The future of the public service is one of the key policy issues of our time in both Canada and the United States. 

Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have launched a large-scale, misguided attack on the U.S. federal public service, indiscriminately firing thousands of workers before rehiring some of them because they are essential to nuclear weapons security and other key issues. 

There has been pushback from the courts, unions, Democrats and even some Republicans but overall Trumpism has turned bureaucrats into political targets, branding them as part of a “deep state” working against Republican interests. 

In a similar vein, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s rhetoric about the public service has been generally negative. For example, his approach mirrors right-wing populist movements in the U.S., framing public servants not just as inefficient but as an entrenched elite wasting taxpayer dollars and actively working against the agenda of right-of-centre elected leaders. 

The size of Canada’s public service has also increasingly become a core issue in partisan debates, but not just about efficiency or balancing budgets. As in the United States, it is part of broader ideological debates about the role of the state. 

We, too, could see a further erosion of public trust in government institutions, mirroring the U.S. trend where watchdog agencies and oversight bodies are increasingly viewed as partisan actors. 

What we need in Canada is a richer debate about government efficacy, recognizing that the effectiveness of public services is not merely a function of their size but is deeply influenced by how resources are managed, how projects are........

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