【正文】 flexibility and discretion was, in some jurisdictions, notably the Britain and New Zealand, coupled with increased organizational differentiation, as evidenced by a proliferation of departments and agencies with narrowed mandates, many with a single purpose. “Agencification’, however, was not a major focus reform in all jurisdictions, including Canada and Australia where such change, if not on the margins, was clearly secondary to enhanced managerial authority and responsibility (Pollitt and Talbot 2020). The major NPM innovations quickly led to concerns, especially in those jurisdictions where these developments were most advanced, about a loss of public service coherence and corporate capacity, on the one hand, and a diminished sense of and mitment to publicservice ethos, ethics and values, on the other. Reactions to these concerns produced some retreat, reversals, and rebalancing of the systems in questions (Halligan 2020). Nowhere, however, was there a wholesale rejection of NPM, in theory or practice, and a return to traditional public administration, even if there necessarily emerged some tension between rhetoric and action (Gregory 2020). The improvements in public management brought about by at least some aspects of NPM were simply too obvious, even if these improvements were modest in parison to the original claims of NPM proponents. At the same time that NPM became a major force for change in public administration, however, it was acpanied by a panion force that saw political executives seeking to assert greater political control over the administration and apparatus of the state, not only in the formulation of public policies but also in the administration of public services. Accordingly, from the start, at least in the AngloAmerican systems, there was a fundamental paradox as political executives, on both the left and the right sides of the partisanpolitical divide, sought to (re)assert dominance over their publicservice bureaucracies while simultaneously devolving greater management authority to them (Aucoin 1990). The impetus for this dynamic lay in the dissatisfaction of many political executives with the ‘responsiveness’ of public servants to the political authority and policy agendas of these elected officials. Public choice and principalagency theories provided the ideological justifications for taking action against what were perceived as selfserving bureaucrats (Boston 1996). Beyond theory and ideology, however, the practice of public administration by professional public servants in some jurisdictions, notably Australia, Britain and New Zealand, offered more than sufficient evidence to political leaders of a publicservice culture that gave only grudging acceptance, at best, to the capacity of elected politicians to determine what constituted the ‘public interest’ in public policy and administration. The Canadian case is of interest, I suggest, for several reasons. In parative perspective, Canada did not approach public management reform with much of an ideological perspective. When the Conservatives defeated the centrist Liberals in 1984, neither the new prime minister, Brian Mulroney, nor his leading ministers were hardcore neoconservatives in the Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher mold. At that time, and until the end of the Conservative government in 1993, the party was essentially a centrist party in the Canadian ‘brokerage’ party tradition. While important aspects of neoliberalism unfolded, especially under the umbrella of economic deregulation that came with a freetrade agreement with t