In a recent Ottawa Citizen interview, former federal cabinet minister David Emerson began an important conversation on how the public service might improve the way it provides policy advice to ministers. As someone who has looked at this question from the perspective both of a political advisor in ministers’ offices and of a policy analyst in the public service, I commend Mr. Emerson for this initiative, even as I reject much of his argument.

Emerson’s central thesis is that “Public servants are losing their monopoly on policy advice to government and will soon be considered irrelevant unless they change how they gather, analyze and shape their recommendations.” He is strongly critical of the public service for being ensconced in an “Ottawa bubble” which isolates it from the “real world,” relying too much on traditional institutional sources of data such as the Census and Statistics Canada surveys, and being hamstrung by cumbersome internal approval processes which pose a barrier to timely policy advice. In an age of tablets, smart phones and hand-held devices with instant access to all kinds of “qualitative and quantitative information,” he asserts, Ministers and their political staff no longer have to put up with such dysfunctional approaches to providing policy advice and will increasingly turn to the multiple sources of data and advice available outside government.

In later testimony before the House of Commons government operations committee on his annual report to the Prime Minister on the public service and the first round of his proposed Blueprint 2020 reforms to modernize that institution, the Clerk of the Privy Council, Wayne Wouters, appeared to accept much of Emerson’s argument.

In future he told the committee “public servants will have to collaborate with think tanks and other groups… and network inside and outside of government- to tap into the best ideas. The job will shift from sole advisors to analysts who can integrate information and connect the dots and adapt policies designed elsewhere for the Canadian situation.”

Much of Emerson’s critique and Wouters’ testimony rests on a number of unsupported premises which hide important weaknesses in their cases. In formal debates this strategy of assuming a controversial proposition is accepted by all is referred to as “begging the question.” I will point to examples of this question begging later. But at a more fundamental level, I believe Emerson is concealing a deep-seated distrust of the content of the policy advice coming from the public service under the guise of a methodological critique of how that advice is developed and delivered to ministers. Wouters seems blissfully unaware that a trust issue between ministers and public servants even exists.

Whenever there is a change in government, incoming Ministers have traditionally been initially wary of the advice they receive from the public service, particularly when their party has been out of power for a long time. They have tended to believe that the public service is intellectually invested in the policies and world view of the previous government and would try to persuade them to continue with the status quo rather than to help find the best way of implementing their own policies. Similarly, many public servants doubt the capabilities and are suspicious about the agendas of incoming ministers. If the public service behaves professionally, and Ministers keep an open mind about advice that may differ from what is contained in the party platform, this period of initial wariness usually is short-lived and a relationship of mutual trust gradually develops.

However, as governments have become more ideological in their outlook, their tendency has become to view the public service, not just as people who may not share their views, but as ideological enemies to be ignored and circumvented whenever their advice does not coincide with the government’s preferences. What Emerson’s critique amounts to is a rationale for why ministers are right to ignore the public service and look elsewhere for data, information and advice. Wouters’ testimony implicitly accepts this critique.

Because he is unwilling to admit his real motivation, Emerson’s methodological critique must necessarily be based on a series of “question begging” unproved assumptions. The following are some important examples:

1) Mr. Emerson states that Ministers need to make policy decisions more quickly than in the past. 

While there are rare instances where policy decisions must be made quickly and on the basis of incomplete or unreliable information, these situations are no more common today than they ever were. Moreover, contrary to what Mr. Emerson suggests, in such cases Ministers need access more than ever to the disinterested expert advice which only experienced, knowledgeable public servants can provide. When policy decisions must be made in a hurry, ignoring the expertise and experience of individuals committed to serving the public interest and privileging that of individuals, advocacy groups and think tanks with agendas of their own is a recipe for worse, not better, advice for ministers.

2) .Mr.Emerson also appears to presume that because they originate outside the Ottawa bubble, the data, information and policy advice coming from outside the public service are inherently superior to those coming from within it. He also seems to assume that public servants never consult such information sources.

While there are many valuable data bases and knowledgeable policy experts outside the public service, they best contribute to the public interest when ministers see them as complements to rather than as substitutes for what public servants provide. Not all outside sources have something relevant to offer, and even relevant information can be misleading if it is coloured, as it often is, by biases or misinterpreted because its strengths and weaknesses are not understood. For these reasons having access to outside data and experts which support their beliefs and preferences can give analysts in central agencies, political staff in ministers’ offices and Ministers themselves a false sense of confidence that they are getting something more valuable than what is being offered by line department experts. The very proliferation of information generated and circulated through technological advances makes it far too easy for virtually anyone to set up as an expert. As Karl Greenfeld succinctly put it in his article, “Faking Cultural Literacy”, in a recent piece in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times, “It’s never been so easy to pretend to know so much without actually knowing anything.”

