John Ivison: Ottawa’s bureaucrats aren’t buying what Mark Carney is selling

There’s no doubt that Prime Minister Mark Carney is a man in a hurry.

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During Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit this week, the Ukrainian president revealed that his drone team said a partnership deal could be concluded with Canada within 90 days.

“Then Mark said: ‘Can we have it in nine days? And the team immediately said: ‘Yes, we can’,” Zelenskyy recounted.

The need for speed has been a hallmark of Carney’s time in government. But senior officials complain privately that the federal bureaucracy is struggling to keep up with the prime minister’s pace and ambition.

Frustrations with the public service are said to be at the root of the rumoured departure of the head of the new Defence Investment Agency (DIA), Doug Guzman. (He appears to have been talked into staying, for now at least).

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But the failure of the bureaucracy to enact Carney’s agenda will become a recurring feature if ambitious targets are not met.

In his introductory communication to federal employees in June 2025, the clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Sabia, warned that internal procedures have become too complicated and too slow. “The standing operating procedures don’t work anymore,” he said. His mantra, Focus, Simplify and Accountability, have since been drummed into the public service’s 346,000 employees.

There is undoubtedly a culture of caution among the senior mandarins, who head rigid, hierarchical silos that are as intent on making sure negative things don’t happen as on ensuring positive things do.

The public is not impressed. The benchmark annual Confederation of Tomorrow survey suggested last summer that two-thirds of Canadians lack confidence in the ability of the public service to spend taxpayers’ money wisely.

The average public servant, who could rarely be mistaken for a ray of sunshine, wasn’t happy even before recent developments. The government’s public Service Employee Survey for 2024 suggested fewer than half believe senior management in their department make effective, timely decisions, and only six in 10 think the proposal of a new idea would be well received.

Carney and Sabia’s solution has been to try to bypass the bureaucracy on key files by setting up new agencies — the aforementioned DIA, Build Canada Homes and the Major Projects Office — to ensure that their agenda is implemented.

However, one former senior bureaucrat said none of the outsiders brought in to run these organizations have any sense of how the public service works, even though the bulk of their staff often come from legacy departments, such as Public Services and Procurement. He said Shared Services Canada, a relatively new department designed to centralize all IT functions, took 10 years to create.

The argument is that this kind of disruption will shake up the inertia and see a repeat of the bureaucracy’s finest hour during the pandemic, when nearly a quarter of Canadians were out of work and the public service processed 2.4-million Employment Insurance applications in days on a 46-year-old computer system.

But even the trade war with the United States has not produced the kind of bold, collaborative, adaptive response that is being sought.

The former senior public servant, who spoke to National Post on condition of anonymity, said part of the problem is Sabia.

“When he came in, he said all the right things. But you have to ask yourself now that there is an empirical record, what are the results?” he said.

“When you create new machinery, you slow things down. The DIA, the Major Projects Office and Build Canada Homes — they sound like they will speed things up by hacking through the bureaucracy. But the paradox is that they take a lot of bureaucracy to set up.”

He said in his opinion Carney and Sabia should have tried to fix the existing system first, before creating new structures.

“When the prime minister brings in his personal friends, the rest of the system says: ‘Alright smarty-pants, go and figure this out.’ It makes enemies in the existing structure.”

One incident in particular upset some senior bureaucrats; namely, Sabia’s decision to promote Christiane Fox from deputy clerk of the Privy Council to deputy minister of National Defence. Fox was sanctioned by the ethics commissioner for hiring an old university acquaintance in a prior job. “That says to the system that he doesn’t care about the institution,” the former official said.

Another criticism levelled at the senior levels of government is that the approvals process for action has become over-centralized.

Carney and Sabia have been focused on the Canada-U.S. issue for obvious reasons.

But their critics say they have set up a structure where all big decisions have to go through them, creating a logjam in Ottawa on many other files.

The sense that power has become too concentrated was a theme in a speech given by retired deputy minister John Knubley at a testimonial dinner organized by the Public Policy Forum last May.

One of the lessons he passed on from a long career in the public service was that senior leaders should not be the ultimate gatekeepers, and people closer to the problems should be empowered to come up with solutions.

“I worry about what’s happening in Ottawa today,” Knubley said. “While I very much like the shape of directions being set, there are signs only the smart guys at the top are making the decisions.”

Every government that I have covered this century has talked about reforming the bureaucracy to focus on outcomes.

Sir Humphrey Appleby, in the classic British sitcom Yes Minister, dismissed such efforts as being comparable to drawing a knife through a bowl of marbles.

In this case, everyone appears to be on the same page when it comes to grasping the opportunity to bolster Canada’s sovereignty and make the country more prosperous and resilient.

But the anecdotal evidence is that the prime minister’s expansive agenda lacks buy-in from many of the people it relies on to implement it.

National Post

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