I think that, in this moment, the public service is in real need of reform, and it's one of the only times over the past, I don't know, 30 years or maybe even more than that, that we're not engaged in a formal reform exercise of the public service.
We're not doing Blueprint 2020 right now. We're not doing La Relève. We're not doing any of those things. We're in a moment when the government deeply needs specific things from the public service, and we're not in a conversation in a formal way that is led by the clerk about what we need the public service to be doing.
These cuts are happening, and they're quite significant. Everybody's being affected by that, even the people who are staying. Even the people who manage to hold on to their jobs are still affected by this broader piece. There are people losing their jobs. There are SERLO competitions. When people win, they know that they had to compete against their colleagues, and they feel kind of awful. If you make them SERLO, maybe they feel that it means you don't trust them, so we're teeing the public service up for quite a crisis in confidence here and, at the same time, we're not giving any clear direction about what we want this organization to do.
I think, at the same time, the fact that the government is making these significant cuts indicates that it wants something different from the public service. The government is looking for specific skills, and I think the public service members need to hear how they fit into the government's agenda. “What do you want us to do? How can we be helpful? How can we fit into this?”
I think part of the answer to that is that the Prime Minister is clearly looking for people who have expertise in finance, economics and AI, in growth and that sort of thing, so it's fine to be.... For me, it's okay to be bringing people in from the outside because I think that makes for a more robust public service, but I also think that questions need to be answered about how you take a permanent public service and plug it into the implementation of the government's agenda. That's exactly what the public service is supposed to do, so what's our plan for that?
I think we might be at a point now where we need to be thinking about what kinds of rules might apply. If there's going to be a lot of recruitment.... There's potentially a revolving-door situation where you've got people coming in from banks for a year or two years, and then they're going to go back out. They have all kinds of information about what the government's doing, how decisions are being made and who the powerful people are. They're going to go back out. What rules are going to apply to them? If the answer is none because they're not caught in the Conflict of Interest Act because they're not public office holders, then you're going to get people saying, “Well, why am I caught in this? That person was much closer to the centre of power than I was, and they don't have to obey any kind of post-employment rules.” They can go back to their bank and do what they want.
We're setting ourselves up for a problem if we don't address those things. It doesn't have to be a problem, and if I sound like I'm saying we shouldn't be recruiting from the banking side, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that we need to be mindful about it, because we do have rules that govern that door that people go in and out of when they're moving from their expertise in and out of government.