important areas of public policy and government activity. These areas included provision of social services and an important role in economic development, especially through provincial ownership and control over Crown lands and natural resources and regulatory powers associated with jurisdiction over property and civil rights. However, over the course of much of Canadian history these extensive provincial powers proved to be a less than optimal development



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advantage from the point of view of the Maritimes. They enabled larger, more resource-rich provinces to pursue discrete provincial development strategies and to monopolize the associated economic, fiscal, and social benefits. With limited economic spread effects from resource development and a negligible role for the federal government in the areas of economic development, social provision, and wealth redistribution, widening regional economic disparities were more or less inevitable. This has been only partially countered in more recent decades by an expanded redistributive role for the federal government through interregional and interpersonal transfers and federal interventions to support the construction of economic infrastructure. In effect, the failure to adequately integrate the Maritimes economically and socially over the course of Canada’s first century can be attributed as much to the highly decentralized federal system – in other words, too much provincial autonomy, raising internal barriers to economic, social, and political integration – as it can to regionally discriminatory national policies and unresponsive national political institutions. Finally, what are the development implications of the current process of regional integration into the global economy? Two points are worth raising here. First, whatever the balance of positive and negative aspects of globalization for the Maritimes, it does represent a release for the region from a somewhat shielded but unfavourably structured national economic context. Under the regime ushered in by NAFTA of relatively free trade and investment within North America, economic growth in the Maritimes has become more closely tied to the region’s further integration with markets outside Canada, and particularly to New England and New York. Second, the terms and conditions under which this integration into global markets occurs are of crucial importance. If the region is to insert itself into the global economy and the international division of labour in a fashion that will have diffuse economic benefits for the populace, while generating relatively high wages and supporting a high standard of living, then governments – and especially the federal government – will have to continue the social and infrastructure investments that will support an economy that will need to compete on the basis of highquality human capital and knowledge-intensive economic activities. As an essential corollary, there will need to be a renewed national commitment to policies that promote inclusion, equity, and justice. It is this combination of policies that is most likely to support a

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development process that continues movement towards the opportunity for all to realize their human capacities and potentials, within a sustainable physical and social environment conducive to a high quality of life. Institutions Institutions are a central consideration for understanding both regions and development. Strong regions rely in large part on “institutional thickness” at the regional level and the design and operation of institutional hierarchies. Path dependency is also an important consideration here: the observation that decisions and choices are constrained by previous decisions and choices and likewise the observation that established institutions (a distillation of the norms and values embodied in past decisions and choices) have a powerful influence on both the conceptualization and resolution of problems (Keating, Loughlin, and Deschower 2003, 23). The institutions of Canadian federalism are territorially constituted, based on the division of the responsibilities and capacities of the state between the federal and provincial/territorial governments. As the only regions endowed with constitutionally entrenched state powers and revenue-­ raising capacities, including sovereign power over other regions within their territorial boundaries, provinces can be considered as the “uber-regions” of Canada, casting a powerful shadow of hierarchy over all other regions within their territory as well as limiting the reach and scope of federal government power. As described by Cairns, Canada’s provincial states have over time expanded their institutional presence, influence, and control within their bounded provincial societies, strengthening themselves as regional actors both internally and within the broader Canadian federation (Cairns 1977). That provinces are the primary representatives of regional interests in Canada is partly due to a constitutional design that confers a wide variety of exclusive powers and jurisdictions upon them. It also is due to national institutions that in their design are relatively impermeable to regional political forces, especially the forces of a peripheral region like the Maritimes. Without a national legislative body designed to represent regions in an equal or effective way, Parliament and national administrative structures, as persuasively argued by Savoie in Visiting Grandchildren, have generally defined



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and responded to national interests as a unitary state would: they tend to reflect the concerns and outlook of the heavily populated and economically dominant central regions. However, despite this fairly exclusive division of responsibilities between federal and provincial governments, there is still scope for considerable overlap, cooperation, and even the shifting of responsibilities and capacities between levels of government in Canada. Miller refers to the latter process as “rescaling” (Miller 2009, 53). For example, social services have been rescaled upward from the municipal to the provincial level out of concern for geographic and social equality in access to services; the provision of economic infrastructure has been variously rescaled from the provincial to the federal or from the municipal to the federal level as part of regional and urban development programs. On the other hand, social housing was rescaled from the federal to the provincial to the municipal level during a period of federal austerity and downloading of responsibility, with negative results for social equality and the problem of homelessness in major urban centres (Mahon, Andrew, and Johnson 2007). Since governance authority or capacity can be shifted among different levels in a nested hierarchy, rescaling becomes a process for empowering, or disempowering, particular groups, classes, or communities (Miller 2009, 57). The capacity of the Canadian federation to accommodate such shifts, usually without formal constitutional change, is clearly evident from Canadian history. Institutional flexibility has been central to addressing both national and regional problems and challenges, and in future it is likely to be even more central. Breaking down rigid hierarchies and policy silos, moving across the boundaries of formal government institutions, is the hallmark of the new, more open policy processes that are needed to cope with the increasing complexity and interconnection of societies. For development, different aspects of this multi-dimensional process have been and will continue to be best secured at different scales, within different territorial boundaries, and involving different sets of actors: local, regional, national, supranational, and global. Defining and engaging the optimal combination of actors and actions, policies and programs, rules and regulations, is necessarily a dynamic, messy, and iterative process. Strong and adaptive institutions that are more permeable, open, and networked, and less closely wedded to path dependency, are needed. This may also extend to creating new institutions at new

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scales of action when both politics and policy needs push persistently if not inexorably in this direction. Identities The theme of identities includes a number of issues related to regional development. They include but are not limited to culture, cooperation, and leadership. In Visiting Grandchildren, Savoie makes several critical observations on these matters with regard to the Maritimes. While the starting point for political regions is usually that they are institutionally based (endowed with administrative and political structures), their further “construction” usually involves bringing them into existence as “imagined communities” with regional identities able to sustain a continual process of regionbuilding and a vision around the theme of development (Keating, Loughlin, and Deschower 2003). In the Maritimes, as elsewhere in Canada, this process has been dominated by provinces. Strong identities, discrete political processes, entrenched bureaucracies, and myriad other institutions have made provinces the dominant territorial spaces and provincial governments the dominant actors in regional development. Interprovincial competition or benign disinterest, rather than cooperation, has been the norm within the Maritimes, even when the latter would clearly have been beneficial from the perspective of development strategies, policies, or programming. Despite a long shared history and many areas of shared interest, what seems to be lacking is a stronger sense of regional identity beyond the provincial level that would support closer and more sustained cooperation and other processes of institution-building. Savoie has also described provincial efforts to shape societal culture by creating more “entrepreneurial” societies (with mixed results). He further identifies a “dependency mindset” that militates against an “entrepreneurial culture” in the region. It is in this connection that he impugns Canada’s system of social transfers for maintaining wage rates and dependency ratios at higher levels than they would be otherwise. Finally, one additional negative observation on regional identity and culture concerns general attitudes in the Maritimes toward outsiders and immigrants. A strong sense of history and place and long-established family and community connections is a feature of Maritime life, but it can also be an ingredient in parochialism, insularity, and a certain closure toward newcomers.



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Or at least that is what has been argued by some as an explanation for a low level of immigration into the region and a low retention rate for immigrants who do come. It is both unclear whether this is an accurate portrayal of identity and culture in the region (for it is based on very slim evidence), and in any event how important a variable it is for development. There is a classic “chicken and egg” conundrum at work here for development theorists, whereby large urban metropolises attract most immigrants, who create enclave communities that are highly attractive to the succeeding waves of immigrants who join them. As well, there is no question that a steady influx of immigrants can contribute skills, capital, and additional consumer demand that can be a catalyst in regional development, but it can be a major factor only for the immigrant-­fueled economic growth models of polyethnic metropolises like Toronto or Vancouver, and it is certainly not the only route to economic prosperity. A final observation might be made about the tendency to equate an open-minded and intelligent society with one that enjoys a strong influx of immigrants, while other societies are left behind in the “development race.” One might question how apt this characterization is in the context of a globalized, information-rich environment where all societies that are exposed to and partake in this environment (as Maritimers like other Canadians do, given the widespread use of information and communication technologies) are not only increasingly aware of other cultures but culturally hybridized themselves. Certainly identities and cultures matter to development, not least because they provide a framework for collective action and a rationale for social cooperation. It is recognized that local identities rooted in distinct cultures can be an asset to development and a means of coping with globalization. In Europe and elsewhere traditional cultures – particularly a modernized tradition that sustains a vision of region while projecting a dynamic image  – have been revalorized coincident with the “rediscovery” of local and regional production systems, as well as state-initiated restructuring on a territorial basis. This suggests an interactive relationship between cultural reinvention and economic restructuring. Similarly, there is a growing consensus, fostered by a new middle class, on the desirability of minority regional languages as a symbol of identity and as useful human capital, as opposed to their previous association with backwardness and parochialism (Keating, Loughlin, and Deschower 2003, 181–2). All

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these general observations drawn from the comparative literature on regions can be applied within and to the Maritimes. Finally, leadership assumes a strong role in building regions by synthesizing divergent elements into a regional project that can further contribute to the construction of imagined regional communities. In essence, regions are continuously built and rebuilt by political and social actors in given contexts. Identity and culture are both a condition under which leadership operates and a product of that leadership as they invoke cultural images and identities in their pursuit of regional development projects (Keating, Loughlin, and Deschower 2003, 27). This makes the presence of elected regional governments important to social mobilization and collective action. It creates the region as a political space and endows it with democratic legitimacy and institutional boundaries within which actors must operate, making it difficult for any to “defect” (183). In the case of the Maritimes, political, business, and social leaders have been prominent in coalescing individuals around the regional development project. This has occurred mostly at the provincial level with its well-­established institutional framework and socially embedded associational networks. This is not to diminish the role of leadership in region-­building beyond and within the province, but the extent to which they are successful tends to be conditional on the social construction of institutional supports that allow leadership to emerge and effectively function.

(re)building

regions: acadie and cape breton

The historic dominance of the federal-provincial political dynamic, reflected in institutional arrangements and political discourse, is the central reality of national and regional political life in Canada. One consequence of this has been the dearth of attention toward other manifestations of region, regionalism, and spatial politics more generally, or alternatively their somewhat ill-fitting incorporation into the conceptual frameworks and modes of analyses of federalism and intergovernmental relations. Yet there have been and continue to be other regions of note within and beyond the province-regions of Canada, variously rooted in historical claims of ethno-­linguistic, cultural, and socio-economic community, along with territorial and place-based affinities. Throughout their history, these regional



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c­ommunities have pursued cultural recognition and preservation, equality, development, and territorial justice. They have recommended or supported political projects that have sought to alter the terms of regional integration with the broader polity and economy, to attain more regional autonomy, or to effect both greater integration and more autonomy in some distinctive combination. As previously suggested, federal state structure and institutions exercise powerful path dependency effects on regional politics and policy. Community leaders in sub-provincial regions have had to rally resources and employ spatial strategies in their efforts to pursue their own regional development projects, including the need to contest the institutional hierarchies of federalism: what Brenner in another context has termed “the scalar architecture of uneven spatial development” (2009b, 134). While it can be noted that the decentralized and overlapping jurisdictions of Canadian federalism can frustrate or constrain the building of non-provincial regions, under some conditions it can provide them with political opportunities. Building “regions within region” in this way is an important dimension of regional development, crucial to a less uneven and more just and equitable spatial distribution of development. Of the many “regions within region” within Atlantic Canada, two will be briefly examined from a regional development perspective: Acadia and Cape Breton. Both are peripheral areas within the Maritimes with poor endowments of agricultural land, settled by peoples speaking minority languages who had been dispossessed of their ancestral homelands and who continued to be marginalized politically, economically, and socially. For the most part, the two regions remain relatively disadvantaged in economic terms, though Cape Breton was for a time a key region in the industrialization of the Maritimes, and recently the Moncton area has emerged as Acadia’s relatively prosperous “capital city.” Given these features of cultural minoritarianism and geo-political economy, Acadia and Cape Breton have had daunting development challenges to overcome: the first has endured a long, slow, climb out of obscurity and rural poverty, made doubly difficult by its minority ethno-linguistic and religious status; the second has been forced to cope with de-industrialization and a drawn-out economic crisis. Both communities have had to redefine and re-build themselves as regions, with integration, institutions, and identities as central dimensions within these processes.

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Acadia “Acadia” today generally refers not to the whole of the Maritimes (as it once did), but only to those areas that are home to predominantly Acadian communities. As such, it is a geographically fragmented region within the Maritimes, but all the same a distinctive community held together by the durable bonds of a shared history, language, religion, and culture. Numbering about three hundred thousand, Acadians are the descendants of the first European settlers in what would later become Canada, with their origins dating back to Samuel de Champlain’s “Acadian years,” pre-dating his founding of Quebec in 1608. A century after their initial settlement, they had constituted themselves as a prosperous agricultural community spread over some of the more arable valleys and marshlands of the region, which through their labours they had successfully diked and developed. In the eighteenth century, political and military control over Acadians passed to Britain, and in 1755 the seminal event in Acadian history occurred: the deportation of the Acadian population by British authorities, known to Acadians as the Grand Dérangement. That a fragment of the Acadian population eventually returned and managed to re-establish communities in the region became the foundational myth of Acadian history and identity: perseverance and redemption in the face of calamity, injustice, and insuperable odds (Griffiths 1973). A century after their return from exile, when a Canadian census was taken, about eighty-seven thousand Acadians were enumerated. Roughly one-half of these were in the province of New Brunswick, constituting about 15 percent of the population. By 1960, thanks to a consistently higher population growth rate than the Anglophone community (the so-called revenge of the cradle), this provincial percentage had grown to nearly 40 percent (Young 2001). The political role, status, and rights of Acadians in New Brunswick would change dramatically after New Brunswick’s first Acadian premier came to power. Elected in 1960, Louis Robichaud would remain in power for a decade, and the massive changes that occurred during that period can be compared in their scope and impact to the Quiet Revolution that was happening simultaneously in Quebec (Young 2001; Savoie 2009). Robichaud’s revolution was centred on his Equal Opportunity Program, rebuilding and revamping the public service, setting in train the most wide-ranging and ­controversial



