the treasury board of canada and its clients: five years of change and administrative reform...

The Treasury Board of Canada and its clients: five years of change and administrative reform 1966-71

Abstract. It is ten years since the Glassco Commission called for a drastic reduc- tion in the numbers and in the scope of the administrative controls exercised on the departments of the federal government by the Treasury Board. But the Glassco slogan ‘Let the managers manage’ is not subtle enough to cope with the delicate question of how to give the maximum manageria1 freedom to departments while retaining for the Treasury Board enough supervision to satisfy the constitutional principle that the Cabinet is collectively responsible for the policies and adminisbation of each department. The Treasury Board is trying to solve the problem by working out guidelines and audit mechanisms to take the place of rules and regulations in administrative life.

While this is going on the Board has had to adjust to the emergence since 1968 of the Committee on Priorities and Planning as the senior cabinet committee on broad expenditure policies. At the same time collective bargaining, new budgeting systems and the bilingualism program have wrought great changes in bureaucratic life. The ‘clients’ of the Board, the operating departments, welcome most of the changes but feel that the delivery of the promised reforms is far too slow.

Sommabe. Ii y a dix am que la Commission Glassco a recommandk une rkduction importante du nombre et de I’envergure des contr6les administratifs exercks sur les dbpartements du gouvemement fkdkral par le Conseil du Tr6sor. Mais la devise Glassco, a La gbrance aux gkrants B, ne s’est pas rkvkl6e assez subtile pour donner la plus grande libertk de gkrance aux dkpartements tout en conser- vant pour le Conseil assez de pouvoir de surveillance pour se conformer au principe constitutionnel selon lequel le Cabinet est responsable des politiques et de l’administration de chaque dkpartement. Le Conseil du Trksor essaie de rdgler ce problkme en Btablissant des directives et des facons de vkrifier qui prendraient la place des regles et des ordonnances de la vie administrative.

Pendant ce temps, le Conseil du Trksor a dQ s’habituer, depuis 1968, B une nouvelle rdalitk : depuis ce temps, en effet, le Comitd des Prioritks et de la Planification est devenu le principal comitk du Cabinet en ce qui a trait aux dkpenses importantes. Ceci, alors m&me que les conventions collectives, de nouvelles faGons d’ktablir le budget et le programme du bilinguisme apportaient des changements importants dans la bureaucratie. Les a clients B du Conseil du Trksor, c’est-8-dire les dbpartements, accueilIent d’un bon oeiI la plupart des changements mais croient que la mise en euvre des r6fonnes prkuves est beau- coup bop lente.

A decade has passed since Grant Glassco first reported to the Diefenbaker government on ‘the organization and methods of the departments and O The author is Assistant Professor of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba.

TRE m Y BOARD OF CANADA

agencies of the Government of Canada." Six years ago the Glassco reforms began to be implemented, together with other changes which have had an even greater effect than the Glassco reforms on the administrative system of the federal government. The pace of change in the system, severe by any yardstick, is startling in an organization as large and com- plex as the federal service. The Treasury Board is a central actor in this upheaval. This paper examines some aspects of the Treasury Board's work in recent years, especially as the Board is seen through the eyes of its 'clients,' the operating departments.

The major changes in the last six years affecting the relationships of Treasury Board and its clients have 'been: (1) the decentralization of accounting, simpMcation of the vote structure of the estimates, expansion of information retrieval and reporting; (2) the gradual introduction of planning, programming, and budgeting (PPB) and all the freight it carries with it; (3) the separation of the Board Secretariat from the Finance Department in 1966 to go under its own Minister, the President of the Treasury Board; (4) the reclassification of all positions in the service and the introduction of collective bargaining; ( 5 ) the strengthening of the cabinet committee system; the Committee on Priorities and Planning has emerged as senior to the Treasury Board in the formulation of the broad outlines of priorities in spending. Surprisingly, this has made the Board's work as a Committee on Expenditure more effective; (6) successive steps have been taken in the transfer to departments from control agencies of many powers of financial, managerial, and personnel control. At the same time departments have been delegating and decentralizing to their regions.

The Board is redefining the content and method of the Glassco slogan Zet the managers manage.' Central direction is not giving way to full independence in management but rather to substantial independence under guidnnce and audit.

Although the program of language training for civil servants and the drive to hire francophones has not the same status as the administrative changes listed above, its impact has been great enough to add significantly to the dBculty the service has experienced in absorbing a high rate of changenP

We are primarily concerned here with the Treasury Board's role as a central agency of control in this rapidly evolving administrative system. The paper focuses mainly on the last two aspects of the six points listed above: the role of the Board as a Committee on Expenditure, especially in

1 CANMA, Royal Commission on Government Organhtion, Ottawa, Queen's Printer, 1982. 2 In addition to personal di5cdties of morale among some civil servants (rather exaggerated by the press) there have been some dislocations of &ce routine and of the process of policy-making due to the absence on language courses of senior officers two or three times a year for extended periods.

MICHAEL HICKS

its relationship to the new Priorities and Planning Committee, and second, an assessment of the Board’s work as a Committee on Management as it relaxes strong central control and institutes a system of broad guidelines together with an audit of perf~rmance.~

The Treasury Board Secretariat in recent years

Since 1947, when R. B. Bryce became the Secretary of the Treasury Board,4 the position has generally been regarded as one of the most important, and demanding, in official Ottawa. In the last six years the Board has seen massive change at the top. There have been four Secretaries in this period - G. F. Davidson, S. S. Reisman, A. W. Johnson, and G. F. Osbaldeston - and more than two complete sets of deputy secretaries. Not a few friends of the Board regard these leadership changes as one of the Secretariat’s most serious problems as it tries to retain the confidence of departmental of€icials who are being washed by successive waves of administrative reform.

The Secretary of the Treasury Board imprints his stamp upon the work of his department as few deputy heads do (save perhaps Finance), for content and process are peculiarly united in the head of a central control agency. George Davidson came to the office as an established mandarin and as the first Secretary of the newly independent agency he raised the status of the Secretariat. The advent of collective bargaining made personnel management his major concern, but as head of the Bureau of Government Organization he was personally committed to implementing the Glassco reforms. Under Davidson massive changes began and they are still not complete.

As watchdogs of the public purse the Treasury Board in Davidson’s regime was a failure, but the responsibility was not so much his, or that of the ministers of the Board, as that of the generally permissive tone of the Pearson government.

