I recently read with interest the Values and Ethics Report to the Clerk of the Privy Council submitted by the Deputy Ministers’ Task Team. (Those who share my mildly quixotic passion for the ethics of public administration can find the report here.) Documents of this sort are composed subject to a variety of political constraints (in the keeping-everyone-happy sense), which I am not subject to, and so I thought I might share a few thoughts about the strengths of this report, but mainly about its limitations. As far as the impetus for the exercise is concerned, I don’t have any inside knowledge, but I take this article to provide a reasonable sense of the political context. Basically, the public service is concerned about increased opportunities for violations of neutrality (i.e. partisan behaviour) by its members on social media, and embarrassed by the spectacle of overt conflict between civil servants being aired in parliamentary committee (in the ArriveCAN app scandal). There has also been a lot of employee turn-over since 1995, when the last major exercise of this type was undertaken (generating the Tait Report).
Underlying this, it seems to me, are some broader issues. The public service is currently being squeezed between two opposing forces. First, it is dealing with an influx of young, woke employees, who expect to be able to “bring their whole self to work,” and so are demanding changes to the public service aimed at realizing their preferred conception of social justice. Second, there is the expectation of a Conservative government being elected next year, which is guaranteed to put a great deal of stress on the institution of political neutrality. If the public service looks and talks like an extension of the Liberal party, the Conservatives are going to want to clean house. (It is good to see that people are already worried about this, because it has the makings of a catastrophe.)
Given this context, I would have been happier with the report if it had put more emphasis on political neutrality as a structuring condition on the ethics of public administration. For the most part, public servants are in the happy circumstance of occupying an institutional role in which their private morality coincides with their official duties. You want to promote the common good? Great, so does the government. You want to see that justice is served? Great, so does the government. Neutrality is tricky because it constitutes the most important exception to this alignment. Neutrality requires that public servants refrain from pursuing their preferred conception of the common good, or of social justice, out of deference to the power of elected officials to define those ideals. It is therefore the most unnatural of the virtues demanded of the civil servant. Refraining from corruption and graft requires placing the moral demands of one’s professional role above one’s self-interest. Refraining from partisan political action requires placing the moral demands of one’s role over one’s private moral convictions. The latter is a much more difficult distinction to draw, which is why individuals require more institutional support in defining these obligations and carrying them out.
Of course, I approach these issues as a political philosopher, so I tend to think about them in a top-down way, in terms of the abstract values that structure the institutional role and how they interact with circumstances that may arise. The process that led to the production of this report was somewhat opposite, in that it seems to have consisted primarily in a listening exercise, in which the deputy ministers went around and asked civil servants at various levels of seniority what they thought about professional ethics. This turned up several interesting observations (e.g. such as the challenge posed by remote work to the reproduction of professional culture). At the same time, it resulted in a great deal of emphasis being put on the “bring your whole self to work” demands. Furthermore, of the various complaints that are quoted in the report, I could not find a single one that had a right-wing political valence; they are all either neutral or stereotypically woke. So it’s pretty obvious where the challenge to neutrality is coming from. (The status of these quotations is a bit ambiguous. While the report does not officially endorse the positions taken, the DMs obviously found the comments important enough to reproduce them.)
While the actual recommendations made in the report are significantly more moderate than the demands from the workforce that are reported, I think they nevertheless underplay the extent to which the public service has no choice but to swim against the tide of contemporary political fashion. Many corporations in the private sector have been keen to indulge, among their younger workers, what is often described as the expectation that “the organization should share your values.” For example, corporations have adopted “mission statements” suggesting that the goal of the firm is to promote various social justice causes. Many universities succumbed to the same temptation, indulging their employees by taking official positions on various hot-button political issues. As far as corporations were concerned, this was all cheap talk, and so when the inevitable blowback occurred, they stood convicted of no more than hypocrisy. With universities, on the other hand, the blowback generated a great deal of internal conflict (as well as reputational damage), leading to a new-found appreciation for the virtues of political neutrality.
With the civil service, on the other hand, political neutrality is more than just a counsel of prudence, it is (as Lorne Sossin has argued) a constitutional convention. It is important to remember that in our political system, ministers are accountable for everything that happens in their department. This means that even relatively low-level officials can find themselves in a position to destroy the career of very high-level elected officials. In order for the system to work, ministers must be therefore be able to invest an extraordinary amount of trust in those public servants. This requires at very least that public servants scrupulously abstain from any action that can be construed as partisan. In the present political context, this must include refraining from taking a position on any “culture war” issues. This abstention is not only in the interest of the public service as a whole, it is in the interest of all Canadians (by virtue of the salutary effects it has on the quality of government). As a result, indulging the political commitments of one’s (predominantly left-of-centre) employees, in the way that some private organizations have been doing, is completely out of the question. This needs to be more clearly communicated to public employees: if you want to be political staff, go ahead, but if you choose to be a civil servant, you leave your politics at the door.
