A New Blueprint for Government: Reshaping Power, the PMO and the Public Service

By Kevin Lynch and Jim Mitchell

University of Regina Press, November 2025/218 pages

Reviewed by Colin Robertson

December 14, 2025

In 2025, ‘Business as usual’ is not a winning strategy for any country. Such is the explicit warning from Kevin Lynch and Jim Mitchell in their book A New Blueprint for Government.

Drawing on decades of public service experience, former clerk of the Privy Council Lynch and senior policy adviser Mitchell offer not a partisan polemic but a systems audit of the Canadian state. Their opening premise is stark: Canada’s public sector has lost its capacity to think, plan, and deliver in a world that is moving far faster than its institutions.

They describe a machinery of government that has become inward-looking, reactive, and structurally incapable of managing sustained change.

The book opens with an assessment of a political culture addicted to short-termism and moral performance.

Too often, governments conflate talk with policy and “rhetoric is not a substitute for substance,” the authors write. The result is a state that does too much badly rather than a few things well. Canada, they write, is falling behind in a fast-changing world.

The public service has expanded in size but contracted in purpose. The cabinet system has been hollowed out by centralization in the Prime Minister’s Office. Parliament performs more theatre than scrutiny. Fiscal discipline, once the pride of Canadian governance, “has been squandered by a doubling of the federal debt and a massive increase in the public service.”

Behind these trends lies a broader loss of seriousness. “Virtue signalling and moralistic foreign policy may make governments feel good,” they note, “but they don’t get bridges built, hospitals staffed, or productivity raised.” Their critique echoes the managerial realism of the late 1990s—a period when program review restored efficiency, fiscal credibility and institutional competence. Lynch and Mitchell write with the authority of that era’s technocrats, now confronting what they see as bureaucratic bloat and policy decay.

Colin Robertson’s Global Exchange interview with authors Kevin Lynch and Jim Mitchell

The authors marshal a sobering array of evidence. Canada’s per-capita GDP, they remind readers, fell in 2023–24. Productivity growth, the only sustainable driver of rising living standards, has stagnated, especially in the last decade. The productivity gap with the United States has widened to roughly $20,000 per person. In an increasingly competitive world, they warn, Canada risks becoming a high-cost, low-productivity economy living off its past reputation for competence.

For Lynch and Mitchell, the productivity crisis is not only an economic travesty but a moral test of governance. We cannot redistribute what we do not produce and a country that cannot produce efficiently will steadily lose the fiscal capacity to fund its social ambitions.

Federal debt has doubled in less than a decade, and yet service delivery—from passports to procurement—has deteriorated. Public-service compensation has outpaced that of the private sector, while performance has declined.

Much of New Blueprint for Government reads as an indictment of policy incoherence. The authors point to a proliferation of goals without priorities, and announcements without implementation. They describe departments more focused on ‘managing narratives’ than on solving problems, and central agencies consumed by risk aversion rather than innovation.

The result is a policy ecosystem defined by slogans and silos. Canadians, they write, deserve more than performative politics, they deserve government that can deliver.

Their treatment of the federal machinery is detailed and unsparing. The cabinet system has atrophied into a talking shop. The Treasury Board has lost its function as a guardian of spending discipline. The Privy Council Office, once the engine of policy coordination, now “manages messaging more than policy.”

The authors call for a return to cabinet government, where ministers are accountable for results and supported by policy-capable departments.

There are thoughtful chapters on immigration, energy, climate, and industrial strategy, rethinking the RCMP and invigorating our national defence and security. Their blueprint for economic reform is bult around five pillars:

1. Fiscal Credibility: Reinstate transparent fiscal rules and limit structural deficits.
2. Policy Coherence: Align economic, social, and environmental objectives through Cabinet coordination.
3. Institutional Renewal: Rebuild the public service’s analytical capacity and depoliticize central agencies.
4. Productivity and Innovation: Treat productivity as a national mission, backed by tax and regulatory reform.
5. Public Accountability: Create measurable standards for performance, service delivery, and citizen trust.

They propose a balanced industrial strategy rooted in six ‘policy guardrails’: competitiveness, fiscal credibility, strategic industrial policy, trade diversification, NATO commitments, and intergovernmental collaboration. Each guardrail, they argue, is a test of coherence—an attempt to align means with ends in a world of fractured supply chains and weaponized trade.

Their approach is managerial, not revolutionary, although in today’s context, managerialism itself feels radical. The authors’ emphasis on coherence and execution recalls a lost tradition of Canadian statecraft—part Pearsonian professionalism, part Chrétien-era discipline, part technocratic pragmatism.

This book should be on the holiday reading list of every public servant, including Prime Minister Mark Carney and his ministers, many of whom came of age in the message-driven world the authors critique.

The key takeaway from A New Blueprint for Government is clear: In an age of populism, protectionism, and policy fatigue government must once again learn to think long term, act collectively, and deliver competently.

Contributing Writer Colin Robertson, a former career diplomat, is a fellow and host of the Global Exchange podcast with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute in Ottawa.