Some outcry over Senate stacking, but not a whole lot of outrage over the takeover of our public service. Scary, that, since an independent public service is supposed to make sure our tax dollars are well spent on our behalf and not to forward the goals of any particular political group, and to protect us from people and groups with self-serving agendas, among other things.
BACK in Canada’s 2006 election campaign, Stephen Harper said that even if his Conservative party won a majority in the House of Commons, he would not have “absolute power”, because the senators, civil servants and judges appointed by the Liberals would hold him in check. During the two Conservative minority governments that followed, he dealt with the Senate and the bureaucracy, using his powers to appoint, hire, fire and sideline to create a Conservative majority in the Senate and slot amenable bureaucrats into senior posts. After winning his long-sought-after Conservative majority in May, he is now turning to the judiciary. (emphasis mine)
When senior bureaucrats serve political masters rather than the public, we no longer have an impartial, independent public service working for us. Forget about transparency and accountability. It becomes a branch of the ruling political party paid for by us, and will bow to their new masters as their main goal is to forward that party's agenda and save that political power from embarrassment, even if it means lying to the public.
Monday Afternoon Links
9 hours ago
3 comments:
Harper has also stacked all Board appointments with his supporters. Sixth Estate has an extensive list of various appointments to port authorities, regional economic development, labour relations tribunal, immigration boards, etc. For some, all it took was a donation of $200 to the CONservative election campaign to get an appointment.
Now that he has a majority, he is definitely going after the judiciary. The two latest appointments are hard right (one was a Mike Harris cronie).
And again, Harper's hatred for Quebec and francophones in general rears its ugly head as he appoints a unilingual judge to the Supreme Court and a unilingual Auditor General to replace Sheila Fraser.
wow, thanks! Knew it was going on with Boards, but that's worse than I thought. Just amazing that more isn't written about this - the dangers, the scuzzy factor.
The Public Service Commission is supposed to appoint a new President in December. The current one is very good, but her term was up last May. It makes me nervous that there hasn't been even a rumour of who will replace Barrados. A harperite would really undermine non-partisan hiring, official languages in the fed. public service, visible minority hiring - all things stevo keeps attacking. You watch what the Sun media raves about, ask why is this coming up now, and you can be reasonably sure what steve has in his sights.
Thank you for wrriting this
Post a Comment