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Breadcrumb Trail
A Profile of the Public Service of Canada
Conclusion: Looking Forward
The preceding pages present an impressive number and wide scope of reforms that have occurred during the eight or more years since the first edition of this profile. This in no way means that reform will now come to an end or even slow down.
As we look forward in 2003 and try to identify future challenges, the emerging priorities of the government's management board provide some clues to the broad and significant issues that will need to be tackled. The Treasury Board Secretariat has been pursuing an already substantial agenda of 'management change' and much of this will continue to be pursued in the coming fiscal year and beyond in all three business lines - stewardship, human resources and service improvement. It is also considering the development of an integrated management framework to inform and guide its new approach to relations with departments and agencies, and to provide an accountability framework offering greater clarity on the division of accountabilities between the Treasury Board and departments and agencies, as well as setting clear performance expectations. Strengthening integrity, accountability, and values and ethics could also involve revision of the public service conflict of interest and post-employment guidelines, and the publication of a code of public service values and ethics.
The introduction in February 2003 of human resources reform legislation to modernise the legislative framework for human resources management in the public service (Bill C-25) is expected to bring about the most significant change to the public service legislative framework in nearly four decades. If adopted, it will mean changes to a number of statutes in the areas of staffing, recourse, relations between labour and management and learning, and institutional changes affecting the Public Service Commission, the Canadian Centre for Management Development and the TBS. Implementation will take several years because of the need to draft regulations and policies to support it; negotiate and implement transfers of responsibilities and resources; establish new organisations and staff them; and train the HR community, as well as staff and managers, in the new system. There will also be non-legislative HR reforms, for example advances on the Embracing Change Report commitments to diversify the public service so that it better reflects the demographic realities of the country and to improve performance on other employment equity groups in the public service; to implement the new Official Languages Plan; to expand public service learning activity and programmes through the development of a standard entry level orientation programming, mandatory programming for different levels of responsibility or functional responsibilities and increasing knowledge transfer capacity; and to further advance the work on leadership development, including the establishment of a broader and deeper leadership continuum and collective management of assistant deputy ministers.
In the area of stewardship, the Modern Comptrollership Initiative has been extended to 88 departments and agencies from the original five pilot departments. It will focus on strengthening and improving performance on all fronts in all organisations and it continues to be a corporate priority for the Clerk of the Privy Council (who is also Head of the Public Service). Improved reporting to Parliament and the public (i.e. providing more 'whole-of-government' reporting, reducing the number of reports and consolidating all existing Treasury Board reports on the Public Service) and the move to accrual accounting will also create challenges. Attention will also focus on the new five-year cycle of expenditure and management reviews on non-statutory spending (both 'vertical', i.e. department or agency specific, and 'horizontal', i.e. policies and programmes that cut across departments and agencies); _the need to reduce the non-statutory A base in FY 2003-2004 by $1 billion; and the need to consult with Parliament and the Auditor General on changes to government reporting to Parliament.
Finally, with regard to service improvement, the Canadian Government is committed to have all key services on-line and to achieve a 10 per cent improvement in Canadians' satisfaction with the delivery of key government services by 2005. Several other service improvement initiatives are being envisaged: a move towards greater service integration within government; development of an integrated single window employee portal; approval of a management of government information policy; and the elaboration of government IT security standards.
At the beginning of the new century, it is obvious that reforms will be continuous. The challenge is to formulate a coherent and integrated management framework for the Canadian public service, one that will ensure that governance goals are met, that the focus is on results and that accountability is strong throughout the system.
While this profile will help readers to catch up on Canadian reforms, they will obviously need to follow closely the continuing evolution of the Canadian model, as major developments are continuing or beginning in many areas such as citizen engagement, an ethics and integrity package, human resource management, excellence in management, electronic government, continuous learning, official languages and many more areas. Readers should continue visiting the appropriate websites for recent updates.
A new goal was set for the Canadian public service by the Clerk of the Privy Council in the 10th Annual Report of the Head of the Public Service in April 2003: 'We can justifiably aspire to setting the world standard for a professional public service'. Future updates of this profile thus promise to be even more full of discoveries than this one. They should reveal an even more mature and more sophisticated model of management excellence.