The next Secretary, Simon Reisman, took over in 1968 in the midst of severe financial crises. The thrust of his short two-year tenure was neces- sarily on the program side of the Board’s work. The Reisman Secretariat was run with a flair typical of its Secretary. Although he jarred some members of his staff he was much appreciated for his toughness and skill in administering the severe cuts and holdbacks of the first two years of the

3 The paper relies heavily on material drawn from confidential, personal interviews with some forty-one senior officers in 1971, including nine active deputy ministers and four former Secretaries of the Treasury Board. A similar set of twenty-five interviews was conducted in 1968. The Treasury Board Secretariat was most helpful in welcoming research into the subject by giving interviews and other assistance. 4 Until his death in 1951 the Deputy Minister of Finance, W. C. CLARK, remained the Secretary with Bryce acting ‘For the Secretary,’ but in fact BRYCE was fully in charge of the work.

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Trudeau administration. He was able to wield the axe, the oldest weapon in the Board’s arsenal, while at the same time making some progress in developing more sophisticated methods of allocation and measurement. Reisman tempered the temptation of some of his subordinates to treat planning, programming, budgeting as magic, but welcomed the analytic process which PPB forced the departments to go through.

A. W. Johnson occupied the Secretary’s office from 1970 to early 1973. He brought to his job a scholar’s interest in the problems of public administration as well as decades of experience in the central agencies of government, both provincial and federal. Johnson used his pen as one way of influencing his constituency, the permanent heads of departments. His series of excellent articles outlined what the Board was trying to do, even as it tried to do it.6 He appeared committed to the continuing search for guidelines and standards to replace rules and regulations, and gave himself a year or two to deliver these to an anxiously waiting constituency.

The Davidson Secretariat stressed personnel matters, the Reisman era saw the restructuring of budget preparation and the Johnson Secretariat attempted major initiatives in administrative policy by switching from regulations to guidelines, in planning by developing efficiency and effectiveness indicators, and in personnel by reshaping the manpower policies and senior officer programs of the public service.

Johnson believed that the slogan l e t the managers manage’ did not, in recent years, reflect adequately the fact that without audit and measurement of departmental management, a government could be exposed to one Bonaoenture fiasco after another. He thought that one of the unfortunate products of decades of decision-making on administrative questions by central agencies, is that too many deputy heads in operating departments divested themselves of any knowledge or control of organization, finance, and personnel management. ‘The administrative underworld of Ottawa negotiated with itself’ under these conditions without the deputy heads’ knowledge, but with their acquiescence. As Secretary, Johnson believed that policy development is the proper function of a departmental head, but that to free himself for this a deputy minister must first be sure that his officers can satisfy the Treasury Board on administrative questions.6

Temporarily, at least, strong direction can be expected from Treasury Board as the Committee on Management for Cabinet. As guidelines are developed and measurement techniques made operable the Board Secre-

5 A. w. JOHNSON, ‘Management Theory and Cabinet Government,’ CANADIAN PUSLXC ADMINISTRATION, vol. 14, no. 1 (Spring 1971); ‘Productivity, People and the Public Service,’ Optimum, vol. 2, no. 1 (1971); ‘PPB and Decision-Making in the Govern- ment of Canada,’ Cod and Management ( March-April 1971); ‘The Treasury Board of Canada and the Machinery of Government of the 1970s; Canadian journal of Politi- cal Science, vol. IV, no. 3 (Sept. 1971); ‘Education and the Development of Senior Executives,’ CANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, vol. 15, no. 4 (Winter 1972). 6 Personal interview, July 1971.

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tariat can be expected to recommend a fuller implementation of ‘Let the managers manage.’

Treasury Board and the Department of Finance

In October 1966 Treasury Board became an ‘agency’ (not a department) separate from the Department of Finance, with its own Minister, the President of Treasury Board, and its deputy head, the Secreta~y.~ The intimate relationship with the parent department still continues through the sharing of a building and common administrative services. The two departments have overlapping interests in their concern about the expenditure budget. The Minister of Finance has, of course, the prerogative to propose the total size of the budget, but he also retains an interest in some aspects of its allocation. The manner in which the budget is spent affects the structure of the economy and its capacity to grow as well as having short term effects on prices and employment. Some members of Finance believe that the Department should go further than voicing merely economic concerns. They prefer to maintain the practice of the past which has seen Finance involved in the broad evaluation of all major programs with social as well as economic impact. Finance is working out arrangements with Treasury Board on dividing their labours regarding non-budgetary ex- penditures in such institutions as CMHC, the CNR, and Air Canada.

Separating Treasury Board from Finance and making it a new and dis- tinctive entity has been a success. There is more than enough work for its Minister, the President. And whatever diminution of power Finance suffered in losing its step-daughter is compensated by the increase in the effectiveness with which the two departments cooperatively can attempt the control of govemment expenditure.

I Treasury Board as an expenditure

The Cabinet Committee on Priorities and Planning

committee

After its birth in 1968 the Committee on Priorities and Planning took little time in asserting itself as the ‘key’ committee of Cabinet.* It now stands a 7 Glassco’s recommendations were unusual. He wanted two Ministers, Finance and Treasury Board, but the staff of the Board would be in the Privy Council Office with its Secretary as a senior deputy minister alongside the Clerk of the Privy Council (Canada, Royal Commission of Government Organization, (1962) I, p. 56). When interviewed in 1968 three former Secretaries of Treasury Board held divergent views on the subject. One felt that Glassco’s advice should have been followed, putting Treas- ury Board in the Privy Council Office, thus ‘marrying policy with expenditure.’ A second former Secretary thought that Finance and the Board should have remained united under one minister but with two deputy heads. The third thought that the right thing had been done: that the Board ‘needs a full-time Minister and that the Minister of Finance needs an ally more than he needs control over the whole process of expenditure.’ Person2 interviews, June 1968. 8 JOHNSON, ‘The Treasury Board of Canada,’ p. 351.



little closer to the sun than the Treasury Board, the oldest of all cabinet committees, but, surprisingly, it has achieved this position of preeminence without weakening the effectiveness of the older committee. The Board is stronger and more effective than it was ten years ago for it is better able to play its dual role as a committee on expenditure and management since the creation of the new Priorities and Planning Committee.

Fascinating as this development in Canadian cabinet government is, the new Proirities and Planning Committee must not be regarded as an emerging ‘inner cabinet’ on the British model. ‘Inner cabinet,’ as the British understand the term, is a group of ministers around the prime minister, not formally set up, without papers or records or a place in the hierarchy of political authority. As Patrick Gordon Walker says, it may meet informally ‘to concert the advice the members of the inner Cabinet will tender to their colleag~es.’~ It cannot do the business of Cabinet or predigest its work.

