As the Labour Party wrestles over whether to honour or disown its New Labour past, Canada\u2019s new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, has been busy assembling the architecture of a Blairite central government.<\/p>\n
Trudeau\u2019s youth, good looks and self-declared \u201csunny ways\u201d all evoke the Tony Blair of 1997. Both were swept to power on the back of popular discontent with a tired, shrunken conservative government, and each embodied widely held aspirations for a new, open and optimistic national spirit.<\/p>\n
But the parallels don\u2019t end there. Trudeau is consciously borrowing from the structures of the delivery state that Tony Blair developed in his second term as Prime Minister, most often associated with Sir Michael Barber and his No10 Delivery Unit.\u00a0 Barber joined Trudeau and his Cabinet for a retreat<\/a> earlier this week held to hammer out priorities for the new Liberal government, advising the assembled ministers on how to deliver their core objectives. (With the oil price still falling, and China\u2019s debt bubble unwinding, the global economic slowdown was top of their agenda. The Liberal government was elected to inject a deficit-financed infrastructure investment stimulus into the economy, and it needs to deliver on that in its first Budget).<\/p>\n Trudeau has appointed his own Barber figure, Matthew Mendelsohn<\/a>, to be the Canadian government\u2019s first deputy secretary for \u201cresults and delivery\u201d.\u00a0 Mendelsohn is one of a stable of top Trudeau advisers who worked for Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty\u2019s administration, which pioneered the take up of Barber\u2019 delivery approach in Canada. Political links, shared institutional history and a common language often facilitate policy transfer within the so-called \u201cAnglosphere\u201d countries, and in this case, the pivotal figure was Trudeau\u2019s new Principal Secretary, Gerald Butts, who travelled to the UK in the early 2000s to study the Blair government\u2019s delivery unit and took the lessons back to Ontario<\/a>.<\/p>\n Institutional and political differences limit the scope for straightforward R & D \u2013 \u201cRob and Duplicate\u201d \u2013 in governance practices across countries. Canada is a federal country, with powerful provincial and territorial governments, unlike centralised England (for the most part, Barber\u2019s writ did not run in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, since each has devolved government responsible for its public services). The Prime Minister cannot simply pull a delivery lever in Ottawa and expect the Canadian provincial premiers to do his bidding. Trudeau is also committed to restoring some semblance of Cabinet government to Canada, after the government-by-closed-clique administration of the Stephen Harper years. His advisers know they need to empower, and engage carefully, with Cabinet ministers, which will require modifications to the delivery and implementation structure pioneered by Barber and Blair. On forming his government, Trudeau lifted the technique of Ministerial appointment mandates <\/a>\u2013 letters to new Ministers setting out their key objectives - straight from the Blair delivery textbook. But the letters were in two halves: one setting out how a Minister should govern with openness, democratic engagement and accountability, in pointed contrast to the Harper government; and the second, a list of delivery goals drawn from the lengthy Liberal manifesto. How Canada\u2019s ministers spatch these technocratic and democratic modes together will be an interesting object lesson in modern federal government.<\/p>\n Does Trudeau\u2019s delivery agenda signal fresh vitality for new public management (NPM)? Elsewhere in the world, the high water mark of NPM appears to have passed, challenged from below by democratic forces, such as insurgent political parties and powerful city leaders exercising their own mandates; by the emergence of identity issues, such as immigration, which cannot be dealt with as \u201cdelivery\u201d challenges; \u00a0by the explosion of data, which can be used to spread power out of central government as much as to underpin centralised public sector management; and by new relational approaches <\/a>to public sector reform, which draw on the insights of complexity theory <\/a>and the twin democratic and realist turns in political theory<\/a>.<\/p>\n