Today, we will be talking about a false good idea from the Quebec Municipal Commission (CMQ). If this idea were implemented, one of the foundations of state management would be attacked: the political neutrality of civil servants.
Last June, the CMQ submitted a report on the governance of the City of Sherbrooke. This week, the city council adopted an action plan to follow up on it. One of the issues that the council will have to address is the following, and it is not trivial.
When a draft resolution is submitted in anticipation of a municipal council meeting, it is accompanied by what is called a “decisional summary”. This summary is prepared by the municipal administration and is addressed to elected officials. It contains a summary of the data necessary for them to make an informed decision: arguments for moving forward, main objections, financial data, general comments, etc. The summary also contains the officials’ recommendation, favorable or not. So far, so good.
However, for the sake of transparency, some cities like Sherbrooke now make this document public, but not in full. They sometimes remove certain elements, for political reasons, for example the recommendation of civil servants. In its June report, the CMQ recommends that the decision-making summaries no longer be modified by elected officials and that they contain “the administration’s full recommendations.” This is where it gets complicated.
One might believe that it is in the public interest for all this information to be made public. I don’t believe so, for two reasons.
First problem. If officials know the document will be public, will they write it the same way? Will they sugarcoat their conclusions so as not to step on each other’s political toes or to protect themselves? Will they highlight the limits of their knowledge of the subject, the weaknesses of their analyses, the data they are missing? I am convinced that ultimately, making the document public will cause elected officials to lose valuable access to frank and direct advice from their officials.
Let’s be perfectly clear here, it is entirely possible (and desirable) for a city to transmit all the factual information necessary so that citizens and journalists have a detailed understanding of the file… without however transmitting the decision summary itself.
This document is unique in that it is at the heart of the relationship between elected officials and their team of experts: for it to have value, civil servants must be able to express themselves in complete freedom, without heavy constraints. which come with an official publication.
State management and reality television are two distinct things: to properly manage the State, it is necessary that certain spaces be preserved to host debates between civil servants and elected officials. The decision-making summary is one of them.
The second problem is even more important. Politicians and civil servants don’t always get along. There are visionaries in both groups, there are people who lack scope in both groups. There are also people for whom almost all public spending is to be avoided, others who are spendthrifts. Politicians and civil servants therefore often debate among themselves, vigorously, behind closed doors, which is very healthy. If, through decisional summaries, these disagreements become public at the very moment when the debate between elected officials takes place, civil servants will immediately become political actors.
I happened to think that certain recommendations from civil servants were disconnected from the reality of citizens, that others were financially unrealistic, that they flatly contradicted the political choices already made by the council (yes, civil servants sometimes fight policies) or that they were superficial, poorly prepared, based on too little serious data. I expressed it internally, it sometimes got messy. If the recommendations had been public, I would have had the obligation to publicly denounce the work of my own officials, which would not have been without consequences.
If Sherbrooke follows the CMQ’s recommendation, over time, several things could happen. Civil servants could write notices of convenience, depending on the political positions of each party. Political battles could be fought on their backs, with some relying on them, others denouncing them. An unhealthy “us and them” could develop between civil servants and elected officials.
Knowing that senior civil servants will occupy public space, elected officials could even decide to hire them based on their political orientations rather than their skills. Do you see the danger?
So, what to do? Do like other governments: do not make public either the decision-making summaries or the recommendations of civil servants, therefore let civil servants administer and let elected officials do their political work. The factual data should obviously be made public.
The space for deliberation belongs to politicians. If civil servants want to place their recommendations in the public space, let them run for office. Elected officials should use the content of the decision-making summaries to debate by saying “I believe that” rather than “the civil servants say that”.
What the CMQ is proposing, in my opinion, will encourage a confusion of roles, which will compromise the political neutrality of civil servants, and therefore the sound management of the State.
What do you think? Participate in the dialogue