Canada’s Public Service

Who exactly is the Government of Canada?

Areal person in touch with real things inspires 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.

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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

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

The old Canada Post headquarters in Ottawa

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

Gullibility and fear of culpability by two political parties collided with union agendas and shadowy bureaucratic agents to create a Rubik’s Cube of accountability. Taxpayers are probably wondering why a professional public service that cannot keep the bedbugs from biting would it be trusted to implement a sophisticated payroll system. confirmed that, "Responsibility for training design and execution was transferred to the Crown in March 2014.” Blame ping-ponged back and forth once serious problems emerged under the current government. "There was a cost associated with training, and it was made clear to me that the Conservatives opted to go with the train-the-trainer model versus buying the IBM training approach. In this case, savings were prioritized before the project was fully implemented," said Liberal Judy Foote, the minister of Public Services and Procurement Canada at the time. By all accounts, Foote, an experienced and highly capable professional who genuinely took Phoenix to heart, never received warnings from either senior government managers nor from the independent report by Gartner Consulting that was dismissed by those officials. Throughout the early stages of the calamity, PIPSC President Debi Daviau never once blamed Foote, who always assumed full responsibility, as a good professional would. Auditor General Michael Ferguson revealed the rot in May 2018, by which time about 80 per cent of 290,000 public servants were experiencing Phoenix grief. The Standing Senate Committee on National Finance labeled the whole f-up an “international embarrassment” Ferguson called it “an incomprehensible failure of project management and oversight.” He blamed three unnamed senior managers, public service phantoms in a mysterious layer of government which is neither unionized nor politically accountable. “I think there may well be opportunities to improve the accountability regime,” opined the AG. “One of them is to look at the number of layers of executives and whether or not that number of layers facilitates the effective flow of information.” All three no-names have since been shuffled or retired and given a sweet bonus, in spite of a dreamy $70 million a year in savings mutating into a repair bill that could top $2.2 billion by 2023. Add in the collective fiduciary nightmare of public servants and it’s enough to make your pinhead spin. Ferguson summed up the outrage in polite, bureaucratic language. “We do need to look at the capacity of the Government of Canada for removals.” In other words, fire their asses! Gullibility and fear of culpability by two political parties collided with union agendas and shadowy bureaucratic agents to create a Rubik’s Cube of accountability. Taxpayers are probably wondering why a professional public service that cannot keep the bedbugs from biting would it be trusted to implement a sophisticated payroll system. Where were unions when all of this was unfolding? PIPSC President Debi Daviau issued a rebuttal to the AG’s depiction of “an obedient public service fearful of making mistakes.” “It’s true,” Daviau asserts, “numerous warnings about Phoenix and countless pleas not to proceed with it (including from PIPSC and other unions) went inexplicably unheeded.” If PSAC/ PIPSC members saw the train wreck coming, why would they not have thrown themselves in front of it by walking off the job right then and there to prevent thousands of their sisters and brothers from being royally screwed? Daviau defended them, claiming they were still intimidated by Harper, three years after his defeat. So why, postfacto, has PSAC/PIPSC never once supported strike action, especially by members who have received no pay whatsoever under Phoenix? An old beat cop investigating a crime would have said, “If it doesn’t make sense, it’s probably not the truth.” Project management and procurement are perhaps the most front-facing roles of the public service. Build stuff, buy stuff. You’d think building stuff must be the more challenging of the two, given all of the stagnant or dead-end NCC botch jobs around town. This is the agency that spent $35 million to build a pavilion about Canada and The World, to the express objections of national museums whose own programming mandates were being trod upon. They insisted it was pointless. The business plan on this one obviously had as much professional expertise behind it as the concept itself. Up went CATW’s new home on perhaps the most stunning piece of real estate in the city. They built it, right next to Rideau Falls, but nobody came. Really. Nobody. Ever. NCC might has well have built a pay toilet on top of the Centennial Flame. It became a tool shed for years before being rented at $200k annually, meaning it will be paid for in the year 2195, give or take astro-inflation. Hands up if you think anyone was fired (moron that later…). Ok, so then there’s procurement, no doubt a complex process that requires tremendous planning and analysis — but isn’t that what a professional public service does? Laurier’s civil service procured the inception of the Royal Canadian Navy. Mackenzie King’s wartime cabinet committee, led by C. D. Howe, expanded it into the 4th-largest navy in the world. The public service has a long tradition from which to learn the ancient bureaucratic craft of spending money. So why have comedians been making jokes about military equipment since the great Dave Broadfoot got laughs out of Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig with his, “The US now claims to have invented invisible weapons. Hell, that's all Canada's got!” zinger? Right in front of PE Trudeau no less, who probably wished he’d thought of that one himself. Brian Mulroney became PM shortly after that state visit and was determined to croon his way into America’s heart. Military procurement and free trade would surely go hand in hand. The