In Canada there has never been an inner cabinet of any kind nor is one likely to emerge. As one former Cabinet Secretary commented, the principles of area representation which are fundamental to Canadian cabinet building permanently preclude the development of any ‘inner cabinet.’l0 Canadian cabinets are the largest in the parliamentary world because political integration is so weak in this c0untry.l’ No small group of ministers could effectively deprive full Cabinet of its powers of deliberation and decision-making on any issues which have important implications for various regions and interest groups throughout the country. The ‘federal principle’ is of the essence of cabinet government at Ottawa. An ‘inner cabinet’ with either formal or informal powers, able to predigest the business of Cabinet would violate t h i s principle and would prove unworkable in Canadian cabinet government.

And yet the Priorities and Planning Committee like other Cabinet Com- mittees is f m U y set up, has papers and records and a place in the hierarchy of political authority. Furthermore it is chaired by the Prime Minis- ter, and although its membership is secret it almost certainly includes the Minister of Finance, the President of Treasury Board, and other Chairmen of Standing Committees of Cabinet.

What is to prevent it from becoming an inner cabinet of unquestioned authority and influence, much more powerful than the British model? Three factors should prevent suoh a development. First, the Prime Minis- ter and Cabinet are unwilling to let t h i s happen, for, as we have seen, it would violate the ‘federal principle’ of Canadian cabinets; second, like other committees, ‘its decisions or recommendations go to the cabinet for

GORDON ROBERTSON, ‘The Changing Role of the Privy Council Office,’ CANAJXAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, vol. 14, no. 4 (Winter 1971 ), p. 495. 10 Personal interview, May 1968. 11 as many politicians as possible involved in directing the bureaucracy.

9

In the Trudeau administration an additional reason for a large cabinet is to have

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confirmation or for debate and final decision.12 Finally, Priorities and Planning considers long-term matters of broad scope rather than urgent matters of general concern, and thus deals with only a part of Cabinet’s agenda.

The new Committee was established by the Pearson government in January 1968, in response to recurring financial difficulties and crises. Gordon Robertson writes: ‘... it became apparent that there was serious need of a systematic assessment of over-all priorities of expenditure with a view to better long-term planning. I t is !rue that program priorities were set implicitly in the annual estimates, the annual expenditure plans, but this was done by the Treasury Board in the absence of any broad direction from cabinet as to over-all objectives or priorities.’13

The Trudeau government has widened the scope of the Committee be- yond the financia1 aspects of poLicy to ‘the broad objectives of the government and to major questions of policy having long-term implication^."^ A prime function of the Committee is the setting of priorities for the allocation of the expenditure budget. This it does in a review each Spring known as the ‘guidelines.’ (The ‘guidelines’ are to guide the expenditure budget for the fiscal year which is still 12 to 15 months in the future.) ‘The priorities are set out in broad terms: objectives to be reached, the amount of effort and resource to be directed toward each ... It is on the basis of such broad decisions that the Treasury Board determines in detail the funds to be made available for specific programs administered by the various departments and fixes the personnel establishment to be allocated to them.15

A. W. Johnson describes the relationship between the Board and the Priorities and Planning Committee in terms similar to those of Gordon Robertson. The Committee develops and proposes to Cabinet the ‘broad priorities and policy directions of the government.’ These guidelines go to Cabinet and then to Treasury Board. ‘The role of the Treasury Board is to superimpose upon this general map of social utility, so to speak, the detailed social utility maps which emerge in respect of individual programs and projects.’1e

Apparently the ‘guidelines’ for the allocation of funds are transmitted to Treasury Board in very rough dollar terms. For example, if after existing programs have been costed for ‘normal’ increases and after the Department of Finance has established the fiscal framework for the next expenditure budget there might remain, let us say, 700 million dollars available to allocate to new programs or to expand old programs. The ‘guidelines’ might then specify that this 700 million be divided roughly into 300 millions for programs primarily oriented towards economic development, 50 millions

12 ROBERTSON, ‘Privy Council Office,’ p. 495. 13 Zbid., p. 490-1. 14 Ibid., p. 495. 15 Ibid. 16 JOHNSON, ‘The Treasury Board of Canada,’ p. 353.



for programs primarily oriented towards fostering national unity, 250 millions for expansion of social security programs, 75 millions for p m p s primarily oriented towards pollution control, etc. It then becomes the job of the Treasury Board to allocate new funds to s p e d c departments and programs using the broad figures of the guidelines as the point of depar- ture. Johnson characterizes the Treasury Board as getting down to the ‘nuts and bolts’ of decision-making, ‘‘making the hard choices within the more general policy framework.”l’

Has the emergence of Priorities and Planning as a major power centre in the Cabinet structures weakened the power and authority of Treasury Board in the budgetary process of the government? Does the setting of priorities and guidelines by the Committee diminish the importance of Treasury Board by taking away from it some of its traditional functions? The statutory basis of the power of Treasury Board in respect to the expenditure budget is, at first glance, unambiguous. Section 5 of the Finan- cial Administration Act says that the Treasury Board may act for the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada in ‘( 1) (d) the review of annual and longer term expenditure plans and programs of the various departments of Government, and the determination of priorities with respect thereto.’** A literal reading of this subsection suggests that the Treasury Board is supposed to determine the priorities of all Government expenditure both within and between departments. But we have seen that the Secretaries of Cabinet and Treasury Board are agreed that the priorities of the &vm- ment and the guidelines for the coming year as a broad expression of these priorities, are determined by Cabinet on the advice of Priorities and Planning, not Treasury Board. Has then the Board lost to this new cabinet committee its apparent statutory function to determine ‘priorities’?

The answer to this question is that the Board has not lost a function which it ever effectively exercised or was expected to exercise. As one former Secretary of Cabinet put it, ‘no Treasury Board could carry the Cabinet with it on the kinds of priority settings now undertaken by Priorities and Planning because the Board has never packed the political heft that the new Committee now carries. The Board has never had the Prime Minister as its chairman, nor more than one or two of the senior Cabinet members as active participanb.’lQ Treasury Board did not, and indeed could not under- take the level of priority setting that the Financial Administration Act ex- pects of it.

17 Ibfd., p. 354. The guidelines may be expressed in categories other than the func- tional classifications of PPB (planning, programming and budgeting). See BRUCE DOERN, ‘ m e Budgetary Process and the Policy Role of the Federal Bureaucracy,” in G. BRUCE DOERN and PETER AUCOIN (eds.), The Structures of Policy-Making in C u W , Toronto, Mamillan, 1971. 18 CANADA, Revised Statutes of Caw& Ottawa, Queen’s Printer, 1970. F-10. 19 Personal interview, July 1971.


