public service series part II by Michael R. Bussière
Who exactly is the Government of Canada?
person in “Areal things inspires
touch with real terror in him,” is how one Canadian writer once described a bureaucratic administrator's worst nightmare in the modern era. The current state of affairs is a long way from the formative days of the PS when holding a pen was qualification one. Imagine a city in which one could map the complexification of government by the rise of bureaucratic epicentres. We call it home. Government boomed during World War II resulting in the erection of 18 temporary buildings constructed of white timbre all around central Ottawa. Older residents may remember them at Elgin and Laurier, at Dow’s Lake, and on the sites of the current US Embassy and National Gallery.The last one stood until the 1980s as they were slowly replaced by Lego blocks like Riverside Heights, Tunney’s Pasture, and Place Vanier. Place du Portage transformed downtown Hull from Little Chicago into a brutalist utility. Place de Ville was the city’s first Mies knock-off; Place Ville Marie minus the sex appeal.They stand like filing cabinets, populated by swivel servants who scale mountains of policy papers a required 7.5 hours a day. In simpler times, “The Government of Canada” meant the ruling party (that changed occasionally) and a professional civil service (that supports policy development, implementation, and continuity). With the growth of government came The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), The Professional Institute of the Public Service (PIPSC), and a bunch of others. Get a government job and bam(!), you’re in a union; unless you’re a contractor, in which case you work
44 OTTAWALIFE SPRING 2020
The old Canada Post headquarters in Ottawa
the same job, you can get canned without warning, and you have to pay for your own massages. The advent of unions also created the current schizoid culture that differentiates between “The Government” and “The Government”. Unions are there to protect workers from, and negotiate with, “The Government” as employer. There’s been a lot of protection required lately. It’s not clear from whom or what. A recent Treasury Board Secretariat report on the state of 2,197 buildings owned by the Crown in the National Capital Region describes a stunning degree of neglect. 187 buildings are in critical condition and 409 are ranked as poor, totaling about 27 per cent overall. Only 31 per cent rank as being in good condition. Then, as if Soviet-era buildings aren’t bad enough, there was the little matter of bedbugs. Government workers started noticing the little buggers in federal buildings in several cities; presumably not in beds, unless nap time was a stealthy contract clause. PSAC immediately called upon “the government” to take action to ensure “that bed bugs won’t follow them home and impact their families,” meaning; Catherine McKenna in a hazmat suit giving everybody the once-over before they O-Train it outta there. These are shocking problems regarding the working conditions of thousands of
public servants, especially considering the properties are managed as per contracts awarded by, you guessed it, public servants. If ghetto plague and droopy ceilings weren’t bad enough, there is the whole Phoenix pay system debacle. Here’s the 411 for those of you not being overpaid, underpaid, or not paid at all. Phoenix, like building deterioration, has occurred under two political watches. It all began in 2009 as part of what the Harper government called The Transformation of Pay Administration Initiative.The plan was that an automated payroll system would save taxpayers $70 million annually. All political parties concurred. IBM’s PeopleSoft software was selected to do the trick in a sole-source contract at a cost of $5.7 million.The whole thing would be run by Public Services and Procurement Canada out of the new payroll HQ in Miramichi, New Brunswick. Phoenix would serve 101 departments and nearly 300,000 employees. Three Harper ministers oversaw various stages of implementation. The Phoenix contract somehow ballooned to $185 million, leaving the Tories to look for cost-saving measures for their cost-saving measure. The solution was for public servants to assume responsibility for training from IBM, deviating from the recommended model. Carrie Bendzsa of IBM
