Could Trump-style politicization of the public service happen here?
Not likely, based on how Canada’s public service is structured — but we could inch in that direction.
Published in the Ottawa Citizen on February 11, 2025
WASHINGTON, DC, Feb. 7: A worker removes the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) sign from its headquarters after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) abruptly shut down the U.S. aid agency in recent days. Photo by Kayla Bartkowski /Getty Images
The unprecedented upheaval in the American federal civil service, spearheaded by “special government employee” and sometime spaceman Elon Musk, has shocked the world. In a core civil service of some 2.2 million, hundreds of thousands of jobs, and in many cases the corresponding services, are suddenly on the line.
But alongside the Trump-Musk approach to downsizing, and its resemblance to a Viking raid, is the issue of the growing politicization of the U.S. bureaucracy, as Trump moves to replace a growing number of senior career officials with political loyalists.
Could a similar politicization of the public service happen in Canada? Not likely — but we could inch in that direction. Let me explain.
The American public service is somewhat differently conceived than Canada’s, which is intended to be thoroughly non-partisan. The U.S. system places a bit more emphasis than we do on personal commitment to a given administration’s political agenda.
Let’s not overstate this, however. The overwhelming majority of U.S. civil servants are career personnel appointed under the authority of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), an independent agency with origins dating to the 1880s. It’s intended to ensure competitive, merit-based staffing. Under this system, there are several classes of civil servant, including the competitive service (most employees) and the senior executive service (SES), about 8,700 non-competitive, senior positions which can be staffed by either career employees or political appointments. Since there’s an overall cap of 10 per cent of SES positions for political appointees, most SES personnel are also career civil servants, who should be non-partisan.
In the normal order of things, an American president makes about 4,000 political appointments. Some 1,200 of these, such as cabinet secretaries and ambassadors, require Senate confirmation. About 450 positions are mostly either in the Executive Office of the President or fill a variety of councils, boards and committees. About 750 are non-career members of the SES, and about 1,550 are positions that are exempt from the standard staffing process because of their confidential or policy character.
So far, so good. Then in 2020, the once and future President Donald Trump, by executive order, created a new category of federal employee, Schedule F. This included all career civil servants engaged in “policy making,” which is a lot of them. Such employees are not covered by the usual protections against arbitrary dismissal, meaning they would be vulnerable both to losing their jobs and to political pressure. Joe Biden eliminated Schedule F as soon as he came to power, but on Jan. 20, 2025, Trump reinstated it.
Schedule F, along with mass resignations, is a presumed basis for Elon Musk’s downsizing ambitions, and also for Trump’s desire to turn the purported “Deep State” into a happy family of MAGA enthusiasts. It also puts at risk the knowledge and experience, not to say the careers, of a lot of people. Exactly how this all will play out remains to be seen, but Musk and a small cohort of aides with sofa beds have already taken over the OPM and tried to access the Treasury database. Even allowing for the possibility of some successful legal challenges, the U.S. will be looking at a very different civil service going forward.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk want an American civil service that is loyal to the president’s politics. Photo by Alex Brandon /THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Even if Trump and Musk aren’t able to fully dismantle USAID, as they hope to, does anyone expect to recognize America’s foreign aid agency when they’re done? Nor does it always take mass firings to have a massive impact. When Trump sacked a dozen or so career prosecutors from the Department of Justice with no allegations of misconduct beyond “you played a significant role in prosecuting President Trump,” he signalled with trademark brazenness that no one should dare to launch a criminal investigation of anyone in the Trump administration.
Partisan role more restricted in Canada
Meanwhile, back in Canada, everything is fine. OK, that’s only half a joke. While Canada’s public service could certainly use some downsizing, along with some fresh ideas and skills from other sectors, sending blanket offers of push-button resignations to virtually every federal bureaucrat without so much as a performance audit would be alien to the Canadian political landscape. But how far down the road of politicizing public servants might we actually go? I think the answer is: a little.
Similarly to the U.S., the great majority of public service positions in the Canadian government are staffed under the delegated authority of the Public Service Commission, mandated for over a century to ensure a merit-based, non-partisan public service staffed without political involvement. In Canada, the partisan lens is restricted to a cadre of political staff in each minister’s office, who — in theory at least — are not to interfere in the work of the public service. That said, this cadre has grown rapidly in recent years and with such growth, especially in the Prime Minister’s Office, comes increased risk of intensified political pressure.
Canada’s government also includes more than 2,000 individuals appointed by the Governor General on the “advice” of the prime minister, the so-called Governor-in-Council (GiC) appointees. This may sound like a lot compared to the number of presidential appointees in a much larger bureaucracy, but there are some big differences.
First, there is no wholesale replacement of GiC positions when a new government is elected. Most are replaced gradually as normal turnover requires — indeed too gradually, as vacancies are a real problem. Secondly, most GiC appointments are to agencies, boards, commissions, administrative tribunals, agents of Parliament and the like, not to the core public service, and the more sensitive positions tend to have security of tenure.
Finally, over the past two decades, these posts have increasingly been filled through open, merit-based processes akin to those of the public service.
The closest thing Canada has to core public service appointments by the prime minister is the community of deputy ministers (DMs). Though relatively few in number, these are critical positions for shaping what the public service does and how, and for that very reason the driving force in their selection is the Clerk of the Privy Council as head of the public service. Not surprisingly, the great majority of Canada’s deputy ministers have been career public servants.
Still, it is at the DM level that a government motivated to install its loyalists could most readily do so. A relative handful of careful appointments in key positions could set the tone for a public service more strongly committed to the government’s political agenda. These DMs would still be subject to public service ethical requirements, including stringent non-partisanship, but steering clear of party business is not perfect insulation from politicization.
Despite this, I remain hopeful that a Trumpian quest for “loyalty” won’t happen here, and not just because there’s no one quite like Trump. I believe most governments recognize that they wouldn’t benefit from loyal (as opposed to frank and fearless) advice and therefore prefer to keep their professional and party advice separate. Public servants are already ethically bound to support the government of the day in realizing its agenda, and in my experience they do so conscientiously — perhaps especially when they point out unintended consequences and suggest alternative options.
My real fear is not that governments will appoint openly partisan public servants, but that larger, more intrusive ministers’ offices, and especially the PMO, could pressure senior public servants to be more political in the advice they provide and the work they do.
Karl Salgo is a former senior public servant and is currently an executive adviser at the Ottawa-based Institute on Governance.