Commission on the Reform of Ontario's Public Services

Chapter 3: Our Mandate and Approach
The best public service would constantly evaluate priorities. If a new priority is identified,
then by definition existing priorities would move down a place. Some at the bottom of the
heap, once useful but now outmoded, would be discarded. New priorities cannot just be
stacked on top of existing ones; otherwise, the array of government programs begins to look
like a junk pile. In other words, there would be continuous “program review.”
The best public service would drive relentlessly towards effectiveness and efficiency,
goals that complement each other. Objectives, metrics, accountability and benchmarking
would drive effectiveness. Governments typically struggle with achieving efficiency.
The common explanation is that unlike the private sector, government organizations lack the
discipline imposed by a bottom-line profit motive and by shareholders who hold their feet to the
fire. We cannot help but observe that in recent years we have seen enough dreadful
performances in the private sector that we cannot blindly put the business model on such a
high pedestal. Besides, does the public sector really have no external sources of discipline?
The Ontario government has more than 13 million stakeholders — Ontario’s residents, most of
whom pay taxes. Those taxpayers have made it very clear that they do not want to pay more
taxes and do not want their government to run persistent large deficits. Pressures for efficiency
are not totally lacking in the public sector. Yet this report is full of recommendations for where
we think efficiency could be dramatically improved, where programs wastefully overlap, where
backroom operations could and should be consolidated. These opportunities for public-sector
improvement are not unique to Ontario. Nothing we have found suggests that Ontario’s public
sector is less efficient than public sectors elsewhere. More needs to be done and more should
be expected from the best.
As an example of how the best public service would operate, take an employment service
whose task is to help an unemployed man, who is perhaps receiving social assistance, find a
job that will stick. That is the objective. It would be clear who will help him and in what manner,
so he is not left to navigate alone a mystifying jumble of programs offered by three levels of
government. The success and cost of providing the service would be tracked. Did he find
work? What resources did the government devote to helping him? In effect, what was the
public cost of finding him a job? Taking into account the likelihood that he will keep the new job
and switch off social assistance, did the benefits (he is no longer receiving social assistance
and is perhaps paying taxes) exceed the cost of helping him find a job? The best public
service would know the answer to this question.
131