P.E.I. Senator Percy Downe is calling for federal offices to be moved away from Ottawa and into regions across Canada.

In a speech to the Senate and in a letter to Prime Minister Paul Martin, Downe said decentralization would make public services more effective by putting some miles between the bureaucracy and the politicians who set departmental agendas.

“In my opinion, bureaucratic power has been overly centralized in the hands of a small group of institutions closely concentrated in the capital region,” Downe said.

He said the Ottawa area held on to 70 per cent of the public service’s highest-level jobs between 1994 and 2003 and that the capital maintained a constant civil service presence at the same time as thousands of federal jobs were lost to provinces. Most of the job losses took place in the late 1990s when Ottawa was in the midst of efforts to contain its fiscal deficit.

Downe said it would make sense to redistribute federal institutions. He said federal jobs would be a sort of regional development, that staff turnover would be less prevalent in federal offices away from Ottawa and that government itself would benefit from a more nationwide presence.

“Why then, is the Export Development Corporation currently located in downtown Ottawa?” he said. “It could be situated in Vancouver, after all, Canada does more than $20 billion of trade with the state of California alone.”

The senator said Ottawa made a similar move a few years ago when the offices of the National Energy Board were moved to Calgary in order to be closer to the energy industry itself.

He said a similar logic could be applied to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

“Does it make more sense for them to be located on one of Canada’s coasts where they can see the impact of their decisions on fishing communities and their residents more directly?” Downe asked.