I would like to say a few words to clarify the nature of my remarks.
I'm a professor at the École nationale d'administration publique. I've been interested in the evolution of state governance and administrative reforms for over 40 years. I've been monitoring developments in Quebec and carrying out empirical research on the topic. I've also done this abroad. I ran a centre for monitoring and comparative analysis at the international level. I have taught or consulted in around 30 member countries of the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.
If you ask a politician to say a few hard‑hitting lines in 30 seconds, they'll manage quite well. I believe that it's their job. However, if you ask a professor to explain a somewhat complex issue in five minutes, it goes against their nature. I'll try anyway.
I'll start by pointing out that the issue under consideration right now has been around for half a century. It didn't start yesterday. Specifically, it has existed since the mid‑1970s, when governments were faced with a major structural economic crisis. Some neoliberals advocated for the withdrawal of the state. They believed that limiting government intervention would solve the crisis. We saw this in the United States and Great Britain, under Margaret Thatcher.
The plan was to deregulate the financial markets and labour market, privatize, increase subcontracting, cut social programs, and, of course, lower taxes to ensure that the government wouldn't recover those funds and start spending again. However, against the backdrop of globalization, this affected nearly all industrialized countries. These countries faced deindustrialization, falling real wages, increasingly precarious employment, diminished social protections, rising inequality, deteriorating infrastructure and the decline of public services.
However, the Anglo‑American model wasn't adopted everywhere. In the Nordic countries, for example, governments have continued to support the development of the national economy and to provide a high level of social protection. Today, the Scandinavian countries continue to lead the pack in terms of gross domestic product per capita, quality of life, health, education and even happiness. There are now happiness indexes. So it seems that this approach can work.
At the international level, the neoliberal discourse has also done a great deal of damage in developing countries. They were advised to withdraw the state and to let the markets run wild. They were told that everything would work itself out. We saw that the major—or even minor—emerging countries, the tigers and dragons, didn't take off that way at first. On the contrary, these countries' economies took off as a result of government intervention by a strategic rather than a reactive government.
The fact remains that, for the past 50 years, all countries have been grappling with financial and budgetary challenges. That much is clear. It's also clear that people's expectations are much higher and that many more challenges and collective players are involved both at home and abroad. So governments are grappling with all this. They have tried to cope with the measures proposed by the new public management, which is useful and which has led to gains. However—as you can see in the document that I prepared—challenges and risks remain.
I'll give you a few examples of the challenges. We can decentralize the central government and create agencies that provide services and take action on an operational level. The risk—and it exists—lies in the separation of policy and program development from practice. The practice no longer provides input, so we end up with ill‑suited policies and programs.
We could give a host of other examples. The infamous public‑private partnerships in particular pose more than just a risk. They seemed like a good idea and some people took the plunge. These partnerships made it possible to draw on the private sector's expertise and money in order to give the public sector the ability to tackle a number of collective challenges. However, we've seen the results in some cases, particularly in Quebec, but also in other places. They have led to a loss of expertise in public services and to government dependence on the market. Unfortunately, they have also led to higher costs—obviously—along with shenanigans and abuse.
This brings me to my final point. The reforms inspired by the new public management approach have failed to reduce deficits or halt the debt process. On the one hand, successful reform requires us to keep adding funds, not cutting them. Reforms can't succeed without new resources. On the other hand, remember that successive economic and financial crises have forced governments to make major investments in order to stabilize financial markets and support strategic sectors, for example.
I'll take the last 30 seconds to remind you that public administration is a government's first tool. As a result, we shouldn't consider it a black box that we expect to deliver the maximum while we allocate the minimum. Today, we can and must draw on the lessons learned in the past 50 years. For example, we must stop making cuts that result in the government losing or undermining its ability to defend its sovereignty, to support the country's socio-economic development and to provide quality public services to both people and businesses.
I'll stop here.
