Movers and stayers: mobility patterns among senior public servants in Canadian provinces

There has developed-in Canada a well-established literature on bureaucratic elites at the federal level. There has not, however, been a systematic stu dy of bureaucratic elites at the provincial level. While individual scholar s have studied particular provincial governments, there have been few studi es that covered more than one province. This paper, which analyses a census of assistant deputy ministers and deputy ministers in every Canadian provi nce between 1988 and 1996, considers the mobility of these top two levels o f the senior public service. The findings indicate that there has only been a slight decline in the number of senior public servants as governments ha ve downsized. The findings also show that, unlike at the federal level, the re is limited mobility among these senior public servants, with roughly one -third of them changing each year. In some provinces, mobility levels incre ase slightly in the year after an election. Levels of mobility and changes in the number of senior public servants also vary across provinces, but the re is no pattern based on the size of the province. Finally, there are impo rtant differences in the mobility depending on the type of department. In p articular, in departments where there is a core knowledge or skill, mobilit y levels are much lower than in departments that lack such a core. These fi ndings throw some light on the difficulties provinces may have in solving s ome of their more intractable policy problems.