Has the big beast had enough?

 Why do these lines of Yeats come to me now?

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

When John Baird made an announcement that really should have been made by the President of the Treasury Board, Stock Day, and when that announcement is such a blatant lie contradicting what Day has been saying, you need to ask why, and why now.

“We won’t see the massive cuts to the public service that happened under the last Liberal government,” said Baird. “I don’t envisage anything like that.”...As an example (of how important public servants are), he cited the 300 public servants who work at his former ministry, Infrastructure Canada. “We could not have done the economic action plan without them. They delivered it.”    

Sure.  Baird valued public servants so much when he was head of Infrastructure that he short staffed them while drastically increasing the workload.  They were then blamed for the slow process of loosening up stimulus funds.

The government body that oversees $38 billion in federal infrastructure spending has had its knuckles rapped for being poorly staffed and hiring unqualified employees.  Infrastructure Canada has had either no human resource plan or insufficient plans in the three years audited since the Conservatives came to power, said the report.  "The department has faced and continues to face a significant shortfall of staff," said the audit.

"My understanding of last year is they didn't add a single staff, net," said Kennedy.  "That is a recipe for bad performance. It's also a recipe for political interference. Shortcuts are taken when people aren't there and when people aren't trained."

Baird now claims there will be no cuts to departmental budgets, and spending will increase for defence, airport security, and law and order.  This certainly hasn’t been the case so far under Harper.


Although Demers (PIPS) says politically-driven public service cuts have been going on for many years, the process has accelerated under the Harper Conservatives. The 2007 federal budget mandated across-the-board savings of five percent in every government department.

Nor has the guy who actually is supposed to decide what to cut in the public service sent the same message.

Just days into his new job, Day cut 245 positions from government boards and agencies, principally related to the arts.  On the day he was appointed, he boasted of being the new Dr. No and warned of cuts to come.  The words of CON liars aside, logic tells us the public service has been, and will continue to be under attack.

Since the government has already promised that funding transfers to the provinces are safe and ruled out tax hikes, that leaves government programs as the obvious target to curb spending.

...Day earned a reputation as a zealous cost-cutter when as Alberta labour minister he was caught in a furor over hospital staffing when then-premier Ralph Klein's government attempted to chop public-sector wages. As a candidate for Canadian Alliance leader, he advocated cutting funding for departments like Health Canada.

So why send Baird out to lie on behalf of Day?  Day’s bragging of cuts is too recent for him to do a flip-flop, and he has reduced his feeble credibility to the negative zone over his non-existent criminal comments.

That still leaves us to wonder why Baird was sent by the master to make any comment on this at all.

The rough beast, perhaps, has been vexed to nightmare and is waking up.  Public servants are generally passive, grumbling from time to time about the little things, putting up with the partisan nature of their Ministers, adjusting after each election.  But push them too hard, from too many directions, and they will kick up more than a fuss.

In the past year, Flaherty has openly stated that their pensions and benefits are very generous and considering the context, there is little doubt these will be under attack.  Public servants are being forced to violate their own commitment to non-partisan service through pressure and instruments such as MEPs.  They are being muzzled.  They are being used as scapegoats while the political bosses who forced them despite their best advice walk away unscathed.    The list of public servants served up as fodder simply because they were doing their job and doing it well is lengthy.

Then, Colvin came along.  The moment I saw him on video, I knew he would be a catalyst for change.  Linda Keen was admirable, but so wonderfully tough she was viewed by some as abrasive.  Not so with Colvin.  He clearly didn’t want to be in front of cameras, he was obviously pained by the whole process, and he came across as very sincere.  His actions cost him.  Seeing Colvin take a beating day after day without quitting on his role as a public servant was not only inspiring to public servants, it also tweaked a little guilt each time their political bosses asked them to cross a line.

Then, along come Munir Sheikh.  Well, well, well.  Resign a gem of a job on principle.  A principle held dear by any decent public servant.

Public servants have to be wondering who is next, and what will be asked of them by this government.   They have to be waking up to the reality that they are nothing but a resource to be kicked around by this government, then tossed aside for political reasons.

