By Philippe Lagassé and Patrick Lennox

July 28, 2025

Prime Minister Mark Carney has an ambitious policy agenda, and for good reason. Carney won the election by stressing that Canada’s relationship with the United States has been fundamentally transformed by President Trump’s return to White House.

That ambitious policy agenda follows from a simple premise: we are in a new world, one where Canada will need to be far more self-sufficient and less dependent on our closest ally.

Rhetoric on the campaign trail is one thing. Implementing big promises is altogether another. Pulling it off will require a unity of purpose and tolerance for risk at odds with the current culture of the federal public service.

The public service will need to take on a new ethos inspired by the reality that Canada’s sovereignty and self-sufficiency depend on it. Instilling in the bureaucracy a sense of accountability, renewed focus, and more nimble response time will be priorities for the new Clerk of the Privy Council, Michael Sabia, as he acknowledged in his July 7th open letter to the public service.

Canada has an excellent bureaucracy, despite all the derision it endures. The reality is that Canadian public servants are, on the whole, smart, talented, dedicated people who give effect to the will of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Like any complex organization, however, the federal public service has developed tendencies that undermine its own reason for being.

Put simply, too much of the bureaucracy exists for the sake of the bureaucracy. Too often, process becomes the end rather than a means; announcements have become a stand-in for action.

Exacerbating these problems are the bureaucracy’s incentive structures and silos. Although departments work toward common objectives set by the Prime Minister and Cabinet, they are still motivated by their particular concerns and agendas. Government departments move in roughly the same direction, but not always cohesively.

We see examples of these tensions in the security and intelligence community. Despite there being a National Security and Intelligence Advisor to the Prime Minister in the Privy Council Office, the security and intelligence community remains under-coordinated and, indeed, parochial.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are challenged to deconflict and assign leads in the evolving national security landscape, which routinely exposes new overlaps in their mandates and new intelligence-to-evidence challenges.

Similarly, the Canadian Border Services Agency and the RCMP, who share the border enforcement mandate, have long struggled to effectively share intelligence and coordinate enforcement action in the fight against high-level human, drug, and weapons trafficking.

With resources in short supply and new threat vectors materializing and converging rapidly, the capabilities and powers of this community must be more effectively combined towards threat disruption, not sequestered in order to preserve criminal prosecution possibilities.

The relationship between the government and the armed forces is another example. Prime Minister Carney has outlined a series of initiatives aimed at increasing the military’s adoption of new technologies and encouraging the growth of a Canadian defence industry around novel capabilities and partners outside the United States. Yet, the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces will need to make important changes to their capability planning and procurement processes if they are to make these pivots.

The public service will need to take on a new ethos inspired by the reality that Canada’s sovereignty and self-sufficiency depend on it.

The DND and the CAF are accustomed to working with large prime contractors and American capabilities; opening the military aperture to smaller, innovative firms in Canada will require a serious culture change. There is a risk that the defence community remains wedded to priorities and wishlists that don’t align with the government’s wider objectives, hampering Canada’s ability to spend more than 2% of gross domestic product on the armed forces in future years.

As the war in Ukraine has shown, and the Carney government has recognized, a larger portion of the defence capital budget needs to be spent on rapidly evolving technologies and consumables, ideally from Canadian firms, many of which are still small and medium enterprises.

In calmer, gentler times, process and risk aversion can reign without serious consequence. That is no longer the case.  We have entered an age of significant change, one that requires the federal public service to quickly adapt to meet generational challenges. Some of this will take courage, some of it will take entirely new ways of thinking about bureaucratic outcomes; all of it will have to happen at a dramatically enhanced pace.

In the same way that there is now an imperative to create “one Canadian economy” by obliterating boundaries, the federal public service must become a more coherent, mission command-driven entity, united by a clearly articulated and collectively understood conception of the national interest.

By issuing one mandate letter for the entire cabinet with seven shared priorities as opposed to individual mandate letters with laundry lists of deliverables for each minister, Prime Minister Carney has telegraphed that the executive must band together under an overarching set of national goals, and be quite literally on the same page.

The implementation of that vision should be coupled with performance metrics that incentivize public service leaders to build stronger connective tissue between and across departments and agencies, lift barriers to effective cooperation and timely lawful information sharing, and identify outcomes that the entire public service can achieve together.

Tasking the entirety of the security and intelligence community, for example, with eradicating transnational organized crime in Canada would compel novel all-source approaches to disrupting and dismantling organized crime’s increasing influence on Canadian political, economic, and social integrity.

In some cases, it may be necessary to create entirely new departments and agencies designed to carry out more tailored and priority functions, with a view to streamlining interdepartmental process.

The Liberals’ promised defence procurement agency, for instance, should have a clear objective: to shorten Canada’s excruciating military procurement timelines. A dedicated financial crime agency could also be created to increase efficiency in bringing white collar criminals to swift justice as a means of reversing Canada’s lagging reputation as soft on money laundering.

It is likely that both types of bureaucratic reform will be required in order to realize Prime Minister Carney’s ambitious agenda. Amid structural change, a new bureaucratic ethos will also have to take hold; where outcomes take precedent over process; and professional courage courses through the body bureaucratic.

Philippe Lagassé is an associate professor at Carleton University.  Patrick Lennox is a consultant and former national security official.