Senior public service officials must take the coming threat of artificial intelligence seriously, as it could result in thousands of bureaucrats losing their jobs in the next few years, says one of Canada’s leading expert on the machinery of government.
“AI is a freight train coming at the public service, at government operations,” said Donald Savoie, Canada Research Chair in Public Administration and Governance at the University of Moncton, in an interview with The Hill Times.
“It’s a freight train, and my fear is that we’re not thinking hard enough about what it means.”
Savoie, who has co-edited a new e-book about the decline of public service in democratic countries around the world, said that one of the key challenges among many others before the newly minted Privy Council Clerk Michael Sabia will be to address the challenge of AI.
He said that the private sector is well ahead of the government in handling challenges posed by AI.
Savoie said that among other tasks, a significant chunk of the government’s workload involves application processing, which is ideally suited for artificial intelligence tools. He warned that if the government does not develop concrete plans to adopt AI, it may soon be too late.
“We’re at the point where AI has reached a level of intelligence that’s the most intelligent human being,” said Savoie, an award-winning and author and scholar who has authored and edited more than 28 books. “The difference is that they [AI] work 24 hours a day, they don’t get tired. They’re not members of a public-sector union.”
In his newly released book, What Happened? The Decline of the Public Service in Democratic Governments, which he co-edited with B. Guy Peters, an emeritus professor the University of Pittsburgh, Savoie asked top scholars around the world about the reasons behind the decline of the public service in democratic governments. Based on his analysis of these experts, Savoie said the decline is not only a Canadian and American phenomenon, but that it’s happening in all democratic countries around the world, including in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, South Korea, New Zealand and the Netherlands. The reasons are similar even though all these countries have different histories, geographies, and political institutions, Savoie said.
The following is a Q&A with Donald Savoie which has been edited for length and clarity.
What question did you ask these top scholars?
“The question that was asked was, ‘Why is it [that] in the 1960s, government could say “we’re going to go to the moon, we’re going to build a Trans-Canada Highway, we’re going to have Medicare, we’re going to do great things, and we’ll get it done.” Why is it that [the] government can’t do that anymore?’ That was the question that was asked.
“I got Guy Peters, a friend of mine, at the University of Pittsburgh. We went to really the best scholars in public administration [in] New Zealand, France, Germany, Japan, and we put the question because we kind of suspected the problem was not a Canadian problem. It was an international problem. And lo and behold, that’s what came out, that national governments are having a heck of a time with the people they serve. …The level of trust and the confidence that people had in 1960s of their government is not nearly as strong as it once was [and] permanent bureaucracy not nearly as valued as it once was.
“What’s fascinating is what I just said is true in all the countries, absolutely in all the countries the challenges are the same. Very few countries do not reflect what the challenges Canada has and so on. And so what that does is that it invites people like [United States President] Donald Trump to take a chainsaw to it. Nobody in the 1960s, no politician anywhere in the countries that we looked at … would have wanted to put a chainsaw to the public service.
“You would have been laughed out of court. You would have been laughed out of the room if somebody said ‘We’re going to put a chainsaw’ because the level of trust and the respect and the ability of the government to get things out of major projects was there. Today, it’s not there. So the question is: is it a one-country phenomenon? The answer clearly is no. … What is true in Canada is also true in Japan, South Korea and Germany. It’s there. It’s also true in France.
“So then you ask the question, ‘what has transpired? Why is it that national governments have lost the ability to mount great things, to do great things, and why have they lost the respect of the citizens that they serve?’ And then we try to answer the questions in several ways. When the government [and] people don’t think they’re getting a good return on their taxes. They think they pay very high taxes. Taxes in government are not nearly as efficient as they should be, and that’s true in all the countries.
“Public opinion surveys speak to that. So that’s a problem. I also think that public sector unions have to answer a lot of questions. We’ve reached that point, and it’s not just a Canadian phenomenon. Third, the distrust between politicians and public servants. It wasn’t there in the 1960s. It is very much present today in all the countries. Politicians don’t trust their public servants, they don’t feel that they’re on the same team, and that’s why everywhere you see political offices being built up considerably. I mean, the political staffers in Ottawa, in Washington, in France, in England, are many times more than was the case in 1960. In 1960, they were barely visible.
