Serving Canadians used to be the primary function of public servants. Increasingly, the public service and its unions look like they’re most interested in serving themselves.
I'm a public servant who works in a branch that delivers programs. I joined the government after 20+ years in the private sector. I don't know if it's because of oversight agencies (and there are too many), but I've encountered paralyzing risk aversion in the public service. It shouldn't be so difficult to get simple things accomplished, but it's like pulling teeth to get decisions made.
Far too many people need to sign off on simple things like choosing an image for a handout or replying to a question from a citizen. I also have three managers who want weekly meetings for updates on my work -_- there's a lot that could be changed/shrunk in the PS, but don't leave PS management in charge of that. It would be like dividing by zero.
Any who uphold the principles of liberal democracy must acknowledge that banning public sector unions is a non-starter.
The same would be true for bans against unions of any sort, so long as they do not undertake activities that violate the Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
To prevent employees in any organization from joining a union would violate Charter rights.
I recently had to deal with CBSA because a duty paid in error. It was about $2500, and related to an import of an item that is explicitly duty free according to USMCA. It was a nearly a year long journey that eventually involved staff of several MP offices, CBSA staff, and ministery staffers.
At about the nine month mark I sent a bit of a spicy email to my CBSA contact, CC'ing everyone who'd been involved to that point. About three weeks later I got an email telling me to check the memos on their website for further instruction— that's not the interesting part— the email I got was a forward, and attached was a dozen, or more, emails bouncing my message all around to various public servants. They all seemed terrified to go on the record to tell me that the item in question was in fact USMCA duty free. It was bizarre. It's not complex. It is written in very plain English. But these staff were so... I don't know? Broken? Beaten down? Disempowered? That they were not able to send me a simple message confirming the working of the USMCA.
The federal public service needs some real reform, not the least of which, they need to be empowered to act in the interest of Canadians, and spend less time desperately trying to cover their ass.
It sounds like a total failure of incentives - it seems public sector workers get in too much trouble for deviating from procedure or for anything going even slightly wrong, and in not nearly enough trouble for failing to produce results.
Unless you are connected to Cabinet and then you can break every rule in existence, make hundreds of millions of dollars disappear without explanation, and the government will illegally defy every disclosure order then maybe call an election to protect you. But otherwise use the wrong wording in an email and there will be hell to pay!
It cannot be understated just how chilling an effect the Modernization of the Official Languages Act is having and will have on the public service's effectiveness.
For the uninitiated, the feds assess language skills for reading, writing and oral comprehension on an A-B-C-E scale, where A is a basic understanding and E is fluency. The standard for supervisors used to be BBB, which is essentially "functional." As of June the standard is now CBC, which in practice is a lot closer to "fluent" than it is to "functional." This is especially true for oral comprehension, which for anglophones is generally the toughest part. Even if an individual supervises one person, they now must have CBC. Existing supervisors are grandfathered but even lateral moves are now subject to this requirement, not just promotions.
Ministries all over government now have a far smaller and shallower pool from which to select leaders and supervisors, and language profile is driving those selections, regardless of whether or not the organization directly serves Canadians. In some cases, whole initiatives may or may not go ahead depending on whether CBC-qualified candidates can be identified. Skills, knowledge and abilities that address a position's mandatory selection criteria are almost secondary considerations: none mean anything if the individual isn't bilingual. There's an option to hire someone without the language standard if they can achieve it within two years, but that's a lot of risk for a candidate to take on, particularly if they're moving from one PS job to another and their old job is filled in behind them: if they lose their new gig because they can't achieve CBC, and their old job is gone, they're screwed.
All that to say, if you think the government had a hard time delivering up until now, wait for it. Now that MOLA is in force, there will be even fewer competent leaders to take the feds through Canada's challenges than ever before.
‘Now that MOLA is in force, there will be even fewer competent leaders to take the feds through Canada's challenges than ever before.’
Especially outside Central Canada, where competent bilingual candidates are less likely to be found. Service delivery in French, in particular, will be poorly provided in The West. I say this as a bilingual (EEC) former federal civil servant who observed it first hand for many years. Too bad.
Shhhhhhh…..don’t tell the Reddit CanadaPublicServants thread about this article because many of them think that Canadians don’t understand how the public service works when in fact, Canadians do understand how the public service works and are frustrated by it
Interesting that a confessed former public servant can describe the public service so inaccurately. Public servants serve the government of the day. They do this loyally - regardless of political stripes. The government of the day serves Canadians, but the public service is beholden to the government, and their dominant priority is not to serve Canadians. It is a nice idea, but it is inaccurate.