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socio-economic reform package in the province’s history, passing legislation making the province officially bilingual, and providing Acadians with their own French language university (Université de Moncton). The program was pushed through over the strenuous objections of powerful political opponents (the English-language media, wealthier regions, and the province’s legendary economic barons). After Robichaud was defeated in 1970, subsequent premiers left his reforms intact, even carrying them further by having the equality of the two linguistic communities entrenched in provincial law and ultimately in the Canadian constitution (Savoie 2009, 67–76). Not all Acadians were content to continue with Robichaud’s project of revamping the provincial state. In 1971, the nationalist Parti Acadien was formed on a program of territorial autonomy leading toward a separate Acadian province. However, popular support for the party never went beyond 10 percent, and it failed to ever win a seat in the provincial legislature. It was disbanded in 1986 (Savoie 2009, 105). The most obvious explanation for the abject failure of the territorial autonomy option to gain widespread support was the rapid transformation of the political, social, and economic climate for Acadians in New Brunswick. This can be fully understood only within the larger context of Canadian politics during this period, and particularly the programs and policies of the federal government during Pierre Trudeau’s long tenure as prime minister. ­Trudeau’s determination to combat Quebec separatism by enlarging the role of French Canadians within the federal government and by promoting bilingualism throughout Canada, particularly through state support for French-Canadian minorities outside Quebec, meshed perfectly with the political agenda of Acadians. These national policies and institutional changes greatly facilitated the political, social, and economic integration of French-speaking Canadians, including Acadians within New Brunswick. Clearly, Acadians had a powerful ally in the federal government for a “linguistic and social equality” solution to their minority political and underdeveloped economic status. The availability of such an ally and the considerable resources and supports this afforded were surely significant factors in their rejection of the confrontational, high-risk alternative of pushing for majority status within an autonomous territory either within or outside the boundaries of the provincial state (Savoie 2009, 113–15). That Acadians may simply

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have been recruits in the larger political struggle to keep Quebec in Canada does not diminish the major influx of political, financial, programmatic, legal, and discursive resources that clearly contributed to the protection and advancement of their community identity and interests. If the Québécois were proclaiming themselves mâitres chez nous by using their control over the provincial state to transform Quebec society in the interests of the linguistic majority, Acadians pursued other avenues to take control of their communal destiny. After 1960, within a particularly favourable political opportunity structure, the attention, interests, and identity of New Brunswick Acadians focused on the project of transforming the provincial state in order to ­create a bilingualized partnership within its territorial boundaries.1 As a result, the political, economic, and cultural position of the Acadian nation within New Brunswick was stabilized and enhanced, while elsewhere in the region assimilation processes inevitably took a toll on the size and cultural integrity of geographically dispersed Acadian populations (Laxer 2006). At the same time, the creation of a relatively secure territorial and institutional base in New Brunswick has given new generations of Acadians the option of pursuing higher education or permanently relocating within the region as a way of dealing with assimilation pressures (Laxer 2006; Basque 2010). The role and significance of rescaling as a strategy of empowerment is readily apparent in Robichaud’s Equal Opportunity Program provincially and Trudeau’s political and constitutional reforms federally. Equal Opportunity, by shifting responsibilities for taxation, education, and social services from the local to the provincial level, dramatically altered the disadvantaged position of poorer, rural Acadian communities within New Brunswick. Trudeau’s bilingualism legislation and the subsequent constitutional entrenchment of linguistic equality similarly advantaged Acadians by making language use a question of legal right adjudicated and enforced by the courts. This also can be seen in the numerous interventions of the federal government in the regional economic development field and through proactive federal support for civil society organizations, which effectively underwrote the creation of a francophone civil power in New Brunswick, the so-called Acadien d’Éat (Savoie 2009, 248). Finally, it can be surmised that it was the happy coincidence of strong provincial and federal leadership sharing a development



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vision and working in tandem toward similar objectives that enabled clear and continuous gains for New Brunswick Acadians, while also marginalizing the autonomist option. Regional development occurred through the further economic and political integration of Acadians into provincial society, under conditions of linguistic equality, minority rights, institutional reform, and regional institution-building. It was these renegotiated terms of integration that transformed the New Brunswick region as a whole and created the conditions for the political, economic, social, and cultural development of Acadia. cape breton

While Acadia exists as a linguistic and cultural region in Atlantic Canada fragmented by its geography, Cape Breton is territorially compact, an island that forms the northeastern portion of the province of Nova Scotia. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had a separate colonial existence, first under the French as Isle Royale and also briefly under the British from 1784 to 1820, when it was settled primarily by dispossessed Gaels from the highlands and islands region of Scotland. This gave Cape Breton its distinctive ethno-cultural character, which persists today. The second central feature of the Island that has been seminal to its history is its extensive coal deposits. By the late ninetenth century coal mining had become the dominant industry and subsequently the basis for a program of heavy industrialization. The coal and steel industry remained the backbone of the local economy, though in decline since the mid-twentieth century (Bickerton 1990a). Cape Breton history is marked by industrial strife and class conflict. The industrial works were owned by non-resident and foreign capitalists. Strikes were common and often bitterly contested as owners attempted to maintain or restore their profit margins by squeezing wages. The Canadian state became directly involved in the industry through policing actions against the workers and later through tariff adjustments and various subsidies to facilitate transportation, maintain production levels, or encourage modernization of the operations. Employment levels fluctuated, but as late as the 1970s coal and steel still employed a unionized labour force of ten thousand (Bickerton 1990a). This combination of factors – peripheral location, island geography, a shared sense of class solidarity and

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external exploitation, and a distinctive cultural heritage  – created both a strong sense of community identity and a suspicion and mistrust of the motives of external political and economic actors. This was expressed in Island politics, as the only region east of Ontario to return socialist politicians to national and provincial legislatures, and in political resentment towards what were often seen as distant and unsympathetic federal and provincial governments (Bickerton 1990a). The seminal event in the Island’s modern history was the DOSCO crisis of 1966–67, when the British multinational announced the impending closure of Cape Breton’s mines and mills. The short-term resolution of the crisis was the effective “socialization” of the industry through the creation of two state enterprises. A federal Crown corporation – the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) – took over mining operations and was given a mandate to diversify the Island’s economy. Over the next three decades, despite significant, if sporadic, injections of modernization funds, operations were incrementally but steadily downsized until shuttered altogether in 2000 (Bickerton 1990a, 1998; Johnson 2007).2 The fate of Cape Breton’s heavy industrial base is a familiar portrait of many similar industrial districts in North America and Europe that have undergone wrenching adjustments owing to changes in the trading environment and the international division of labour, the global renewal and relocation of production facilities, and the sweeping economic and technological changes that have reduced domestic demand for the products of older “rust-belt” industries. While steel-making in Cape Breton left little behind but a legacy of pensioned workers and what was acknowledged to be the worst toxic waste site in Canada (the Sydney Tar Ponds), DEVCO lives on in Cape Breton as a regional development agency, restyled as the Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation (ECBC). Even this transition, however, proved to be difficult politically, since it involved reducing DEVCO’s exceptional autonomy, which in its former existence reported to no other authority but Parliament.3 This local political sensitivity to the level and site of control and decision making concerning the Island’s development is understandable in the context of its political and economic history, its strong sense of distinct regional identity, and the prior state interventions that set Cape Breton apart as a quasi-autonomous political entity and development region. This sensitivity relates particularly to the



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state response to the industrial crisis of the 1960s, which shifted ­control over the region’s economy to the public sector, while rescaling responsibility for economic development from the provincial to the federal level. It also created an activist developmental state, immanent in the interventionist nature of DEVCO’s mandate, which gave it a peculiarly broad ambit with significant social as well as economic responsibilities. In this sense there was a re-territorialization of the Island, partially removing it from the provincial sphere and providing it with a degree of autonomy from both higher levels of government and the market that was unique. Leadership on the Island was loath to lose this “special status,” which explains the political struggle that was later fought to preserve it when it appeared to be threatened ­(Bickerton 1990b). Regardless, ECBC continues to operate with a degree of operational autonomy and discrete funding, which it has used to nurture regional partnerships and to collaborate in the construction of a regional development strategy through networking relationships with local political and business elites and highereducation institutions, as well as social and cultural organizations (Johnson 2007). A second development to have significant political effects on Cape Breton  – both internally and its relations with senior levels of government – was the 1995 amalgamation of thirteen separate municipalities into one regional government: Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM). While the boundaries of this new government did not encompass the whole of the Island, it did gather together all of industrial Cape Breton and its adjacent rural districts, constituting most of the Island’s population, under one elected mayor, council, and administrative apparatus. The rationale offered for the forced merger of the municipalities included economies of scale, more coherent regional planning, ending destructive competition, and increasing horizontal equity. Perhaps most important to the provincial government’s decision to impose the merger, however, was the worsening fiscal situation of most of the affected municipal units and an austerity context for the province that had them desperately searching for cost savings and economies (Stewart 2000). As with virtually all such amalgamations, neither the functional gains that were expected nor the hoped-for consensual political fusion were realized in the short term. What was eventually set in train, however, long after the provincial government that initiated it

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had been defeated, was a nascent if largely ineffectual secessionist movement advocating provincial status for the Cape Breton region.4 It also spawned a political and constitutional challenge to the policies and practices of the province from the new regional government.5 In its appeal to the courts, the regional government submitted that it stood “almost apart in Canada” as an urban region experiencing severe localized disparities over an extended period of time without receiving effective government intervention to rectify underlying structural economic problems and thereby to significantly ameliorate the resulting economic disparity. In this connection, CBRM alleged that the province of Nova Scotia had breached its constitutional commitments as set out in section 36 of the Canadian Constitution in that it hadn’t given the regional government sufficient fiscal capacity to provide a comparable level of public services for a comparable tax burden. Additionally, the region claimed that the province had failed in its constitutional duty to further economic development and reduce disparity in opportunities between the ­citizens of the Cape Breton region and other Nova Scotian communities.6 While the region’s court challenge failed,7 it has proceeded with plans to strengthen the region, accepting the recommendations of a commissioned study that it take further steps to consolidate its regional identity and alter regional planning to spatially concentrate both existing and new services (Fraser 2010). The municipal amalgamation that created a new regional scale of government is a case of region-building through re-territorialization. The political strategy of the new regional government has sought to reinforce regional coherence and solidarity by mobilizing historical grievances and resentments against external political control as the cause of regional economic and governance problems. Clearly the election of a regional government and the emergence of strong regional leadership has contributed to a process of region-building that includes both identity and development. The vertical clientelist politics that were so often dominant in the past (Bickerton 1990a) seem increasingly supplemented, if not superseded, by a horizontal region-building dynamic with at least the potential for more inclusive and solidaristic outcomes. Furthermore, with the raw materials of a well-defined and unique regional history, culture, and identity to be mined, political and social leaders can make use of these materials in their efforts to mobilize the local population behind a collaborative development project.



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The Cape Breton case also illustrates the use by regional elites of “scale-jumping” to confront an inherited scalar architecture (exclusive provincial control over municipalities) perceived to be unfavourable. This is evident in the attempt to bypass stalled negotiations with the province by making a direct appeal to the courts to intervene in order to increase the regional government’s capacity to provide adequate services at tax levels that will allow the region to be competitive in the pursuit of its long-term development goals. conclusion

The case of Acadia illustrates that the principle of equality for minorities requires that different situations call for different responses at different times and, further, that “there is nothing wrong if autonomy is recommended in some circumstances and not in others” (Palermo 2009, 4).8 The Robichaud government’s policy agenda in the 1960s  – scaling social services and taxation to the provincial level (EO program), establishing a francophone university for Acadians, and “bilingualizing” the province – was the key development in shaping and determining the primary political strategy of New Brunswick Acadians. It confirmed that the path to political, cultural, and economic development lay through the pursuit of equality within the province, rather than through some form of territorial political autonomy. While there was significant resistance initially to this equality-seeking program within the majority Anglophone community (Belkhodja 2001), it was muted by the fact that the EO program was designed to benefit all poorer communities (not just the Acadian districts) and by the strong support and parallel policies being pursued at the federal level. As for Cape Breton, in many ways it is typical of small islands that seek special status arrangements or unique forms of autonomy (Hepburn 2012). Here, too, spatial rescaling has been an aspect of state response to the unique circumstances, historic claims, and political demands of a distinct island community. In contrast to New Brunswick Acadians, the main tendency of Island politics has been the fairly consistent trend toward a semi-autonomous Cape ­Breton region through accessing a range of mechanisms and processes: rescaling up from the provincial to the federal level in a manner that enhanced regional autonomy; consolidating a new scale at the regional level through various region-building processes and

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­ ractices; and using “scale jumping” tactics in an attempt to lever a p further transfer of governance capacity to regional authorities. Over the past four decades, regionalization has occurred in government, economic development, higher education, hospitals and health care, social and municipal services, and taxation and revenues. Political, cultural, and place identities have been a germane and sometimes primary factor in political struggles around these processes. What observations can be made about intra-provincial regions seeking development through political and social empowerment, culture and identity preservation or reconstruction, and territorial justice? A first point is that federal institutions and structures do constrain and shape the strategies of such regions, but they do so in ways that simultaneously have provided opportunities and supports. While provinces remain the primary regions within and toward which other regional communities must orient and insert themselves, the federal government can provide significant sources of support for non-provincial regions that can be used to consolidate their political position and further their goals and objectives. And while provincial institutions and structures have effectively captured and routinized what might be termed “big R” regional politics in Canada, scope remains for other forms of region to carve out spaces for themselves within the interstices and overlapping powers and jurisdictions of federalism. This can occur through their deeper integration into a reimagined and rebuilt province-region, or, alternatively, distinct regional communities can be propelled to seek out new forms of autonomy. This brief overview of the development history of Acadia and Cape Breton has been parsimonious in its examination of the various aspects of region-building that can be associated with integration processes, institutions, and identity construction. Moreover, since both of the cases reviewed here continue to be peripheral regions within Canada, new challenges associated with globalization and the new information economy will sorely test their survival and adaptive capacities. Migration to larger urban areas continues to drain energy, talent, and population. Immigrants continue to be attracted primarily to large urban agglomerations, while the low birth rates common now to developed societies strain the long-term prospects for these regions to maintain their population and stimulate future growth. At the same time, it can be argued that the institutions that both regions need to survive and advance their development projects have been put in place; and that both have developed strong and



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adaptive regional identities. Effective use must be made of these advantages, not only to counter tendencies toward decline and further marginality, but to thrive economically and culturally. In this connection, the continuing political will of communities (and particularly their elites) to promote their identities and seek out the resources they need to maintain community infrastructures will be a key factor.

notes

  1 A “political opportunity structure” is effectively a “nest of variables” developed by social movement scholars to explain the periodic success of social movements in stimulating policy innovation by the state. These scholars argue that social movements “are organized, take fire, and occasionally succeed as a function of political opportunity structure.” Tarrow has defined the main variables as the relative openness or closure of the polity to participation by non-elite groups on the margins, the stability or instability of political alignments, the presence or absence of influential allies or support groups, and divisions or conflicts within and among elites. A favourable political opportunity structure can provide groups on the margins with resources that can make their protests and appeals more effective; it can place new issues (or newly framed issues) on the agenda; and it can creatively influence the political imagination, initiative, and strategies of aggrieved groups (Tarrow 1991, 34–6).   2 Australian multinational Xstrata has announced it will open a new coal mine in Donkin, Cape Breton, with an initial workforce of two hundred producing 2.5 million tons of coal per year for export. However, production is not expected to begin until 2014 (Shannon 2010).   3 As a federal crown corporation, DEVCO fell under federal legislation that placed it at arm’s length from federal politicians and the departmental bureaucratic structure, requiring only annual reports to Parliament. In 1987 the Industrial Development Division of DEVCO was transferred to the Cape Breton-based ECBC, which was placed under the authority of a new Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA), which, as one of several federal regional development agencies, was itself subsumed under the government’s Industry department (Bickerton 1990b).   4 The regional government went so far as to commission an academic study of the economic, fiscal, political, legal, and functional implications of ­political devolution or provincial status for the Island (see Locke and Tomblin 2003).

