Several days after the election that brought Mike Harris to power in June, 1995, the premier-designate offered Rita Burak, then deputy minister of agriculture, the post of secretary to cabinet, and she accepted. It was, both for her and for the public service, a fateful decision.
Ms. Burak will leave her job at the end of June, after serving five years as one of the most powerful and influential cabinet secretaries in Ontario's history.
The cabinet secretary is the ultimate mandarin, the unseen presence who runs the public service and makes sure it serves the needs, although not the whims, of the government of the day.
Cabinet secretaries are always powerful, if unquoted, figures in government, but few were more powerful than Ms. Burak. Charged with implementing the Common Sense Revolution election platform, Ms. Burak oversaw the 25-per-cent reduction in the size of the Ontario bureaucracy, the contracting out of many of its former responsibilities, and the five-week strike by public servants that accompanied it.
She advised the government on, and helped implement, its massive Who Does What restructuring of municipal and provincial responsibilities. She introduced merit pay into the senior ranks of the bureaucracy. She also drew power from the line ministries into her own bailiwick, centralizing bureaucratic decision-making in the cabinet office just as Mr. Harris and his key advisers siphoned power from cabinet ministers into the Premier's office.
Shortly after he was sworn in as Premier, Mr. Harris addressed a meeting of deputy ministers, several of whom had been hired since the election. Their allegiance, he reminded them, was to the cabinet secretary, not to their ministers. "Rita is well known to you," he told them, "and through her you will communicate with me." Cabinet ministers, in other words, were not the ultimate bosses of their departments. Ms. Burak was and, through her, the Premier.
Like all good éminences grises, Ms. Burak was rarely seen, and never heard, by the media and the public. Her husband, Peter Barnes, had been a cabinet secretary before her, and she no doubt learned much through observation. Personally, Ms. Burak was well liked, not inclined to wield power capriciously or with malice.
But she leaves her post with the Cabinet Office in some discord. In recent times, Ms. Burak has focused -- some would say obsessed -- on long-range planning. Under her Better Planning Process, the size of the Cabinet Office has swollen and lines of responsibility have become blurred, while its efforts to bring coherence to policy planning butts up against institutional inertia and a Premier's office more interested in today's headlines than next year's agenda.
But Ms. Burak rejects the notion that her office has lost its focus and sense of mission.
"We are trying to do a better job, as all public services are, in ensuring that policies that cut across government ministries are coherent," she said in an end-of-the-job interview.
"Of all of the different attempts at doing this [co-ordinating policies]at the centre, I think this is the first time we've got a real crack at doing some real planning. And I've been around for 30 years."
Her successor has not yet been chosen. Among current deputy ministers, Michele Noble at Management Board and Bryne Purchase at Finance are possible candidates. (Dan Burns would have been a front-runner, but has just been parachuted into the crucial position of Health.) Within the Cabinet Office, communications co-ordinator David Guscott, policy co-ordinator Tony Dean and Linda Stephens, deputy minister responsible for public-service restructuring, are all possibilities.
The next cabinet secretary will be faced with scraping off the calcium of personal resentments and feuding fiefs that build up under any administration, and will have to help restore a sense of energy and momentum still dangerously lacking in this administration. He or she will also have to live up to a legacy of a cabinet secretary who gathered and wielded power discreetly but implacably during tumultuous times.
Sir Humphrey would be pleased.
John Ibbitson