MICHAEL HICKS

It is painfully clear that during the Pearson administration no organ of government set the priorities; neither Treasury Board nor Cabinet itself produced a yearly master plan for the expenditure budget. Of course all budgets tacitly appear to express the priorities of those who draw them up. There is, however, a considerable difference between a budget which is essentially the sum total of its parts and one in which the size of each pie slice is planned in relation to every other slice as the result of an orderly setting of priorities. The expenditure budget is not yet a ‘planned’ budget in the sense that it is made up entirely of programs which have been annually assessed and evaluated and which truly reflect the priorities of the government. The improvements described above in the setting of guidelines generally apply only to ‘incremental’ decision-making on the use of new funds. Existing programs, A. W. Johnson points out, have ‘received the least attention from Treasury Boards, partly by reason of the difficulties inherent in evaluating the effectiveness of programs in relation to their objectives, and partly by reason of the formidable political obstacles to the elimination of almost any current program.’*O Nevertheless, the guide lines process is a considerable step forward towards the goal of a planned expenditure budget.

We may conclude, then, that the ministers who sit on Priorities and Planning have not ‘taken’ power from the ministers of Treasury Board, but have been given a ‘grant’ of power from the cabinet to recommend priorities - a function heretofore not exercised even by the cabinet itself. Treasury Board meanwhile is stronger and more effective than in the past at the pie-cutting ceremonies of the second level, dividing up into individual programs and departments the available funds on the basis of the guidelines priorities.

Although it is true to say that Treasury Board Ministers have not lost powers to Priorities and Planning that they ever effectively exercised, they have lost some of the prestige formerly accorded to the appointed guar- dians of the Treasury. This decline pre-dates the formation of Priorities and Planning by some years. It is partly the result of the replacement in 1966 of the Minister of Finance as chairman of the Board by the bearer of the new Presidential portfolio. Although the Minister of Finance is a permanent member of the Board, neither Sharp, nor later Benson, attended with any frequency after the Board was given its President. No cabinet committee on budgetary questions can be as powerful without the active par- ticipation of the Minister of Finance.

The weakening of the Board’s position began, however, before the re- tirement of the Minister of Finance as Chairman. The Pearson years saw a decline in the effectiveness of the work of Treasury Board in its role as Treasury watch-dog, with an accompanying loss of esteem for the Board as 20 JOHNSON, ‘The Treasury Board of Canada,’ pp, 356-7.

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”€D3 TREASURY BOARD OF CANADA

the senior cabinet committee. Neither Walter Gordon nor Mitchell Sharp in the Finance portfolio was able, or perhaps willing (in Gordon’s term) to check the ‘permissiveness’ of the Pearson administrations in regard to budgetary expansion. One deputy minister of that era said ‘that the Pearson government suffered a loss of a sense of financial responsibility and over- rode any attempt by the Department of Finance to maintain a sense of financial responsibilityP1

Paradoxically, the formation of Priorities and Planning, without question now the glamour committee of Cabinet, has not led to any further decline in the position of Treasury Board. Indeed, the setting of priorities by &e ‘key’ committee has in fact made it easier for Treasury Board to go about its work and has increased its effectiveness in the area of expenditure control; at the same time the new post-Glassco management role of the Board has increased its power and influence in recent years.

We have spoken to this point of the relationship between the Board and Priorities and Planning Committee as a relationship of groups of ministers. Of course the working relationships of their staffs are also of great importance. The group within the Privy Council Office which serves the Priori- ties and Planning Committee is the staff of Michael Piffield, Deputy Sec- retary (Planning) to the Cabinet and Secretary to the Cabinet Committee on Priorities and Planning. Piffield is a man whose influence in the Ottawa of 1971 appeared to be greater than that of all but a handful of deputy ministers. The papers from which the ministers work in establishing the guidelines for the expenditure budget are channelled to Priorities and Planning by Pitfield, using a general statement of the ‘fiscal framework‘ from Finance; broad expenditure forecasts of existing programs from Treasury Board; an analytic paper from the Privy Council staff; together with briefing papers from the Prime Minister’s office.

The ordering of priorities and the setting of guidehes is clearly a decision of the ministers themselves. Suggesting to ministers rough dollar figures to attach to the several broad categories in which priorities are ordered is, one supposes, an operation in which the senior civil servants present share in a spirit of eager competition. Apparently the effective voice in offering this advice has come from varying sources in the three or four years in which the guidelines process has been followed, but with the President of Treasury Board exercising a very personal role. Observers agree that under the Trudeau administration the Privy Council Office and the Prime Minister’s Office have strengthened their role in policy advice, but not at the expense of Finance and Treasury Board. Rather there seems to have been a strengthening of all four central agencies (PCO, PMO, TB, Finance) and a lessening of the influence of officials from ‘operating’ departments.22 21 Personal interview, June 1968. 22 Personal interview, June 1971.

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The role of the Privy Council stafE members is unusually delicate as they relate to the Cabinet Committees they serve. A Privy CounciI officer has the duty to serve the ministers who are the members of Cabinet Com- mittees, the Chairman of each Committee, and the Prime Minister who is his departmental Minister.23 The briefings which members of Committees and Chairmen are given apparently differ in depth; and at all times the Prime Minister must be served. Gordon Robertson has outIined in his article how the Privy Council staff try to order themselves in this web of relationships.2’ By comparison the officers of Treasury Board have a less compli- cated loyalty. All briefing documents from petitioning Departments together with the comments and recommendations of the Secretariat go to all members of Treasury Board. Additional briefing may be given to the President but, as he is in any case the Minister of the Treasury Board Sec- retariat, the senior officers of the Board Secretariat are not likely to suffer the divided allegiance which is at least theoretically possible in the Privy Council Office.

Some Ottawa officials feel that, although it is a necessary part of Cabinet government for the secretariat of the Cabinet to serve the Prime Minister, it would be desirable to give more briefing to ministers in Cabinet Com- mittees than is done at present, so that they might better cope with the volume, complexity, and diversity of the material placed before them.

Changing role of ministers Ministers are, as ever, overworked, but the situation is worse than usual and is partly due to the demands of ‘collective decision-making’ in Cabinet Committees. One deputy reported that he saw his Minister for one hour a week on average. He reckoned that the Minister did about seven hours a week of departmental business. The rest of his seventy hour week was spent in Cabinet, Committees, House and political obligations. Many senior officiaIs found their Ministers at a disadvantage in Committee work where departmental staff had neither the opportunity, nor perhaps the training to brief him on the multitude of questions. It was agreed that some deputies, but by no means all, are not competent to advise their Ministers in areas outside of departmental concerns.

Robertson says that Canadian ministers prefer to hear difFering views at first hand from officials rather than to receive a report which suppresses or compromises disagreement. But such a process is time consuming and

23 The President of the Privy Council ( at that time the Honourable D. s. MACDONALD) speaking in the su ply debate about the responsibilities of his portfolio: I . . . except with respect to the paiiamentary returns branch which has been transferred from the De- partment of the Secretary of State, I do not have direct responsibility for any aspect of the privy council office. This fails within the responsibility of the Prime Minister ...’ House of Commons Debates (Oct. 11,1968), p. 1117. 24 ROBERTSON, ‘Privy Council Office,’ pp. 504-7.

