Meet Trudeau’s go-to guy from Queen’s Park
Matthew Mendelsohn is the latest of the McGuinty-Wynne advisers to sign on
Matthew Mendelsohn, a brainy think-tank founder who is Canada’s new chief deliveryman, faces the daunting job of making the federal Liberals’ election promises come true.
Mendelsohn joined the Privy Council Office — the bureaucratic nerve centre — Monday as the first deputy secretary responsible for “results and delivery.” His task: Ensure the Liberals’ priorities are watched, tracked and delivered by the next election in 2019.
He is the latest of the Dalton McGuinty-Kathleen Wynne brain trust to head to Ottawa and join the Trudeau government.
Mendelsohn was deputy minister of several provincial portfolios where he worked with Queen’s Park veterans Katie Telford, now Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff, and Gerald Butts, his principal secretary. Mendelsohn’s wife, Kirsten Mercer, was Wynne’s justice policy adviser and is now chief of staff for Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould.
His new job will be modelled — as in Ontario — on the approach pioneered by Michael Barber, whose books on the science of “delivery” have become must-reads for mid-level and senior bureaucrats who will be under the gun to meet the targets and timelines of Mendelsohn’s new secretariat.
Barber became the most powerful public servant in Britain more than a decade ago as head of thenprime minister Tony Blair’s “delivery unit.” He drove results with an arsenal of targets and goals to keep track of how departments were doing in areas of Blair’s interest. His unit monitored wait times in hospitals, literacy and test scores in schools; if departments ran into problems, Barber’s team found out why. Trudeau’s ministers will hear from him at their cabinet retreat in New Brunswick, which starts this weekend.
Mendelsohn’s job in Ottawa is meant to mirror Barber’s approach.
While he declined to be interviewed, Mendelsohn, an academic and self-described wonk, has a long history of working with governments.
He took a leave from his job as director at the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation, a public policy think-tank, to help write portions of the federal Liberal election platform. He also worked with Trudeau’s transition team to help craft Trudeau’s mandate letters for ministers — fittingly penning the passages about how ministers will be expected to track and report on government priorities.
With such close political involvement, some have questioned whether he should have been appointed to a senior position in Canada’s non-partisan public service.
But former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page, often a harsh critic of public service leadership, praised both the creation of the new secretariat and Mendelsohn’s appointment, saying the bureaucracy could use more like him.
Page, who worked with Mendelsohn at the Privy Council Office during the 1995 Quebec Referendum, called him an “experienced and competent public servant, researcher and thought leader.”
“He is energetic, smart, openminded and a good communicator. Matthew will not be afraid to change things that do not work,” said Page.
Mendelsohn grew up in Montreal and went to McGill University to study political science, where he was president of the debating club and won the Canadian National Debating Championships in 1987. (Coincidentally, chief Trudeau adviser Butts, with whom he would go on to work in the Ontario government, went to McGill a few years later and also won the national debating championship, twice.)
After finishing his doctorate at Université de Montréal, Mendelsohn landed a job as an assistant professor at Queen’s University. He later took a leave for several years, working as a senior adviser at PCO in intergovernmental affairs.
Back at Queen’s, he was an associate professor until senior provincial bureaucrat Tony Dean recruited him in 2004 to become Ontario’s deputy minister for the Democratic Renewal Secretariat. He also became deputy minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and an associate secretary of cabinet in the Dalton McGuinty government.
In 2009, Mendelsohn became the founding director of the Mowat Centre at University of Toronto’s School of Public Policy & Governance, where his research included government transformation and better outcomes for public services.
Mendelsohn’s first big challenge will be to get buy-in from ministers, cabinet committee chairs, deputy ministers and departments on creating a “delivery culture” in government.
The Liberals made delivering on their key promises a priority. But would they adopt the tough, top-down Blair model that Barber espouses, or develop a hybrid that would work with Trudeau’s promise to loosen the reins and return to cabinet government where ministers are given the power to manage their departments and files again?
Some senior bureaucrats worried a PMO-based “delivery unit” wasn’t going to fly after a decade under the Conservatives’ tight leash.
Yet Trudeau’s top aides, Butts and Telford, were key players in the Liberal government that adapted the high-centralized Barber model with “results tables” for education and health.
Dean, who was cabinet secretary and Ontario’s top bureaucrat in the Liberal government, said all signs are that Barber’s model will indeed be modified for Trudeau’s promise to restore cabinet government, but the approach is the same.
The way to improve public services is to build powerful partnerships between ministers and a key bureaucrat — with the support of the prime minister.
“If you are serious about delivery you need the prime minister involved in monitoring and need a high-level single point of public service accountability that just focuses on results. That’s what we have in this model,” Dean said of Mendelsohn’s appointment.
Still, the move raises questions about how PCO will work with Treasury Board Secretariat, the central agency whose own mandate is to improve performance, drive results and hold departments to account.
A description of the cabinet committee on agenda and results, chaired by Trudeau, says it “sets the government’s forward agenda and tracks progress on priorities.” Mendelsohn will be the committee’s public service point man, which Dean calls a “powerful job with weighty responsibilities.”
Another step was Trudeau’s mandate letters to ministers — which Mendelsohn helped to write — telling ministers the government wants “real” results and they are expected to track and regularly report on government priorities.
“The original U.K. model was command-and-control, and if ministers and departments got into trouble, Barber’s unit would almost put them into receivership but this won’t fit well with a return to cabinet government. This is a more broadly politically driven approach with a committee of ministers,” said Dean.
One of the big issues for cabinet at its retreat this weekend is to select the top priorities the government wants to focus on, then discuss how to adapt Barber’s approach to the Canadian system.
The Trudeau government is intent on breaking the pattern of governments making big promises but falling short on delivering them once they are turned over to the public service to implement, said Sunil Johal, policy director at the Mowat Centre.
“Knowing you have face-to-face meetings with the prime minister on key initiatives can really motivate the mind and deputy ministers to make sure they have good news and progress on the file,” Johal said.