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  5 As mayor, lawyer-businessman John Morgan sponsored a major conference on Cape Breton’s political status and a plebiscite on the size and organization of regional government, and he persevered in the region’s legal challenge to the provincial government despite defeats in the lower courts (Fraser 2008, 2010). He also resisted entreaties to step down as mayor to run for provincial or federal office.   6 Section 36 of the Canadian Constitution contains the following clauses: “36(1) Without altering the legislative authority of Parliament or the provincial legislatures, or the rights of any of them to the exercise of their legislative authority, Parliament and the legislatures, together with the government of Canada and the provincial governments, are committed to a) promoting equal opportunities for the well-being of Canadians; b) furthering economic development to reduce disparity in opportunities; and c) providing essential public services of reasonable quality to all Canadians. 36(2) Parliament and the government of Canada are committed to the principle of making equalization payments to ensure that provincial governments have sufficient revenues to provide reasonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation.”   7 In the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Regional Municipality v. A.G.N.S., 2008 NSSC 111, 23 April 2008.   8 It also may raise questions about the meaning and applicability of the concept of autonomy, particularly if autonomy is understood in contrast to dependence, rather than integration: “autonomy to do” rather than “autonomy from.” See Keating on the concept of autonomy (2012).

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– 1987. Establishing the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. Report prepared for the Prime Minister of Canada. – 1986, 1992. Regional Economic Development: Canada’s Search for Solutions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1981. Federal-Provincial Collaboration: The Canada/New Brunswick General Development Agreement. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Simeon, R. 2009. “The Dynamics of Canadian Federalism.” In J. ­Bickerton and A.-G. Gagnon, eds., Canadian Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 155–78. 1977. “Regionalism and Canadian Political Institutions.” In J. M ­ eekison, eds., Canadian Federalism: Myth or Reality? Toronto: Methuen, 292–303. Stewart, I. 2000. “The Dangers of Municipal Reform in Nova Scotia.” In P. Clancy, J. Bickerton, R. Haddow, and I. Stewart, eds., The Savage Years: The Perils of Reinventing Government in Nova Scotia. Halifax, NS: Formac, 199–227. Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Regional Municipality v. A.G.N.S., 2008 NSSC 111, April 23, 2008. Tarrow, S. 1991. Struggle, Politics, and Reform: Collective Action, Social Movements, and Cycles of Protest. Western Societies Program Occasional Paper #21. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Centre for International Studies. Young, R. 2001. “The Programme of Equal Opportunity: An Overview.” In The Robichaud Era, 1960–70: Colloquium Proceedings. Moncton: Canadian Institute for Research on Regional Development, 23–35.

11 Democratizing Regional Economic Development in Sweden: Why? Did It Make a Difference? jon pierre

In 2013, the state has become too big to solve the small problems in life and too small to solve the big problems. Daniel Bell

The problem with prophesies is that those of us who are fortunate enough to be around long enough can see whether or not they came true. When in 1987 Daniel Bell chose 2013 as his target date for the prediction above, his point was probably not to give a detailed forecast about the state of the world twenty-five years later. Rather, he wanted to present a thoughtful and provocative scenario about the likely issues on the political agenda and the role of central government institutions in addressing those issues. In that respect, his prediction was right on the money; we need only think about climate change, the post-9/11 surge of national security issues, transnational migration, and financial instabilities to see the validity of his statement. As I will argue in this chapter, the notion of the state becoming too big to handle some issues and too small to handle others is a useful preamble to the discourse on regional institutional reform in many countries. Regions have come to be seen as perhaps the key institutional vehicles for economic development programs. In the European Union, regions – not member states – were the dominant paradigm in terms of resource allocation and program implementation (Le Galès and Lequesne 1998). Apart from macroeconomic

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policy, neither cities nor nation states are today believed to have the know-how or the instruments to promote economic development. Regions have the potential to offer the right mix of business and trade opportunities to make them attractive to other regions. And, through institutional reform, administrative regions can be brought into harmony with functional regions, thereby removing administrative obstacles to economic processes. the resurrection of regions

In Canada, given its vast territory, the regional or territorial dimension is present in almost all policy-making and administration. This also holds true, albeit it to a lesser degree, in other federal states but also – surprising to some – in Norway, a unitary state with a population scattered across a large territory. However, in a large number of countries, particularly in most unitary states, regions were for long the forgotten tier in of democratic government. Instead, the focus of political and administrative attention was on either central government, as the centre of policy-making, or on local government, where public services are delivered. Regional government controlled specific sectors of public services, for example, health care in Sweden, and regional government had to share its control of the regional territory with central government subsidiaries at the regional level. All of this meant that regions were to a large extent invisible to citizens and voters; largely irrelevant to central government, since public policy was implemented either centrally or locally; and of little consequence to private business and economic development. At the same time, however, regions are increasingly often identified as the key institutional level for economic development policies and programs. The nation-state territory is too vast and too heterogeneous to allow for coherent development programs; given the diversity of what territory has to offer in terms of economic development, it makes little sense for almost any state to have central government in charge of that policy area. Similarly, cities and municipalities are often portrayed as too small to carry out such policies, unless of course they qualify as “global cities” (Knox and Taylor 1995; Sassen 1991) or “city-regions” with an international standing (Scott 2001). Thus, if Bell’s prediction reflects the nature of political issues that will confront governments in 2013, a similar logic applies to regions and their role in economic development.



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All of this having been said, targeting regions as the key institutional level for economic development programs is one thing and designing the optimal institutional framework for such policies is quite another. Across the Western world, even though more or less extensive institutional reform has been implemented at the regional level, “nowhere is [there] the feeling that the institutional mixture is about right” (Newman 2000, 895). Part of the problem seems to be that there are different views about what should be the role of the regions: are they to serve strictly as operative instruments to promote economic growth and economic governance in the regional territory, or should they also blend economic coordination with democratic governance, thus providing some democratic anchorage and control over regional economic development? Also, since regions in the EU context can mobilize resources from the structural funds, regional institutions are also expected to engage in multi-level governance with the central government, EU institutions, and the local governments within their territory. Small wonder, perhaps, that the institutional architects have done some serious head scratching over the design of regional institutions and their tasks. This was the backdrop against which regional reform in Sweden evolved in the 1980s and 1990s. The reform had been on the agenda for a couple of decades; already in the 1960s a Royal Commission had been appointed to look into the regional issue. With Sweden’s joining of the EU in the mid-1990s, regional reform caught momentum. Several commissions and other studies were launched, and there was a fair degree of turmoil among the political parties in terms of the solutions they advocated. regional reform in sweden

For the present context I will not trace the trajectory of Swedish regional reform too far back but will focus, rather, on the reform that was launched around the mid-1990s. After considerable investigation and inquiry, three regions were designated as part of an “experiment” in regional institutional reform. The notion of “experiment” indicates the political sensitivity of the issue; there were conflicting notions about the definition of some regions. The political parties at the national level were also divided about the desirability and feasibility of reform. By emphasizing the experimental nature of the reform, that is, by indicating that the reform would first be

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e­ valuated, after which the government would then decide on whether the new regional institutional arrangements were to become permanent or to be dissolved, the advocates of the reform could pre-empt much of the criticism and avoid forcing politicians to make the final sensitive decisions at this time. An overarching challenge in the reform was how to integrate the top-down nature of the state administration in the regions (länsstyrelse) with the region’s own system of democratic representation. This problem was by no means new – it had been a feature of the Swedish regions for more than a century  – but the reform campaign was an opportunity to address the issue. Also, since the purpose of the reform was to strengthen regional governance, the region’s political system had to become more integrated with the central government institutions in the region. In addition, partial regional governance emerged through bottom-up processes in which local governments forged partnerships to increase efficiency in service delivery and to boost their economic development (see Andersen and Pierre 2010; Feiock 2007). All these processes with the similar objective of creating governance in the region or parts thereof came together in what would become a somewhat nebulous “region.” The public sector brought state interests, regional interests, and local interests to the table, while the private sector brought a mixed bag of multinational research-intensive companies, a large number of small and medium-sized businesses, and several business organizations, all with stakes in the region and its economic development. There was an abundance of actors but a shortage of directors. In one of the “experimental” regions, regional governance was reformed by the creation of an inter-local partnership with extensive capabilities and autonomy in relation to the participating municipalities. The other two regions saw more extensive and innovative reform. There, the fundamental idea was to place the economicdevelopment sector under the control of a directly elected regional parliament. Previously, regional economic development had been implemented by the central government’s administration at the regional level (länsstyrelse). In addition, counties (län) were merged, thus removing administrative boundaries that tend to obstruct cluster formation and economic growth. In the West Sweden region, three counties and the city of Gothenburg were merged into one county comprising forty-nine local governments with a population of about 1.6 million, and the bulk of economic development



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­ rograms were transferred from the state’s regional administration p to the regional parliament. As mentioned, an important goal of the reform was to strengthen regional governance. Towards that end, central government pooled state subsidies to a wide variety of programs – programs related to the labor market, culture, infrastructure, economic development, and so on – into a single grant that the region was to allocate according to its own purposes. An extensive process of hearings and deliberations involving private business organizations, organized interests, local governments, and other actors with a stake in the region’s development was initiated with the objective of producing a negotiated regional economic development program involving socalled “growth agreements” (tillväxtavtal). In addition, the regional parliament formulated a regional-development strategy – I will come back to it later in this chapter. The key questions addressed in the present context relate to the rationale for the idea of democratizing regional economic development and the outcome of that reform. The analysis draws on an extensive evaluation of the regional reform in West Sweden ­(Västra Götalandsregionen) conducted by the present author and Sarah Schütt as part of a larger evaluation program (Pierre and Schütt 2003, 2005; see Nilsson 2005). Since regional economic development both in Sweden and in many other Western democracies has involved a significant role for national government both centrally and in the regions, the idea of anchoring this policy sector more firmly in regional governance was one of the novelties of the regional reform in Sweden. d e m o c r at i z i n g r e g i o n a l e c o n o m i c d e v e l o p m e n t : the reform

One reason for democratizing regional economic development was simply that it was believed to be important to bring politics into regional economic development. Taken seriously, economic development is a cluster of policies and programs that, if successful, will over time reshape the regional landscape and infrastructure. A decision on what the region should look like twenty or thirty year is inherently political, not administrative. Since regional economic development involves collective resources to a large extent drawn from the region itself, the relevant policy decisions should be made

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at the regional level, not at the nation-state level. Furthermore, if the idea is to strengthen regional governance and self-reliance – Sweden largely abandoned its “regional policy” whereby the state supported lagging regions in the late 1980s (Johansson 1991) – through broad deliberation and involvement, it only makes sense to allow regional institutions the final word on regional economic development policies. Second, related to this argument was the notion that the future of the region, normatively speaking, should be made a matter of democratic discourse. Politicians and voters have contending views and ideas about what should be prioritized in economic development programs and these different scenarios should be brought to the table. Furthermore, these issues affect everyone living in the region. Opening them up for public debate revitalizes regional democracy and helps build legitimacy for the newly created region and its institutions. Third, it was believed that by placing regional economic development directly under an elected regional parliament, thus putting politicians in control, political networks could be used to steer and coordinate economic development (Bäck 2004). Contacts between elected officials at the local, regional, and national – perhaps even the EU  – institutional levels could help manage the complexities of multi-level governance arrangements. Forging such vertical networks could in fact be integral to the reform at large, not least since the regional reform left the question of the relationship between the new region and the local governments largely unanswered. Institutions are arenas for political action, and coordination among institutions requires some degree of political presence and control. Thus, by introducing a role for politicians in the regional economic development sector, reform advocates hoped that they could serve as coordinating instruments. Fourth, there was a strong belief that democratizing regional economic development would help facilitate governance. Central government actors are, for the most part, not anchored in the region. Instead, governance was built among the regional stakeholders, including regional and local elected officials. Building governance without empowering institutions and actors will not succeed. If, on the other hand, institutional design combines institutional autonomy with some degree of capability and empowerment of the politicians who are to lead those institutions, the prospects of creating



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c­oncerted governance improve significantly. Before the reform, regional economic development programs had been implemented by the central government’s administrative tier in the region in a rather distinct “government” style, with little involvement or mobilization of stakeholders. The new organization seemed to have all the necessary ingredients to be successful. outcomes of the reform

The measures for promoting regional governance were generally well received among the dominant players in the region. The new institutional setup of the region and the higher priority given to economic development issues appears to have helped mobilize a wide variety of players in the region. There were, of course, exceptions to this rule. For instance, small- and medium-sized businesses were not particularly interested in more continuous interaction with politicians or political institutions. They basically wanted to be left alone, and whenever they had to deal with the public sector, they expected a swift and correct handling of matters. In other words, these business representatives were less interested in governance than in good old-fashioned government (Pierre and Schütt 2003). The outcome of the democratization of regional economic development was intriguing. While the institutional arrangements for placing this set of issues under the political oversight of an elected regional parliament and under the administrative control of an institution – the regional economic development board (regionutvecklingsnämnden) and its staff reporting to the parliament – was a relatively easy task, getting elected politicians to launch a debate about alternative scenarios of economic development for the region in terms proved more difficult. Instead, there was an immediate search for consensus and compromise. It was only the Green Party that had some problems with the focus on economic growth, but even they saw the significance and benefits of positive economic development in the region. The region’s first policy document on economic development, the “regional development strategy,” bears every sign of a compromise among the political parties when everyone had their pet issue on the strategic agenda. Economic development operatives acknowledged in interviews that in their view the main purpose of the strategy was not to set tough, discriminating objectives but to ensure political

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consensus. Not surprising therefore, that almost all our interviews with senior politicians on the regional-development board started off with a proud statement that “there are no disagreements among the political parties on the economic development issues.” Given the significance of the issues for the region’s future, the obvious follow-up question, “Why not?” produced little more than confusion among the interviewees. To them, getting all the political parties behind the overarching development strategy was a core political goal. There are several possible explanations for this pattern. One is quite simply that this is Swedish politics at its best and worse; here, there is almost always a search for the middle ground, the compromise, in order to get everyone’s approval. The Swedish word for ensuring broad societal approval, förankring, is hugely popular, particularly among regional and urban politicians and bureaucrats, second only to utvärdering, meaning “evaluation.” It is with förankring and utvärdering that political action is legitimized in Sweden. A related explanation is that the drive for consent and approval serves the important purpose of ensuring a smooth implementation, since all the key players have had a chance to voice their opinion on the plan and are in agreement with it. Yet another explanation could be that the development strategy was prepared and adopted at a sensitive stage in the institutionalization of the region and that this was not seen as an appropriate time to engage in extensive deliberation on a key policy for the region. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the rather vague and diluted regional development strategy provided precious few cues and directives to the operative side of the economic development institution. Furthermore, the strategy was largely devoid of distinct priorities and offered little support for discriminatory measures, that is, for programs that would benefit some municipalities more than others. Therefore, the first three to four years of democratized regional economic development in the West Sweden region consisted primarily of getting the actors in place and the relationship among them organized. It was not until the second development strategy was adopted, in 2004, that some priorities could be detected. This was also the time when the development bureaucrats launched the “second step” in their own strategy and began designing and implementing de facto discriminatory measures and targeted resources more directly in order to boost the region’s economic development.