That having been said, while the report exhibits moderation overall, I felt that at several points it goes too far in indulging demands that should have been ruled out on grounds of neutrality. Most obviously, one cannot simply endorse DEI (or EDI) as an organizational objective and expect that to fly below the political radar. It is essential rather to separate out the uncontroversial from the controversial elements of these doctrines. For example, the report makes repeated reference to “equity-deserving communities” (e.g. in its third recommendation). Many people would be puzzled by this locution. After all, don’t all communities deserve to be treated equitably? There is obviously a controversial (unexplained) conception of “equity” at work here. Even if one happens to agree with this conception, one might still refrain from officially endorsing it, in recognition of the fact that it is politically controversial.
The government of Canada already has a robust (expressed) commitment to fairness and non-discrimination in all of its operations (articulated clearly in the current code of ethics), which is non-partisan and accepted by all. DEI goes much further than this, adopting an explicitly consequentialist, outcome-focused way of thinking about justice. For example, Ibram X. Kendi’s conception of anti-racism supports racial discrimination in the treatment of individuals as a means to achieving racial equality in the outcome for groups. Even among those who agree with this program, it shouldn’t take a Herculean feat of metacognition to recognize that it is hugely controversial.
There are, of course, elements in the Liberal party that clearly support the current American conception of anti-racism that is being promulgated through DEI initiatives. They have been fairly active in trying to impose it on universities through various federal research funding programs (e.g. here). But it is clearly a partisan political position (and will undoubtedly be reversed by any future Conservative government). So while it is perfectly appropriate for employees of the federal government currently to be implementing these programs, it is not appropriate for the public service as a whole to incorporate such commitments into its basic code of ethics. The public service should be governed by a deontology, which constrains its procedures and actions, it should not be focused on specific outcomes. One might reasonably criticize the Tait Report for not having paid enough attention to these concerns, but the appropriate response is to strengthen the commitment to non-discrimination, not to embrace a controversial form of telic egalitarianism (and especially not in a country with rapidly shifting demographics).
I had a similar concern about the indulgence shown to safetyism in the report. While the previous ethics code articulates a commitment to a “safe and healthy” work environment, the new recommendations go beyond this in imposing an obligation to promote both physical and psychological safety in the work environment (at one point even urging the creation of “psychologically safe spaces.”) This strikes me as incautious. Illiberal progressives have been quite aggressive in using safety complaints to launder political demands into workplace-relations issues (e.g. New York Times employees objecting to the publication of an op-ed written by a Republican Senator on the grounds that it jeopardized the “safety” of Black employees). Reframing political demands as safety concerns has been a major tactic employed by those who are trying to circumvent traditional constraints on the imposition of their political views on others. Since the prime imperative of the civil service should be to discourage politics in the workplace, these concessions to safetyism seem to me like inviting a fox into the henhouse.
Finally, I can’t resist making one little point about the various nods made to “reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples” in the report. Too many people use “Indigenous knowledge” or “Indigenous ways of being” as a sort of Rorschach blot, onto which they project their preferred political views (a lot of it sounding suspiciously like warmed-over 1960s countercultural ideology). So, for example, the report comes across as sympathetic to the view that Indigenous peoples are uncomfortable with hierarchy. At the same time, the only official recommendation that makes reference to Indigenous perspectives seeks to honour the “wisdom of elders,” which is obviously a rather hierarchical notion — certainly a lot of Indigenous elders interpret it as giving them hierarchical power.
Of course, when it comes to the wisdom of elders, it’s not obvious that Indigenous people are all on the same page. I once heard Chief Clarence Louie go on a hilarious rant about how he never calls them “elders,” but prefers to refer to them as “seniors,” to discourage people from taking them too seriously. (In his book he has a somewhat more nuanced view, but nevertheless, one can see that there is an element of picking-and-choosing going on.) More importantly though, I wonder whether the principle is supposed to be one of respect for elders, or just respect for Indigenous elders. If we are serious about incorporating Indigenous ways of being into our mode of governance, then it seems to me that we should be respecting all of our elders, which in the case of the civil service would probably not be such a bad idea. It would actually be great if all the young recruits to the civil service starting listening more carefully to what the old mandarins have to say. They could start by reading the Tait Report.
Last but not least, a point about omissions. From a top-level perspective, the major “ethics” problem confronting the civil service is the increased pluralization of its accountability relations, coming from two different directions: parliament and the judiciary. It is notable that because this report focuses so much on HR issues it winds up having nothing to say about the ArriveCAN debacle. Without getting into the details, it seems to me that the difficult ethical issue arising from this file involves determining the obligations of civil servants when they are being directly held accountable by parliamentary committees. The interesting question is whether the prohibition on “naming and blaming” that prevails under ministerial accountability should also apply when dealing directly with parliament. That’s a tough one. The other major issue, which is completely off the radar in this report, is the way that judicial interpretation of administrative law is creating an entirely new pole of accountability for the civil service (to see the problem that can arise, take a look at the U.K. JOYS handbook). This is highly relevant to civil service ethics in multiple dimensions, but gets passed over completely. I imagine that somewhere someone is thinking about this, but it would be nice to see it incorporated into the discussion of “ethics and values” (e.g. what does the public service think about the Supreme Court’s Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Vavilov decision, which seems likely to reduce judicial deference?) Administrative law runs in a track that has traditionally paralleled, but is increasingly crossing over into, professional civil service ethics. Americans are currently discovering the consequences of being asleep at the switch on this issue; we would be wise to avoid their fate.