“They were there to organize a minister’s agenda schedule. Today, you have 25 very senior staffers in your ministerial offices. And what they do, they aim for [some] sort of influence. They don’t trust public servants. That’s why they’ve built up their own offices. In the 1960s, politicians looked for the advice of public servants, career officials, or career officials.
“Today, the element of trust is no longer there. So, that’s what we discovered. And what I find fascinating is what I just said applies to all the countries that we’ve looked at. It’s not a Canadian phenomenon. It’s not a U.S. phenomenon. It is present. So our national government and representatives for democracies need to think fundamentally [about] the role of the public service.”
Why do the politicians not trust the public servants anymore?
“When [politicians] are in an election campaign, they make a lot of commitments that when you test them, a number of them don’t make sense. They cost too much. The implementation phase is far more complicated. So when they come into government … they can’t do … what they promised to do.
“Instead of looking in the mirror, instead of saying, ‘Well, maybe we over committed, maybe we weren’t as truthful as we could have been with voters. Maybe we said things that we can’t deliver,’ instead of coming to that conclusion, often they will blame the bureaucrats, number one. Number two, politicians know better than you and I that today there are [many] levels, from managers, director, director general, assistant deputy minister, deputy minister, associate position.
“We’ve clogged up the system so much that the system is heavily burdened with management levels, and politicians don’t have the time and the patience that public servants have. Politicians have a four-year lifespan. That’s their compass. Public servants don’t look at four years. And so there’s a disconnect there. In the 1960s, a politician could access somebody at the front line delivering a program easily. Now, it’s nearly impossible.
“We need to rethink the relationship between politicians and public servants. We need to rethink, ‘what can we expect [from] public servants?’ and that’s true in all countries, that we’ve loaded up the public service on the policy side, and we’ve ignored the program delivery side. That’s not just a Canadian phenomenon, that’s an international phenomenon and politicians deal with Canadians far more than senior public service in Ottawa, so they feel their frustration.”
You and other experts have been writing and talking about a reform and rethinking of the public service for years. Have you seen any progress yet?
“The only real substantial progress, if I go back in history, the one that has left the mark was [former U.K. prime minister] Margaret Thatcher. I think Thatcher, in many ways, reshaped the British civil service. [Former Canadian prime minister] Jean Chretien had an impact in a different way, but if I look at history since I started working on this, there’s only two that stands out that really made substantial contributions to the public service, negatively or positively. Anyway you want to shake it, it’s Margaret Thatcher and Jean Chrétien, they never lost focus. They decided this is important. They knew the system.
“They had served in the system. They understood the system. And they said, you know, the famous sentence that ‘this lady is not returning’. And so they stayed the course. The problem, of course, is that no question that prime ministers and presidents come in with a firm intention to reform the civil service, but they get so many crisis thrown at them every day that they tend to lose focus. And the risk is higher in Canada because we have provinces and we’re next to the United States.
“There’s never a day that the prime minister goes in his office without a new crisis to deal with. So the notion that when you first come in, you want to reform the public service, that by force of circumstances, priority number one becomes priority number 10 and that’s why the commitment is never sustained.”
Chrétien left the government 23 years ago, and Thatcher long before that. So, in Canada, how much time do we have before it’s too late to reform the public service?
“That my friend, is a very, very, very good question. That is the question. I don’t think that there’s any hope of reforming the public service in a substantial fashion without looking at accountability in government. That’s the key. And if you can’t [take a] fresh look at accountability in government, you’re going to run the fish bowl over and over and over again saying, ‘nice castle, nice castle, nice castle.’ I don’t think it will have much of an impact until you deal with accountability. Now that is a very difficult issue to tackle. Accountability, the role of public sector unions, unless you deal with those two questions, the chances of reforming the public service are not great.”