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harrying. A minister in the future may either have to have a very large personal staff (like a US Senator) who can brief him on any policy subject, or perhaps the cabinet committee system will have to move back to greater reliance on interdepartmental committees to prepare the ground. Such interdepartmental committees of officials can preserve ministerial freedom and valuable time by offering proposals to ministers which list options, and arguments for and against alternative solutions.25

Gordon Robertson notes that ‘Ministers have more influence on the shape of policy as a whole, and on its development, and officials have pro- portionately less than they used to.’26 This judgment was c o h e d in every interview. One deputy commented that the cohesive mandarinism of the St Laurent and Pearson years has disappeared. He thought that the only mandarinism left was conlined to the central agencies, Privy Council Office, Finance and Treasury Board. He added that deputy heads may find the Cabinet Committee system frustrating because the department’s recommendations are subject to so much debate from other departments. Ministers must now enter into significant debates about policies outside their portfolios. Robertson notes that in their day, C. D. Howe or J. G. Gardiner brooked little interference in their domains. Another deputy said, exaggerating, ‘In the old days ministers were kings in their own departments and powerless elsewhere. Now the opposite is more the case.)27

Treasury Board as a committee on expenditure

When the Priorities and Planning Committee has transmitted the guidelines for the next expenditure budget to Cabinet and to Treasury Board, the Program Branch of the Board Secretariat is responsible for moving the budgetary process to the next stage. Although it is not the largest division of the Treasury Board Secretariat, the work of the Program Branch is still the heart of the system. Its job is the traditional one of recommending the precise amounts of departmental budgets and programs which will reflect the priorities of the government. It also makes proposals to increase the effectiveness of programs and the efficiency with which resources are used. 2* Ably led by Gordon Osbaldeston (who has since succeeded Johnson as Secretary of the Board) the Program Branch has successfully tied in its work with that of Priorities and Planning in the setting of the fiscal framework and in establishing the concepts of A, B, and X budgets. In his recent article, A. W. Johnson outlines the procedures

25 See ibid., p. 501. 26 Ibid., p. 499. 27 Personal interview, June 1971. 28 CANADA, Estimates, for the fiscal year ending March 31,1973, p. 28-6.


of the Board in dividing the budget into A present programs, B new or expanded programs, and X programs of low priority which may con- ceivably be dropped.

The senior officials of departments reported that they regard with satisfaction the division of the budget submission into A and B, but they found offensive the X budget. No deputy head, they said, can be expected to enjoy listing items of very low priority which might be dispensed with, for he may feel that it reflects badly on his judgment in the past. He may also fear that to identify his least favourite programs may lead to the loss of those programs without compensating gains elsewhere in the Depart- ment’s budget.

The Board Secretariat recognizes the difficulties which the X budget poses to departments and is exploring other ways of trying to commit departments to making their own trade-offs. The Secretariat can be expected to involve the departments as much as possible in the ‘Effective- ness’ studies of the Planning Branch and may also suggest to the departments specific items that might be put in the X budget.

For some years PPB (Planning, Programming, and Budgeting) has been under development by Treasury Board and by the departments themselves. The Board Secretariat does not make grandiose claims for what a few years ago was hailed as a panacea, but it regards the principles of PPB as essentially sound, that is the examination ‘on a regular and continuing basis of the effectiveness of present programs and the efficiency of their admini~tration.’~O In general, however, the most senior o5cials are conscious that PPB can only be helpful if the tools to judge effectiveness and efficiency of programs are developed.

Perhaps it is a measure of the success of Treasury Board reform that the Program Branch is not at present the whipping boy for departmental complaints. On the other hand it may be merely a sign that, with all the changes and improvements in budgeting technique, the Treasury Board is still not able to make the budgeting process creatively painful for senior officers in departments; painful enough that deputy heads must eliminate inefficiency where they know it to exist and try to persuade ministers to terminate programs that are less valuable than others not yet begun. The political and administrative obstacles are formidable in firing civil servants or in reducing low priority programs (which have at least some conceivable use to some members of the public).

At present neither the Board nor the departments have the tools of performance audit which, though they may be slighted by ministers, cannot be ignored. Nevertheless, substantial progress has been made towards the goal of a ‘planned expenditure budget to replace budgets which just ‘growed.’ 29 JOHNSON, ‘The Treasury Board of Canada,’ p. 357.

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II Treasury Board as a management

Ministers, deputy ministers and management responsibilities

committee

The role of Treasury Board as the cabinet committee on management is discussed in one of A. W. Johnson’s recent articles.30 He states strongly his central thesis: that cabinet has collective responsibility for management as well as for policy. The Treasury Board ‘is the body responsible for ensuring that the cabinet as a whole is able to answer for the administrative actions of individual ministries, and for ensuring that such actions conform with the standards of probity and prudence which are expected of the government by the community.’81

The relationship of departmental deputy heads to Treasury Board raises some interesting and significant problems. To whom is the deputy head responsible for his stewardship of his department? To his minister? To the Prime Minister who appoints and removes him? To the Cabinet? Or to Cabinet’s management committee, the Treasury Board?

In the area of policy formation it is evident that the deputy head is responsible to his minister, who in turn is responsible to Cabinet. The department is the ohief adviser of the government on policy within its purview. When the policy has been decided it is administered by a particular minister OR behalf of his colleagues. The deputy head will work for, or on behalf of, the minister in carrying out the policy. No other minister save his own can interfere in his department (except the Prime Minister - normally, one supposes, through the minister).

In the area of management (if for a moment we may make that delicate distinction between poIicy and administration) the deputy head’s position is ambiguous. Legally he exercises a great deal of power, some of it derived from his minister and the Departmental Act, but much of it from other sources. A typical Departmental Act reads: 3. (2) The Minister holds office during pleasure and has the management and direction of the Department of Regional Economic Expansion. 4. The Governor in Council may appoint an officer called the Deputy Minister of Regiond Economic Expansion to be the deputy head of the Department of Regional Economic Expansion and to hold office during pleasure.8a The deputy’s position is described by the Interpretation Act: ‘23. (2) Words directing or empowering a Minister of the Crown to do an act or thing ... include a Minister acting for him ... and his or their deputy.”8 The section then goes on to exclude the deputy from exercising a minister’s power to make regulations. He is also by custom forbidden to recommend 30 Ibid., pp. 35965. 31 Ibid., p. 365. 32 Revised Statutes of Canada ( 1970), R-4. 33 Ibid., 1-23.

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legislation to Cabinet nor, of course, can he exercise his minister’s function of privy councillor.