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remaining issues and problems

All was not well, however. While the formation of the new West Sweden region had been successful, a couple of complex problems remained to be solved, or at least accommodated. One was related to the amalgamation of what was a rather diverse and heterogeneous region in terms of population and economic development trajectory. The western part of the region, centred around Gothenburg (population five hundred thousand, or about a third of the total population in the region) had gone through a difficult time with massive industrial restructuring in the 1980s but had begun its economic recovery during the latter part of the 1990s. Meanwhile, the eastern parts of the region were characterized by higher unemployment and lower economic growth, partly as a result of the shutdown of several defense facilities. This created an imbalanced region in which the same economic development programs could not be implemented across the territory but had to be adapted to the different preconditions in different parts of the region. The new region, it appeared, was sufficiently big in territorial terms and sufficiently heterogeneous in its economic infrastructure that it almost had to develop its own regional policy to ensure that all parts of the region were given opportunities for positive economic development. Second, and related to the previous point, different parts of the new region had a history of inter-local cooperation; the region had four such pre-existing cooperation models, which now emerged as “sub-regions.” The Gothenburg region had a cohesive partnership between the city and the surrounding municipalities, while there were other partnerships in the central and eastern parts of the region. Furthermore, there was a strong sense in large parts of the region that they needed to get organized in order to prevent the new region from being dominated by the city of Gothenburg and its partnering municipalities. Thus, organization drove counter-organization and fortified the four pre-existing sub-regions, a development that was not supporting the institutionalization of the new, larger region. A third problem related to institutional capacity. The region’s institutions had limited operative capability, at least initially. In particular, their capacity to implement programs and actions that discriminate among local governments in the region was quite limited, in part because of the aforementioned disparities between different parts of the new region and in part because of important differences

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between the western and eastern parts of the region in the popular support for the policies and institutions of the new region. The fourth problem, finally, has already been touched on: the new region was imbalanced in terms of its economic growth potential and its popular support. The western part was doing well in terms of economic development, and, overall, its inhabitants supported the regional reform. The eastern parts of the region presented a different picture, however, with lower economic growth, higher unemployment, and weaker support for the region. Thus, there were significant changes in the support for the new region across its territory, not least in terms of economic development, about which critics argued that the new region catered to the interest of the only major city in the region, Gothenburg (Johansson 2005). Many of these problems have now been overcome. The subregions are still important players, but they are now integrated into the larger regional governance process. The operative capacity of the region’s institutions has been strengthened over time, so much so that the region can now implement programs that de facto discriminate among municipalities. And popular support for the region, including for the economic development programs, has increased in all its parts. Thus many of the initial problems facing the new regions can be seen as part of an institutionalization process; the region has now clearly begun to gel, and regional governance is becoming a matter of routine. permanent reform?

The regional institutional and geographical design is still in motion. In the West Sweden region, one of the initial “experiment” regions, the only institutional instability is related to the configuration of one of the “sub-regions”: a couple of municipalities have tried to join the Gothenburg “sub-region” but it is cautious about not becoming too big and losing cohesion and homogeneity. From a larger perspective, these are very minor issues. But regions are still being formed or reconfigured in several other parts of the country, particularly in the northern part of Sweden. The key question now is, how many regions should there be? And, obviously related to this question, what is the appropriate size of regions? Should the “size” of a region be measured in terms of population, area, the number of municipalities? Should it be related to



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functional regions or to the pre-existing administrative regions or to some mixture of the two? This process follows in the wake of a Royal Commission, the so-called Responsibility Commission (ansvarsutredningen), which was appointed to look at the future organization of local and regional government in the face of a growing demographical challenge to many smaller local authorities. At the time of writing, local and regional governments are negotiating the configuration of regions and the location of the regions’ institutions. The commission envisaged two different systems of regional organization, one with six to nine regions and the other with eight (SOU 2007, 10). However, the commission emphasized that the final decisions on these matters are to be negotiated in the regions. The result has been a rather tedious process. Again, securing widespread approval at the regional and local levels has been seen as integral to the success of the reform. Closely related to the issue of the size and number of the new regions is the question of their tasks. While the model of democratizing regional economic development is popular within central government, there has been some concern that boosting the regions’ capabilities to promote economic growth could lead to complex inequalities among the regions. Different parts of the country would grow at an uneven pace. This problem has been present in the ­Swedish context throughout most of the postwar period, and for decades the central government redistributed financial resources from the growth regions to the lagging parts of the country. For the past twenty years, however, the political position on this issue has been that all parts of the country must develop according to their own preconditions – in other words, regional policy as we used to know it is over. Nevertheless, the central government – regardless of its ideological orientation – has expressed some concern that regions that are too strong may create or exacerbate imbalances among different parts of the country. This means that the tasks and assignments that should be given to the new regions are not self-evident. Finally, although the institutionalization of regions is a long and complicated process, as not least the case West Sweden demonstrates, there is a case to be made for continued monitoring and evaluation of the tasks and size of the regions. Institutional economists emphasize that correspondence between administrative and functional regions is the key to strong economic development (cf.

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North 1990). Given the pace of structural transformation in the economy, this means that institutional design is shooting at a moving target; tomorrow’s functional regions will look very different from those of yesterday. Thus, policy-makers must strike a balance between allowing the new regions to institutionalize and gel, on the one hand, and adapting the regional organization to changes in the economy, on the other. discussion

The political search for consensus instead of opening the process for public debate is intriguing. Whether this reflected the new roles that politicians were to play or the consensual style of Swedish politics is beyond this essay to ascertain. The region did not get off on the right foot in its parliamentary politics when a small, single-issue party, the “health care party,” switched allegiance on the eve of the inauguration of the new parliament. The outcome of the situation was the formation in 2000 of a coalition across the left-right division that included the Social Democrats, the Liberals, and the Center Party, a constellation of parties that has ruled the region ever since. As this was a rather formative moment for the institution, it was considered important among the main political parties to present a united front on economic development matters. The ironic outcome of the democratization of regional economic development was that it increased bureaucratic control, albeit subject to political accountability. Since the political level was preoccupied with generating consensus and produced a very broad, non-binding development strategy, bureaucrats had to use their latitude to make choices and design their own strategy and modus operandi in order to provide the work of promoting the region’s economic development with some direction and objectives. Another intriguing irony is that while observers of economic development have long argued about the existence of policy choice in the face of global economic change and massive structural changes in the economy, the reform’s attempt to create such choice yielded a very modest response. In 1987, Stone and Sanders – in opposition to scholars like Paul Peterson (1981)  – argued that political institutions do have a choice when it comes to economic development, even under severe economic conditions and major structural problems. Even in Detroit, a city embedded in the complex contingencies



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to the automobile industry, Jones and Bachelor (1986, 212) maintained that the city had some degree of policy choice, or what they called “creative bounded choice.” No one seems to have thought about looking into the issue of to what extent politicians actually exercised that choice, or even wanted to exercise it. The existence of choice and the exercise of choice are two rather different issues and, as this case study suggests, one does not automatically follow from the other. In the first years of existence for the West Sweden region, demonstrating unity was clearly more important than initiating a debate about the future development of the region and what it should look like twenty or twenty-five years from now. There are a number of contextual reasons for this pattern of behaviour, but it could probably be attributed to a large extent to the institutionalization and consolidation of the region and its institutions. Today most observers would agree that the region is well under way; its institutions are now firmly established and popular support seems to be growing. In terms of institutional relations, the only issue left to settle is the relationship between the region and the city of Gothenburg. Early in the reform process the Gothenburg political leadership rejected any subordination to the region; there was to be no hierarchy between the region and the city. This decision has caused problems, not least in the economic development sector, where Gothenburg, as the growth engine in the region, plays a key role in the development of the region as a whole. Since neither the reform plan nor central government has clearly defined the nature of the relationship between the region and the municipalities, this issue has evolved over time in a negotiated process. conclusions

The “regional issue” has been on the Swedish agenda for decades, but it was not until the 1980s that more definitive decisions were made to set up, on a trial basis, new regions in a couple of different parts of the country. It is intriguing to note that some twenty years on the regional reform process is still in motion. Other regions are currently deciding on their regional boundaries and institutional arrangements. In Sweden, as in most other EU member states, the EU’s structural funds and overall orientation towards regions provided massive, if not irresistible, momentum for reform; even in a

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strongly unitary country like England (not the United Kingdom), “economic regions” were launched in order to tap into EU funds. The regional reform in Sweden emphasized creating governance and revitalizing politics in the regions. We can see that there has been a fair degree of success in these efforts over time, although the first years, as demonstrated in this essay, looked less promising. The case of the democratization of regional economic development in Sweden raises the issue of the significance of policy choice. Here was a case where choice was created by placing the cluster of issues belonging to regional economic development under the directly elected regional parliament. The outcome was a firm commitment to consensus among all political parties. This could perhaps be attributed to the institutionalization process, to the overall consensual nature of politics in Sweden, to the business community’s insistence on policy stability or to competition among regions forcing key players to come up with policies that were immune to changes in the majority composition in the region. Either way it should tell us that the existence of policy choice is different from the exercise of that choice, particularly in the area of economic development.

references

Andersen, O.J., and J. Pierre. 2010. “Exploring the Strategic Region: Rationality, Context, and Institutional Collective Action.” Urban Affairs Review 46:218–40. Bell, D. 1987. “The World and the United States in 2013.” Daedulus 116:1–31. Bäck, H. 2004. Av de många ett [Unity from Diversity]. Göteborg: ­Göteborgs Universitet, Förvaltningshögskolan. Feiock, R.C. 2007. “Rational Choice and Regional Governance.” Journal of Urban Affairs 29:47–63. Johansson, J. 1991. Offentligt och Privat i Regionalpolitiken [Public and Private in Regional Policy]. Lund: Department of Political Science, ­University of Lund. Johansson, F. 2005. Medborgarna och regionen [The Citizens and the Region]. In L. Nilsson, ed., Svensk Samhällsorganisation i Förändring: Västsverige vid Millennieskiftet [The Changing Societal Organization in Sweden: West Sweden at the Turn of the Millennium]. Gothenburg: CEFOS, 467–82.



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Jones, B.D., and L.W. Bachelor. 1986. The Sustaining Hand: ­Community Leadership and Corporate Power. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Knox, P.L., and P.J. Taylor, eds. 1995. World Cities in a World-System. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Le Galès, P., and C. Lequesne, eds. 1998. Regions in Europe. London: Routledge. Newman, P. 2000. “Changing Patterns of Regional Governance in the EU.” Urban Studies 37: 895–908. Nilsson L. ed. 2005. Svensk Samhällsorganisation i Förändring: Västsverige vid Millennieskiftet [The Changing Societal Organization in Sweden: West Sweden at the Turn of the Millennium]. Gothenburg: CEFOS. North, D.C. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Peterson, P. 1981. City Limits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pierre, J. and S. Schütt. 2005. “Regionalisering och ekonomisk utveckling: Västra Götalandsregionens utvecklingspolitik” [Regionalization and Economic Development: The Politics of Economic Development in the Västra Götaland Region]. In L. Nilsson, ed., Svensk Samhällsorganisation i Förändring: Västsverige vid Millennieskiftet [The Changing Societal Organization in Sweden: West Sweden at the Turn of the Millennium]. Gothenburg: CEFOS, 415–40. – 2003. ‘‘Kommunerna i de nya regionerna” [Local Authorities in the New Regions]. In H. Brynielsson, ed., På jakt efter en ny regional samhällsordning! [In Search of a New Regional Order]. Stockholm: Svenska Kommunförbundet, 73–90. Sassen, S. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scott, A., ed. 2001. Global City-Regions. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. SOU 2007:10. Hållbar samhällsorganisation med utvecklingskraft [A sustainable organization of society with development capacity]. Stone, C.N., and H.T. Sanders, eds. 1987. The Politics of Urban Development. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

12 The Economic Integration Continuum and the Canadian Securities Industry: In Praise of the Status Quo thomas j. courchene

introduction

In his National Securities Regulator Report, Professor Michael ­Trebilcock (2010) applies an economic integration framework to the evolution of the regulation of securities markets. The thrust of this framework and Trebilcock’s accompanying analysis is that the march of domestic and international developments has been such that the status quo with respect to the regulation of the securities sector needs to be replaced by a single national (i.e., central) regulatory authority. Specifically, Trebilcock characterizes Canada’s securities regulatory regime as having evolved from stage 1 to stage 5 in terms of his six-stage stylization1 of the industry’s economic integration continuum. The stages are 1 Complete provincial autonomy; 2 Uncoordinated multi-jurisdictional responses to jurisdictional externalities; 3 “Check-the-box” issues choice of single regulation; 4 A common clearing house: qualified mutual recognition; 5 A passport system: harmonized standards; 6 A single national securities regulator: full economic integration. As noted, his conclusion is that Canada must now embrace stage 6. His final paragraph reads as follows: “After decades of inconclusive



