At this time of global disruption, the implications for Canada cannot be overstated.

The Global Risks Report 2026, published by the World Economic Forum, identified the top five threats facing the world in the year ahead: geoeconomic confrontations, disinformation, societal polarization, extreme weather events and state-based armed conflict. Shockingly, only four months into the year, the world has experienced all of them.

The question is how to best protect our economy and sovereignty in an era of radical uncertainty and polycrises often fomented by U.S. President Donald Trump. These attacks, coupled with a decade or more of underachieving our potential and diminishing our resiliency, amplify the need to change our policy trajectory in a fractured world.

In our new book, A New Blueprint for Government: Reshaping Power, the PMO, and the Public Service, we argue that part of Canada’s sustained underperformance – anemic productivity, weak growth, stagnant per-capita incomes, the immigration mess, widespread affordability pressures, an underfunded military and the doubling of the national debt – has its roots partly in the way our governments are governing today.

We examine in depth how the largest and most complex institution in the country – the federal government – actually works and we contrast this with how our Westminster system of governance was designed to operate.

The gap is now a chasm, caused by a series of corrosive governing imbalances that affect everything that Ottawa does.

Centralization in the PMO is weakening execution

The most impactful is the extreme centralization of power in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and with the prime minister personally. A parallel factor is the marginalization of ministers; dominance by political staff of the nonpartisan public service; prioritization of communications over policy and service delivery; and a declining role for Parliament in........

© IRPP - Policy Options