A recent example of the dangers of privileging information from “outside the bubble” to that coming from the public service is the rapid expansion of Temporary Foreign Worker permits in several occupations based on inflated estimates of job vacancy levels by the Department of Finance. The Finance estimates relied heavily on job listings by Kijiji. Kijiji often lists the same job opening in multiple locations and does not quickly withdraw vacancy listings once they have been filled. Alternative job vacancy estimates from Statistics Canada were much lower, but were discounted by Finance and the ministers concerned because the Kijiji data were timelier and told the story they wanted to hear.

3)The advent of Big Data, the proliferation of alternate sources of data, information and advice and the growing ease in obtaining instant access to them are indeed significant changes which enhance the options available to Ministers. But Ministers have always rightly sought out policy advisors and alternate sources of data and information from those provided by the public service. Emerson’s error, implicitly endorsed by Wouters, is to assume that outside sources are superior substitutes for rather than valuable complements to expert, unbiased advice from professional public servants using data and information from an internationally-respected government statistical agency such as Statistics Canada.

This is not to say that Emerson does not make some valid points. And, the public service should and could take important steps to make their advice more credible, relevant and trustworthy for ministers. Unfortunately these are not found among the reforms proposed by Clerk Wouters.

For example, no one who has worked on policy advice within the public service will deny that the internal approval processes for advice are far too slow and, paradoxically, far less rigorous than they should be. Making sure that the director of every possible unit with the remotest interest in the policy area has signed off on policy advice often becomes more important than subjecting that advice to real scrutiny by people with the knowledge and capacity for careful vetting. Similarly, some policy analysts within government may indeed be too comfortable with established, familiar data to consider more thoroughly and seriously the work of non-government policy analysts. However, my own experience and that of my spouse who served at more senior levels of the public service than I did, is that most public servants have always taken pains to keep up with the best outside analysis done in their policy areas and to draw on reliable outside data sources for forecasts and analysis.

The cumbersome and less than rigorous internal approval processes are a symptom for a more important problem within the public service. That is that expertise in policy areas has been neither encouraged nor rewarded as much as it ought to be in recent years. Increasingly, the Clerk of the Privy Council recommends and the PMO selects for senior appointments in line departments individuals with good process and presentation skills obtained from short stints in central agencies such as Finance, PCO and Treasury Board, rather than people who have gained deep knowledge of a subject through years of working in a specific policy area. These officials are rarely allowed long enough stints in their new departments to overcome this initial lack of knowledge about the policy files for which they are responsible. The PCO and PMO adopt these personnel practices as part of a deliberate strategy, in the words of a friend who is also a former minister, “to maintain control and to facilitate adoption of initiatives that conform first to the political agenda or biases of political operatives and only secondarily to objective consideration of the public interest.” Combined with a growing reluctance by senior officials to bring to ministerial briefings officials who have actual expertise in the subject matter, ministers are too often deprived of access to those best able to respond to their inquiries about the context of and the logic behind the policy advice being presented. This, in turn, undermines ministerial confidence in that advice.

The public service also seldom acts proactively to understand and respond to the questions most relevant to governments and ministers. I believe it would go a long way to restoring ministerial trust in advice from the public service if, at the beginning of each meeting between a new minister and his or her senior public servants the following offer was made by the Deputy Minister: “Minister, what questions would you most like answered relating to the content or the implementation of public policies of concern to you? We will begin work immediately on answering those questions and have you briefed on them by the best experts we can find both within the public service and outside government.”

As Emerson suggests, it is vital for the public interest that Ministers have access to the highest quality and best-informed policy advice in order to make good policy decisions. But that advice will only be forthcoming and respected under two conditions. The first is that Ministers are open to hearing ideas and information that may be at variance with their own preferences. The second is that public servants focus on assuring Ministers that their priority is to give the Minister access to the best information and advice they can find which is relevant to the Minister’s interests and responsibilities.

Contrary to what Wouters seems to think, simply aggregating and adapting to the Canadian context the methods and approaches of outside analysts and sources of data is not the best future role for the public service. Instead, what the public service needs to do is to return its focus to developing and maintaining high quality data sources and professional expertise and knowledge in public policy areas and identifying early on those public policy questions which are ministerial priorities. That is the way the public service can best serve the real interests of ministers and the broader public interest.