Thus the law makes it clear that the deputy head can exercise nearly all the powers of his minister with regard to the management of the department. But he has further powers not derived from his minister. Under Section 6 (1) of the Public Service Employment Act he may receive from the Public Service Commission by delegation all the Commission’s powers save those of inquiries and appeals.a*

The Financial Administration Act allows the Treasury Board, Sec. 7 (2), to authorize a deputy head to exercise the powers of the Board in relation to personnel management under specified terms and conditions. In fact the Board, not his minister, is the effective boss of the deputy head in the vast area of personnel administration. In addition, the Board nego- tiates through collective agreements the salaries and working conditions of most employees, and in the case of the senior officials not subject to collective agreements the Board sets the ranges of all salaries and either approves the specific amounts for individuals in consultation with the deputy or delegates to him authority in this field, subject to a tight audit.

If personnel management is one pillar of the temple of administration, then financial management is the other, and this function of setting out the rules under which the departments operate is also assigned to the Treasury Board by Cabinet under the Financial Administration Act. Although the ‘management and direction of the Department’ is under the Minister and through him his deputy head, it is done under hancial and accounting systems devised by the Board and remaining under its control. We have already seen that in personnel management the deputy, rather than the minister, receives the delegated powers of Treasury Board, and that similarly, in fact, if not in law, the minister generally maintains only the broadest interest in other areas of administration.

The result is that the Treasury Board, or its st&, is effectively the real administrative ‘boss’ of the deputy head. His minister has not the information, or in some cases the competence, and rarely the interest in administration with which he could make an informed judgment on his deputy’s performance. All of the deputies interviewed regard the Treasury Board as the body to which they must account for the stewardship of the resources and the personnel given to them to implement the policies of the government and the Minister. In a comment typical of others, one deputy said that his minister will continue to take an interest in managerial performance but, increasingly, the Treasury Board will be the judge of it. 34 This delegation is extensively used, giving most departments virtually a free hand in choosing staff, subject to audit. In mid-1971 a moratorium on further delegation was declared while the Commission studied objections to the procedure. Some civil service employee groups had charged that certain departments were not as ‘fair’ as the Com- mission.

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Unfortunately, he added, it is doubtful if any available criteria could really establish to his own and the Board’s satisfaction his managerial competence.86

Would it be consistent with the twin principles of cabinet government and ministerial responsibility formally to designate the Treasury Board as the supervisor of the deputy head in all management funotions? Can one envisage a minister answering for the policies of a department to the House of Commons but not for the management and implementation of those policies? Not easily. But one can rephrase the question, asking if a minister could, in the House, represent the collective responsibility of the cabinet for the policy, management and direction of his department, even though he is not personally managing and directing it? The answer to that question clearly is yes, for that is the present situation in fact, and partially in law.

A more diEcult problem than the question of answering to the House is to prescribe a formula which would allow the Cabinet to make a deputy head accountable to Treasury Board for every aspect of his management of the department, while retaining for the minister enough of a managerial role to ensure that the policies for which he is responsible actually are carried out. At present a deputy head has three bosses; his Minister, the Treasury Board and, de facto, the Secretary of the Cabinet who has a major part in recommending his appointment to the Prime Minister and who will also be involved in his future moves upwards, sideways or out. As it is in the nature of things for the majority of deputies to be more concerned with policy than with management, the Secretary of the Cabinet, as the chief policy adviser in the public service, is a most important figure in the life of a deputy head. An aspect of this third level of supervision of the deputy head is apparent in the annual assessment of each deputy head by a committee led by the Secretaries of the Cabinet and Treasury Board, and the Chairman of the Public Service Commission, who, with three other senior civil servants appointed on a rotating basis, together report to Cabinet.

On balance, it would probably be best to make each deputy minister responsible in law to Treasury Board, not to his minister, for all his management functions, not just for those personnel functions now dele gated. It seems paradoxical to suggest that the department be placed further under the supervision of the Board at the same time as r e f m in the Glassco spirit are leading to less interference from central agencies. On reflection, however, it will be seen that there need be no conflict. When Glassco’s dream is fulfilled and the departmental managers are managing with minimal interference from Treasury Board, it will still be necessary for some agency to assess periodically the effectiveness of the 35 Personal interview, June 1971.


managers. Only the Treasury Board, as the Cabinet’s Committee on Management, will have the criteria to be able to do this, measuring the effectiveness of programs and the efficiency of their implementation with whatever uniform standards can be developed.

And yet, if our present constitutional practice is to survive we must preserve some content in the term ‘ministerial responsibility’ - some sense in which the Minister does have at least a partial, personal control over policies and their implementation for which he answers in the House, in addition to the collective control he shares with his Cabinet colleagues. Precisely how one maximizes central audit of the managerial performance of the deputy minister while preserving some reality to the term ‘ministerial responsibility,’ is, of course, the root of the probIem.

Power to the departments? In Glassco’s diagnosis of the ailments of the public service in the early sixties, the fundamental criticism of the structure of financial management can be summarized in the words, ‘excessive centralization of authority for detailed decision-making.’ He noted that 16,000 individual submissions came annually from departments for the decision of the Board. He saw the Board and other central control agencies hugging to themselves too much control. He believed that the heavy hand of the Board on the deputy minister’s shoulder was in itself bad for the department, but worse, there was a multiplier effect. ‘Departmental heads, with their authority so circumscribed that they are unable to delegate authority to the manager in the field, tend to surround him with even more restrictive controls.’36

Glassco’s fervent response to this situation was his familiar sermon text: ‘Let the managers manage.’ This could be done, he said, by establishing ‘policies and standards governing the use, throughout the government, of money, staff and other resources defining the objectives to be sought and guide-lines to be observed by departments, but without trying to prescribe the application of administrative policies and standards in The Commissioners believed that leaving detailed matters to the departments should develop a greater sense of responsibility among departmental managers, while at the same time freeing the Board to look at programs and over-all management objectives.

Many of Glassco’s detailed recommendations for decentralization of controls have been implemented in one form or another. Departments have much wider scope in letting contracts, in purchasing supplies, in transferring money between projects within parliamentary votes. Parlia- ment itself was content to reduce the number of separate votes enormously, 36 CANADA, Royal Commission on Government Ozganizdion (1962), vol. I. p. 102. 37 lbid., p. 52.

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so that an individual department may operate its complete program with as few as five or six votes instead of twenty-five to sfty. Reclass8cation of junior and middle ranks is now a departmental responsibility under delegation from Treasury Board. Hiring, promotion and firing (still a rare plant) are also substantially delegated to departments.

