It’s an old model getting a new lease on life.
They started in 1989 under Brian Mulroney’s government — an experiment by a government facing economic pressures to innovate and deliver results more efficiently.
Over the next few years, the federal government created more than a dozen special operating agencies (SOAs) like Passport Canada or the Translation Bureau. However, over the past 30 years, the government appeared to cool on the idea, only creating a couple SOAs.
Until now.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has turned to the decades-old model to spearhead its efforts to strengthen Canada’s economy in the face of the tariff war launched by U.S. President Donald Trump. Three new special operating agencies — Build Canada Homes, the Defence Investment Agency and the Major Projects Office — will be responsible for helping decide how to spend billions of dollars and advance projects.
The government argues that SOAs can be more flexible and move faster.
Until recently, there were only a dozen of them. With the exception of the Canadian Coast Guard, most are small, lower profile and focus on niche areas such as measurement, heritage or translation. They are housed within federal departments and report to ministers and deputy ministers.
However, in the case of Carney’s new agencies, exactly how each of them will work is in part shrouded in secrecy.
They have to follow many of the same rules as the government departments that house them, but they also benefit from exceptions to those rules — and have performance targets that are outlined in each agency’s framework agreement and business plan.
A federal Treasury Board website from the late 1990s, a time when the government had set up more than a dozen SOAs, says that the key part of accountability for the agencies are their framework agreements.
“The framework document and the business plan are central to SOA accountability,” says the archived Treasury Board website. “On one hand, the framework document sets out the agency mission and its relationships with other parties. On the other, the business plan represents a detailed performance contract between the department and SOA management that is renewed annually.”
The site says that framework documents “are generally treated as public documents and are made available, on request, to any Canadian.”
However, attempts by CBC News over the past couple of weeks to obtain copies of the framework documents for the three agencies created by Carney’s government have been unsuccessful.
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Treasury Board officials say the SOA website contains outdated information and was archived in 2012. They referred CBC’s request for the framework agreements to the departments that house each of the agencies.
Public Services and Procurement Canada, which houses the Defence Investment Agency, confirmed its framework agreement and business plan exist and were approved by the Treasury Board. However, it said the documents are secret.
“Treasury Board submissions are designated as Confidence of the King’s Privy Council for Canada and are kept confidential,” the department wrote, adding that the agency’s organizational structure and business priorities will be posted on its website “as it becomes available.”
The Privy Council, which houses the Major Projects Office, has not yet provided copies of the agency’s framework agreement or its business plan.
The Building Canada Act adopted by Parliament in June does provide some information about the rules that will govern the office. The legislation allows the office to streamline approvals by making decisions that would normally come under laws and regulations such as those that protect waterways, fish, birds and species at risk. However, it does not allow cabinet to exempt projects from several other laws including the Investment Canada Act, the Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act, the Auditor General Act and the Indian Act.
Requests to the Housing, Infrastructure and Communities department for the Build Canada Homes framework agreement were referred to Minister Gregor Robertson’s office, which has not yet provided the document.
Michael Wernick, former clerk of the Privy Council, said the basic framework agreement for each agency should be available to Canadians.
“I believe in preserving some of the confidentiality of advice before a decision is made. But once a decision is made, it’s a different context,” Wernick said in an interview. “If these things have now been decided and implemented in place, there’s no reason the framework agreement shouldn’t be disclosed.”
Wernick said special operating agencies do have to follow federal government guidelines but they also have their own customized list of tools and authorities.
“They do have rules they have to follow,” Wernick explained. “They just have higher ceilings and authorities. Instead of being limited to purchases under a million dollars, they might get authority to purchase up to $10 million of their own discretion.”
Wernick said they often have more flexibility as well in areas such as personnel, hiring, staffing, contracting and equipment purchases.
Special operating agencies are also easier to set up quickly, Wernick said.
“If you wanted to create a Crown corporation or a whole new entity, you’re going to have to go to Parliament with legislation, and a minority Parliament at that,” he said “And the record of the last two Parliaments is that legislation moves very, very slowly, and dozens of bills died on the order paper when the election was called.”
While some SOAs have been successful over the years, others have outlived their usefulness or been caught up in spending reviews and disappeared, said Wernick.
Kevin Page, a former parliamentary budget officer who heads the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy, said the track record of federal SOAs has been mixed. But he thinks it is an interesting model.
Page said a lot of money will be flowing through the three new agencies. He said it will be important to watch how the federal government works with the private sector on major projects, how it closes the gap on housing and how it makes sure that Canada benefits from the increase in defence procurement.
Page said it is “mission critical” for the new special operating agencies to be transparent and for documents like their framework agreements and business plans to be public and available to be studied by MPs.
“Particularly in cases like housing or defence or big projects where we’re going to be spending billions of dollars working with the private sector in a different way, there should be no debate,” said Page.
“It just has to be transparent.”