Perhaps it is because most of my time in the public service was spent under the Harper and Trudeau governments, and not under the Chretien/Martin governments like the author. Perhaps things have changed. While "Fearless advice, Loyal implementation" may be a motto, the Harper and Trudeau government made it clear that they had no time for advice that countered their view. They only wanted loyal implementation of their own policies. Both administrations ensured senior officials were willing to implement their policies and this has a trickle down effect to the rest of the public service. This is the reason so many of those governments legislative initiatives have been challenged, often successfully, in court.
Therefore, it is not the unions (who have very limited influence) or the public service acting as a special interest group. The only interest that the public service has, as a collective, is implementing what the government, the public service's bosses, tells them to. It is also this misconception that public servants are there to serve Canadians that lead to these erroneous conclusions.
Having spent a career in the "Public Service" it has been my experience that many, many PS staff emphatically believe that they are "public servants". This becomes problematic when senior staff believe, and propogate, that erroneous view. The government of the day provides the "what" and the reporting PS provides the "how" . The Public Service reports to and serves the government of the day, not the public in general.
Well, Phil, I absolutely detest your assertion. Having offered my (incredibly dubious) opinion .....
Assuming that your assertion is accurate - and I have no reason to doubt you - that means that the phrase "Public Service of Canada" should be retitled to "Publicly Paid Servants of and Sycophants to the Politicians in Charge."
My point is that from your assertion does not in any way deal with actual provision of services to the public.
From my perspective a lot of the problem is that the governments over the last ten years, particularly, but also previously have tried to do absolutely everything. Whenever someone saw something that "wasn't fair" or "wasn't right" or wasn't "whatever" the government developed a policy and pronounced their wisdom in the particular area. The governments over the last ten years just loved announcing stuff but didn't really worry about making sure that the stuff got done. After all, that was the responsibility of the PS, no? Or at least that was the political attitude.
The PS must respond to the government of the day but it is supposed to SERVE to public, hence the name, Public Service. Obviously, they haven't been serving very well at all. And, bear in mind that my comment covers ALL levels of governments.
As above, I believe that the governments have been trying to do absolutely everything. It matter(s)(ed) not whether the "thing" was the formal responsibility of a particular level of government. The three levels of government all (sorta) took care of their own responsibilities but also intruded on the other two levels. The result is that all three levels of government had/have far, far too many staff covering stuff that is manifestly not their responsibility based on what the Constitution Act says. The follow up to that creeping activity is that the governments are all spending far, far too much in contradictory ways, etc. with spending ten miles wide and one centimeter deep.
So, the responsibility for the mess starts with the politicians or, more accurately, with the public who want bread and circuses but Carney et al simply refuse to say, "Yup, circuses are important but they are Doug Ford's/Danielle Smith's responsibility. Go see him/her. If they don't give you a circus, vote them out." Instead, Carney et al say, "Oh, that bad Ford/Smith, he/she won't give you circuses so we will."
But the PS just isn't delivering the circuses that the political masters have tasked them with providing.
A primary basis for this article’s thesis is that the public sector union is advocating for its members to receive a workplace benefit that many Canadians don’t have.
That sounds like an argument in favour of unions, not against the public service.
Or it's an argument against both unions and the public service. It kind of depends on your interpretation of the value of the workplace benefits in question. Ideally benefits actually improve productivity in the long run, but I think it's clear that's not where things are at with the PS unions.
I am not sure whether it is mainly a union issue or more of a DM and public service culture issue, given that policy ranks higher in the pecking order than program and service delivery. I worked at Service Canada for a time when the underlying ethos, as it were, was to flip the current approach to one where service (citizen-centred service in our jargon) would lead policy. Too radical along with some real management and culture change issues.
For me, I think federal public servants numbers number somewhere around 350,000. If we were talking auto manufacturing then Toyota would be up there around 375,000. (If only we manufactured Toyotas!) That Canada has a terribly messed up service delivery model which is to support the government rather than citizens is common knowledge. They are a formidable opposition to anything that will impact the status quo, I think.
Indeed, successive governments have failed to address the serious problems that afflict the Federal Public Service.
Canadians at large generally have little real understanding of what the problems are.
However, the political parties responsible for leading the government during the past two decades have not hesitated to construe certain narratives about public servants’ failings. In part to underplay their part in all this.
