Cut, Bypass, or Simplify ?
How can we tell whether government is really reforming itself?
Ottawa is shrinking the federal public service, including its executive ranks. The conversation that follows is a familiar one. How many jobs will go? How much will we save? Which programs will be hit? Will services get worse?
These are fair questions. But they don't tell us whether government is becoming more effective.
Cutting is not the same as simplifying. And there is a third path, very visible in Ottawa right now: going around the system.
Cut
In his recent profile of the Carney government in the Toronto Star, Justin Ling reports that the public service has about 22,000 fewer people than when the Prime Minister took office. Most of those reductions, though, fell on term employees, students and interns. Ling points to the risk that follows: a government that becomes even more top-heavy.
Picture an administration that cuts its workforce by 10 percent but keeps the same programs, the same rules, the same approval processes and the same layers of sign-off. What has it simplified? Possibly nothing. It is simply asking fewer people to run the same complexity. The savings may be real. But they are likely to come with longer delays, more bottlenecks and less time spent on actual service.
Eliminating a position and eliminating work are two different things. The position disappears from the org chart.
The work may just move to another desk.
Bypass
There is another response when an organization has become too slow. Instead of fixing it, you build a fast lane next to it.
The Carney government has done this several times: a Major Projects Office to speed up projects of national interest, a Defence Investment Agency to overhaul military procurement, Build Canada Homes to accelerate housing construction. The intent makes sense, and much of the political class agrees the government is aiming at the right targets. If existing structures take too long to decide, to buy or to build, why not concentrate authority in an organization designed to act?
It can work. But one question becomes essential: does the new organization replace part of the old one, or does it sit on top of it?
The Defence Investment Agency shows the answer is rarely simple. It no longer needs Treasury Board approval for high-risk defence contracts, whatever their value. One approval is gone: that is real simplification. But political scientist Philippe Lagassé already expects friction between the minister responsible for the Agency and the Minister of National Defence over what future equipment should be required to do. A new structure also creates new borders to negotiate.
If the old departments, rules and responsibilities all remain, you now have to add an agency, its governance, and its relationships with every organization already in the field. A few files may move faster. You have also tried to solve complexity by adding complexity.
Bypassing from the top
Ling's profile adds another dimension. He describes a very demanding Prime Minister who personally follows a great many files, surrounded by a small circle able to keep up with his pace. One public servant quoted in the piece says the federal machine is moving faster than many thought possible. The same official warns, in substance, that because nothing has broken yet, the pushing continues, and that at some point the system will push back.
New agencies and a Prime Minister who drives everything himself are two versions of the same move. In both cases, the system is bypassed from the top. In both cases, things speed up without necessarily increasing what the institution itself can do.
Has the system become more capable, or is an exceptional leader managing to make it run faster? Those are not the same thing. An organization that slows down the moment its leader stops pushing has not gained capacity. It has become more dependent on him.
A successful reform should pass a simple test: would it still work if the leader disappeared tomorrow?
Simplify
The third option is to remove from the system what it no longer needs.
An organization might find that it no longer needs to produce a certain report. That it no longer has to ask citizens for information the government already holds. That two approvals can go. That three units no longer need to coordinate, because one will be responsible. That a decision can be made by the person who has the information to make it. Or that a program that has ended can take the structure built to run it along with it.
Something fundamental has then happened: a piece of work has become unnecessary. When a position disappears but its tasks remain, someone has to pick them up.
When a task becomes unnecessary, nobody does.
Why it is so hard
Organizations rarely become bureaucratic because someone wanted them to. An incident happens, so a control is added. A risk appears, so an approval is required. Two units work badly together, so a coordinating body is created. Each decision is reasonable. It is the pile-up that becomes the problem.
The anthropologist Joseph Tainter described this pattern. Organizations respond to their problems by adding complexity, and at first it pays more than it costs. Then the returns diminish. A growing share of resources goes to running the system itself rather than to expanding what it can do. Complexity is not bad in itself. The question is what it still delivers in return for what it costs.
Five questions to judge a reform
Over the coming months, we will hear a great deal about jobs cut, new agencies and things moving faster. To tell a cut, a bypass and a genuine simplification apart, five questions are enough:
What actually disappears? Not just which positions: which tasks, reports, approvals and committees?
When a new structure is created, what does it replace?
Are decisions moving closer to the people who hold the information?
Would the system still work without constant intervention from the top?
What does government no longer need to do?
The last one is the most telling. The best measure of a reform may not be the dollars saved, the jobs cut, or even the projects accelerated.
It is what the reform manages to make unnecessary.
Sources: Justin Ling, "Who does Mark Carney really listen to?", Toronto Star, October 1, 2026; Philippe Lagassé, "The Requirements Debate Returns," September 2026; Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988; Defence Investment Agency, canada.ca.
Comments