141 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. M. Zavattaro (ed.), Public Branding and Marketing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70505-3_8 Branding the Public Service of Canada: A Model Worthy of Emulation or Unfulflled Promise? Tim A. Mau Introduction Corporations have long been concerned with developing a recognizable brand, pref- erably one that is global in reach, as a means of creating a powerful identity that can enhance the trust and loyalty of both employees and customers and ultimately improve economic performance. Like many other private sector business principles adopted in the public sector as part of the new public management (NPM) move- ment, the use of brands and branding processes is now ubiquitous in the public sec- tor. This includes both politics and the governance process more broadly where branding has been practiced with increasing regularity around the globe (Eshuis and Klijn 2012; Temporal 2015). Branding is clearly a multifaceted phenomenon. In the private sector, branding typically involves specifc goods or the corporation itself. While public goods, such as a bridge, are sometimes branded, this is usually neither as important nor as preva- lent as in the private sector due to the lack of competition. Different forms of brand- ing tend to emerge in the public sector: politicians and political parties are marketed as brands; nations, cities, and other geographic regions are subjected to “place” or “location” branding (Nimijean 2006); government as a whole and its various depart- ments, ministries, and other public sector organizations can be branded like corpo- rations (Marland et al. 2017); and, fnally, a variety of government policies and services are often branded (Marland 2016). Government branding is the focus of this chapter. More specifcally, it explores the Canadian federal government’s effort to emulate leading private sector organiza- tions attempting to brand themselves as employers of choice. The impetus for doing so is obvious. Organizations are in the midst of a global war for talent, one for which the government is not immune (Glenn 2012). For many years, successive clerks of T. A. Mau (*) Department of Political Science, University of Guelph, Guelph N1G 2W1, ON, Canada e-mail: tmau@uoguelph.ca