Which is, of course, considered fair dinkum in our crazy quilt modern world.
In my view, this author has not adequately addressed is the culpability of the politicians. The Harper government’s political staffers in particular were notorious for the contempt they showed to public servants.
Both the Conservatives and the Liberals have also been inclined to bully public servants behind closed doors.
And then, of course, we have the senior public servants themselves. It is absolutely the case that they have often been able to avoid accountability for mistakes made, and are more inclined these days to fall back on “yes sir, no sir, three-bags-full sir approaches to their political masters.
Are public-sector union leaders free from sin? Clearly not.
Do too many public servants fail in their duties to Canadians? As was suggested by the author, the answer is clearly yes. .
But to heap upon them the lion’s share of responsibility for our current pickle is not credible.
"... But to heap upon them the lion’s share of responsibility for our current pickle is not credible."
Well ....... perhaps.
On the other hand the "Public Service of Canada" [quotation marks to indicate both the proper descriptive and the fallacy of that descriptive in that it doesn't seem to involve service to the public] absolutely CANNOT avoid being complicit in the failings of government.
Allow me to put it differently. The PS might argue that the failings arise out of government policy but if [note the qualifier - I am somewhat, somewhat - unconvinced of that argument] that is so, then the implementation of that policy is supposed to be the responsibility of the PS. I can accept that incredibly inept policy goals are political but design and implementation are the responsibility of the PS. If the PS is unable to carry out the goals set forth why the hell do we employ them? Why the hell do we need an extra 100,000 of them over the last decade to provide even poorer public service than they did at the beginning of that time frame and far, far greater cost?
My comment was not meant to be a defence of the Trudeau policies in toto. That said, I would note that under the Harper government, public service capacity was widely thought to have been compromised by ideological (and poorly implemented) staff reductions.
Ultimately, the poor state of the public service isn't about numbers, but about choices (which successive generations of politicians have been responsible for).
WRT work-from-home, clearly the strategy must be made more effective, as there seems to be insufficient attention paid to ensuring productivity. Not that all who work-from-home are shirking. But there has been much reporting, albeit not always corroborated, suggesting that senior managers (and the Unions) should be able to do a better job of ensuring productivity and good value-for-money (for the public writ larger).
I never thought that you were defending the Face Painter's policies. Further, I accept fully that there was animus between the Harper folk and the PS; simply put (at least as I recall matters), the Harpers felt that the PS had bought into the LPC of Canada ideology and were not really interested in offering quality service to the Harper government. I have no idea whether there was or was not any merit to that idea. What I do know is that I fully believe that during the last decade the PS has been a fellow traveler with the LPC policies. You can take my opinion or you can dispute it, but that is fully what I believe.
As to numbers. I absolutely believe that the poor state of the PS ABSOLUTELY IS about the numbers insofar as the geometric increase in the PS is reflective of the ideology of PSAC which believes in increased size of the PS above all. Or so it seems.
As to work from home. I am a retired accountant; prior to my retirement I had my business develop the ability to work remotely and I used to use that ability when I was out of the city or out of the country. I worked extensively with businesses in other countries that used that ability. I am absolutely aware that the major accounting firms have that same ability that allows staff to work from client premises using remote login. But, but, but. I never allowed my staff to work from home simply as a convenience, etc.
Simply put, I found that the in person cross fertilization of interpersonal face to face communication was an absolute essential part of teaching and leading staff. Call me foolish, call me old fashioned but I simply don't believe that remote working as a regular feature is as effective as face to face collaboration. Dismiss my bias (and yes, it is a bias) if you wish but that is what I believe.
I personally dislike WFH, but I know others who do very well under the arrangements established by their respective agencies.
WRT ideological biases (real or perceived), I have met many public servants over the past three-and-a-half decades. It was not my impression that every one of them had a particular bias in favour of the Liberal Party. At least some of them maintained a membership in the Conservative Party of Canada or the New Democratic Party.
On the issue of numbers, we can likely agree to disagree. I certainly do believe, however, that a review of federal government programs (currently underway) MUST result in a reordering of services and the likely elimination of some among them.
It won't be easy... as you and others have alluded, "vested interests" are a tough nut to crack.
I'm a public servant who works in a branch that delivers programs. I joined the government after 20+ years in the private sector. I don't know if it's because of oversight agencies (and there are too many), but I've encountered paralyzing risk aversion in the public service. It shouldn't be so difficult to get simple things accomplished, but it's like pulling teeth to get decisions made.
