Canada’s top public servants meet agency theory in the Harper years (2006–2015)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A survey of Canada’s top public servants was used to test the effects on them of the agency version of the public service bargain held by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper (2006–2015). Most results were as expected: increasing politicization and prime ministerial influence added much complexity to the deputy minister’s job; and ministers’ political staffers acted as guardians of the agency bargain. However, the survey led to the observation of a decline in ministers’ powers and to the surprising increase of the parliamentary accountability of deputy ministers, as well as to some challenge to the concept of public service bargains. Points for practitioners It is a good idea to consider what the main components of the public service bargain are in any public workplace, that is, what expectations exist about duties, competencies, criteria of evaluation, rewards, and discipline for permanent employees and political staffers. Too strong an agency bargain creates confusion about responsibilities, accountability, and a culture of risk avoidance. Staffers should not disrupt the chain of command and should treat public servants with respect and courtesy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".