Over the nine years it has been in power, the Trudeau government has shuffled senior officials 98 times, with more than 300 specific changes – some individuals multiple times.UlyssePixel/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
David McLaughlin is a former clerk of the executive council and cabinet secretary in Manitoba, and past CEO of the Institute on Governance.
Is Canada’s public service quietly preparing for the change in government that voters are expected to deliver next year – or is the significant juggling in our bureaucracy just more of the same, in terms of senior-public-servant office churn?
Just one year into his new job as Privy Council Clerk and the federal government’s top public servant, John Hannaford has presided over 14 shuffles affecting 30 deputy-minister and associate-deputy-minister-level officials. The public service has not seen this kind of senior official churn since the first term of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government.
Over the nine years it has been in power, the Trudeau government has shuffled senior officials 98 times, with more than 300 specific changes – some individuals multiple times. On average, there have been about 10 shuffles per year. Meanwhile, there are now 41 deputy ministers – more than ever before.
Changes in the deputy-minister ranks get far less attention than cabinet shuffles. But they are equally – and sometimes more – consequential to government success. They occur for internal reasons that are either prosaic (such as retirement, tactics, or matching skills and strengths to specific positions and ministers) or empowering, including promoting women and traditionally underrepresented societal groups. Some shuffles are unexpected, and others are planned, such as after a new Clerk takes over or following an election.
These are hard, demanding jobs. You must run your organization while navigating the eddies of shifting political priorities and sometimes capricious edicts from a centralized government. Choosing the right deputy candidate is both art and science.
So why are we constantly changing them?
There’s a legitimate question as to whether such senior executive churn is truly good for the large, complex set of organizations called the Government of Canada. Natural Resources has had five deputy ministers over the life span of this government; so too have Environment and Climate Change, Intergovernmental Relations, Immigration and Citizenship Canada, the Treasury Board, and Public Safety.
There has been more stability at Finance, Health, Industry, Transport and Infrastructure, with deputies serving five years on average. The most stable department has been Infrastructure, with just one DM serving since 2017.
But these are the outliers. The average deputy minister can look forward to being changed at about the three-year mark or even earlier; for the average PCO Clerk, it’s between three and four years. This churn is worse than what has been seen in the British government. By contrast, the average tenure of a CEO of a Fortune 500 company in the U.S. remains more than seven years.
At present, only two of 17 key departmental deputy ministers have been in their current roles for more than two years. Nine of those have served just one year or less in that position.
From a leadership and management perspective, it makes little sense to constantly shift senior management around like this. It can take a new deputy up to two years to learn fully about their department. While doing so, a deputy minister must contend with changes in their own senior management teams. Almost half of the more than 300 changes since 2015 were around associate deputy ministers and heads of agencies, who report into a deputy minister. This adds leadership instability, as some of those officials are being groomed for even higher office.
Fresh perspective on a task or mission is always useful, and promoting people into senior ranks is necessary for talent-building. But rampant shuffling has consequences. It commodifies deputy ministers. It devalues subject matter expertise and institutional wisdom in favour of management and system conformity. It weakens the crucial minister-deputy relationship that comes from longer periods of working together, and it does the same for the extensive stakeholder and delivery apparatus that surrounds modern government. It undermines the institutional memory and corporate knowledge that underpins the whole ethos of an independent, permanent public service.
Most importantly, it divorces senior officials from results. Individual responsibility for seeing things through is diminished when you know it will be your successor who will be carrying the can. This accountability serves as a form of collective protectionism – a kind of omerta – for the public service system as a whole.
Post-pandemic, Canadians are expecting that the institutions of government perform better. Right now, that is wanting. From procurement to service delivery to appointments, there are obvious institutional failures.
As voters increasingly clamour for change and accountability at the highest political levels, now is the time for the highest public service levels to adopt this same attitude as their own. Arresting the churn at the top should be at the top of that list.