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

Article content

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

Article content

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.

Article content

Article content

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

Article content

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.

Article content

Article content

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).

Article content

Article content

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

Article content

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.

Article content

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.

Article content

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.

Article content

Article content

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.

Article content

Article content

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.

Article content

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.

Article content

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.