Analysis Of Breaking The Bargain By Donald Savoie

In Breaking the bargain, Donald Savoie explores the bargain between public servants, ministers, and parliament as they make up the administrative and political parts of Canadian governance. To be more precise, Savoie examines the “territory” between permanent and elected officials in bureaucracy and democracy within Canada (2003, p. 3). In terms of his thesis, Savoie’s central thesis is “the traditional bargain between politicians and public servants is coming unglued, and the space that was once established to determine who is responsible for what is no longer clear” (2003, p. 7-8). In fact, the definition of the bargain has been left for politicians and public servants to figure out and the consequence was the breaking of the traditional bargain between the administrative and political processes in Canada (Savoie, 2003, p. 7). Savoie also argues that the line between politics and …show more content…
According to the traditional bargain, the public service is independent and non-partisan, however; when politicians hire partisan individuals in the public service the public service becomes politicized. For Savoie, the main examples are the affirmative-action-programs in which a candidate will be given priority appointment in the public service after three years of working as a partisan political assistant (Savoie, 2003, p. 222). The politicization of the public service in such manner undermines its independence as the merit principle is not respected and senior levels of the public service becoming political actors rather than administrators. More importantly, Savoie makes it clear that the line that once divided the public service from politics has been crossed as he gives the example of Jean Chretien hiring Alex Himelfarb as the head of the public service who in turn gives a political speech that under the traditional bargain would only be given by politicians (2003, p.