The auditor general is right. Something is rotten in the upper ranks of the federal bureaucracy where careerism too often triumphs over expertise and knowing how to manage up and please the minister and the government in power as the primary way of getting ahead. ---

It wasn’t the best of weeks for Ottawa’s senior bureaucrats.

In a scathing report, Auditor General Michael Ferguson laid much of the blame for the Phoenix pay system fiasco on officials at Public Services and Procurement Canada. And more broadly, Ferguson stated that “pervasive cultural problems” in the public service were standing in the way of delivering the kind of successful results that Canadians have a right to expect.

Ferguson noted that the bureaucrats in charge of Phoenix failed to understand the warnings that made it clear the system wasn’t ready to be launched in early 2016, didn’t conduct adequate testing of the system and chose to ignore the fact that the new centralized pay centre in New Brunswick was unable to do the job assigned to it.

“We found that there was no oversight of the Phoenix project, which allowed Phoenix executives to implement the system even though it had significant problems,” the report said.

The auditor general is right. Something is rotten in the upper ranks of the federal bureaucracy where careerism too often triumphs over expertise and knowing how to manage up and please the minister and the government in power as the primary way of getting ahead.

What the bureaucrats in charge of Phoenix were doing blindly was following their political masters, for whom operating an efficient pay system was the lowest of priorities.

Though it may seem to have been the most mundane of back-office functions of little political interest, Phoenix was handled from the start by the Harper government as an intensely politicized project.

There were two goals. First and foremost, the Conservatives were intent on saving their political bacon in northern New Brunswick, particularly after they scrapped the Firearms Registry and eliminated the 240 jobs that were located at an administrative centre in Miramichi.

So the key was to deliver a big federal office in Miramichi with lots of jobs, which is why Harper went there four times. Centralization of payroll was essential, even if it made no sense in a public service with thousands of arcane, department-specific rules where decentralized expertise was essential. (We still don’t know how and why the decision to centralize was taken.)

Second of all, Harper promised that the new system would save $70 million a year, part of the Tories’ deficit-cutting mantra. So when the top bureaucrats found out that Phoenix would cost tens of millions of dollars more, they preferred to please the boss, stick to the budget, and cut essential functions, like the ability to handle retroactive pay.

What’s more disturbing is that when the Tories were booted out of office in late 2015, those same bureaucrats didn’t have the smarts or the guts to tell the incoming Liberal government that Phoenix was heading for a big fall and they would wear it politically if the bugs weren’t fixed.

And Ferguson points out another problem: the churn that took place among the upper echelons of the Department, including three deputy ministers over the seven years of Phoenix’s implementation.

The churn is an essential part of a culture in the bureaucracy that rewards careerism over competence.

If you want to get ahead in the senior bureaucracy, subject matter expertise is not really important. What counts is learning how to “manage.” So if you’re an expert in aviation at Transport Canada, for example, don’t think you can build up your expertise in that area, learn more about marine transportation or rail safety and after 15 or 20 years, aspire to become the deputy minister of transport.

It doesn’t work that way. If you’re ambitious, the way to get ahead is to rise quickly in Transport, then jump to Canadian Border Services, do a stint at Veterans Affairs, maybe fill in for 12 months at Industry Canada, get a coveted position at PCO or Finance, then become an ADM at Parks Canada, then an Associate at National Defence, before ending up as CEO at the Food Inspection Agency.

Of course, you’re an aviation expert who knows a thing about food safety or never visited an abattoir in your life, but you will have learned to write a fabulous memorandum to cabinet, build a cadre of loyal underlings and know how to deal with difficult ministers. And above all, you will have spent half of your time at work figuring out how to manage your own relentless climb up the greasy pole.

Looking at the biographies of some recent top-level appointments at the federal government points out this kind of career path. Recently, the prime minister named a new head of the FinTrac, the head of the agency that’s supposed to track and stop money-laundering and hasn’t been doing a particularly good job at it.

You would think that the government would be looking for somebody with experience in banking or a lawyer with the smarts to go after bad actors and the financial institutions which are failing to stop these nefarious activities.

Not a chance. The new head of the agency has a B.A. in psychology and has never been near a regulatory or financial-services job. In 20 years in the federal public service, her bio shows that she has held 12 positions, with the longest tenure at three years, in a dizzying variety of departments, from Social Development to Canadian Heritage, from Canadian Border Services to Agriculture Canada.

All of this churn is visible all the way through the executive ranks of the public service. A few years back, the Public Policy Forum studied the average tenure of deputy ministers in the period from 1997-2007 and discovered it was just 2.7 years. And when it took a snapshot of heads of agencies at the end of 2010, it found the heads had been in power for 19.4 months, shorter than the average stint of an NHL coach. I doubt it’s got better since.

The forum noted with this was particularly disturbing since it takes about two years for a new deputy to get up to speed with the department of which they’re in charge. So by the time a deputy gets a handle on the job, he or she is often gone.

Of course, successful bureaucrats have learned to spin this churn to their advantage. Come in, launch a major reform, take credit for doing it and get out of Dodge before its failings become apparent.

Unfortunately in the case of Phoenix, it didn’t work.

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