Ruth Hubbard - Böcker

Public administration in Canada needs to change. A handful of scholars across Canada have been sounding the alarm for years but to no avail. Talented young bureaucrats have been joining the public service with fresh ideas capable of creating real change, but the black hole consumes all. In The Black Hole of Public Administration, experienced public servant Ruth Hubbard and public administration iconoclast Gilles Paquet sound a wake-up call to the federal public service. They lament the lack of "serious play" going on in Canada's public administration today and map some possible escape plans. They look to a more participatory governance model - "open source" governing or "small g" governance - as a way to liberate our public service from antiquated styles and systems of governing. In their recognizably rebellious style, Hubbard and Paquet demand that public administration scholars and senior level bureaucrats pull their heads out of the sand and confront the problems of the current system and develop a new system that can address the needs of Canada today.

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 culture has rendered any action on the managerial front ineffective. 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 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 modernization 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.