Give me an example to explain your point about accountability.
“Well, for example, over the past 10 years, we’ve seen tremendous growth in the public service. We’ve seen tremendous growth in contracts. Who is accountable for those decisions?”
They say, ‘the buck stops with the prime minister.’ So I will say the prime minister of the day is responsible for this?
“The problem with that is every buck now stops with the prime minister. Dealing with Trump stops with the prime minister. The crisis in Ukraine stops with the prime minister. Everything now goes to the prime minister. Dealing with the public service is one of 25 things that the prime minister must look at. You don’t have that capacity to ask fundamental questions about it. So accountability, sure, the prime minister, but you think the prime minister [approved all the] $15-billion to $20-billion in consultant contracts? No. Did the prime minister approve the growth of all the positions? No. Somebody added positions to the public service knowing full well that bureaucracy was already too big. So that person—whether it’s a director general, the assistant deputy minister, deputy minister—somebody should be held accountable. Why did you do this? Why did you not reallocate resources? You had 20,000 employees. You added another 3,000 [when] all those 20,000 employees were gainfully employed. There was nothing happening to redeploy them. Those are the kinds of questions that are not asked.”
In Canada, the clerk of the Privy Council is the head of the public service. Should they not be held accountable?
“He or she also deals with 20 questions a day. He or she, when he or she meets with deputy ministers, they have 20 priority items to deal with. There’s little appetite for the clerk to say, ‘Hey, your department is going too big. We need to deal with that.’ There are too many issues floating and dealing with the public service … it’s not fun. And it explains why … at the end of a program review, if you look at the cuts that were made, they were mostly made in the regions, not in Ottawa. It’s easier for senior executives in Ottawa to cut somebody in Newfoundland or Nova Scotia or Saskatchewan than it is somebody [who] you meet in the elevator going up for work. And so those are all the kinds of questions that need to be asked. The problem is that the prime minister and the clerk are the ones that should be asking, but … there’s no free time in terms of their agenda.”
You write that in order to restore the status of civil service in the public sector and society, public servants may need to play a more visible role than in years past. Could you explain this point?
“Well, that’s the issue. You know, I think public servants need to be responsible for their decisions and their actions. But when you go there, you have got to be very careful because that’s where accountability comes in. A public servant cannot be accountable to 20 actors—to Parliament, to media. It’s full of difficulties, and so if we go down that road, we have to be very careful and think it through. We need some serious reflection on what it would mean in terms of accountability.
“At the moment, accountability is very clear: doctrine of ministerial accountability is there. If we have, say, close to 300 federal organizations—and so every accountability question goes to ministers, there’s 20 some of them—how in the hell can they be accountable for 300 or nearly 300 organizations and that kind of budget? So we need to explore that. The problem that we need to be very careful avoiding—that’s what I’m trying to figure out—is if we go down that road, what happens to the role of Parliament? What happens to accountability? What happens to the long-standing tradition of ministers in Parliament and public servants to ministers? Those are fundamental questions that need to be asked, and we have to be very careful when we ask them.”
Do you have any concrete ideas about the future relationship between career public servants and politicians?
“We need to start with accountability. We need to explore the current accountability relationship between public servants and ministers, between public servants and the prime minister. We need to see if that relationship remains as healthy as it once was. I think not. Then we have to think, ‘well, if it’s not as healthy, what can we do to change it?’ In the 1960s, a minister had an executive assistant … looking after the agenda. Today there are 25 senior staffers [in a minister’s office]. Chief of staff is [at the level of] an ADM. We still have the same rules as we had in the 1960s, the same accountability rules, but we’ve changed everything else, and I think that’s what we need to look at. So the relationship between politicians and public servants has to be looked at. Somebody has to answer the question [about] the tremendous growth in consultant contracts, why did that happen? Who’s responsible? Were there no checks? [That] $15-billion in contracts—to what extent were ministers informed, agreed and were prepared to be accountable for all those contracts?”