Tlie Treasury Board’s ‘clients’, the operating departments, vary in their assessment of the extent of the reforms and their success. The extremely critical would share the sentiment of a deputy head who said: ‘The excessive intervention of Treasury Board officials in the &airs of departments is not commonly known outside the government, although it is a matter which any deputy minister is prepared to discuss at length, through clenched teeth. Glassco proposed giving department heads reasonable scope in managing their &airs; instead the Board’s noose grows ever tighter.’38 This official saw the Board’s continuing control over the structure and organization of a department and the classification of all senior officers as the essential problem. He charged that the Board’s preoccupa- tion with organization leads the departments to ‘pyramid’ their structures, with excessive numbers of executives heading up too many ‘boxes’ on the administrative chart. The number of persons working for him too often is the criterion for determining a supervisor’s classification and pay. The man at the top can only reward merit by joining in the game, creating phony jobs to satisfy the phony criteria imposed by the system.

Another deputy head thought that despite real progress since 1966 the effectiveness and efficiency of government processes is s t i l l ‘bloody awful.’ He said that the chief problem of departmental management arises from the tight control Treasury Board maintains on the structure, the boxes and the pyramid. He thought that senior officers’ salaries should be controlled departmentally, perhaps by an upper ceiling on the total funds for the pay of all senior officers but with no Treasury Board check on individual classifications. He compared his very great freedoms to authorize programs costing millions without reference to the Board or to his Minister, with the restrictions placed on him in the administration of the department. Too many items, he said, are s t i l l referred to the Board The vast majority of them will pass but the process consumes time and, more important, lessens the department’s freedom ‘to manage.’ss

The majority of the senior officers interviewed were moderate in their views of the progress made in letting the managers manage.’ They thought that progress had been made, though rather more slowly than necessary, especially in the field of the classification of junior officers. They were nearly unanimous in wanting considerably more freedom with the senior ranks. One proposal, typical of this group, was for Treasury Board to set the pay of deputies and assistant deputies, leaving departments to set all 38 Personal interview, June 1971. 39 Personal interview, June 1971.

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MICHAEL HICKS

other salaies subject to man-year limits and the collective agreements which are negotiated centrally. It was argued that such a system would be self-regulating, that the constrictions from above and below would effectively establish the salaries of higher ranks at reasonable levels.

The response of the Treasury Board to its critics in the area of personnel management is to produce two sets of arguments, one set pragmatic, the other based on principle. Treasury Board did in recent years experiment with the rapid extension of classification freedoms to a few departments with the result that ‘raiding’ between departments took place as well as ‘overclassification’ by a few departments of some personnel. The second practical argument against a complete, immediate relaxation of restraints is that in the opinion of the Secretariat, 7unu one goes about unravelling the accumulation of forty years of controls is an important question. To the argument that top managers can be created only by giving them the freedom to make mistakes, the Board Secretariat would reply that the freedom to manage or to mismanage must await the development of effective tools to audit the performance of individuals and departments.

This last argument becomes the conceptual keystone of the Board‘s approach. In an early article about the Treasury Board, A. W. Johnson argues that in the absence of market mechanisms to impose pressure on departments to become efficient, central agencies, notably the Treasury Board, try to fulfill this task: ‘ Yet the managers manage,” by all means, but let some central agency of government evaluate the effectiveness with which departments are managing - in terms of the organization and methods they have chosen, and in terms of the results they are achieving. Only in this way will the principle of collective Cabinet responsibility be re~pected.’~~

A second argument based on principle is that the maintenance of certain central controls on personnel is necessary in matters affecting pay and working conditions to ensure a rough equality within the public service, and to maintain standards which do not exceed those which the public will accept. Johnson concludes that: ‘there is no simple solution to the problem of bureaucracy; ... you cannot dissolve it by pontificating “let the managers manage.” What we must do is find a more sophisticated, a less bureaucratic way of setting standards or norms by which departments are to be guided, if guided they must be.’41

The Secretariat has begun a two-year review of all Treasury Board regulations to determine which can be converted from rules to guidelines. Should this review prove successful, (and the early results in the areas of office accomodation, furnishings, and travel are very encourag- ing) then inflexible regulations will give way to flexible standards which 40 JOHNSON, ‘Management Theory and Cabinet Government,’ p. 78. 41 lbid., p. 80.

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could be administered by the departments but with the Treasury Board Secretariat setting in place an audit system which would make possible periodic reports to ministers on the actual performance of de~artments.4~

To this announced goal of the Treasury Board Secretariat the departments cry Amen. But they may be forgiven a certain amount of cynicism when they say that they want to see some results. Even by Ottawa time standards it is a long time since Glassco reported - over ten years. More- over in his three-year tenure as Secretary, A. W. Johnson promised further substantial reforms. Unlike any other top civil servant in Canada he used public forums, conferences, learned societies and journals to discuss present and future policy. This spectacular communications performance received the admiration of official Ottawa but it also exposed the author to the raised expectations of his readers, and their number included all the senior administrators of the federal public service. The natives are getting restless. They believe the Treasury Board is heading in the right direction but much slower and more cautiously than is necessary. The Board, and its Secretariat, however, are not likely to rush the process until they are satisfied that the standards for auditing performance are more advanced than at present, and until they see evidence of increasing numbers of ‘good managers’ in the top ranks of departments.

Input and output Measurements of effectiveness and efficiency are probably the most interesting work now under way in the Secretariat of the Board. Until reliable methods to audit performance are more fully developed the Board seems reluctant to give wholesale approval to further decentralization. Mean- while the Treasury Board Secretariat is attempting to fill the gap through its Planning Branch, a group under D. G. Hartle, formerly Head of the Institute for Quantitative Analysis in the University of Toronto. They are trying to develop and apply ‘methods and procedures for evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of programs and

It is not difEcult to get agreement for the proposition that what comes out of a governmental program or project is more important than what goes into it. Output, the contribution to the public good of any specific program, is the ultimate criterion. And yet input, the costs of the goods and people which are put into the program, traditionally has captured the attention of central control agencies such as the Treasury Board, not least because it can be measured, counted and thus controlled. Outputs are not so easily measured or even described.

