Canadian Politics Today

One can always be more efficient but we have to deal with reality. We have a huge country with a small population. Per capita we are always going to be more expensive when it comes to government and infrastructure. To assume we can provide the same services as Denmark for the same money is a pipe dream.

Why? I'm confused about what this 'huge country' has to do with expenses, unless they're travel expenses. The rural population of Canada is 18% vs 16% in Finland, 20% in France, and 24% in Germany. When I worked in CRA, for example, the only additional cost of the country being spread out would be the distance we had to travel to tax centres for training and inspection - and that was only because a series of governments had spread them all over the country for political purposes (local vote getting). If they were all in Ottawa like they used to be there'd be no big additional cost. And our travel costs were tiny compared to the overall budget anyway.

That's not the deciding factor.  The management culture of the government seems to have a chief objective of not getting in trouble.  The willingness to take on risk is zero, and avoidance of accountability is high.

I have had to do a few projects with government, and it was impossible to get information and to get decisions made so as to move forward.  One project required the Deputy Minister, a very high profile person, to approve the schedule for us to develop a proposal.

After there was some minor news story about hospitality costs for bureaucrats, they took away signing authority for managers, and even directors only had an absurdly low threshold for signing for hospitality costs. So almost any time there was any function which required renting a hall or paying for dinner for people it had to go up to the director general, or often even to the Assistant Commissioner. My boss could sign for millions in spending but couldn't sign for a bunch of donuts and coffees for a meeting. It's all media driven, all fear of some 'waste' being exposed. In turn, that's all driven by the careerism of senior management, afraid that some piddling little thing will get them blamed and thus harm their career advancement.

When I was a pay clerk, I was once moved to a new branch and found that one of my key jobs was paying cell phone bills. That had been a fairly simple task where I had been, but not now. Now we had to photocopy every bill, attach a form addressed to the individual, and have them go over it to ensure there were no private calls. Then they had to get their bosses to sign off on it. These are all managers and directors, understand, and their bosses were all directors or higher, and we are talking about bills which averaged $35. So all these forms had to be moved around by messengers, and spend long periods in mangers/directors/directors generals in baskets, and invariably came back late, accruing penalty interest. Then they had to be paid for through an arcane method using purchase orders, rather than through a credit card. It took me  maybe a week to figure out we were spending more money on processing the invoices than for the actual invoices. But did anyone care? Nope. They found it amusing, but no way was senior management going to change it since, well, what if some manager used his cell phone to make personal calls and the media found out!?

From my perspective, the Trudeau government has fixed a few things and made other things less good.  Such is the constant struggle with any human system.

From my perspective, the Trudeau government has fixed a few things and made other things less good.  Such is the constant struggle with any human system.

What have they fixed?

What have they fixed?

I doubt many of the things that I see as fixes, such as the Census, the CCG spill protection funding, and the GIS increase are seen as fixes by you.  Again, that's a function of a human system.

SJ's criticisms come from the inside and are valuable.

Does anybody else not see the problem with the signing authority thing ?  This is a symptom of a bad system.  Fear of media attention means that the system will be geared towards doing very little. 

It's not so much media attention as the possible impact on careers. You have to remember that once you become a manager, if you're career-minded, you need to move around a lot and get your tickets punched in hopes of building up a resume to go higher. You need to manage all sorts of different resources in different areas so that you can eventually parlay that into becoming a director. Of course, all these management stints have to be clean and clear without any blemishes.

As an aside. When I become a full program officer I was put in charge of a fairly simple  program. But it took me a good two years before I would say I had mastered its complexity. This was one single, small national program. A manager might be in in charge of a dozen program managers, and have responsibility over a score of programs - or just a few really complex ones. I can't imagine how long it takes to figure them all out. But I can say that if you move to a different managerial job every two or three years you never will, really. The same constant musical chair theme continues with directors, and then directors general. By the time they start to grasp how their unit works they're on to their next ticket-punching assignment so they can build their resume. Most of these new assignments have virtually no relation to the ones they've got experience with.

The result of this is that at any given time a very high percentage of senior managers are incompetent, regardless of their actual intelligence, in that they actually know very little about what they're managing. Add in the heavy requirement for fluency in both languages, which shuts out 90% if potential candidates, and that very, very few managers or senior managers have a degree in anything related to management, and you get a bureaucracy full of mediocrities and incompetents.

Meh. It costs more per person to provide electricity due to having to lay all that wire. It costs more per person to provide roads and highways. Natural gas and train service too, I'd imagine. Anything that has to travel about will cost more. But most government services are unaffected by travel time or population density.

It's true that we have a comparatively much smaller tax base to provide infrastructure for a vastly larger area but it's more than just that, a country the size of Denmark can centralize a lot of facilities that we have to duplicate just because of our size. Things like defence and policing have to be spread over much greater areas.

While I don't dispute our beaurcracies have many inefficiencies, some are due to politics and therefore self inflicted. Military procurements would be a good example.