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debates over the optimal institutional structure for securities regulation in Canada – endless commissions, panels, task forces, and academic commentaries – there is much to be said for the axiom that ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating.’ The option recommended by all expert task forces and panels that have examined the issue in Canada is a single, national regulator” (quotation marks in original). Given that the meaning of the old proverb “the proof of the pudding is in the eating “ is along the lines that the item or issue in question can be judged only by its results or when it is tested, the conclusion that a single national regulator is the optimal structure for Canada’s securities sector is puzzling, because no such hard evidence is presented. Rather, part of the argument that follows is that Professor Trebilcock’s conclusion rests on a presumptive logic: since the securities industry is increasingly international and since “of the 109 current members of IOSCO, only Canada lacks a national securities regulator” (Trebilcock, para. 64), it follows that Canada too needs a single national securities regulator. This conclusion has been subjected to close scrutiny by Eric Spink (2010) in his companion submission Distinguishing Functional and Structural Opinions. While the specific subject of the Spink paper is to assess the Report of the Canadian Bankers Association (Wrobel 2010), his deconstruction of the federal position (i.e., that a single national regulator is the best regulatory structure for Canada) is that it is premised on an upward cascading of opinions emanating from a series of commissioned reports, none of which provides adequate evidence to substantiate the presumptive conclusion. The influential report of the Crawford Panel (Cory and Pilkington 2006) is a good example of what Spink has in mind here. The Canadian Bankers Association report cites the IMF Update (2008) which, in turn, cites the Crawford Panel (2006) in order to support the CBA’s argument for a single national regulator. As Spink notes (para. 44): “the ­Crawford Panel’s mandate was not to consider whether there should be a single regulator, it was to suggest an appropriate structure for a single regulator based on the view that ‘various exhaustive studies have already concluded that one is necessary’ ... [Hence] it is inappropriate to construe submissions made in that context as evidence that the assumption was correct.” The role of this chapter is, at one level, similar to that of the Spink paper, namely, to make the case that the available evidence does not support the conclusion that Canada needs a single national ­securities

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regulator. However, I come at the issue from a federal, or federalism, perspective. In the first substantive section I situate the Canadian securities industry within a federal setting where attention focuses on 1 the decentralized and diverse nature of Canada’s federation; 2 how our decentralized federation goes about creating national, or, perhaps more correctly, pan-Canadian programs in areas that fall under provincial jurisdiction; and 3 why federalism contributes to the likelihood that these pan-­ Canadian programs will become both innovative and dynamically effective and efficient. The third section then brings Trebilcock’s economic integration continuum into the above federalism framework. While securing the Canadian economic union is an essential goal and while the continuum delivers on this goal, this would be far too narrow a perspective even on economic grounds if in the process, as would be the case with a single national securities regulator, the result would be to sacrifice the dynamic efficiency aspects of the existing regulatory regime. This is especially the case since there are further federalism stages that could be added in place of stage 6 (e.g., having Ontario join the passport system, having Ottawa enhance its criminal law enforcement provisions) that would continue to enhance economic integration without abandoning dynamic efficiency. In short, stage 6 is not part of the stage 1 through 5 continuum: it is a unitary state solution tacked onto a federalism continuum. More on this later. The fourth section proceeds along a different track. It assesses whether the various issues that the proponents of a single national regulatory agency advance as evidence for their case are sufficient to trigger a transfer of constitutional control over the securities sector to Ottawa. Among others, these issues include enhanced enforcement of the sector, the challenge arising from systemic risk, the greater influence it would give Canada internationally, and the proposition that since securities markets are national, so too should be the regulatory locus. The thrust of the ensuing analysis is that none of these factors is significant enough, even if relevant, to abandon the status quo. The final substantive section attempts to reverse the tables, as it were. The proponents have put the performance of the existing securities industry on trial. Fair enough. However, it is also fair to



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assess some of the ways in which a national securities regulator could go way off the rails. Hence, some attention will be focused on the disadvantages of a single national regulator. Before I embark on the analysis, it is important and instructive to note that the overall backdrop to what follows remains front and centre, namely, that there is hard evidence (in the form of international rankings, empirical data, and survey results contained in the reports filed with the Quebec and Alberta Courts of Appeal by Macey, Choi, and Suret and Carpentier, among others) to the effect that Canada’s existing securities regulatory regime is performing exceedingly well indeed. However, if I were to select just one piece of evidence (not included in the above list) that would appear most appropriate in terms of Trebilcock’s “proof-of-the-pudding” test, it would be the Milken Institute’s 2009 Capital Access Index: Best Markets for Business Access to Capital. For both 2007 and 2008, Canada is ranked number 1 out of roughly one hundred countries, based on the evidence relating to the breadth, depth, and vitality of its capital markets. To be sure, this evidence does not mean that our capital markets cannot be improved. But it certainly does mean that those in favour of a single national regulator must go beyond downplaying this evidence to focus on some evidence that their preferred approach will be an improvement. They have thus far not done so, preferring, as Spink notes, to rely on presumptive arguments. One wonders how they would react to, say, a presumption on my part that the presence of a single national regulator would have meant that Canada would not have come through the financial crisis nearly as well as it did under the existing regulatory regime. How could this be disproved? This is but another way of saying that presumptive arguments are, by their very nature, most difficult to counter. This caveat aside, I now turn to selected aspects of the theory and practice of Canadian federalism as they relate to Trebilcock’s economic integration continuum. f e d e r a l i s m a n d t h e e c o n o m i c i n t e g r at i o n c o n t i n u u m : conceptual underpinnings

Canadian Federalism: Diverse and Decentralized While federations come in all shapes and sizes, Canada is arguably the most diverse and decentralized of the developed federations.

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Inter alia, this is so constitutionally (decentralized division of powers), linguistically (English, French, Inuktituk, Cree  ...), culturally (Quebec, multiculturalism, First Nations, Inuit, Métis), and legally (common law and civil law). One often hears that Switzerland can lay claim to this diversity/decentralist title. However, if one were to elaborate a bit on the above attributes, Switzerland would not be in the running: that Canada has the second largest land mass of all nations; that the economic geography differs markedly across the provinces; and that unlike any other developed federation, the subnational governments have no role at all in the operations of Canada’s central governing institutions (e.g., the lack of a traditional Upper House), which in turn means that regional interests have come to be expressed though the provinces/territories and their premiers, and through executive federalism. As a result of these complications, Canada and Canadians have had to become masters at the art of federalism. The following two sections elaborate in turn on the process dimension of Canadian federal governance and on the provincial governments’ ability to create national (pan-Canadian) programs, both of which provide the necessary backdrop for the later discussion of the economic integration continuum. Federalism as Process It has become commonplace to draw on Daniel Elazar’s famous vision of the structure of federalism as a “self-rule, shared-rule” system, where self-rule obtains in areas of exclusive federal and provincial jurisdiction (e.g., s. 91 and s. 92 respectively) and shared rule obtains in areas that the constitution assigns concurrently (e.g., agriculture, immigration, contributory pensions). In terms of the issue at hand, securities regulation is currently deemed to fall within provincial jurisdiction through s. 92(13), Property and Civil Rights in the Province. Ottawa is desirous of assuming control of the sector through the proposed Canadian Securities Regulatory Agency (CSRA), which is intended to draw legitimacy from s. 91(2), the Regulation of Trade and Commerce. However, in light of the earlier discussion of diversity and decentralization in tandem with the reality of the increasing interdependency across constitutional heads of power, federalism can no longer be only about the structure of government: it must also be about process (Bastien 1981,



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48). ­Admittedly, this conception is hardly novel. Over forty years ago federalism scholar Carl Friedrich (1968, 7) recognized as much: “Federalism should not be seen only as a static pattern or design, characterized by a particular and precisely fixed division of powers. Federalism is also and perhaps primarily the process ... of adopting joint policies and making joint decisions on joint problems.” Through first ministers meetings and more generally the exercise of executive federalism and through interprovincial and federal-­ provincial cooperation, Canadians and their governments have excelled at “federalism as process.” This is quite remarkable  – when Canadians have desired national programs (central or pan-­ Canadian), they have found ways to deliver them whether the responsibility rested in the federal or provincial sphere. This is precisely what the provinces have done with their s. 92(13) responsibility for Canada’s securities industry, as later analysis will demonstrate. Competitive Federalism and Dynamic Efficiency Drawn from the economics literature, “competitive federalism” refers to the benefits arising from the competitive production of public goods and services. While competitive federalism applies to the design and delivery of public goods and services at both the provincial and federal levels, the focus here will obviously be on the provinces. The benefits arise because the individual provinces are free to experiment with alternative approaches to the design and implementation of provincial programs. The presumption is that demonstrably superior results in one province will be copied by other provinces. Saskatchewan’s pioneering experimentation with health care led to Canada’s pan-Canadian Medicare program. More recently, British Columbia has favoured a “principles-based” approach (as opposed to the traditional “rules-based” approach) to securities regulation. At the other end of the spectrum, if a jurisdiction introduces an approach that is deemed not to work, it does not put the entire system at risk. This ability of a system to experiment in very uncertain times is an important asset, one that does not carry over to a central regulator. In other words, competitive federalism brings to the operations of governments some of the innovation and dynamic efficiency associated with the operation of decentralized markets in the private sector. Moreover, this experimentation has been occurring in the same time frame that the Canadian securities regulatory regime

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has become progressively integrated on the economic-union front, on which more in the next section. Before addressing these economic union benefits of the status quo, I must mention a key additional benefit of a decentralized design and delivery system of public goods and services, namely, that provinces can tailor their programs to the needs and/or preferences of their citizens. The relevant economics literature refers to this as welfare maximization. For example, a province’s approach to the exempt market would fall under the category of welfare maximization and so would Quebec’s stock savings plans to encourage citizens’ stock ownership. Intriguingly, both of these exercises in provincial diversity (some of which were copied by other provinces) would arguably also qualify as increasing the dynamic efficiency of our capital markets. This dynamic efficiency and diversity would be most difficult to replicate with a single central securities regulator. Preserving and Promoting the Canadian Economic Union The free flow of goods, services, capital, and labour across the provinces has long been a Canadian policy goal. Spearheading the achievement of this goal during the 1980–82 debates leading to the Constitution Act, 1982 was the Honourable Jean Chrétien’s 1980 so-called “pink paper” (after the colour of its cover), entitled Securing the Canadian Economic Union in the Constitution. Although pursuing this option was abandoned, efforts to preserve and promote the internal economic market have continued to the present: the 1994 Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT); the enhancement of the Annual Premiers’ Conferences in 1996, which eventually morphed into the creation of the Council of the Federation in December of 2003; the 1999 Social Union Framework Agreement (SUFA); and finally, but hardly exhaustively, the 2006 British Columbia-Alberta Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) that led to the 2009 amendment to the heretofore mentioned AIT, which, in the view of the prime minister,2 marked a significant milestone toward eliminating internal trade barriers and enhancing labour mobility within Canada. It is important to note that there was a corresponding thrust by the provinces in the same time frame to advance the capital-markets economic union within the increasingly pan-provincial regulatory framework. Among the initiatives was the 2003 Provincial-Territorial Council of Ministers R ­ esponsible For



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S­ ecurities Regulation, the 2004 MOU committing to a more harmonized system, and the adoption and evolving development of the passport system as an innovative operational mechanism toward the creation of a pan-Canadian harmonized capital markets regulatory regime. The preceding four sections provide an appropriate backdrop for assessing Professor Michael Trebilcock’s stylized economic integration continuum, namely a series of progressions on the economicunion or economic-integration front that lead finally to stage 6 – a single national (i.e., central) securities regulator and full economic integration. f e d e r a l i s m a n d t h e e c o n o m i c i n t e g r at i o n c o n t i n u u m : an initial assessment

Following Prichard and Benedickson (1983, 8), it may be said that “an economic distortion is any policy which interferes with the resource allocation functions of the market, thereby preventing the free flow of capital, labour, or goods and reducing the advantages that can be gained from specialization and exchange.” The authors go on to note that a policy is a distortion only to the extent that it leads to a departure from some optimal result and that an optimal result is a good deal more complex than simply maximizing national output. This leads Prichard and Benedickson (1983, 15) to the following conclusion: “If distortions are understood in this way – as departures from an optimum which is not necessarily that of maximizing income – the task of constitutional reform becomes not one of eliminating barriers to trade but rather one of designing institutions and processes for balancing costs and benefits in a manner that is sensitive to the potential gains from economic integration and to the advantages of diversity and autonomy. A federal system that is itself a very varied structure is of course one such institution which attempts to maintain the appropriate compromise between integration and autonomy” (15).3 The implications of this quotation in terms of the economic integration continuum are, from my perspective, that the movement from stage 5 to stage 6 is privileging the economic union or economic integration aspect of an optimal federal policy at the expense not only of the diversity (welfare-­ maximization) dimension but as well of the economic (dynamic-­ efficiency) dimension, both of which will receive elaboration below.

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Phrased differently, the inclusion of stage 6 in the economic integration continuum can be viewed as suggesting that in terms of securing the internal economic union, a federation is a dysfunctional version of a unitary state. Yet the evidence with respect to distortions or impediments to the economic union does not point in this direction. Again from Prichard and Benedickson (1983, 48): “Interprovincial barriers are a predictable, indeed inherent, feature of federal states. At the same time, even in a unitary or centralized state, interregional barriers not dissimilar to interprovincial barriers would arise. The current Canadian situation confirms this argument: the barriers to trade within Canada are far from the exclusive preserve of provincial governments. As Courchene argues and ­Trebilcock and Whalley document in their contributions to this volume, the federal government itself in the exercise of its central authority is responsible for the most significant departures from and barriers to free trade (in the full sense of the word) within Canada.” What should replace stage 6 in the spectrum are some further options that are consistent with the evolution of stage 1 through 5. The obvious candidate in terms of the actual status quo continuum (instead of Trebilcock’s stylzed continuum) would be a stage where Ontario becomes a full participant in the passport system. This would clearly advance the integration dimension without sacrificing either diversity or dynamic efficiency. Enhancing the criminal enforcement provisions associated with securities crime would also be an obvious evolutionary stage, and for similar reasons.4 Note that the concern here is not with the notion of a national securities regulator if national is defined as “pan-Canadian.” Rather it is that “national” in the context of Trebilcock’s continuum is synonymous with “central.” Yet the evolution of the Canadian securities regulatory regime (as viewed for example through the movement from stage 1 through 5) has been consistently toward an integrated pan-Canadian approach to regulation. The fact that without much federal help at all the provinces have been able to create a pan-­ Canadian regulatory framework for Canada’s securities industry that continues to evolve in directions that enhance economic and capital-markets integration and that accommodates diversity and that embraces dynamic efficiency – indeed a securities industry that in terms of performance indicators regularly ranks among the very best (and sometimes the best) in the world – must rate as one of the single achievements of our federation. On a personal note, I still adhere to the motto that I adopted when I was chair (1982–85) of