Politicians are naturally oriented towards outputs, rather than inputs,

42 JOXNSON, ‘The Treasury Board of Canada,’ p. 363. 43 CANADA, Estdmutes (197%3), p. 28-6. See also D. G. HARTLE, ‘Operational Per- formance Measurement in the Federal Government,’ Optimum, vol. 3, no. 4 ( 1972).


in assessing any particular program. Inputs as represented by the sum total of taxes necessary to sustain all programs are, of course, extremely sensitive politically, but this sensitivity does not extend to the details of programs except among the ministers whose job it is to guard the Treas- ury. Ministers are, of course, interested in effective programs, particularly if the public is able to bring some judgment to bear on what is going on, but it is not of prime concern to ministers whether the program is 20 per cent or 25 per cent ~verstaffed.~~ One deputy head commented that most ministers are busy and worried men and will leave the management of the department entirely to their senior They will be concerned about policy effectiveness and the appearance of effectiveness, but it is not easy to enlist the interest of ministers in costlbenefit approaches to analysis of government programs. The trade-off between programs competing for government dollars must be, for politicians, primarily an exercise in com- paring benefit to benefit, with costs and efficiency as secondary considera- tions (unless they become political problems). We cannot expect our cabinet system to bring a McNamara to the fore, interested in ‘management’ as an activity. It is generally agreed that only the present President of Treasury Board, C. M. Drury, and a mere handful of other ministers are interested in management as such.46

If we cannot expect very much from an individual minister in management improvement what should we expect from the ministers of Treasury Board as a group? A former Secretary of Treasury Board, speaking in 1968, said we should not expect very much: ‘Treasury Board Ministers should not be expected (as Glassco optimistically did expect) to be a kind of super watchdog, taking joy and pleasure in improving the management of the public service. This is not what the political world is all about. Ministers take no joy in castigating their colleagues. They don’t get any public kudos for this kind of role.47 Perhaps this comment would be softened after four years of the Trudeau regime which, at least in its early years, showed an unusual interest in process and system.

Nevertheless, the setting in which the Treasury Board begins to develop measurements of effectiveness and efficiency is one in which leadership will come primarily from the Secretariat, not from ministers. Interviews outside the Board showed considerable scepticism about the possibility of success in designing measurements of program benefits which will prove useful in a political setting. One critic thought that the ‘application of essentially business oriented methods to government will go aground.’48 Hartle’s group, however, is modest in its claims, although fervent in push- ing the concepts as far as is possible. The ‘easy’ side of the job is to develop

44 Personal interview, June 1968. 45 Personal interview, June 1968. 46 Personal interview, June 1968. 47 Personal interview, June 1968. 48 Personal interview, May 1971.



performance indicators and measures of productivity to test the e f i c i e q with which resources are used in canying out a program. For example, it should become possible to correlate work loads in various government activities with given levels of economic activity, just as for years it has been possible to gauge how many clerks are needed to process a given body of family allowance applications.

In developing measurements of efectiveness (the success of the program in achieving its goals) the Treasury Board group is going ahead with great caution. Some measurements are entirely possible; for example, if one purpose of family allowances is to add to family income in Canada, the effective result can be accurately measured and stated. What is not yet possible is to offer adequate quantitative criteria which will allow com- parisons between programs competing for the taxpayer’s dollar. The Planning Branch is careful not to claim too much for their efforts. For example, at a higher level of analysis the cost/benefits of Family Allow- ances and Medicare are not easily compared.

What the Treasury Board Planning Branch must attempt is the evange- lization of departments and civil servants, most of whom remain funda- mentally oriented towards the details of inputs, paying lip service to the necessity of measuring and evaluating what has been achieved in programs past and present.

The working tone of the public service It is a commonplace to say of all public services that they never achieve

maximum output from their civil servants. Indeed all the senior officers interviewed agreed that ten to twenty-five per cent more work could be accomplished if some way could be found to draw it out of people. Or, some said, putting it the other way, ten to twenty-five per cent of staff could be cut if the rest could produce at their potential capacity. There was general agreement that all large organizations suffer from this dis- ease, but that government service is particularly vulnerable. Has the spirit of management reforms got through to the platoon level

of the public service? A deputy head of wide experience has a ‘gut feeling’ that management improvements have barely begun, in mid-1971, to have an impact at the 50,000 units which make up the working level of the service. The principles of management have been established but have not worked their way

There is general agreement that administrators at all levels of the hierarchy are s t i l l subject to Parkinsonianism - the tendency to add to one’s staff whenever possible on the assumption that prestige and pay will ‘both rise. Treasury Board officers pleaded guilty to the charge that too much reward was given in the massive reclassification of the late sixties to those 49 Personal interview, June 1971.

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who supervised large numbers of people. They added, however, that at lease part of this was a necessary corrective in a system which previously had given too much of a premium to policy-makers and not enough to administrators.

A number of senior officers were mildly hopeful that there would be some improvement in work-tone and efficiency as the post-Glassco decentralizing process transferred responsibility further and further down the line. Certainly ‘Management By Objectives’ is predicated on this expectation. Meanwhile the government still seems to be paying the high costs of establishing new management concepts while it has not yet reaped the benefits. Both the control agencies and the departments have spent a fortune on new expensive employees in accounting and information collecting and analysis. The Treasury Board has itself grown during the Trudeau administration from 410 (man-years) in 1968-9 to a projected man-years total of 639 in 1972,-3.5O The total growth of the numbers of civil servants in the whole public service has been admirably controlled, rising only fractionally in four years. The costs of salaries and wages, however, have risen 46 per cent in the same period due to inflation, collective bargaining, and general ‘enriching‘ of the terms of public service.61 There is widespread agreement in ‘official Ottawa’ with the management goals of the present Treasury Board - that is, the replacement of controls by guidelines, and of rules by standards or ‘norms.’ Much interest, and some scepticism, is shown also in the attempt of the Board Secretariat to develop measurements of effectiveness and efficiency of government programs, so that both departmental administrators and officers of control agencies can monitor performance.

The Board Secretariat is asking for a year or more to perfect guidelines to take the place of rules. Much more time than that is probably needed to develop adequate methods of audit and measurement of management performance to accompany new guidelines. It will be interesting to see whether the Board and its Secretariat are prepared to move towards ‘freedom’ for departments although lacking some of the tools of audit. Theoretically it can be argued that if mistakes are to be made, it is better that the local man make them in his department rather than transfer the responsibility upward and outward to the Board.

We must not expect, however, that this or any other government is likely to abandon the concept of collective cabinet responsibility for management which has been so clearly articulated by the Johnson Secretariat. There are natural limits under cabinet government to the possibilities of

50 CANADA, Estimates (1969-70), p. 438, and ibid. (197%3), p. 28-8. 51 Ibid. See tables of standard objects of expenditure. Costs and numbers of civil servants relate to all departments and agencies listed in the Blue Book of Estimates. The major exclusions are Air Canada, CNR, and the Armed Forces.



letting the manager manage without some kind of central control agencies. And there are natural political limits in letting the manager manage without some direction from his departmental minister, who can be embar- rassed or even humiliated in the House and in the country for the mistakes of his department. While preserving the twin conventions of collective cabinet responsibility and individual ministerial responsibility, one hopes that the Treasury Board of the 1970s will allow the operating departments to explore to the limit the possibilities of managerial freedom.


the treasury board of canada and its clients: five years of change and administrative reform...

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