Salgo: Canada’s public service can’t afford to ignore these four New Year's resolutions in 2025

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The start of a new year is widely viewed as a good time to commit to making yourself better. I have not found this to be the case in my personal life, as resolutions ranging from visiting the gym?between membership renewals, to recognizing that onion rings are not a vegetable and beer is not “freshly squeezed barley juice,” have repeatedly gone awry.

But I’m prepared to assume that bureaucrats as a class are more stalwart than I, and in that optimistic spirit, I’m proposing a short list of four resolutions for Canada’s public service in 2025.

First, brace for change.

The most predictable change is that there will be a federal election and, whatever the outcome, a differently configured government with lots of new faces and an aggressive sense of purpose. The chances are high that these faces will regard you with some skepticism and possibly as a source of resistance. So, familiarize yourself with the government’s agenda and remember to craft your advice in terms of how best to achieve it,?without pulling any punches about possible unwanted consequences.

The other predictable change, unfortunately, is that there will be a harsher fiscal environment with a high chance of touching you personally, one way or another.

Second, try to see yourselves as your fellow Canadians see you.

Canada’s public service offers some of the best jobs in the country. By this, I mean it provides some of the most interesting work with real opportunities to grow professionally and make a positive difference. But many Canadians understandably see the public service as a privileged caste that’s spared a lot of the anxieties that preoccupy them. Right now, they’re also inclined to think it isn’t providing particularly good service, which is especially frustrating given how much the bureaucracy has grown.

As a former public servant, I get that a public sector career can entail its own set of trade-offs and frustrations, but if there’s ever a time for self-absorption or complaint, this is not it.

Third, seek opportunities to streamline your organization and its processes.

Canada’s machinery of government, including central agencies, ministerial departments and so-called arm’s-length organizations could use a major rationalization. It’s not that there’s no rhyme or reason to the current structure — indeed there’s some evidence of intelligent design — but it’s also sprawling, hierarchical, siloed and resistant to change.

Every organization, no matter how anachronistic or obscure, has a constituency that will tell you how the world will come to an end if it were reduced in scale, folded into another entity, or wound down altogether. And it will be hard to flatten the hierarchy without simplifying classification and compensation systems, since people are classified and paid based mainly on their place in the hierarchy.

But wholesale reform of government machinery will require political will and it’s not clear that governments see a big political payoff, which is ironic given how much people complain about a bloated bureaucracy.

In the meantime, public service managers should: a) be grateful they don’t have to contend with Elon Musk; and b) look for ways to streamline internal processes and approvals. There’s ample scope for this, especially in a system riddled with self-imposed rules. All public sector organizations have internal protocols that people imagine come some higher authority, but which are actually the detritus of past management practice. Some “phantom rules” may be useful but a lot aren’t.

That brings us to resolution four:

Be the change you want to see.

It may sound like I’m singing Kumbaya, but I’m actually urging a tough-minded search for ways to make things better by doing your own job differently. It’s striking how people will complain about a system while adhering to its follies.

For example, if you review other people’s documents, do you send them back through the system for low-value edits because time doesn’t matter nearly as much as your splendid choice of words? If you’re responsible for approving applications, whether from citizens or your departmental colleagues, do they sit on your desk longer than they need to? When you say no to a request, is it because you know that’s the right answer or because you feel it’s the safe answer?

Does “because that’s how we’ve always done it” sound like compelling logic to you, or do you actively try to come up with better ways of doing things? If Tommy jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too? (Sorry, my parental nagging instincts kicked in, but you catch my drift.)

My list of resolutions actually goes on but I’ll stop here. Besides, I need to come up with a new personal resolution, since “dance like no one is watching” has not gone over well.

Karl Salgo?is a former senior public servant and is currently executive adviser at the Ottawa-based Institute on Governance.