Far too many people need to sign off on simple things like choosing an image for a handout or replying to a question from a citizen. I also have three managers who want weekly meetings for updates on my work -_- there's a lot that could be changed/shrunk in the PS, but don't leave PS management in charge of that. It would be like dividing by zero.
I love this comment. Risks are a way of life for me, personally. Not by choice. Essential nonetheless.
Which branches don't deliver programs?
Who should be in charge of changes/reduction of PS, so that it's not just another oversight agency?
I think public sector unions should be illegal but that puts me in a very small minority.
I don't think it's that small of a minority.
Freedom of association is a Charter right.
Any who uphold the principles of liberal democracy must acknowledge that banning public sector unions is a non-starter.
The same would be true for bans against unions of any sort, so long as they do not undertake activities that violate the Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
To prevent employees in any organization from joining a union would violate Charter rights.
I recently had to deal with CBSA because a duty paid in error. It was about $2500, and related to an import of an item that is explicitly duty free according to USMCA. It was a nearly a year long journey that eventually involved staff of several MP offices, CBSA staff, and ministery staffers.
At about the nine month mark I sent a bit of a spicy email to my CBSA contact, CC'ing everyone who'd been involved to that point. About three weeks later I got an email telling me to check the memos on their website for further instruction— that's not the interesting part— the email I got was a forward, and attached was a dozen, or more, emails bouncing my message all around to various public servants. They all seemed terrified to go on the record to tell me that the item in question was in fact USMCA duty free. It was bizarre. It's not complex. It is written in very plain English. But these staff were so... I don't know? Broken? Beaten down? Disempowered? That they were not able to send me a simple message confirming the working of the USMCA.
The federal public service needs some real reform, not the least of which, they need to be empowered to act in the interest of Canadians, and spend less time desperately trying to cover their ass.
It sounds like a total failure of incentives - it seems public sector workers get in too much trouble for deviating from procedure or for anything going even slightly wrong, and in not nearly enough trouble for failing to produce results.
Unless you are connected to Cabinet and then you can break every rule in existence, make hundreds of millions of dollars disappear without explanation, and the government will illegally defy every disclosure order then maybe call an election to protect you. But otherwise use the wrong wording in an email and there will be hell to pay!
It cannot be understated just how chilling an effect the Modernization of the Official Languages Act is having and will have on the public service's effectiveness.
For the uninitiated, the feds assess language skills for reading, writing and oral comprehension on an A-B-C-E scale, where A is a basic understanding and E is fluency. The standard for supervisors used to be BBB, which is essentially "functional." As of June the standard is now CBC, which in practice is a lot closer to "fluent" than it is to "functional." This is especially true for oral comprehension, which for anglophones is generally the toughest part. Even if an individual supervises one person, they now must have CBC. Existing supervisors are grandfathered but even lateral moves are now subject to this requirement, not just promotions.
Ministries all over government now have a far smaller and shallower pool from which to select leaders and supervisors, and language profile is driving those selections, regardless of whether or not the organization directly serves Canadians. In some cases, whole initiatives may or may not go ahead depending on whether CBC-qualified candidates can be identified. Skills, knowledge and abilities that address a position's mandatory selection criteria are almost secondary considerations: none mean anything if the individual isn't bilingual. There's an option to hire someone without the language standard if they can achieve it within two years, but that's a lot of risk for a candidate to take on, particularly if they're moving from one PS job to another and their old job is filled in behind them: if they lose their new gig because they can't achieve CBC, and their old job is gone, they're screwed.
All that to say, if you think the government had a hard time delivering up until now, wait for it. Now that MOLA is in force, there will be even fewer competent leaders to take the feds through Canada's challenges than ever before.
‘Now that MOLA is in force, there will be even fewer competent leaders to take the feds through Canada's challenges than ever before.’
Especially outside Central Canada, where competent bilingual candidates are less likely to be found. Service delivery in French, in particular, will be poorly provided in The West. I say this as a bilingual (EEC) former federal civil servant who observed it first hand for many years. Too bad.
Shhhhhhh…..don’t tell the Reddit CanadaPublicServants thread about this article because many of them think that Canadians don’t understand how the public service works when in fact, Canadians do understand how the public service works and are frustrated by it
That's one I'm happy I ended my Reddit-using career without running into. There are enough howling crazies on the rest of the Canada subreddits.
Reddit is great to see what people are saying about a product or company; the rest? Not worth it tbh.