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the former Ontario Economic Council, namely, “for programs and policies to be national they need not be central.” Therefore, the essential point is that Trebilcock’s single central regulatory agency should not be viewed as the end point of this economic integration continuum. It effectively abandons the diversity and dynamic-efficiency features of stages 1 through 5. It is an entirely different approach, one with new players, new politics, and no history. Since this represents an entirely new model, the burden of proof with respect to its qualities needs to be demonstrated. In turn this means that its advocates must demonstrate 1 that the status quo is failing Canada; 2 that any presumed defects cannot be addressed with appropriate alterations that fall within the existing overall framework; and 3 that a single central regulator will perform better in terms of the economic-integration/dynamic-efficiency/diversity goals. As the Spink report demonstrates, they have done none of these. In the remainder of this chapter, my focus will primarily be directed in turn to (2) and (3) above, since there is plenty of evidence presented in the Quebec and Alberta submissions that addresses (1), namely, that the Canadian securities industry story is a success story. Accordingly, in the next section the analysis will identify and assess those issues/challenges that implicitly or explicitly have been identified as candidates that can serve as drivers for moving to a single, central regulatory agency. These challenges to the status quo include the following claims: (1) that capital markets are inherently national in nature, (2) that only a CSRA framework can deliver adequate enforcement, (3) that a CSRA is needed to address systematic risk, (4) that the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) problem would not have occurred under a CSRA, and (5) that a single central regulator will give Canada a more effective international presence and influence. Each will be addressed in turn. a s s e s s i n g s e l e c t e d r at i o n a l e s f o r m o v i n g t o a s i n g l e c e n t r a l s e c u r i t i e s r e g u l at o r

Markets Are Inherently National My 1997 book, From Heartland to North American Region State: The Social, Fiscal and Federal Evolution of Ontario, presented data

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that showed that all but one province exported more to the United States than to the other provinces. Arguably, therefore, Canada was no longer a single east-west economy but, rather, an east-west series of north-south economies. Over the intervening years, especially with the emergence of India and China as major consumers of our resources, more apt description is that Canada’s economic relationships are increasingly provincial-international in nature. This is hardly surprising, since our industrial geography is so different across our land, with the result that the individual provinces’ international linkages vary both industrially and geographically. To an important degree, this carries over to investments and capital markets as well; for example, Alberta’s energy and resource base is closely linked with markets and investors in the United States and China, whereas Saskatchewan’s international linkages are even broader, given that in addition to Alberta’s resource mix it also has potash and uranium. Therefore, the intriguing reality here is that while securities markets are obviously local and increasingly international, there is little to suggest that securities markets are progressively, let alone inherently, national in nature. This is important, since the presumption that securities markets are inherently national seems to be part of the rationale for the CSRA. However, this presumption or assumption is questionable, as Jonathan Macey notes in his Expert Report (2010, 67–9): Arguments for centralizing Canadian securities regulation frequently suggest that national regulation is necessarily more effective than local regulation. However, to be effective securities regulation does not have to be at any specific territorial level. Securities markets are not inherently national, but are in fact increasingly global, and any given country does not require a national securities regulator in order to regulate effectively. The assessment that a national regulator is effective to regulate a national market overlooks the basic fact that there is no national market for securities. A way to conceptualize the modern nature of securities markets is to think about them from three perspectives: local, national and global. From the perspective of modern securities market microstructure, the best thinking is that local markets and global markets are both more relevant and important than national markets



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  ... Thus, international markets are important, but they are not substitutes for local markets. The development of global securities markets has shown, in other words, that international markets supplement and complement local markets. They are not substitutes or replacements for local markets, because these markets serve different purposes. On the other hand, it is far from clear what the relationship is between local markets and national markets, and there is no evidence or theory to support the assertion that a national market is superior to local markets. Macey concludes (69) by emphasizing one of the themes of this chapter: “The provinces have demonstrated an ability to effectively regulate securities activities, and a national system thwarting their authority could prove to be both inefficient and ineffective.” Indeed, the goal of many of Canada’s major corporations is to become listed on one of the US exchanges. To be sure, some aspects of the Canadian financial sector are inherently national, the most obvious of which is monetary policy. Canada’s inflation-targeting approach to monetary policy does require the oversight of a single national regulator – the Bank of Canada. Happily and appropriately, banking and the Bank of Canada fall under federal jurisdiction. Nonetheless, even if there is no inherent national component associated with capital markets, the oversight of the securities sector can benefit from being harmonized, and the provincial/territorial securities commissions and the CSA have indeed delivered a harmonized domestic securities regulatory system; that is, the passport system is a national (pan-Canadian) system run by the provinces. This is a variant of the earlier message that for policies to be national they need not be central. However, Canada’s existing securities regulatory regime could also benefit from (at least) two further developments in order for it to become even more integrated – both developments have been noted above. The first is obvious – Ontario could join the passport system. Ontario’s unwillingness to be party to the passport system is not a valid reason for allowing s. 91(2) to overturn s. 92(13). This is especially the case since the other provinces and territories have granted Ontario the benefit of the passport system – listings under the OSC can be automatically offered for sale in all other jurisdictions.

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The second area that needs improvement is the adequacy and effectiveness of enforcement relating to white-collar securities crime. To the extent that this involves criminal behaviour, this is also a federal responsibility under (s. 91(27)). The following section addresses whether or not the admittedly inadequate enforcement arrangements associated with the status quo constitute a reason to opt for a single regulator. The Enforcement Issue In “Critical Issues in Enforcement,” a research study commissioned by the Task Force to Modernize Securities Legislation in Canada, authors Hon. Peter Cory and Marilyn Pilkington (2006) level a veritable broadside against the enforcement failures associated with the Canadian securities industry. Their overarching recommendation is the following: 8. The Need for National Management of Enforcement. 8.0.1: Whether or not Canada adopts a unified or harmonized approach to securities regulation, it is fundamentally important that enforcement be managed on a national basis to ensure the effective use of resources, the development and deployment of expert skill and knowledge across the country, and the independence and accountability of enforcement processes. 8.0.2: Consideration should be given to be the establishment of a national institute to facilitate research and education in the investigation, prosecution and adjudication of securities law. With this recommendation in hand let us return to the securities sector and to the enforcement concern. Criminal law is, as noted, a federal power. The Department of Finance “Fact Sheet on Proposed Canadian Securities Act” (http://www.fin.gc.ca/n10/data/10– 051_2-eng.asp) promises to enhance enforcement as it relates to the securities industry along the following lines: “The proposed Act would lead to a strengthened, comprehensive, and coordinated enforcement regime for Canadian capital markets that would better protect investors. It brings together all securities-related offences and enforcement powers under one statute, creating a comprehensive enforcement regime  ... The proposed changes are intended to



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enhance the ability of all law enforcement and prosecutors to achieve better criminal enforcement outcomes across Canada.” Why is the Department of Finance interested in significantly enhancing securities-related enforcement only in the context of a “regime change” that transfers to Finance the responsibility for regulating the Canadian securities industry? Should not Ottawa be deploying its criminal law responsibility when and where it is needed? It seems quite unacceptable for Ottawa to adopt this stance and to then argue that one of the reasons for a single national regulator is to improve enforcement and prosecution for white-collar crime in the securities industry. As Cory and Pilkington emphasize in their above quotation, Ottawa needs to devote more attention to criminal law enforcement regardless of the securities regulatory regime that is actually in place. Systemic Risk Requires a Single Central Regulator The recent global financial collapse has led to an enhanced focus on systemic risk. Supporters of the CSRA argue that monitoring systemic risk requires an overarching national regulator, not a system of harmonized provincial regulatory systems. This does not follow. From Choi (2010, 100, par. 151): The assessment and monitoring of macro-level systemic risk is typically the domain of prudential and not securities regulators. Moreover, Canada already has a well-functioning prudential regulatory system with the explicit mandate of ensuring the financial soundness of financial institutions and private pension plans and the monitoring and control of overall system-wide risk among other things. No need exists for another regulator to monitor and regulate systemic risk at a macro-level across the economy. The majority of the regulatory response is best left to the prudential regulators in Canada – with the expertise and macro-level overview to assess systemic risk – including most prominently the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions as well as the Bank of Canada. Some elaboration is warranted. The Canadian securities industry differs from that in the United States in an important way. First,

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thanks to the provincial governments freeing up the ownership provisions during the mid-1980s Canada-US FTA negotiations, the chartered banks were able to buy out most of Canada’s securities firms, and these bank subsidiaries typically operate nationwide and remain far and away the dominant industry players. By way of an aside, while the regulatory regime is pan-Canadian, albeit provincially anchored, the industry players themselves operate national firms. Second, and again unlike the United States, as a result Canada’s securities industry maintains a banking culture in contrast with the free-for-all investment-markets culture south of the border. Third, although regulated for their securities market activities by provincial regulators, the bank-owned securities firms fall under the indirect regulatory eye of OSFI. The following exchange between Senator Austin and Nick Le Pan (deputy superintendent, OSFI), adopted from Lortie (2010, 39–40) is most instructive:   Senator Austin: Let me move on to overlap in prudential regulation between federal and provincial governments. We had evidence on this topic this morning. One witness expressed concerns about OSFI not having a direct role in the supervision of that part of bank functions, the investment banking side, feeling that there is an exposure. I would like to have your comment on that ...   Mr Nick Le Pan, deputy superintendent, Operations Sector, OSFI: Your question was premised on the presumption that we have no direct involvement but, realistically, that is not the world as I see it. In the business world, the line of division between a securities dealer and a bank for a particular operation is a pretty blurry one. They often share trading floors and dealers.   Senator Austin: The dealer might conduct the same transaction on behalf of two different entities.   Mr Le Pan: Exactly. For the banks we have, essentially, supervision responsibility for the whole entity on a consolidated basis. As a practical matter, that means that we are looking at aspects of the consolidated entity that involve the investment dealer, the subsidiary, or the affiliate, and it is why we want oversight responsibilities for holding companies. I will give you a couple of examples. We set capital rules on a consolidated basis. Quite recently, international bank regulators developed capital formulas for market risk involving the use of fairly sophisticated



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­ odels for measuring the value at risk. The models used by m major banks do not differentiate between the bank part of the operation and the dealer part of the operation. [...]   Senator Austin: Mr Le Pan, have you ever experienced any refusal on the part of any provincial securities regulator to give you information you have requested?   Mr Le Pan: No, cooperation with securities regulators under existing MOUs is good ... We have no problems sharing that information, but we do have appropriate confidentially agreements and so forth ...   Mr Le Pan: I am confident that, when it comes to sharing information with provincial regulatory authorities, we have an adequate system. Hence, to this significant degree, the existing securities regulatory regime already does involve central oversight in an area that is critical to addressing prudential systemic-risk issues, so that systemic risk does not emerge as a driver for overriding the current regulatory system. Asset Backed Commercial Paper (abcp) There is an assumption, certainly implicit if not explicit, that the ABCP debacle was a result of regulatory failure. This, too, is far from obvious. First of all, given how close the economic and financial links are to those in the United States, it is most impressive that we effectively escaped the financial carnage that befell the Americans, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe. Second, the ABCP episode was successfully contained. Third, and most important in terms of the lessons for the CSRA, it is most unlikely that a single national regulator would have made any difference. Evidence for this claim comes from Purdy Crawford, a strong proponent of a national securities regulator, in an article by François Desjardins (“Après la crise du papier commercial, un bilan,” Le Devoir, 23 January 2009): “I am in favour of a single agency, for many good reasons ... But the reality is that if we had put in place such a single agency, there would have been the same exemptions [for issuers issuing commercial papers]. The crisis has taken everyone by surprise, and a single agency would not have changed anything ... The single agency would have adopted the same rules. The probability that they would

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have decided to examine this exempted segment is very thin. I know that, in Ottawa, I am not liked when I say so, but that’s the reality.” [Unofficial translation of a statement quoted in the French newspaper Le Devoir. Original quotation in French is as follows: “Je suis en faveur d’une [agence] unique, pour plusieurs bonnes raisons ... Mais la réalité, c’est que si nous avions mis sur pied une agence unique, il y aurait eu les mêmes exemptions [pour les sociétés qui émettent le papier commercial]. La crise a pris tout le monde par surprise, et une agence unique n’aurait rien changé ... L’agence unique aurait adopté les mêmes règles. La probabilité qu’ils auraient décidé d’examiner le créneau exempté est très mince. Je sais qu’à Ottawa, on n’aime pas ça quand je le dis, mais c’est la réalité.” Hence, a single national securities regulator is not a silver bullet in terms of this issue and does not contribute to the case for a shift from stage 5 to stage 6. “The csra Would Provide ... More Effective International Representation and Influence for Canada” The heading of this section is a direct quotation from the Department of Finance’s Backgrounder: A New Securities Regulatory Authority.5 This is a strange quotation since Canada’s reputation internationally has never been higher in light of the successful recent navigation of our securities sector through the financial shoals. Moreover, the oft-noted suggestion that Canada would be better represented in IOSCO (the International Organization of Securities Commissioners) if we had a single national securities regulator is also suspect. IOSCO was founded in 1983, replacing the earlier Inter-American Securities Association. The head office of IOCSO was initially in Montreal until it was transferred several years later to Madrid. Canada has two voting members in IOSCO – the Ontario Securities Commission and Quebec’s Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) – as well as two members with “associate status,” the Alberta and British Columbia securities commissions. IOSCO’s Annual Conference was held in Montreal in June of this year. Since IOSCO and its predecessor association have held annual conferences from 1974 onward, this is the fourth time that this event has been held in Canada. No other country (among the 109 voting members) has hosted more than two of these annual conferences. Moreover, as a result of the 2010 IOSCO meeting, the AMF and the OSC were requested, and they agreed, to



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oversee the production of a discussion paper on the important issue of systemic risk. This appears to be convincing evidence that Canada’s participation is valued highly in international securities-industry circles. Perhaps the most important aspect of this Canada-IOSCO relationship is that the four largest provincial regulatory systems, each overseeing an exchange, have formal access to the discussions and decisions of the 107 other national regulatory commissioners. Hence they are not only privy to the latest state-of-the-art developments and instruments but, as well, the four commissions have the opportunity to share ideas and challenges with their relevant partners in their respective provincial-international linkages alluded to earlier. To this point, the analysis has been directed to a series of presumed defects of the status quo that are viewed, singly and especially in combination, as requiring a single national regulatory authority. The above evidence suggests that the case for the CSRA on these grounds is seriously wanting. In the following and final substantive section, the focus switches to assessing the likely defects associated with a single central regulator. t h e c a s e a g a i n s t a s i n g l e n at i o n a l r e g u l at o r

Sacrificing Efficiency and Innovation for Uniformity The case for preferring pan-Canadian provincial regulation over a single central regulator is similar to the preference for a federation over a unitary state: decentralized agents allow for diversity, and they bring to bear some of the competitive features of markets into the governmental sphere. The federalism literature typically refers to this as “competitive federalism.” In the securities industry context the more apt term is “dynamic efficiency.” Expert reports filed with Alberta and Quebec emphasize this dynamic efficiency. For present purposes, we focus on the analysis by Jonathan Macey: As is typical of any market system, regulatory competition can be expected to foster innovation. The feedback mechanism of interjurisdictional flows provides an incentive for regulators to improve their regimes. One of the traditional benefits of federalism is that competition encourages experimentation in legal

