Research Note: A Profile of Ministerial Policy Staff in the Government of Canada

Abstract

Although ministerial political advisors are prominent and influential actors within the core executive in Canada and elsewhere, information is scarce with respect to their personal and professional backgrounds and career trajectory. This article uses recent survey data and publicly available biographical information to analyse the demographic composition of senior ministerial policy advisors within the Government of Canada. It finds that, while ministerial policy staffers are young and politically committed, they are not so young nor so professionally inexperienced as sometimes thought. Nor are they always personally and tightly bound to their current ministers but often work for different ministers in different departments. This suggests that advisors are agents of the whole government as much as agents of their individual ministers and raises questions about the degree to which they are responsive to the Prime Minister's Office, thereby increasing centralization.

Trust but verify: Ministerial policy advisors and public servants in the Government of Canada

“…This is consistent with Eichbaum and Shaw who characterized advisors “principally as ministers' agents, rather than as policy entrepreneurs” (2011: 591). While some political advisors may have subject matter expertise, most are younger and less experienced than their senior public service interlocutors (Wilson ) and can seldom match the expertise of officials. Regardless of personal background, however, their job is not to compete with departmental technical expertise but, as described below, to complement it with political analysis.…”

“…While a growing corpus of international research provides a high‐level portrait of the activities of political policy staffers, generalizations are inadequate in two important respects. First, they tend to present ministerial advisors as an undifferentiated category; this is problematic since they are growing not only in number but specialization (Tiernan ; Wilson ). Second, advisors' day‐to‐day activity is “contextually specific” (Shaw and Eichbaum : 586), varying from country to country and even from government to government (Eichbaum and Shaw ).…”

Politički savjetnici između politike i uprave

“…Dva istraživanja pokazala su da među savjetnicima dominiraju muškarci -u Irskoj ih je bilo 71,4%, a na Novom Zelandu 65,6% (Connaughton, 2010, Eichbaum & Shaw, 2007. Također, vidljiv je trend angažiranja sve mlađih savjetnika (Halligan, 2013) koji su spremni dokazivati se radi napredovanja u karijeri pa stoga ne čudi da je polovica savjetnika u Kanadi u tridesetim godinama, a dodatno je 21% i mlađih (Wilson, 2015).…”

Temporary partisans, tagged officers or impartial professionals: Moving between ministerial offices and departments

“…In May 2007 only 44 public servants were employed in Canadian ministers' offices as exempt staff (Aucoin , p. 69). A survey of 64 senior policy advisers working for Canadian ministers found that only three had previously worked in the public service (Wilson ) . The subgroup of ministerial staff who are public servants is larger in Australia than in Canada.…”