I almost choked on my coffee this morning when I read that our Prime Minister was considering involving Éric Duhaime in the matter of state efficiency. We heard a few times during the last campaign that the state was suffering from inefficiency, hence the idea, in particular, of building private hospitals, whose care would be reimbursed by the government.
This subject is of particular interest to me since I have spent most of my career in the service of the State, as a manager. I was therefore able to observe a certain inefficiency in the provision of service, which, in my opinion, is not generalized. Above all, I have noticed over the years that the reasons for this inefficiency of the services very often have as their cause political decisions. Decisions taken so as not to interfere with the minister or elected officials, elected officials who get involved in complex problems in relation to which they sometimes have no expertise, shaky governance in project management (hey, the REM of the East), for example. Politicians are the ones who decide the main parameters of negotiation and who sign collective agreements (unions, source of inefficiency? So why did you sign?). The government undertakes major reforms (the Barrette reform, for example) which do not seem to have the desired effectiveness, on the contrary. In short, it is possible to find many examples where elected officials are the source of government inefficiency. I could believe, if ever a conspiratorial fiber vibrated in me, that politicians seek to make the state ineffective. And why, if not to better sell it later to private enterprise, reputed to be more efficient?
Other solutions exist: decentralizing decisions, leaving operational management to employees and managers in the field and letting them take the risk of innovating and creating new solutions, reducing accountability and regulations, adopting annual budgets as of 1er April, at the beginning of the financial year (how to intelligently manage a budget planned over 12 months when there are sometimes only 6 or 7 months left to operationalize it?), keep expertise in the ministries so that decisions are based on facts and not on a company’s projected profits. In short, there are many solutions, other than resorting to private enterprise, to make government service delivery even more efficient.
To see in video