Introduction

There is plenty of evidence that the traditional understanding of the complex relationship between politicians and public servants in Canada has been disrupted by a number of factors. In fact, Paul Tellier, the co-chair of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Advisory Committee on Public Service Renewal has recently stated that relations between politicians and the senior levels of the bureaucracy have never been more strained and he would know having served as Mr. Mulroney’s Secretary to the Cabinet in the mid 1980’s.

Paul Tellier could be referring to recent issues like the removal of the chairperson of the Nuclear Safety Commission and of frictions between the government and the chief electoral officer. He could also be thinking of the confrontations between public servants and members of some parliamentary committees. Unfortunately, these high profile examples are only the tip of the iceberg.

Distrust between politicians and public servants is also apparent in a number of provinces – including Saskatchewan – where a large number of public servants have been dismissed following the recent change in government.

Let me first look at the reasons why we are experiencing this tension today. I will then move on to discuss the characteristics of a good working relationship, followed by a brief conversation about the weak elements in the traditional Canadian model. I will complete my remarks by looking at the so-called independent agencies that offer an interesting perspective on the issue given their legislative structure, and then by offering some conclusions.

Why such tension?

In my view, there are both long term and short-term trends at work.

Ezra Sulieman, a professor of politics at Princeton University, noted in a recent book that “in almost all democratic societies we have witnessed over the past two decades an incontestable phenomenon: relentless attacks on and denigration of the state.” Why has the bureaucracy served as the punching bag for so many would-be reformers he asks? He points out, and I quote, that “the attacks on the bureaucracy have largely come from the politicians, in part to ward off attacks and to deflect criticism of their own incapacity to solve society’s pressing problems. Instead, they turned their wrath and frustration on their own state and on the way it was being managed.”

As James Q. Wilson noted in his well know 1989 book entitled, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It, and at the height of Reaganism in the United States, “no politician ever lost votes by denouncing the bureaucracy.”

There are a number of reasons for this development.

First, on a global scale, some have argued that the decline in legitimacy is the result of the ascendancy of the so-called new public management practitioners, who see government institutions as organizations of questionable value.