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rules, as provinces implement different solutions to specific problems ... Another advantage of a competitive regulatory framework is that such a system more quickly corrects policy mistakes than a single regulator can. In a competitive market, there is a built-in self-correcting mechanism, as the actions of numerous actors aggregate information effectively ... Furthermore, a competitive framework gives investors the power to decide how competitive the system should be in practice ... If issuers and investors do not prefer substantial regulatory diversity, then competition will produce uniform regulatory outcomes without the vast resources that would be required for a top-down governmental overhaul of the securities industry. (35–7) Perhaps the most appropriate way to conclude this section is to draw from the speech to the 2009 conference of the North American Securities Administrators Association by the incoming chair, Denise Voight Crawford, the thrust of which was, as Macey (2010, 61) recounts, to link the SEC’s failure in the recent financial debacle to the SEC’s pre-emption of state securities regulators. Macey’s concluding comments to his assessment of the US financial crisis are along similar lines: “The failure of a national securities regulator in the United States is not a matter of too much or too little regulation, but more likely a natural consequence of excessive centralization” (64). While a single central regulator would compromise the dynamic efficiency of the Canadian securities industry, it would also fall short in terms of accommodating the existing diversity dimension of the sector. To this we briefly now turn. Diversity and a Single Central Regulator Canada’s provincial securities commissions currently pursue objectives consistent with the needs of their quite different markets. Alberta has expertise in oil and gas markets, British Columbia in mining and mineral exploration, Ontario in financial services, and Quebec has converted the Montreal Stock Exchange to a derivatives exchange. Beyond this, Alberta’s Junior Capital Pool Program has assisted firms to access capital markets, a program that has been copied by other provinces. Arguably, this latter program is part of the story behind Finance Minister Flaherty’s comment in the 2007



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budget backgrounder, Creating A Canadian Advantage in Global Capital Markets. In this document Finance Minister Flaherty notes that “Canada has almost 3,800 publicly-listed companies, far more per capita than many other developed countries. For example, the U.S., with a population nine times that of Canada, has 5,100 listed companies. The average of a Canadian listed company is smaller than in other countries” (23). While this illustrates how the current system can accommodate diversity, it is no doubt the case that this program designed to encourage small firms to engage with the capital markets also embraces aspects of the dynamic efficiency highlighted in the previous section. Such flexibility/diversity is almost certain not to characterize a single central regulator. Note that the Alberta initiative is hardly unique. Earlier on, Quebec introduced the Quebec Stock Savings Program designed to entice individual Quebecers to become shareholders in Quebec-based firms. Again, this initiative was copied by other provinces. To be sure, the CSRA promises that it will also cater to provincial flexibility by providing provincial offices. However, as Choi notes (2010, 35–6), it is unclear whether provincial-level officials will want to move from their existing provincial regulatory positions, where they have decision making authority, to that of a regional office where decision making is centralized in Ottawa (or in some other location) and where regional officials will constantly face the hassle and delay costs associated with having to communicate with, and obtain approval from, the centralized regulatory bureaucracy. Almost by definition, “an enforcement national body with a focus on the entire nation will have lower incentives to focus on the needs of specific subsets of issuers in a particular province” (36). Hence, the conception of the Canadian securities industry as a model of provincial diversity within national harmony will be effectively eroded under the CSRA. Regulatory Capture and a Single National Regulator There exists a well-respected regulatory-capture principle: regulation tends eventually to be in favour of those being regulated. To be sure, the notion of regulatory capture is not high on the agenda of issues associated with the CSRA. Nonetheless, it is true that a single national regulator (monopolist regulator) would be much more

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s­ usceptible to regulatory capture than a series of provincial regulators. Once again, Macey (2010) is an appropriate source: The United States, at the beginning of 2008, had five (5) major investment banks that were not owned by a large commercial bank: Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, ­Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns. By late fall of 2008, all of these investment banks had either failed or abandoned their status as independent investment banks ... If their uniform collapse was not enough to suggest the possibility of regulatory failure, one additional item unites them: each of these five (5) firms voluntarily entered into the SEC’s Consolidated Supervised Entity (CSE) Program, which was established in 2004 for only the largest investment banks. In fact these five investment banks were the only investment banks permitted by the SEC to enter the CSE Program which permitted its embers to escape the SEC’s traditional net capital rule. While the quotation refers to this as a regulatory failure, it is also an example of regulatory capture. As was implicit in the earlier quotation to the effect that the financial failure was due to excessive regulatory centralization, this sort of regulatory failure or capture is much less likely within a competitive regulatory environment. One of the regulators may be captured, but the system will not be. concluding comments

The provinces have cooperated in crafting a pan-Canadian regulatory framework for Canada’s securities industry – a framework that continues to evolve in directions that enhance economic and capitalmarkets integration, that is able to accommodate provincial diversity in terms of industrial needs and citizens preferences, and that by its very regulatory design is innovative and dynamically efficient. Beyond these attributes, international surveys regularly place Canada’s securities industry at or near the top in global rankings. Given this stellar performance, the burden of proof in the CSRA challenge to the current regime has to be borne by the federal government. In the above analysis attention has been directed to selected factors that are put forth by the federal side as a rationale for a shift to a single national regulator. However, all have been found wanting.



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Finally, I believe that the proposed CSRA is anything but a further progression along the existing economic continuum. Rather, it represents a dramatic shift toward a new model, one that not only would require abandoning both the diversity and the dynamic efficiency virtues of the status quo but as well would have to wrestle with a new organizational framework, new players, and a new political environment. Even if one were to accept Ottawa’s view that there is a new and uncertain international securities environment, which is not at all clear, the answer would surely still be to stay with the demonstrated strengths of Canada’s existing evolutionary model and especially its hallmarks of dynamic efficiency and innovation that flow from a decentralized yet harmonized competitive regulatory system. editors’ note

The inclusion in this collection of essays of Thomas Courchene’s distinctive contribution may seem, when first apprehended, a less than obvious fit with the other chapters in this section, with the topic of regional development more generally, or indeed with the oeuvre of Donald Savoie. Yet Courchene’s intervention here in the long-­ simmering debate in Canada about the need for a federally mandated national securities authority that would replace existing provincial regulators resonates with a persistent theme both in the regional development literature and in Canadian government policy over the relative merits of a centralized versus a decentralized approach to economic development (Polèse, this volume; Savoie 2006, chapter 3; Bickerton and MacNeil 2007). It also directly speaks to Savoie’s own work in the field in two important ways. First, Courchene’s perspective on current federal and provincial government roles in the Canadian economic union  – that provincial jurisdiction has worked over time to create a pan-Canadian “solution” to securities regulation that obviates the need for heavyhanded and unnecessary federal intrusion – can be seen as congruent to some extent with Savoie’s argument (2006, chapter 10) about the history of economic development in Canada: that centralized national policies and federal program administration have not been regionally sensitive and therefore have not been beneficial for the have-less provinces, instead serving Central Canada’s interests, and in particular those of the Ottawa-Toronto-Montreal nexus, which

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historically has been the political, bureaucratic, economic, cultural, and communications epicentre of Canada. Second, Courchene’s point that inter-provincial cooperation in the securities regulation field has been both innovative and dynamically effective and efficient is fully in accord with Savoie’s own long-held and frequently expressed views on the pervasive benefits to be reaped in economic development terms from extensive inter-­provincial cooperation (if not full political union) within the Maritime region (Savoie 2006, chapter 8). Savoie’s support for a “made-in-the-region” development solution that begins with a deep level of inter-provincial cooperation and coordination demonstrates his intellectual commitment to the potential of such cooperation to overcome challenges and problems that may confound or overwhelm provinces that address them in relative isolation from their neighbours. Courchene appears to exhibit a similar intellectual commitment in this essay, and his analysis of the securities regulation question offers some evidentiary sustenance to this shared perspective on an important dimension of Canadian federalism.

notes

On October 18, 2010 Donald Savoie submitted an affidavit to the Supreme Court of Canada entitled “National Institutions, National Policies and New Brunswick.” This presentation was part of the New Brunswick brief to the SCC in connection with Ottawa’s attempt to create a national securities regulatory agency. Savoie’s affidavit included the following statement: “When the government of Canada unveiled plans to establish a National Securities Commission, it may well have assumed that the provinces would see the merit of this “national” initiative ... I see no reason why this “national” initiative would be much different from other “national” initiatives. The existing national institutional and administrative institutions lead me to conclude that New Brunswick’s economic circumstances and interests will, as in the past, not be accommodated under this new national initiative” (19). Since I have a similar vision of national policies as they relate to the smaller provinces (Saskatchewan is my home province), I felt that an analytical defence of the existing securities industry regulatory framework would be an appropriate way to honour the many and various ways that Donald Savoie in his role as a public intellectual has enriched the theory and practice of political economy for Canada and Canadians.



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  1 Stylization is the appropriate word here, since stage 3, for example, represents a model that has never be been implemented in Canada, even though it may constitute a progression in the stylized continuum.  2 http://pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?id=2385.   3 While I had no direct involvement in the Prichard-Benedickson paper, I was one of the editors of the volume in which it appeared. As the relevant entry in the References indicates, the editors were, in the order in which they appeared on the cover, M.J. Trebilcock, J.R.S. Prichard, T.J. ­Courchene, and J. Whalley.   4 Enhancing enforcement within the current conception of securities regulation will be addressed below.  5 http://www.fin.gc.ca/n10/data/10_051_1-eng.asp.

references

* Indicates expert witness reports filed with the Supreme Court of Canada. Bastien, Richard. 1981. Federalism and Decentralization: Where Do We Stand? Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada. Bickerton, James, and Theresa MacNeil. 2007. “Models of Development for Atlantic Canada.” In S. Hodgett, D. Johnson, and S. Royle, eds. Doing Development Differently: Regional Development on the Atlantic Periphery. Sydney: Cape Breton University Press, 42–71. Chrétien, Hon. Jean. 1980. Securing the Canadian Economic Union in the Constitution. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada. * Choi, Stephen. 2010. “The Benefits of Provincial Securities Regulations in  Canada.” Cory, Hon. Peter de C., and Marilyn Pilkington. 2006. “Critical Issues in Enforcement.” Commissioned by the Task Force to Modernize Securities Legislation in Canada (The Crawford Panel). * Courchene, Thomas J. 2010. “A Single National Securities Regulator:   Public Policy and Political Economy Perspective.” – 1983. “Analytic Perspectives on the Canadian Economic Union.” In M.J. Trebilcock, J.R.S. Prichard, T.J. Courchene, and J. Whalley, eds., Federalism and the Canadian Economic Union. Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Ontario Economic Council, 51–110. Courchene, Thomas J., with Colin Telmer. 1998. From Heartland to North American Region State: The Social Fiscal and Federal Evolution of Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto, Rotman School.

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Friedrich, Carl. 1968. Trends of Federalism in Theory and Practice. New York: Praeger. IMF. 2008. “Canada: Financial System Stability Assessment – Update.” Washington, DC: IMF. Karazivan, Noura, and Jean-François Gaudreault-DesBiens. 2010. “On Polyphony and Paradoxes in the Regulation of Securities within the Canadian Federation.” The Canadian Business Law Journal 49, no. 1: 1–39. * Macey, Jonathan. 2010. “An Analysis of the Canadian Federal Govern  ment’s Initiative to Create a National Securities Regulator.” Milken Institute. 2010. 2009 Milken Institute Capital Access Index: Best Markets for Business Access to Capital. publications@/milkeninstitute. org. Prichard, J.R.S., and Jamie Benedickson. 1983. “Securing the Canadian Economic Union: Federalism and Internal Barriers to Trade.” In M.J. Trebilcock, J.R.S. Prichard, T.J. Courchene, and J. Whalley, eds., Federalism and the Canadian Economic Union. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, for the Ontario Economic Council, 3–50. * Savoie, Donald. 2010. “National Institutions, National Policies and New  Brunswick.” – 2006. Visiting Grandchildren: Economic Development in the Maritimes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. * Spink, Eric. 2010. “Distinguishing Functional and Structural Options: A   Report in Reply to the Report of the Canadian Bankers Association.” * Suret, Jean-Marc, and Cécile Carpentier. 2010. “Securities Regulation in   Canada: Re-Examination of Arguments in Support of a Single Securities  Commission.” * Trebilcock, Michael J. 2010. National Securities Regulator Report. Trebilcock, M.J., J.R.S. Prichard, T.J. Courchene, and J. Whalley. 1983. Federalism and the Canadian Economic Union. Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Ontario Economic Council. Wrobel, Marion. 2010. Report of the Canadian Bankers Association Regarding Parliament’s Jurisdiction to Create a National Securities Regulator. Toronto: CBA.

Contributors

P E T E R A U C O I N was professor emeritus of political science and public administration at Dalhousie University. Among his many honours and distinctions, Peter was a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Canada. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Civil Law from Saint Mary’s University in May 2011. Peter was the author or editor of sixteen books and the author of more than eighty articles and book chapters. His work is cited extensively in Canadian and international publications. His research spawned a range of topics related to democratic governance and public administration and reform. Sadly, Peter passed away in July 2011. HER MA N B A K V I S is professor of public administration at the University of Victoria. Previously, at Dalhousie University, he was director of the School of Public Administration from 2000 to 2004. He has also held visiting appointments at the Australian National University, Queen’s University, and the University of Saskatchewan. His research and teaching interests include intergovernmental relations, the policy process, and public sector management and governance. Recent publications include Contested Federalism (Oxford University Press 2009), co-authored with Gerald Baier and Douglas Brown; and Canadian Federalism (Oxford University Press, 3d ed., 2012), co-edited with Grace Skogstad. From 1990 to 1992 he was research coordinator with the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing. J A M E S B I C K E R T O N is professor of political science at St Francis Xavier University. He is co-editor of Canadian Politics, currently in its 6th edition, and among his many publications on regionalism

332

Contributors

and federalism are “Regions” (with A. Gagnon), in D. Caramani, ed., Comparative Politics; “Deconstructing the New Federalism” in the Canadian Political Science Review; and Nova Scotia, Ottawa and the Politics of Regional Development. J A C Q U E S B O U R G A U L T , Ecole nationale d’administration publi­ que/UQAM, has retired as full professor at UQAM. He is now adjunct professor at UQAM and ENAP. As a scholar in CCMD, then CSPS, he chaired IPAC and participated in many boards and panels of inquiry and is currently working in national and international consulting on public administration. Dr Bourgault has published books and many studies on public administration, on senior officials, on strategic planning, human resources, performance appraisal, and management by results. His most recent book  – Deputy Ministers In Canada: Comparative and Jurisdictional Perspectives – is co-edited with C. Dunn and involves twenty academics from across Canada. THOMAS J . C O UR C H E NE holds the Jarislowsky-Deutsch chair in economic and financial policy at Queen’s University, where he is a member of the Department of Economics and the School of Policy Studies. He has written widely – roughly sixty authored/edited books and three hundred academic articles – on Canadian issues such as monetary and budgetary policy, equalization, fiscal federalism, climate change, regional disparities, resources and energy, social policy, federal-­provincial relations, and the constitution. Tom is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an officer in the Order of Canada, and he holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Western Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Regina. In 2000 he was awarded the Canada Council Molson Prize for lifetime achievement in the social sciences. RALPH HEINTZMAN is an adjunct research professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a senior fellow of Massey College in the University of Toronto. A former editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies, his career has spanned the university, research, and government worlds. His publications also range across a variety of disciplines: recent books are Tom Symons: A Canadian Life and Rediscovering Reverence: The Meaning of Faith in a Secular World.



