Johnson: Canada’s federal ministers have far too many personal staff

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Chrystia Freeland has 46. Marc Miller has 25. Mark Holland has 25. Bill Blair has 21. Eisenhower, at the height of the Second World War, had 24.

Personal staff.

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Why would Defence Minister Bill Blair, overseeing our tiny military during peacetime, need almost as many staff as Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allies in Europe in 1944? And this is in addition to the staff support Blair receives from his departmental and military officials.

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A little bit of online digging reveals that it’s much the same across the oversized 40-member federal cabinet. Canadians should ask tough questions about the bloated staff numbers in our ministers’ offices and their effects on our national decisions.

Cabinet ministers need political advice, decision support, and executive assistance that is prohibited for politically neutral public servants. Perhaps the 24/7 news cycle and increased stakeholder demands on today’s ministers necessitate a few more staffers than in previous eras. Let’s concede that. But how many political staff does a minister legitimately need? Are the numbers now so large that leadership effectiveness is compromised?

Here are some numbers, as of March, that might surprise you. Marci Ien, minister of Women, Gender Equality and Youth, has five policy advisers, four regional advisers, three parliamentary assistants, and two communications advisors among her team of 19. Mark Holland, minister of health — a field that is almost exclusively provincial, to the point where the federal government’s role is basically to wire money to the provinces — has nine policy advisers, four regional advisers, and five communications advisers in his entourage of more than two dozen. Chrystia Freeland has an absurd 21 regional advisers, 10 policy advisers, and six communications people.

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This is in addition to the policy, media and outreach personnel provided to each minister by their respective departments. For example, the Department of Finance has branches dedicated to fiscal, economic, tax and social policy, each with advisers and analysts, whose very job is to provide expert advice to the minister.

Being political animals themselves, these ministers should be savvy enough to politically assess their own decisions without the need for a platoon of partisan advisers. Moreover, they also have scores of caucus colleagues who can provide feedback, not to mention their own caucus research office, which provides them with research, communications and administrative services.

At what point do teams become too large to function effectively? Adding people increases capacity and output to a point, but soon becomes counterproductive as operational problems mount.

Efforts spent on recruitment, onboarding, training, dissemination of knowledge and refereeing competing personalities and goals rise dramatically. More and more attention is focused on internal disputes and collaboration problems instead of outward-facing strategic decisions and outcomes. Things get complicated. Actual work doesn’t get done.

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The management literature on optimal team size is abundant. Jacques Neatby, a leadership team expert, also describes the demoralizing effect that an oversized leadership team has on subordinates. In “The Ballooning Executive Team” in the Harvard Business Review, he warns, “As CEOs add more members to their team, each one fighting to see his/her priorities prevail, conflict at the top becomes more visible. With the lack of collaboration at the top in plainer sight, staff below are less likely to collaborate across units and they may begin to question the quality of their organization’s leadership.”

Brooks’s Law for software development holds that adding people to an already late project makes it even later. Ramp-up time, additional management duties, communications co-ordination, cliques, integration challenges and getting in each other’s way all make things worse.

Minding and worrying about a massive political team, many of whom are barely out of school, assuredly detracts from the minister’s important work of addressing national issues. Supersized staff — too many people with their fingers in too many things — pestering the public servants who are actually working the problems, does not make for good government. There’s no persuasive management reason for Freeland’s 21 regional advisers or Blair having staff numbers comparable to Eisenhower in 1944.

It’s time to streamline our ministers’ offices.

Mark Johnson is a general counsel who has worked in the private and public sectors. He was a Conservative candidate in Toronto in the 2021 federal election.

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