By Andrew Kemle

August 5, 2026

The federal government can seem alien to those living outside Ottawa. According to public administration scholar Donald Savoie, around 41.1 per cent of federal public servants work and live in the National Capital Region (NCR). That number was only 25 per cent in 1979. This centralization of power can make it hard for people beyond the NCR to feel the federal government reflects them as Canadians.

In a post-internet employment context in which working remotely can mean anything from working from home down the street to collaborating with a colleague across the globe, the concept of federal government satellite offices has never made more sense.

In the United Kingdom, the new prime minister, Andy Burnham, has made the decentralization of executive power — including the opening of a “No. 10 North” office in Manchester — a policy priority. In Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney, who hails from Alberta, where alienation from Ottawa has fuelled an independence debate, a decentralized public service could enhance the argument for staying.

Spreading federal departments and their employees throughout the country would have a positive impact on Canadian unity by bringing federal public servants closer to the local contexts of Canada’s diverse population. It would also help ensure that local knowledge is better incorporated into the federal government’s decisions, making it less likely that different levels of government will fight one another over jurisdiction or policy questions.

A context-sensitive, dispersed federal government would help Canadians better recognize themselves and their needs in the actions of their national policymakers.

Centralization and Alienation

A centralized federal government doesn’t mean that Canada is a highly centralized country. On the contrary, Canada is among the most decentralized federal states in the world, meaning that provinces have significantly more power than sub-national governments in other countries. The trend toward decentralization has increased since the country’s founding, with the federal government holding less power over the provinces now than it did in 1867.

Critics of the power the federal government wields discount that a significant number of political decisions are made without any input from the Ottawa whatsoever. In fact, a great deal of frustration toward Ottawa is fundamentally misplaced. Stephen Harper struggled to build a pipeline despite coming from Alberta and being a longtime advocate for its largest industry.

This was due to the power that individual provinces wield over their own domains; the same constitutional powers that allowed Alberta to challenge the Impact Assessment Act a decade later. Ottawa is often more of a convenient scapegoat than a legitimate villain.

Ultimately, the reason so much focus is placed on the federal government is that it’s the most visible and scrutinized of the four levels. Regardless of the power granted to provincial or even municipal governments, most Canadians will associate public services and legislation with Ottawa.

As long as ministries, departments, independent agencies, and government workers are underrepresented beyond the NCR, it will seem as though government in Canada is made by and for Ontario and Quebec, to the exclusion of other provinces. This is what animates the “Laurentian Elite” stereotype of business and political leaders dominating the national conversation while regional (including Western) voices defend local interests.

Local Knowledge, Local Decisions

Besides creating the impression that the federal government disproportionately serves two provinces, this centralization of power in Ottawa also causes legitimate governance problems. All large organizations must contend with tacit knowledge, or information that’s difficult to communicate. It’s usually learned through doing, rather than through instruction sheets or formal rules, which requires decision makers to be embedded in local contexts to access, let alone understand, what this knowledge is. Centralization assumes that orders can substitute for on-the-ground thinking, so too much centralization inevitably leads to ill-informed decisions.

We ignore tacit knowledge at our peril, as in many cases it encompasses the foundational practices that help sustain institutions and organizations.

The more centralized our public service, the more likely public servants will be acting on top-down demands from Ottawa absent bottom-up knowledge from local communities. The more that happens, the more government decisions will poorly reflect the needs of citizens. The conflict resolution mechanisms of Confederation are increasingly activated as communities push back, whether it be via court challenges or legislation specifically designed to curtail federal involvement in local politics. This reinforces the image of Ottawa as an out-of-touch, distant force at odds with the interests of those outside the NCR.

Importantly, none of this implies that public servants are elitist or incapable of understanding people in Alberta. The problem is that they don’t work here, so the information they have access to is naturally incomplete.

Governing from the Town Square

We’ve already seen efforts by Prime Minister Carney to reduce tensions between Ottawa and the provinces, particularly in Alberta, especially now. This is not surprising, as Mr. Carney made much of his Albertan roots during the 2025 election, so much so that it was speculated he might try to run for a seat in the province before he chose the Ottawa-area riding of Nepean.

Mr. Carney has also underscored that cooperating with Alberta on major pipelines projects is a priority for the federal government, deferring to the province for tracking environmental impact in the 2025 Memorandum of Understanding he signed with Premier Danielle Smith and in listing the west coast pipeline as a national interest project. Western alienation was down to a five-year low in a January 2026 Pollara poll, especially noticeable in Alberta, where 51 per cent of respondents felt the federal government pays attention.

Moving more of the federal public service out of the NCR would complement these efforts. First, it would give the federal government a bigger footprint in different regions of Canada. Being the most visible level of government in the country, it would make all Canadians more aware of — and feel more closely connected to — the workings of the federal public service. Having more civil servants selected from, and living directly in, local communities would not only remove the perception that the federal government only cares about central Canada, it would give Canadians across the country a sense of ownership of the policies that impact their lives.

Second, it would incorporate tacit, community-based knowledge into federal decisions. This would improve decision-making and, more specifically to Canadian unity, reduce conflict among different levels of government. More harmonious provincial-federal relations would help present Canada as a unified political entity, something that is especially important as the country navigates on ongoing trade war with the United States.

Turning Back the Clock

In the case of the new Burnham government in the U.K., a Downing Street spokesperson quoted in the Guardian said of the decentralization shift that they are “taking power and decision-making out of SW1 [the Westminster post code] and putting it closer to people’s lives”.

Something similar to “No 10. North” would be difficult for Canada, given the assortment of major cities that could host a PMO outpost and the shortage of them that could do so without prompting a political debate. Instead, the Treasury Board Secretariat should start by looking to Canada’s past for ideas. If 75 per cent of federal workers lived outside the NCR in 1979, there should be reference materials still available for how to recruit and place public servants throughout Canada.

A more specific pathway would be for the Treasury Board to follow the recommendations of the External Advisory Committee on Cities and Communities, whose final report was released in 2006. The goal of this committee was to understand the role cities should play in governing the country and to provide guidance on federal-municipal relations. The committee recommended the federal government partner with municipal governments and civil society organizations to learn how to tailor national policies to local conditions.

Resurrecting this “place-based” approach would build the federal government’s capacity to incorporate tacit knowledge into its policy development and service delivery, while sending a strong signal to local communities about the value of their participation in Canada’s national conversation.

Andrew Kemle holds a master’s degree in political science from the University of Calgary and serves as a policy and external relations specialist for a student association and trade union.