Contributors 333

M A R K D . J A R V I S is a doctoral candidate in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria. He is author or coauthor of a number of publications, including Democratizing the Constitution: Reforming Responsible Government. He is also coeditor of From “New Public Management” to “New Political Governance”: Essays in Honour of Peter C. Aucoin. His current research investigates how individual public servants are held to account for their day-to-day work, comparing Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. This research builds off Modernizing Government Accountability, which he co-authored with Peter Aucoin. LOWE L L MUR R A Y, Senate of Canada (retired), is a native of New Waterford, Nova Scotia. He was educated at St Francis Xavier University and Queen’s University, where he received an MA in public administration. In 2005, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Civil Law from St Francis Xavier University. Engaged in politics from an early age, he was appointed to the Senate of Canada on 13 September 1979. In 1986, he became leader of the government in the Senate, serving as minister of state, federal-provincial relations, and minister responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. He chaired and served on several cabinet committees, as well as numerous Senate committees. Lowell Murray retired from the Senate in 2011. B . G U Y P E T E R S is Maurice Falk professor of American government at the University of Pittsburgh and also professor of comparative governance at Zeppelin University in Germany. He is founding co-editor of the European Political Science Review. His recent publications include Institutional Theory in Political Science (3d ed.) and Interactive Governance: Advancing the Paradigm, with Jacob ­Torfing, Jon Pierre, and Eva Sørensen. jon p i e r r e is a research professor in political science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He holds adjunct professorships at the University of Pittsburgh and the Nordland University in Bodö, Norway. His most recent books in English are Administrative Reform and Democratic Governance (2011) (co-edited with Jean-Michel Eymeri-Douzans), Steering from the Centre (2011) (coedited with Carl Dahlstrom and B. Guy Peters), The Politics of Urban

334

Contributors

­Governance (2011), and Interactive Governance (2012) (with Jacob Torfing, B. Guy Peters and Eva Sorensen). M A R I O P O L È S E is professor at INRS (University of Quebec) in Montreal and holds the senior Canada research chair in urban and regional studies. Recent books he has authored or co-authored are The Wealth and Poverty of Regions (2009), Économie urbaine et régionale (2009, 3d ed.), Connecting Cities with Macroeconomic Concerns (2003), and The Social Sustainability of Cities (2000). He writes regularly on issues of regional and urban e­ conomics and has acted as a consultant to municipal, provincial, federal, and international agencies. Professor Polèse has held teaching positions in Latin America, Switzerland, Spain, and France. C H R I S T O P H E R P O L L I T T is emeritus professor of public management at the Public Management Institute, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He is also editor-in-chief of the International Review of Administrative Sciences. Christopher is author of more than sixty scientific articles and author or editor of more than a dozen scholarly books. Among the better known are The Essential Public Manager (2003); Time, Policy, Management (2008); Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis (with Geert Bouckaert; 3d ed., 2011); and New Perspectives on Public Services (2012). He has also undertaken extensive consultancy and advice work for a wide variety of organizations, including the European Commission, the OECD, the World Bank, H.M. Treasury, the Finnish Ministry of Finance, the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, and the Danish Top Executives Forum. D O N A L D J . S A V O I E holds the Canada research chair in public administration and governance at l’Université de Moncton. He has published widely in public administration and regional economic development. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, an officer of the Order of Canada, and a member of the Order of New Brunswick. Pau l G. T h omas is professor emeritus in political studies at the University of Manitoba, where he taught for forty years. His most recent scholarly work was as co-editor and contributor of three chapters to the book Manitoba Politics and Government: Issues,



Contributors 335

Institutions and Traditions (2010). Throughout his career he has served in various leadership and advisory roles to federal, provincial, and local governments. He twice received university-wide teaching awards, as well as national recognition for outstanding teaching. He is a member of the Order of Manitoba.

Index

Aberbach, Joel, 151 Acadia, 4, 14, 25, 276–8 accountability, 26–7, 34, 47, ­215–16, 252–3 accounting officer, 86, 92–6 agenda setting, 62–4 Alberta, 112–13 Allison, Graham, 4, 5 Arar, Maher, 28 Atlantic Canada Opportunity Agency (ACOA), x, 7, 9, 11, 30, 236 Aucoin, Peter, 26, 37, 113 Australia, 40, 49 Axworthy, Tom, 121 Bank of Canada, 329 Barzelay, Michael, 183 Bekke, Hans, 144, 146, 150 Bell, Daniel, 291 Bevir, Mark, 61 Blair, Tony, 187, 194 Bouckaert, Geert, 140, 160 Bouctouche, 3 Bourgault, Jacques, 174 British Columbia, 311 Buckler, Sandra, 70–1 budgets, 10

bureaucracy, 204; career, 12; constitutional, 12, 143; instrumental, 143; professional, 145 bureaucrats: amphibian, 153; guardians, 156–7; gurus, 157; leaders, 158; managers, 157; proactive, 152; promoters, 157; reactive, 152 Bush, George W., 187 Butler, Sandra, 36 cabinet, 40, 43–4, 207 cabinet government, 27, 33 Calgary, 245–6 Campbell, Colin, 152 Canadian Association of Journalists, 69–70 Canadian Centre for Management and Development, viii Cape Breton, 14, 242, 279–83; Cape Breton Regional Municipality, 281–2; Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation, 280–1 central agencies, 33, 67 Charter of Public Service, 101, 116 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 26 Chrétien, Jean, 75, 125, 312

338 Index

Christensen, J.G., 145 citizen engagement, 203 civil service bargains, 154–5 Civil Service Code (United Kingdom), 118 civil society, 265 Clerk of the Privy Council, 108, 115 clientelism, 142 clusters, 237–40 coalition government, 207 Committee on Public Accounts (United Kingdom), 93 Committee on Standards in Public Life (United Kingdom), 129 communications, 17–18, 53, 55, 69 Communications and Consultation Unit, 73 communications management, 36 communist systems, 141 Conservative Party, 36 consociational representational bargain, 155 Constitution of Canada, 59, 90–1 convergence, 190 coordination, 218 Cornell University, 243 Council of the Federation, 312 Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in ­Canada and the United Kingdom, 34, 53–4, 85, 112, 211 “court politics,” ix, 147 Crawford, Purdy, 322 customer service, 186, 203 Dean, Tony, 128 delegation, 47 democracy, 21 democratization, 295

Denmark, 214 Department of National Defence, 37 Department of Regional Economic Expansion (DREE), 8, 232–3 Department of Regional Industrial Expansion (DRIE), 8–9 Dogan, Mattei, 144, 149, 167 e-government, 185 Economic Action Plan, 74, 99, 127 economic integration, 267–70, 308, 315 elections, 54 entrepreneurial government, 188 equalization payments, 228 European Union, 210; European Commission, 187; regions, 291; structural funds, 302–3 evidence-based policy making, 190–1 executive power, 33, 85; constraints, 39–41, 89 Federal Accountability Act, 86, 101 federalism, 13, 19–20, 34, 275, 309–12; competitive, 323–4; executive, 34–5 First Ministers Meetings, 34 Flanagan, Tom, 74 Fleischer, Julia, 145–6 Florida, Richard, 19, 244–5 foreign policy, 27, 37 France, 142, 145, 152, 187; Grand Corps, 145 Franks, C.E.S., 98 Fraser, Sheila, 28 “Fraser Test,” 88 Friedrich, Carl, 311



G8 Summit, 105–6 Germany, 145, 152, 187 globalization, 56 Gomery Commission, viii, 39, 86, 95, 108–9, 116, 127 governance, 57, 58, 181; interactive, 208–9 Governing from the Center, 32 Government Resources and Accounts Act, 94 governor general of Canada, 46–8 growth poles, 18–19, 230–7; critique, 231–3; politics, 235–7; “Why only them” (WOT) rule, 235–6 Harper, Stephen, 10, 36, 39, 55–6, 68, 76, 78–9, 103 Hatfield, Richard, 9 Heady, Ferrell, 142 Hennessy, Peter, 148 Hodgetts, J.E., 97 Hondegem, Annie, 163 Hood, Christopher, 151, 154, 163 House of Commons, 43, 102 ICT, 56 Ignatieff, Michael, 74 India, 150 Industry Canada, 105, 106 Infrastructure Canada, 105, 106 institutional approaches, 141, 162 institutions, 14 Jain, R.B., 150, 154 Japan, 152 Joined Up Government, 213 jurisprudence, 87 Karvonen, Lauri, 62

Index 339

Kent, Tom, 7 Kernaghan, Kenneth, 116, 121 Keynesian economics, 234 Kinnock, Neil, 187 Lambert Commission, 94–5 leadership, 75 Lewis, David E., 145 Liberal Party, 42 Lodge, Martin, 151, 163 Macdonald, John A., 60 machinery of government, 182 Mallory, James, 5 Manion, John L., 11 Marchand, Jean, 8 Maritime provinces, 261–3, 272–4 Martin, Lawrence, 33, 75, 77 Martin, Paul, 35 Marxism, 141 media, 57 Medicare, 311 message event proposal (MEP), 36, 71, 75–6, 100 migration, 284 ministerial direction, 95–6, 126 minority government, 35–6, 76 Montreal, 233–4, 238–40 Morgan, John, 285 Morin, Edgar, 167 Mulroney, Brian, 5, 9, 29 multi-level governance, 296 National Policy Domains, 19, 306–10 networks, 60, 296 New Democratic Party, 35 New Political Governance, 6, 11, 32, 37, 50, 57, 85

340 Index

New Public Management, viii, 5, 38, 160, 171, 172, 181, 186–9, 203, 218 “New Right,” viii New Zealand, 45–6, 48, 112, 188 Newfoundland, 225, 229 Norway, 292 Ontario Government Advertising Act, 130 Painter, Martin, 144, 163 pantouflage, 142 parliament, 33, 119–20; committees, 102–3; dissolution, 47; no confidence, 47, 49; opposition days, 47; prorogation, 40, 48 Parrado-Diez, Salvador, 159 participation, 205 party caucus, 40 path dependency, 271–2 patronage, 11 Pendleton Act, 173 performance management, 203, 214–15 permanent campaign, 65–7, 76–7 Perroux, Françoise, 231–3 personalization of politics, 62 Peters, B. Guy, 144, 146, 149, 153, 163 Peterson, Paul, 302 Pfetsch, Barbra, 63 Pierre, Jon, 146, 149 policy instruments, 58 political culture, 57 political parties: leadership selection, 42; party discipline, 43 politicization, 33, 40, 44–5, ­146–51, 171, 212; functional,

148–9; ideological, 148; partisan, 147 policy advice, 207–8 policy evaluation, 192–4, 196 political parties, 207 Politics and Administration: ­Ministers and Civil Servants, 126 Pollitt, Christopher, 140, 160 Porter, Michael, 237 presidentialization, ix, 41, 62, 206, 217 Prime Minister’s Office, 38, 56, 67–70, 172 priority management, 213 Privy Council Office, 17, 56, 67–8, 71–4, 109–10, 172 Public Policy Forum, 73 public service, 86; deputy ministers, 103, 106–16; independence, 86, 87–90, 124; neutrality, 87–8; ­private sector model, 114–16; professionalism, 173; trust, 124 Public Service Commission, 27, 114 Public Service Employment Act, 123 public service ethics, 14–15 public service quality, 190 Putnam, Robert, 151 Quebec, 8, 229, 235, 277 Reagan, Ronald, 5, 187 reform, viii, 16–17, 41–9, 180; business model, 184–5; consultants, 184; cycling, 181–2, ­194–5; experimentation, 196; failure, 181; international dimension, 183–4 regional development agencies, 236–7



Index 341

regional development policy, ix–x, 18, 30–1, 225–6, 264–7; economic disparities, 227–8; education, 241–4; history, 226–30; institutions, ­270–2; intrusive rentier syndrome, 251–2; local development corporations, 248– 9; local government, 247–50; “smokestack-chasing,” 244 regionalism, 264 regulation, 306–7, 313; capture, 325–6; enforcement, 320; of securities, 327–9 results-based management, 254 Rhodes, Ray, 61 Robichaud, Louis J., 4, 14, 278, 283 Rockman, Bert, 151 Rose, Richard, 209 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 28 Russell, Peter, 35, 47 Salamon, Lester, 212 Sarkozy, 187 Savoie, Donald J., vii, viii, ix, 32–4, 38, 41, 50, 53, 55, 62, 77, 85, 87, 108, 112, 116, 122, 139, 147, 149, 159, 171, 180, 190, 204, 211, 218, 226, 260–1, 267, 272, 327 “Savoie Thesis,” 31, 32, 53, 60–2, 77 Sayre, Wallace, 4 Schaffer, Bernard, 154 Schutt, Sarah, 295 Senate, 41, 50; elected 39 senior public service, 44–5, 139; images, 140; Latin America, 142; professionalism, 143; roles, 152;

senior executive service, 142; typologies, 139–41, 167 Seymour-Ure, Colin, 54 Simpson, Jeffrey, 33 social media, 57 social movements, 285 soft law, 212–13 soft power, 60 Sossin, Lorne, 97 special advisors, 207 spin, 64–5, 79–80 Spink, Eric, 307, 309 spoils system, 142 Stairs, William, 70 “Steering at a distance,” 210 Stone, Clarence, 302 strategic government, 214 Sweden, 20–1, 291; Gothenburg, 299, 300, 303; political parties, 302; regional development strategy, 297–8; regional institutions, 294; regional policy, 293; Responsibility Commission, 301; West Sweden Region, 294, 298, 299, 300, 303 Switzerland, 152, 310 Tait, John, 89, 110–11, 121, 122 targeting, 226, 232 Task Force on Public Service Values and Ethics, 95 Thatcher, Margaret, 5, 187 Total Quality Management, 196 transfer payments, 30 Transport Canada, 105 Treasury Board Secretariat, 67, 99, 127 Treasury (United Kingdom), 92–3, 105, 126 Trebilcock, Michael, 306, 309, 313

342 Index

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 4, 152 United Kingdom, 152, 188 United States, 142, 145, 187 University of Moncton, 25 Values and Ethics Code for the Public Sector, 89–90, 99, 110, 117

Van der Meer, Frits, 144, 146, 150 Visiting Grandchildren: Economic Development in the Maritimes, 260–1 welfare state, 7 Westminster model, 38–9, 61 White, Graham, 34 World Bank, 193