A group of Senators, led by Liberal Sen. Percy Downe, is pushing Prime Minister Paul Martin to relocate thousands of public servants from their jobs in the National Capital Area to the outlying regions of the country. Sen. Downe says bureaucratic power has been “overly centralized in the hands of a small group of institutions” in Ottawa and Gatineau.

They want the Martin government to follow the lead taken by other major countries such as the U.K. where Prime Minister Tony Blair announced in his spring 2004 budget the relocation of 20,000 public servants from the capital of London.

Sen. Downe has launched an inquiry on the matter in the Upper Chamber and has written a letter to the Prime Minister asking him to decentralize government departments, agencies and Crown corporations.

Last week, Sen. Downe said he hopes the issue gets some play in the coming budget on Feb. 23, but noted that he hasn’t heard from the Prime Minister yet.

“I’m hoping the budget will be an opportunity to do it. That’s why I did the speech and wrote to the Prime Minister to try to get it into the budget cycle,” said the former PMO official and onetime chief of staff to former prime minister Jean Chrétien. Sen. Downe was appointed to the Senate by Mr. Chrétien.

The only federal department with its national headquarters located outside Ottawa is Veterans Affairs which is in Prince Edward Island, the home province of Sen. Downe.

That relocation happened in 1976 and proved so controversial the experiment was never repeated. At the time, the then Ottawa mayor Lorry Greenberg criticized the move overseen by Mr. Jean Chrétien, who was then president of Treasury Board, and

Dan MacDonald, then minister of Veterans Affairs.

But the benefits to the region, with the benefit of 28 years of hindsight, are indisputable, added Sen. Downe. He said those include 1,200 full-time jobs, an annual payroll of $68-million, summer student jobs, and a career path for generation who want to stay in the region.

In his speech in the Senate, the Senator wondered why the Department of Fisheries and Oceans officials toil from a downtown Ottawa high-rise “where they cannot see a harbour or a fishing boat.” He said it would make more sense to locate them on one of Canada’s coasts “where they can see the impact of their decisions on fishing communities and the residents more directly.”

Sen. Downe went on to argue that the Export Development Corporation, a massive Crown corporation located in downtown Ottawa, should be in Vancouver. “After all”, he said, “Canada does more than $20-billion of trade with the state of California alone.”

Sen. Downe spent about five years working in the country’s most powerful political office – the Prime Minister’s Office. He started in 1998 as Mr. Chétien’s director of appointments and then moved on to become his chief of staff in 2001 until Mr. Chrétien appointed him to the Senate in June 2003.

When asked why decentralizing never happened when he had the prime minister’s ear, he said the financial situation simply didn’t permit it.

“The difference now is that we have a financial situation now that has been pretty constant for the last number of years and we have massive surpluses,” he told The Hill Times, adding that he still hasn’t heard from Mr. Martin about his letter to him.

During the program review launched in the mid-1990s, the federal government shed thousands of jobs in a bid to beat back the deficit. However, most of the job losses happened outside the National Capital Region.

Getting a handle on how many public servants work for the federal government and where they’re located has never been an easy task, in large part, because many have different employers who keep separate files. While Treasury Board is the employer for most bureaucrats attached to federal departments – who are part of the core public service – many others work for agencies, Crown corporations, and various other federal bodies, such as foundations and granting councils.

The core public service is about 171,000 bureaucrats strong. A year before the program review took hold, in 1994, it numbered about 231,400.

Part of the drop can be accounted by the fact the core public service no longer includes certain agencies, such as Revenue Canada which is now a standalone employer. The rest is mostly due to job loses.

Sen. Downe says this shedding has proportionately affected the regions of Canada. When he spoke to his inquiry in the Senate, he noted that the National Capital Region has maintained 70 per cent of the highest executive level positions in the public service from 1994 to 2003.

During the same period, the National Capital Region, lost the most. In 1994, there were about 39,312 public servants toiling in Ontario outside Ottawa. Nine years later, there were only 21,189. Quebec, not including the Gatineau area, lost 13,379 jobs during the same period.

Other big losers were British Columbia (7,135), Alberta (4,556), Manitoba (4,423), and Nova Scotia (4,234).

Sen. Downe admitted that there would be some fairly prohibitive relocation costs, but that those would be made up down the road. He also said that modern technology, including videoconferencing, has reduced the need to herd bureaucrats under one roof.

There doesn’t seem to be much appetite right now in decentralizing federal institutions in government.

“There is no active plan on it,” said Treasury Board President Reg Alcock last week. “It’s been talked about at different times but there is no plans to proceed in that way at this time.”

However, Sen. Downe says he believes there is some traction for his idea. He said he’s encountered by the recent proposal to relocate the Canadian Tourism Commission, an agency of less than 100 employees, from Ottawa to Vancouver, as well as Public Works minister Scott Brison’s new plan to sell off government buildings to the private sector to save operational costs.

“This move would further ease the relocation of departments and agencies to the regions. Mr. Brison himself alluded to this possibility, saying that the release of ownership would help create opportunities in places like Halifax or Moncton. However, these proposals should only be the start to a greater decentralization program,” he said in the Senate.

Sen. Downe said he has the support of several Senator’s. Sen. Terry Mercer, the Liberal Party’s former national director, has already spoken in favour of the inquiry which was adjourned in the name of Liberal Sen. Fernand Robichaud.

Inquiries in the Upper Chamber stay alive so long as a Senator speaks to it every 10 sitting days.