Government’s structural flaws bedevil rollout

A BIG PART OF THE PROBLEM IS THE GOVERNANCE-BY-RULES ETHOS — SEAN SPEER

This week’s news that Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine supply is essentially drying up is bound to have major political ramifications. We’re now 33rd in the world for vaccinations per 100 people — just below countries such as Poland, Portugal and Cyprus — and are likely to fall further in the coming days. The Trudeau government will need to answer for the country’s poor performance. It’s quite possible that the politics of vaccines dominates the next federal election campaign.

Setting aside politics, though, the path out of our vaccination deficit is far from obvious. National Post columnist John Ivison recently wrote that we need a modern-day Lord beaverbrook, the Canadian expatriate credited for mobilizing and co-ordinating aircraft production for the british government during the Second World War, to give a jolt to our vaccine production and procurement. There’s no doubt that his administrative talents and intolerance for inertia would help right about now.

but we must also recognize that the pandemic has exposed structural issues that can’t be solved by one person. Our governments are more sclerotic than we previously understood. Canada has a state capacity problem.

The inability to procure a timely and reliable supply of the coronavirus vaccine isn’t even this week’s only evidence of our deficient state capacity. A Globe and Mail story reports that Ottawa’s plan to acquire 15 new warships is now more than double its projected costs ($26 billion to $60 billion and counting) and several years delayed. A quotation from the story — “this project hasn’t met a single one of its major milestones” — unintentionally, yet poignantly, captures the bureaucratic malaise that has come to bedevil modern Canadian policy and governance.

This isn’t a critique of Canadian public servants. I’ve worked in the Canadian government and regularly witnessed the competence and hard work of individual officials. but there seems to be systemic issues — including poor incentives, institutionalized risk aversion, red tape and so on — that undermine effective and expeditious collective action.

American lawyer and policy expert Philip K. Howard attributes these challenges to the growing labyrinth of government rules and the powerlessness and paralysis that can result. We’ve created a system that favours prescription over discretion, box-ticking compliance over human judgment and ultimately risk mitigation over collective reward. The net effect is to “pre-empt the active intelligence of people on the ground.”

It’s important to emphasize that this isn’t merely the result of big government. Other countries with similarly sized governments — or even bigger ones such as denmark, Finland and Israel — seem to be able to deliver more effective and expeditious public services than us.

These examples show a jurisdiction can theoretically provide for a high-tax, high-spending government and still deliver good governance. What one wants to avoid is the worst of all such worlds: a big, costly, slow and ineffective government. Canada’s vaccination deficit is a sign we’ve fallen into this latter category.

A major source of these challenges is state capacity. In its broadest sense, state capacity refers to the government’s ability to generate revenues, enforce laws and deliver public goods. A wide body of research shows that, although such governmental capacities may seem mundane, they’re closely linked to short- and long-term economic growth. As economist Tyler Cowen has put it: “Strong states remain necessary to maintain and extend capitalism and markets.”

There are various causes for Canada’s diminished state capacity. A big part of the problem is the governance-by-rules ethos that has come to be reflected in modern Canadian policy and governance. Another is Ottawa’s instinct to want to impose national standards on any given issue. The idea that the federal government can anticipate every occurrence in a decentralized network of child-care centres or long-term care homes belies the complexities of human interaction.

The simple lesson: we need to replace a system that tries to correct for human imperfection with one that accepts and accounts for it by empowering those closest to the problems that we’re trying to solve.

This, by the way, isn’t an anti-government screed. There’s a strong case, in fact, that government ought to play a greater role in the post-pandemic economy — including funding for science and technology and cultivating key industrial capacities, including biomedical production.

but such an industrial policy will only be successful if we have the state capacity to sustain it. It will require that Canadian governments reform themselves to enable more experimentation, greater risk-taking and ultimately to empower individuals to exercise their judgment and discretion. It must involve replacing the current culture of apprehension and smallness with one of dynamism and innovation.

There are risks to such an agenda. Humans are fallible, after all. Most rules, no matter how silly and impractical, were conceived to minimize potential harms and protect against political impropriety. Many, for instance, were a direct result of the Liberal sponsorship scandal in the 1990s.

yet, if we’ve learned anything over the past several months, it’s that we cannot anticipate every issue or development. The best that we can do is to empower people. That’s the path to rebuilding

OUR GOVERNMENTS ARE MORE SCLEROTIC THAN WE PREVIOUSLY UNDERSTOOD.