National Public Service Week is an opportunity to recognize the many ways in which public services facilitate trade and investment, such as the importance of the Canadian Coast Guard to marine commerce.
This is the first article in our series marking National Public Service Week from June 9 to 15, 2024. This week, Federal Retirees is recognizing the work of public servants and the value of a strong federal public service. In this series, we asked experts to explore questions including the way forward for our public services and how privatization affects people in Canada. In our first piece in the series, former clerk of the privy council Michael Wernick looks at what the future holds for the federal public sector and how it will have to respond.
As the 32nd National Public Service Week rolls out, it is useful to recall the original purpose of the week: “to recognize the value of the services rendered by federal public service employees.” Over the years, the week has perhaps been more successful in providing a platform for activities to promote pride and internal recognition than it has been in reaching the broader public, but this may be a year when starting to engage a wider audience is particularly important.
The public sector is entering another period where dramatic changes are coming. This is precisely the time to advocate for the importance of a dynamic, effective public service and to argue for mindful, smart management of these forces of change.
One in five Canadians works for the public sector if you add up federal, provincial, territorial, municipal and Indigenous governments. The past few years alone have seen already “choppy waters,” starting with the arrival of the pandemic in 2020. The efforts by public services to address the public health crisis, stabilize the economy, keep supply chains moving and adapt a wide array of external and internal services to online delivery were acknowledged by many Canadians. These accomplishments were even more extraordinary because public servants also had to cope with lockdowns and infection control measures and caring for their families.
The pandemic had several knock-on effects. It accelerated a shift of many workflows to online platforms, from document sharing to holding meetings. The emergence of hybrid work combined with the return of inflation after decades of absence to create a tense environment for post-pandemic collective bargaining. We saw job action in several provinces and the first federal public service strike in a generation. The quick rebound in travel after two years of restrictions brought high-profile attention to passports and border services.
Meanwhile, public services, like the rest of society, have been roiled since 2020 by uncomfortable conversations about racism and how far we in Canada still must travel on the road to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.
Last year brought the first light tapping of the brakes on federal operating budgets in a decade, and, this year, the federal budget announced an intention to gently reduce workforce numbers. These are nowhere near the magnitude of the 1995 Program Review or the 2012 Deficit Reduction Plan, but they signal a pivot to restraint.
The past year also brought closer attention to the role of external contractors and consultants. A fuzzy intention by the federal government to repatriate some of that work to public servants has not yet been backed up by increased effort at training them. Attention to “side hustles” in contracting by some public servants has done a lot of reputational damage and a deeper reform to procurement is now on the to-do list.
As we take stock in 2024, there seems little prospect of respite or a return to calmer waters for public services across Canada. Some big forces will continue to create challenges but also opportunities.
Some of them seem like incoming asteroids because they were there before, but now they loom larger in the sky. The combination could mean several years of disruption before any “new normal” emerges.
Changing political winds
One is the political cycle. While nothing is ever inevitable, polls say the federal public service now has a busy current government to deliver for and a government-in-waiting to anticipate. Big changes are also possible in upcoming provincial elections. Keep an eye on Quebec and the possible return of the separatists to office in 2026.
The federal election, whenever it comes, will present Canadians with quite different packages, not just of policy promises and catchy slogans, but underlying views on the size of government and the role of the federal government within our federation.
It is these underlying views that will shape how the next government goes about a serious review of federal spending. There is an alliance of lobby groups, media pundits, academics and politicians building a case that the federal government needs trimming back (although offering precious few specific ideas on where and how). Another round of review on the scale of 1995 or 2012 seems inevitable after the election.
The advent of artificial intelligence
Even if it isn’t, we are going to see a wave of change brought on by the use of artificial intelligence. AI is a loose term covering a range of tools. Some are the facial recognition, translation and chatbots that are already becoming familiar as we scroll through our smartphones. Others are the new generative tools that can be harnessed for writing and creation of content. The truly disruptive parts of AI come from rapidly advancing “learning software” and prediction models that can and will replace or assist many cognitive tasks that used to be performed by humans.
The medium-term horizon is now one of a lot of change to organizations, occupations and locations, whatever the policy agenda and whatever shocks come from the geopolitical situation or the U.S. election.
Public service leaders will deal with some divergent interests that strain solidarity. One potential fault line is generational, as younger employees become a vulnerable underclass as cutbacks start. There are already a lot of younger term employees in precarious employment. If seniority is baked more explicitly into the algorithm for layoffs of permanent employees (workforce adjustment is the euphemism), this tension will be even more evident. Some readers may be triggered with flashbacks to discussions of early departure packages, job swapping, reverse order of merit processes and reasonable job offers.
