Righting the ship: Civil servant edition

I received several comments about a line in my Brunswick News column yesterday about when I started with the Jobs Board Secretariat in 2015: “I was surprised to find that a lot of bureaucrats in government at the time seemed to be settling into this new reality of population and economic stagnation. There were indeed ongoing discussions about school closures, streamlining public services and other ways to manage in a time of economic decline.”

I will tell you that just about everyone I worked with in GNB was highly professional and cared about their province and the work they were doing. But there is a natural conservativism among many civil servants. they don’t want to make wrong assumptions based on what they would like to see, they want to advise governments based on the actual data they have on hand and in 2015 the trend lines were not great.

So, you are senior civil servants in government. How do you advise Cabinet? In 2015, GDP growth has averaged less than 0.5% per year for nearly a decade. You have heard all these promises about an energy cluster and other big investments that didn’t happen. You are seeing a slight uptick in immigration but retention rates are below 50%. Business investment has been relatively low for years. The Boomers are all 10-15 years from retirement and workforce aged 15-24 is shrinking. Other than the Moncton and Fredericton regions things are fairly bleak in 2015.

Let’s say you are a civil servant doing K-12 education planning and you have at your disposal the following chart but it stops in the early 2010s. Further, you have expert consultants and forecasters telling you the demographic trend line will continue downward for the foreseeable future.

So, I don’t blame civil servants for decisions made at the time.

I just think they should have done a better job advising government on the implications if things continued on the path they were on.

And they may have but I didn’t see it.

The top civil services should have been crystal clear with politicians that the trend line we were on could ultimately lead to a shrinking workforce, continued weak economic performance and even worse outcomes in specific regions across the province (this is still a possibility). The tax base need to sustainably support public services like health care would be in jeopardy.

The bottom line is we need our public sector leaders to help politicians set a vision for the province and then work towards that vision. Instead of inevitable decline, let’s be aspirational about the future.

That doesn’t mean be cavalier.

There may still be a need for some school closures and a reduction of maintenance on rural roads with very little traffic. We want our government to be efficient with our tax dollars.

Now we are on a clear growth trajectory (although true to form GNB is forecasting almost every major economic indicator to fall back considerably in the coming years).

For example, the forecast for real GDP growth in 2025-2027 is 1.2% per year.

When I arrived in 2015, the forecast was for 0.5% per year.

So I guess that counts as progress.