Interesting that a confessed former public servant can describe the public service so inaccurately. Public servants serve the government of the day. They do this loyally - regardless of political stripes. The government of the day serves Canadians, but the public service is beholden to the government, and their dominant priority is not to serve Canadians. It is a nice idea, but it is inaccurate.
Perhaps it is because most of my time in the public service was spent under the Harper and Trudeau governments, and not under the Chretien/Martin governments like the author. Perhaps things have changed. While "Fearless advice, Loyal implementation" may be a motto, the Harper and Trudeau government made it clear that they had no time for advice that countered their view. They only wanted loyal implementation of their own policies. Both administrations ensured senior officials were willing to implement their policies and this has a trickle down effect to the rest of the public service. This is the reason so many of those governments legislative initiatives have been challenged, often successfully, in court.
Therefore, it is not the unions (who have very limited influence) or the public service acting as a special interest group. The only interest that the public service has, as a collective, is implementing what the government, the public service's bosses, tells them to. It is also this misconception that public servants are there to serve Canadians that lead to these erroneous conclusions.
Having spent a career in the "Public Service" it has been my experience that many, many PS staff emphatically believe that they are "public servants". This becomes problematic when senior staff believe, and propogate, that erroneous view. The government of the day provides the "what" and the reporting PS provides the "how" . The Public Service reports to and serves the government of the day, not the public in general.
Well, Phil, I absolutely detest your assertion. Having offered my (incredibly dubious) opinion .....
Assuming that your assertion is accurate - and I have no reason to doubt you - that means that the phrase "Public Service of Canada" should be retitled to "Publicly Paid Servants of and Sycophants to the Politicians in Charge."
My point is that from your assertion does not in any way deal with actual provision of services to the public.
....perhaps we would at least agree on the point that bigger isn't better regarding government and the actual provision of services.
Phil, we can definitely agree on that.
From my perspective a lot of the problem is that the governments over the last ten years, particularly, but also previously have tried to do absolutely everything. Whenever someone saw something that "wasn't fair" or "wasn't right" or wasn't "whatever" the government developed a policy and pronounced their wisdom in the particular area. The governments over the last ten years just loved announcing stuff but didn't really worry about making sure that the stuff got done. After all, that was the responsibility of the PS, no? Or at least that was the political attitude.
The PS must respond to the government of the day but it is supposed to SERVE to public, hence the name, Public Service. Obviously, they haven't been serving very well at all. And, bear in mind that my comment covers ALL levels of governments.
As above, I believe that the governments have been trying to do absolutely everything. It matter(s)(ed) not whether the "thing" was the formal responsibility of a particular level of government. The three levels of government all (sorta) took care of their own responsibilities but also intruded on the other two levels. The result is that all three levels of government had/have far, far too many staff covering stuff that is manifestly not their responsibility based on what the Constitution Act says. The follow up to that creeping activity is that the governments are all spending far, far too much in contradictory ways, etc. with spending ten miles wide and one centimeter deep.
So, the responsibility for the mess starts with the politicians or, more accurately, with the public who want bread and circuses but Carney et al simply refuse to say, "Yup, circuses are important but they are Doug Ford's/Danielle Smith's responsibility. Go see him/her. If they don't give you a circus, vote them out." Instead, Carney et al say, "Oh, that bad Ford/Smith, he/she won't give you circuses so we will."
But the PS just isn't delivering the circuses that the political masters have tasked them with providing.
A primary basis for this article’s thesis is that the public sector union is advocating for its members to receive a workplace benefit that many Canadians don’t have.
That sounds like an argument in favour of unions, not against the public service.
Or it's an argument against both unions and the public service. It kind of depends on your interpretation of the value of the workplace benefits in question. Ideally benefits actually improve productivity in the long run, but I think it's clear that's not where things are at with the PS unions.
I am not sure whether it is mainly a union issue or more of a DM and public service culture issue, given that policy ranks higher in the pecking order than program and service delivery. I worked at Service Canada for a time when the underlying ethos, as it were, was to flip the current approach to one where service (citizen-centred service in our jargon) would lead policy. Too radical along with some real management and culture change issues.
Wake me up when "Good Service Delivery" becomes a top election issue.
For me, I think federal public servants numbers number somewhere around 350,000. If we were talking auto manufacturing then Toyota would be up there around 375,000. (If only we manufactured Toyotas!) That Canada has a terribly messed up service delivery model which is to support the government rather than citizens is common knowledge. They are a formidable opposition to anything that will impact the status quo, I think.