What will a reasonable job offer look like now that many public servants are working from home in distant locations? Another fault line that has emerged is between the roughly half of the federal public service who have “hybrid work” options, and the other half who have always had to show up at physical places of work because of the nature of the work they do. Sometimes, these fault lines show up within the same department or agency.
Are we past “peak Ottawa”?
My prediction is that the combination of fiscal reckoning, AI and hybrid work will lead governments to pursue a shift of the overall footprint of the federal service away from the National Capital Region. We have probably passed “peak Ottawa” as a government town.
This isn’t intended to be a gloom and doom forecast. Some of this change can be a good news story. Hybrid work has benefited many public servants with family responsibilities, and it may end up opening up the potential talent pool and spreading more good jobs across Canada. As it gets better, AI will help Canadians navigate transactional services and service windows and get the information they are seeking. AI assistance will help functions such as costing, financial analysis, legal advice and screening case files and piles of applications.
My own hope is that AI assistance can achieve long sought breakthroughs in traditionally hard-to-change areas such as staffing, classification, procurement and record management. Imagine feeding every job description and every collective agreement across the entire public service into a solid AI model built for human resource services.
The other change, which will likely be more controversial, is the way rapidly improving AI-driven translation and interpretation tools will challenge the way we think about language of work and definitions of bilingualism.
The main point about the coming wave of change is not to deny it is coming, but to manage it mindfully and proactively so that the public sector can enter the 2030s better than ever. It can be smaller, flatter, more agile and more productive while continuing to deliver real value to people in Canada. Public service can continue to be a great career path full of opportunity and meaning for the emerging generations, as it was for mine.
With this in mind, it was very timely to engage public servants over the past year in a conversation about values and ethics. This will help provide a compass. Difficult issues have surfaced including how far public servants can go in speaking out on social media platforms.
A difficult conversation that lies ahead will centre on the productivity of the public sector. There has been a lot of talk in recent months about Canada’s overall productivity, which has been lagging. Some commentators see smaller government and a smaller public service as part of the solution.
They have yet to take the next step and identify what to cut, what to retain, and where to bulk up. Serious attention to productivity would mean investments in training and technology, just like the private sector.
A toast to the public sector
There is a better conversation to be had — one that starts from acknowledging the value of a dynamic, effective public sector.
We can start with the contribution an effective public sector makes to the economy. Canada has many advantages, including a healthy, educated labour force, physical infrastructure, effective tax agencies and border management, and trusted markets for producers and consumers, investors and lenders, inventors and innovators. Public sector research councils and in-house labs are the innovation engine rooms of much of what the private sector then takes to market. Public services facilitate trade and investment.
Some of this is hidden in plain sight, like the importance of the Canadian Coast Guard, ports and pilotage to more than 200 billion dollars a year in marine commerce or the importance of Environment Canada’s weather service to agriculture, tourism and recreation. Even less appreciated is the importance of Statistics Canada and other agencies in generating the data and information on which the private sector relies for decision-making.
More than 65,000 public servants “stand on guard” for Canada in an increasingly dangerous world by working in defence, security and intelligence, cybersecurity, the coast guard, the RCMP and border services. Is this the time to cut back?
As we look ahead and think about defending our democracy, the importance of the public sector as a reservoir of authentic and reliable facts, data, evidence and science has never been greater. Public services can help Canadians, their governments and their journalists cope with the onslaught of disinformation. Public services will have to become more skilled and more proactive in working to retain and build common ground and trust. Sadly, public servants will be more exposed to online abuse and doxxing .
Change is coming. If we are deliberate, mindful and smart about it, we can improve the capabilities of the public service, tackle some old problems as well as some new ones, and emerge stronger than ever. That will require learning from the past, where too often we cut the very things that matter to future capabilities, like training, continuous learning and investment in internal services.
We won’t get there with simplistic across the board budget trimming and running tired old plays of pulling back on travel and training. It will take hard choices about priorities, not just by our politicians, but by the new generation of emerging public service leaders.
National Public Service Week matters. It is a time to acknowledge and celebrate contributions and accomplishments. But more than this, it is an opportunity for reaffirmation and recommitment. Resilience, persistence and bloody-minded optimism about the future will be in demand from public servants. They will need encouragement and support from their fellow Canadians — after all, it’s in all our best interests.
Michael Wernick served as 23rd Clerk of the Privy Council from 2016 to 2019 after many years as a federal deputy minister. He is a consultant at MNP Digital, the Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management at the University of Ottawa and the author of Governing Canada.
Continue your reading with Wernick’s recent contribution for the Institute for Research on Public Policy. His must-read article explores the nature of Canada’s budget process and the risks in focusing on the overall cost rather than the mix of government spending.