Public service has become top-heavy and politicized, former civil servant says

A longtime, former civil servant in Saskatchewan has released a report critical of how much senior management has grown in the province.

Rick August, who was in the public service for 34 years, compared salaries of senior managers in the Saskatchewan civil service in 2006-07 and 2015-16.

In 2006-07, the NDP was still in power, and the data available from that year marks the most recent time there was a non-Sask. Party government.

“The results are for me a little bit shocking,” he said. “While there are attempts being made to reduce the size of the public-sector workforce, the senior management component is going up.”

But the government disputes the methodology employed by August, calling it an “apples to oranges comparison.”

In a statement, the premier’s office said, “Mr. August has made many bold assumptions, but there are errors in his methodology. For example, he assumes that anyone earning over $100,000 is a senior manager, but there are many examples of unionized employees in non-management positions at that pay range. It could include staff working overtime and even those who have left the government with severance.”

“His estimates may be double the reality — in the Ministry of Agriculture, for example, his study counts 30 senior managers (anyone at an executive director, assistant deputy minister or deputy minister level), when there are actually 14.”

August found the public service workforce numbered 11,940 in 2006-07 and 11,031 in 2015-16. That is an overall decline of 7.6 per cent and as the report points out, “this falls well short of the government’s workforce reduction target, announced in 2012, of 15 per cent.”

The province said in response that the government met its target in 2013-14 and has since “held the line.”

“There is always flux in the number of public servants as government responds to pressures in areas such as Health and Education,” the statement said.

The report, titled “Politicization of the Saskatchewan Public Service: Measuring the Cost,” goes on to find that the overall workforce declined at the same time the number of senior managers increased.

In 2006-07 there were 708 senior managers. By 2015-16, there were 1,084 senior positions, a 53-per-cent increase the report says.

He suggests — based largely on anecdotal evidence — this is because there has been an increased appetite for political appointments to senior positions in the supposedly non-partisan civil service.

“What we’ve got, in my opinion, now is a situation where the public service is being transferred from a service to the public to a service to the party in power, and there are a lot of implications for that,” he said. “You lose out on expertise, and you lose out on objectivity and advice that is given.”

August is concerned there is a “big risk if this just becomes the norm” because successive governments will have an increasingly difficult time resisting the temptation to repeat the behaviour and appoint people based on their political affiliation.

The province maintains it has always been served well by the public service and that public employers follow legislation “to ensure fairness and transparency” in its hiring practices.

You lose out on expertise, and you lose out on objectivity and advice that is given.