Indeed, successive governments have failed to address the serious problems that afflict the Federal Public Service.
Canadians at large generally have little real understanding of what the problems are.
However, the political parties responsible for leading the government during the past two decades have not hesitated to construe certain narratives about public servants’ failings. In part to underplay their part in all this.
Which is, of course, considered fair dinkum in our crazy quilt modern world.
In my view, this author has not adequately addressed is the culpability of the politicians. The Harper government’s political staffers in particular were notorious for the contempt they showed to public servants.
Both the Conservatives and the Liberals have also been inclined to bully public servants behind closed doors.
And then, of course, we have the senior public servants themselves. It is absolutely the case that they have often been able to avoid accountability for mistakes made, and are more inclined these days to fall back on “yes sir, no sir, three-bags-full sir approaches to their political masters.
Are public-sector union leaders free from sin? Clearly not.
Do too many public servants fail in their duties to Canadians? As was suggested by the author, the answer is clearly yes. .
But to heap upon them the lion’s share of responsibility for our current pickle is not credible.
"... But to heap upon them the lion’s share of responsibility for our current pickle is not credible."
Well ....... perhaps.
On the other hand the "Public Service of Canada" [quotation marks to indicate both the proper descriptive and the fallacy of that descriptive in that it doesn't seem to involve service to the public] absolutely CANNOT avoid being complicit in the failings of government.
Allow me to put it differently. The PS might argue that the failings arise out of government policy but if [note the qualifier - I am somewhat, somewhat - unconvinced of that argument] that is so, then the implementation of that policy is supposed to be the responsibility of the PS. I can accept that incredibly inept policy goals are political but design and implementation are the responsibility of the PS. If the PS is unable to carry out the goals set forth why the hell do we employ them? Why the hell do we need an extra 100,000 of them over the last decade to provide even poorer public service than they did at the beginning of that time frame and far, far greater cost?
My comment was not meant to be a defence of the Trudeau policies in toto. That said, I would note that under the Harper government, public service capacity was widely thought to have been compromised by ideological (and poorly implemented) staff reductions.
Ultimately, the poor state of the public service isn't about numbers, but about choices (which successive generations of politicians have been responsible for).
WRT work-from-home, clearly the strategy must be made more effective, as there seems to be insufficient attention paid to ensuring productivity. Not that all who work-from-home are shirking. But there has been much reporting, albeit not always corroborated, suggesting that senior managers (and the Unions) should be able to do a better job of ensuring productivity and good value-for-money (for the public writ larger).
I never thought that you were defending the Face Painter's policies. Further, I accept fully that there was animus between the Harper folk and the PS; simply put (at least as I recall matters), the Harpers felt that the PS had bought into the LPC of Canada ideology and were not really interested in offering quality service to the Harper government. I have no idea whether there was or was not any merit to that idea. What I do know is that I fully believe that during the last decade the PS has been a fellow traveler with the LPC policies. You can take my opinion or you can dispute it, but that is fully what I believe.
As to numbers. I absolutely believe that the poor state of the PS ABSOLUTELY IS about the numbers insofar as the geometric increase in the PS is reflective of the ideology of PSAC which believes in increased size of the PS above all. Or so it seems.
As to work from home. I am a retired accountant; prior to my retirement I had my business develop the ability to work remotely and I used to use that ability when I was out of the city or out of the country. I worked extensively with businesses in other countries that used that ability. I am absolutely aware that the major accounting firms have that same ability that allows staff to work from client premises using remote login. But, but, but. I never allowed my staff to work from home simply as a convenience, etc.
Simply put, I found that the in person cross fertilization of interpersonal face to face communication was an absolute essential part of teaching and leading staff. Call me foolish, call me old fashioned but I simply don't believe that remote working as a regular feature is as effective as face to face collaboration. Dismiss my bias (and yes, it is a bias) if you wish but that is what I believe.
I personally dislike WFH, but I know others who do very well under the arrangements established by their respective agencies.
WRT ideological biases (real or perceived), I have met many public servants over the past three-and-a-half decades. It was not my impression that every one of them had a particular bias in favour of the Liberal Party. At least some of them maintained a membership in the Conservative Party of Canada or the New Democratic Party.
On the issue of numbers, we can likely agree to disagree. I certainly do believe, however, that a review of federal government programs (currently underway) MUST result in a reordering of services and the likely elimination of some among them.
It won't be easy... as you and others have alluded, "vested interests" are a tough nut to crack.
But it is essential.