COVID complicates new government’s moves

Every new government stumbles along for a bit before finding firm footing, but you have to think that the changes underway in Nova Scotia's new government are — like most everything else — complicated exponentially by the ever-present pandemic.

New governments are like the proverbial duck skimming crossing a pond. They may appear serene on the surface but they're paddling like mad just below.

I suppose, to some extent, that might be said of all governments but the paddling is particularly frantic inside a new administration, where there are new players in key roles, new roles to be defined and relationships to be forged or fractured.

As we saw this week, most of the attention invariably focuses on the new cabinet. Ministers are the public face of the government, so it is natural that we'd want to know who's in, who's out, who's up and who's down.

More than half of the 16 members of Iain Rankin's cabinet, including Rankin himself, are new to their jobs and, two weeks to the day from taking on those posts, they'll be in the legislature and expected to be on top of their new files.

As intense as the process to get new ministers up to speed may be, it's old hat to the permanent government — the civil service. In every department and agency, staff have been updating briefing books and the like in anticipation of getting a new minister, almost since Premier Stephen Mcneil announced his pending departure back in August.

The three new ministers in Rankin's cabinet and the halfdozen cabinet veterans in new posts will have every opportunity to be fully prepared by the time the House sits on March 9. Those who aren't have only themselves to blame, although where the blame belongs and where it lands can be very different inside government.

Which brings us to the other sweeping changes Rankin made to the provincial government this week.

He named four new deputy ministers and gave six others new or additional responsibilities.

If ministers are the public face of their departments and agencies — and they are — it's the deputies who run the place. A ministerial change is a fairly routine occurrence, but a new face in the deputy's office can send shivers through a department's rank-and-file.

And 10 deputies in new jobs may be the biggest shake-up in the senior ranks of the Nova Scotia public service since then-premier John Savage fired a similar number of deputies early in his tenure in the mid-1990s.

Savage had to clear house after a dozen years of Tory rule, most of it under John Buchanan, but his reordering at the top had decidedly mixed results. Of the new deputies hired, almost all were gone within a few years. Most of the survivors were promoted from within.

In my experience, when a new deputy arrives in a department, he or she works flat-out to get to know the place and the players, find out where the real talent is and start building the professional relationships that will go a long way to determining success or failure.

At the risk of understatement, that entire process is complicated by COVID. A good many government employees are working from home, coming to the office maybe a day or two a week. Other health protocols, like masks and physical distancing, are in place in the workplace.

All of that makes a new deputy's prime initial objective — to build an effective team — all the more difficult.

The two deputies Rankin put in charge of new government entities – Eiryn Devereaux in the new Department of Infrastructure and Housing and Cathy Berliner at the new Office of Equity and Antiracism Initiatives – have particularly tough rows to hoe, standing up new operations amid the cloud of COVID.

Among the most critical relationships the new government must cement are those between the political staff that arrived with Rankin and the senior civil servants who operate out of the provincial government nerve-centre in One Government Place.

In Nova Scotia's civil service that nerve-centre is known simply as “the centre” and it is from there that directions emanate which must be followed.

The quality of the relationships that develop between the new political staff and the permanent, senior public servants in the centre can make the difference between a government that runs like a well-oiled machine — or at least appears to — and one that sputters and chokes.

Of course, the worst way for COVID to derail Rankin's early efforts is through a resurgence, and with case numbers mounting late this week, that, and not organizational issues, is where his government is focused.