Building Reserve Capacity into Public Institutions

Reserve capacity is the idea that we have more than we need. We need a new method of accounting to sell the idea that more costs less.

The most significant achievement of Canadian governments over the last decade has been the disappearance of what we once referred to as public management. Ministry hallways are more busy with issues managers than they are with employees who, at one time, would actually deliver tangible public services. Public administration has evolved significantly, with the management of outsourced contracts and public perception slowly taking priority over more mundane discussions about how to best serve the public. 

Rewind twenty years ago when our federal and provincial governments were working hard to balance the books by finding efficiencies wherever they could.  Services were dropped down to the next unfortunate level of government, who got stuck delivering the service with less than generous transfer payments.  Efficiencies had to be found somewhere, and when the obvious cost-saving measures have all been taken, you look to the private sector to find a few more.  

The private sector is so deeply intertwined with all functions of government.  Much of this happened though a heady mixture of convenience and ideology.  There is no need to sharpen your own wisened pencil when you can simply engage the private sector and dive headlong into the philosophy that third-parties will always be able to fulfill the role of government much better than the government ever could.  

We have found ourselves ruled by a small army of communications and project managers, each assigned to ensure the timely delivery and announcement of key deliverables, whether they be flu shots or long-term care beds.  In the short space of ten years, the ability of our government to accomplish something on its own has become very much suspect.  We have paid people to catch our fish for us for so long that it feels awkward to even hold a fishing rod.

Finding efficiencies didn’t just impact our ability to singularly respond to a crisis as a coherent government entity.  The efficiencies also slowly worked to decimate our reserve capacity.  We always provided just enough of a public service, but certainly never more.  We offered excellent healthcare and educational programs, but neither system was backstopped by additional capacity in case things ever went sideways.  There were never any extra seats in the classroom, and the only beds we could find in the hospitals were scattered throughout the hallways.

We priced our social programs to perfection.  Our government leaders dutifully reported on the accomplishments made by outside contractors with a government badge, and while we remained a little nervous about the overall state of our institutions, we also realized that fiscal realities are difficult to avoid.  So acute care beds would always be above 85% utilized.  Classrooms would see caps at 23.5 heads. A long term resident could expect 2.7 hours of personal attention.  All of these essential services, each measured out precisely to the decimal point, lest we mistakenly provide an additional fraction of a bed or a teacher.

The pandemic has shown us the value of reserve capacity, and the consequences of not having it.  There are few ICU beds available, creating classrooms or reducing class sizes is not something done overnight, and it’s next to impossible to find personal support workers when your issues manager is busy tweeting messages of self-congratulation.  Our institutions have proven unable to handle a pandemic stress test, and without our repeated interventions they would have failed many times by now.  We are adjusting and compromising all the way down, just to ensure our institutions can stumble into tomorrow.

There are very real consequences to our lack of reserve capacity.  The effects can be measured in additional fatalities, unnecessary economic loss, and cognitive decline within our most vulnerable populations.  The metrics escape us, here, because assessing the fallout from public institutions in mid-collapse is a speculative industry.  The contract to survey the damage hasn’t been awarded yet. 

As Canadian governments look to announce their mid-pandemic budgets, the public desire for reserve capacity is absent.  We want our services to just work.  My mother has never referred to reserve capacity, although she has never gotten uppity about idled fire trucks or a military that spends a lot of time training.  She knows exactly why the expensive equipment is polished daily and rarely used and so she pays her taxes. 

So the idea of reserve capacity isn’t foreign to us, we just struggle to apply it to other areas of our society where, truth be told, the economic math would be much more compelling.  What is the value of a classroom of 20 students that can also be transitioned to a class of 17 during a global health crisis?  

Education is one sector where we can fruitfully apply the idea of reserved capacity. Should a school and it’s support system be designed and staffed to withstand a pandemic?  It would seem irresponsible to not apply some margin of safety.

We should combine our public health, education, and economic modelling to clearly show the return on investment offered by reserve capacity in schools.  A smaller classroom would improve educational outcomes for students, reduce worker and student absenteeism, and would allow us to more easily pivot in an emergency situation.

One of the most crippling cognitive biases is our tendency to underestimate how much effort it takes to get things done.  When you’re running a tight ship, there are limited options for how to navigate the storm. A slightly larger crew working the oars might have kept the cargo off the rocks, if only we had the foresight to see the extra bodies as an investment, and not just as dead weight to be left behind on the dock.

The delivery of public services is a sustained act that we have allowed to become transient and unfocused.  There is renewed debate about what we expect our government to build with its own hands, and at what level we expect it to be done at.  When your institutions collapse so spectacularly, the window for change gets opened a little wider.  The idea of reserve capacity works as a really nice wedge to just prop that window open and let the breeze blow in.