Even if Stephen Harper wins a minority, it looks like he won't be around long. Whoever forms the next government will face the task of rebuilding the public service. Jeremy Nuttall writes:
No matter who forms government after Monday's election, they need to move quickly to end the culture of intimidation, inefficiency and top-down management that infects Canada's public service, say two former top bureaucrats.
Former Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page and the former nuclear safety watchdog Linda Keen agree the public service needs major, quick reform.
Kevin Page may be out of government, but he has not given up his passion to reform it:
Too many people are being appointed to powerful positions with little or no experience in a department, he said. "These people are moving paper around as opposed to engaging and providing fearless advice to cabinet ministers."
And though many civil servants may be proven performers, many appointments to top jobs are made based on relationships and networking instead of looking for the best candidate, Page said. He too was guilty of this, he acknowledged.
That's resulted in civil servants more concerned with keeping deputy ministers and MPs happy and delivering services however the government wants instead of providing alternative, more effective solutions, he said.
And Linda Keen, former head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission agrees. Moreover, she has a tale to tell:
Keen, appointed by the former Liberal government, said she was really pushed from her job because she rejected a government plan to build a new nuclear reactor that didn’t meet modern safety standards. The plant being pushed by the Conservative government was based on 40-year-old design standards.
Instead of improving the design, the government set out to get her, Keen said.
Keen said former Saanich-Gulf Islands MP Gary Lunn, then natural resources minister, was an ideologue who told her it was her job to promote the plan for new reactors, not regulate them.
Lunn did not return multiple requests for comment.
Keen stood her ground, worried about her reputation in the scientific community if she started bowing to politicians instead of ensuring the safety of the reactors, she said.
Keen said she started hearing she was a target because of her opposition to the new plan for the reactors.
"They're after you," a friend working for a senator told her. "They're going to get rid of you."
The Harperites told ambitious civil servants that advancement depends on telling the government what it want to hear, not what it should know.
That has to change.
8 comments:
It may be possible to change the culture within the civil service fairly quickly but it will take years to undo all the harm Harper has done to our various departments. Its easy to slash and burn but much harder to grow and nurture! I just hope that no matter who gets in the other non Con partys and the new government put partisanship aside and work together to do that. Well one can dream cant one?
This election is all about dreams, Rural. We can dream of a better country. Or we can continue to have nightmares.
Nothing is impossible Owen in changing the culture within the civil service. The New government just has to have the will.
I agree, Pam. But it needs more than will. It needs respect for the people who work in public service.
Severance packages our going to cost us plenty but the joy of watching all the harper 'appointees' get pink slips will ease the pain.
The list is long and devious the way they have infiltrated every department and every province to do the bidding of their benefactor.
Trudeau will have to create a new bureaucracy just to purge the myriad plants throughout the system...including the RCMP.
It all comes down to the kinds of people you hire, Ron. The list of Harper's bad hires -- Mike Duffy, Patrick Brazeau, Bruce Carson, Arthur Porter -- is stunning.
I've heard the same kind of stories from my Ottawa cousin Owen, a long serving public service manager who retired this year after deciding enough was enough. The entire system is strangled by the micromanager and his cast of micromanagers being micromanaged by him. The mere thought that he didn't know about the Nigel Wright cheque to Duffy is so utterly preposterous that to believe otherwise would be naivety to the fullest degree. To believe that this government has enabled anything close to innovation, creativity and even productivity is too, naive and dumbfounding.
In their retirement, the voices inside the civil service -- the ones Harper silenced -- are speaking out. Eventually, this whole ugly saga will become public, waterboy.
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