You say that public servants’ advice is expected to be more attuned to the government’s political stances, and they are more often now used as spokespersons for the government rather than as eminences grises behind the scenes. Could you please expand on this?
“Well, I think now they’re becoming gun shy, but there’s no question, if you go back to the glory days of Gordon Robertson [who was] the gold standard [of] the [Privy Council] clerks. But he was extremely discreet. Gordon Robertson would never take a public … policy position. If you look at the public servants who have spoken up, spoken out on climate change and what needs to be done in a fairly forceful fashion, Gordon Robertson would have [spoken to] cabinet [or] the prime minister on climate change and what needs to be done. He would never have gone out publicly and that’s an important difference, and that comes back to accountability. Gordon Robertson knew who was accountable. He knew that anything said publicly—to be accountable—on climate change, had to [come from] the prime minister or ministers of cabinet. He knew that he would not get ahead of them. We’ve seen public servants over the past 10 years taking some pretty public positions on climate change, on the ring of fire in Ontario, on major projects, and so that’s an important departure from where we were.”
Let’s talk about the impact of artificial intelligence on the public service. Do you think public servants are at risk of losing jobs in the coming years as a result?
“That is what I’ve been thinking about lately. AI is a freight train coming at the pubic service at government operations. It’s a freight train, and my fear is that we’re not thinking hard enough about what it means. The private sector [is already ahead of the public sector]. …We’re at the point where AI [has] reached a level of intelligence [where it’s] the most intelligent human being.
“The difference: they [AI] work 24 hours a day, they don’t get tired and they’re not members of a public sector union. And so I think government, as they have in the past, they’ll try to give the appearance of change, but chances are they will be standing still. They will talk AI, they will talk about the importance, they will have meetings about what it means, but it doesn’t mean that change is going to follow. In the private sector, they’re talking about it. There’s already some pretty dramatic changes … [of] cutting staff, and … [of] not hiring. A lot of what government does is processing applications, processing demands, processing processes, and so AI is tailor-made to that kind of work. And I don’t see much evidence that the federal government is thinking through how you implement it, how do you inform staff, how do you bring about change to make the smooth transition to AI rather than manual processing? It’s a critical issue, and I fear that we’re not paying enough attention to it.”
How much time do top government officials have to understand AI’s impact on public servants and to do something about it before it’s too late?
“We don’t have that much time. The freight train is coming at us at a tremendous speed, and there’s going to be a point where, if we don’t move, if we don’t accommodate, if we don’t change, there’s going to be a point of deep frustration. …The pressure to respond after AI has arrived in the private sector, and we see two to three years from now, the massive change in the private sector, how it goes about its work—if the government has stood still, just talked about it [and] didn’t do anything about it? That’s the freight train. That’s when it says, ‘Okay, this thing is falling apart,’ and it will be extremely hard to manage.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney has hired Michael Sabia, a former senior government official, to serve as his clerk of the Privy Council. Why a former official and not from the ranks of current senior civil servants?
“I can only congratulate the prime minister on selecting Michael Sabia [as his clerk]. It was an extremely wise choice. He has no vested interest. He knows there’s a job to be done. He’s going there free of constraints, and he’s going to get it done. [Also,] he knows how the public sector operates. He was a major part of it. He knows how PCO operates. He knows how finance operates. He was a major player. So, he knows which button to push, which lever to pull, to make things happen. He’s coming from the private sector. He has looked at the public service from the outside, not from within. Every clerk has grown within the system. And most clerks, when they leave, they say, ‘Oh, my God, this is not the way we sort of change things. This is not working.’ Every clerk, after they leave, they open up. Michael Sabia goes in, knowing what needs to be done. His next appointment will be going back home. His next appointment will not be Rome or England or London or Paris. His next appointment will be, ‘I’m going home’. So, he’s got a job to do. He knows what job needs to be done. He knows what he needs to do to get it done, and his track record, both in government and in the private sector, is very impressive. I can only applaud that that appointment.”
arana@hilltimes.com
The Hill Times