ISSN : 1496-9106 Public Management Reforms, Social Struc- tures and Collective Values : The Unusual Case of Quebec within Canada By : Joseph FACAL, Professeur invité, HEC Montreal Cahier de recherche N°: 06-02 September 2006 ______________________________________________________________________________ Copyright © 2006. HEC Montréal. All rights reserved for all countries. Any translation or alteration in any form whatsoever is prohibited. This document is intended to be used as the framework for an educationnal discussion and does not imply any judgement about the administrative situation presented. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. Toute traduction ou toute modification sous quelque forme que ce soit est interdite. Les textes publiés dans la série des cahiers du CÉTO n’engagent que la responsabilité des auteurs. CETO, HEC Montréal, 3000 chemin de la Côte- Sainte-Catherine, Montréal (Québec) Canada H3T 2A7 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. From “reengineering” to “modernization”: The tale of a forced landing............... 3 2. A modernization based on consultation and consensus ............................................ 7 3. What now?............................................................................................................... 16 References......................................................................................................................... 18 ___________________ 1 Copyright © HEC Montréal Public Management Reforms, Social Structures and Collective Values: The Unusual Case of Quebec within Canada PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORMS, SOCIAL STRUCTURES AND COLLECTIVE VALUES: THE UNUSUAL CASE OF QUEBEC WITHIN CANADA Prepared by : Joseph FACAL, Department of Management, HEC Montreal. Cahier no 06-02 – September 2006 The Quebec elections of April 14, 2003 gave victory to the Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ) and ended nine years in power for the Parti Québécois (PQ). Several statements by the head of the PLQ, Jean Charest, before his victory and after his rise to the job of Premier, as well as those by some of his lieutenants, implied that the new government would devote itself to the most radical reconfiguration of Quebec’s public administration since the 1960s’ Quiet Revolution. The outcry that followed forced the government to beat a hasty retreat and to change its ambitious “reengineering” to a more modest “modernization” – a continuation, for the most part, of an agenda the previous PQ government had already begun. In our view, this failure can be explained by a series of political mishaps, but also and more fundamentally by the refusal to take into account some of the cultural characteristics specific to Quebec society, arising from its history and from the unique institutionalization of the power relations found there. At the same time, it would be wrong to conclude that Quebec’s administrative machine is stubbornly resistant to change. On the contrary, Quebec has, in our view, found its own unique road to the modernization of its public administration, which is already showing appreciable results although there is much still to do. What is different about the Quebec case becomes particularly apparent when we compare the modernization of its administration to the much more radical modernization that occurred in recent years in two other Canadian provinces – Ontario and Alberta. In every major organizational change, there is always – whether explicitly or implicitly expressed – a particular vision of the power relations between human beings and the social order that goes beyond simple instrumental logic. For a sweeping reform of public administration to be perceived as legitimate and achieve lasting success, it must therefore be constructed on principles and implementation strategies that are a good fit with the political culture of the setting in which it is rolled out. Basically, we are calling for management research to be more open to the sociological, historical, and political factors specific to each society. We know at least since the seminal text by March and Olsen (1989) that there is a correlation between various types of states and various types of public administrations and yet a large part of scientific research in management CÉTO, HEC Montréal 2 Public Management Reforms, Social Structures and Collective Values: The Unusual Case of Quebec within Canada continues to ignore the presence of precisely those factors that drive societies, namely power, ideologies, values and political interests. The first part of this text highlights some of the political mishaps that explain the relative failure of the plan to reengineer the state envisioned by the Charest government at the time of its election in 2003. The second offers a more nuanced sociological explication of the unique nature of the modernization of the public administration as it has unfolded in Quebec since the late 1990s. The third part looks at some of the difficulties still to be dealt with. 1. From “reengineering” to “modernization”: The tale of a forced landing The factors that have led almost all governments in advanced capitalist societies to undertake the reform of their public administrations are well documented: precarious public finances in many states, the opportunities afforded by new technologies, the displeasure of citizens dealing with public services, the forceful comeback in the public sphere in recent years of a free market rhetoric often dubbed «neo-conservatism» that values regulation by market forces, and the propensity of governments to imitate by adopting foreign experiments they view favourably (Belhocine, Facal & Mazouz, 2005). At the highest level of generalization, these reforms share a number of characteristics that have led researchers to see in them the emergence of a new paradigm in public administration, usually referred to as the New Public Management, or NPM : an emphasis on user satisfaction, outcomes assessment, loosening of rules, decentralization and devolution, increased use of outsourcing and privatization, increased reporting by public officials to elected members of parliaments, and the introduction of performance contracts that tie funding to the achievement of results (Jones & Kettl, 2003). Basically, we may read this emerging paradigm as a kind of contract by which public authorities give managers and directors more independence in exchange for better results (Mazouz, Tremblay & Facal, 2005). After a period during which a rather normative and prescriptive approach seemed to be dominant, corresponding grosso modo to the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, the understanding now seems to be that, while states are all facing similar challenges, they should each find their own way to modernize their public administration. Several factors explain the considerable diversity of the reforms that have been implemented: the ideology of political leaders, the power relations prevailing in each society, specific institutional arrangements, administrative traditions, the political culture specific to each society, and voter perception of the gravity of the situation to be corrected (OCDE, 2001). In this regard, Canada has proved to be a fascinating laboratory, given the number and range of administrative reforms it has seen since the late 1980s. Its political system is a British parliamentary one, with a federal Prime Minister and provincial Premiers who usually enjoy clear legislative majorities and concentrate most of the power in their own hands, and a Whitehall-type civil service. In recent years, foreign observers seem to have been most interested in reforms at the federal level. But, it has been provincial governments, much more than the federal government, that have introduced the deepest and most innovative organizational changes (Borins & Kocovski, 1997). CÉTO, HEC Montréal 3 Public Management Reforms, Social Structures and Collective Values: The Unusual Case of Quebec within Canada This may be explained on one hand by the federal nature of the Canadian political system which makes each provincial government theoretically sovereign within its own areas of jurisdiction, and on the other hand by Canada’s extraordinary cultural diversity – of which Quebec is the most striking but not the only example. What makes the study of the Quebec case so fascinating in a comparative perspective is that we are dealing with a majority Francophone society, set within a country and a part of the North American continent that is very largely Anglophone, whose political institutions have been inherited from Great Britain, but within which the principles and practices coming out of New Public Management have been introduced gradually and with restraint, in contrast with the much more radical changes that have occurred elsewhere in Canada, most notable in Ontario and Alberta (Côté, 2003). Let us now return to the chronology of events. Elected in spring 2003, Jean Charest’s Liberal government seemed determined to implement a complete review of the political and administrative legacy of the Quiet Revolution, convinced that Quebec’s development model was cumbersome, costly and inefficient. His government gave the impression of being driven by a desire to break with the past, and he himself of being filled with the unshakeable certainty of being right, which Margaret Thatcher once termed “conviction politics” as opposed to “consensus politics” (Metcalfe, 1993). At that time it was a question of proceeding to a genuine “reengineering” of the state as defined by the writers – Michael Hammer and James Champy – who popularized