The quiet crisis and the emergence of La Relève: A study of crisis perception and executive leadership within the Canadian federal public service, 1997–2002
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In 1997, then‐clerk of the Privy Council Jocelyne Bourgon reported to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien that a “quiet crisis” existed within the ranks of the federal public service. After years of restraint, privatization, deregulation, downsizing, pay freezes, salary cutbacks, hiring moratoriums and staff reductions, the clerk reported that the members of the public service were suffering from a crisis of identity and purpose. To address this problem, the Privy Council Office launched La Relève, a program of crisis management designed to resolve the immediate tensions faced by the public service and to promote the renewal and rejuvenation of the public service at the beginning of the 21st century as it dealt with a variety of mega‐trends affecting public‐service delivery. La Relève marked the beginning of a decade of close attention to human resource management within the federal public service. But was there actually a crisis within the federal government in 1997? Using in‐depth interviews with a wide variety of senior public‐service insiders, this article explores three schools of thought found in Ottawa respecting “the crisis” and assesses the use of crisis management in this case for framing public‐sector modernization policy. Sommaire: En 1997, Jocelyne Bourgon, alors greffière du Conseil privé, signalait au Premier ministre Jean Chrétien qu'il existait une «crise silencieuse» au sein de la fonction publique fédérale. Après des années de restriction, de privatisation, de déréglementation, de compression d'effectifs, de gel des salaires, de réductions de salaires, de suspension du recrutement et de réductions d'effectifs, la greffière signalait que les membres de la fonction publique souffraient d'une crise d'identité et de raison d'être. Pour s'attaquer à ce problème, le Bureau du Conseil privé a lancé La Relève, programme de gestion de crise conçu pour résoudre les tensions immédiates auxquelles faisait face la fonction publique et pour promouvoir le renouveau et le rajeunissement de cette dernière au début du XXI e siècle alors qu'elle subissait diverses tendances majeures qui exerçaient une influence sur la prestation des services publics. La Relève a marqué le début d'une décennie au cours de laquelle on a porté une grande attention à la gestion des ressources humaines au sein de la fonction publique fédérale. Mais est‐ce qu'une crise régnait véritablement au sein du gouvernement fédéral en 1997? Grâce à des entrevues approfondies avec une grande variété de hauts fonctionnaires, le présent article examine trois écoles de pensée prévalant à Ottawa au sujet de «la crise», et évalue l'utilisation de la gestion de crise dans ce cas pour formuler une politique de modernisation du secteur public.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".