Driving the Fake Out of Public Administration: Detoxing HR in the Canadian Federal Public Sector

Much of the waste in public administration is ascribable to the displacement of the primary concern for performance and coordination by a primary concern for redistribution. In each sphere of activities, it has led to unreasonable rules inspired by egalitarianism that have triggered permanent allocational malefits. The failure to confront the progressivist ethos and the culture has rendered ineffective any action on the managerial front. First, the authors underscore the seemingly unanimous diagnosis of waste and dysfunctions in Canada's federal public service, and show that efforts to correct the situation have failed. This failure is ascribable to a fundamental incapacity to deal concurrently with both the ill-advised managerial decisions of governments and the perverse progressivist philosophy inspiring them. Second, an MRI of the human resource (HR) regimes has been sketched as a guide to the detoxing and modernisation of the HR regimes. It was used to spell out some guidelines for the modification of management structures and competencies, and to probe the cultural underground of moral contracts that would need to underpin the new arrangements. The conclusion hammers home that prototyping refurbished structures and rules may succeed in breaking out momentarily from ill-inspired initiatives like the Pearsonian mental prison of the model employer, but that it would prove futile and temporary unless one can tame the progressivist cosmology that will bring those ill-inspired schemes back from their ashes. Some modest general propositions are put forward.