Bad enough if your pay, pension, and benefits are threatened.  But when you are asked to toss aside your integrity by someone who doesn’t even give a damn about you, when you are used as the kicking boy, then you cannot go home each night feeling good about that eight or so hours of your life, day after day.

I’m guessing there are rumbling coming from the beast that is the public service, and Harper is realizing that this particular beast need only roll over to crush him.  Public servants have learned under this government the importance of saving e-mails and memos.

Colvin's letter: public service

Several people have covered Colvin’s letter, Further Evidence of Richard Colvin to the Special Committee on Afghanistan.  Off the top of my head, here are a couple of good posts, dealing with specific points that support Colvin’s credibility - here  and here.   

I want to comment on his closing statements:

I am not a whistleblower. Rather, I am a loyal servant of the Crown who did his job in Afghanistan to he best of his abilities, working through internal and authorized channels.
...Contrary to Minister Cannon’s suggestion, I testified in Parliament because I was summoned by the Committee and legally compelled to speak the truth. I feel it is my duty as a public servant, when commanded to appear before the Parliamentary Committee, to give evidence that is full, frank and fair. I feel duty bound to be frank and thorough in responding to the Committee’s inquiries.

Colvin is a public servant of the highest quality and he clearly defines what it means to act in that capacity.

It is not always an easy job.  Many public servants face what Colvin did: serving the public with honesty and integrity, not backing off despite the knowledge that doing your job properly can bring you major grief from some of your supervisors, or from the government, or both.

They also know they will likely be harassed and attacked by members of the public should their actions negatively affect the political party those members worship.  And I do mean worship, because there is little effort at understanding that the public servant was doing their best for Canada and Canadians.

You don”t need to carry a gun to serve your country, and you don’t need to be on a battlefield to be subject to attacks.

We are familiar by now with the on-going attacks from the government and even other public servants.  Here is a sample of some of the public’s attacks (complete with spelling errors), via the comment section in this article -  

The old must be a Liberal assumption:

 FearlessCrusade - It appears likely that this man is a Liberal mole trying to cause problems for the Conservatives. My suggestion to him is to "Let it Go".

Threats and death wishes:

 Austrian - Colvin will be rewarded by the same way like other thoughtless trators.

 ruthanddave  - colvin should be tried for treason! If he had been captured by the taliban how would he be treated? Must be a liberal for sure.

 Gerrypolitical  - Colvin should join the witness protection program (in the States) and disappear

There was one that said: We used to hang people like Colvin.  Maybe we should start to again.  It appears to have been removed, though.

The ridiculous distortion of information and mind boggling stretch in a bid to assassinate character:

koconnor100  - In 2002, he moved to Ramallah in the Palestinian territories, where he served as head of a new political mission in the wake of Yasser Arafat's death. His marriage failed, and he returned to Canada in 2005, moving to Calgary. During a vacation in Whistler he was offered a job in Afghanistan [5]. --- --- ---- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Colvin_%28diplomat%29 ---

Oh this guy is hardly a disinterested observer. He lived in Palestine for 3 years ? And the palistinians love him , they offered him a job.

Bull shit, of course.  The Crown offered him a position, just like the CONs did.

We can’t afford to have public servants like Keene and Colvin be bullied into silence.  This is why I harp on and on about the public service and the importance of keeping it independent from the elected government.  We can’t afford to have serious issues hidden.  How can we take charge of our own lives if being denied information, we cannot act on our own behalf or vote in an informed fashion?

The vast majority of comments (despite the obvious cut and paste jobs by neanders - compare the comment section in Kady O’s post to the CBC one) were very supportive of Colvin.  Here is my favourite positive comment:

 socialjusticequest  - Until now I disliked government civil servants. With your courage and professionalism, Mr. Colvin, I have changed my view now and acknowledge my own bias. You are a professional with integrity and I salute your efforts for revealing the truth. To know that someone like you serves as a civil servant, makes me a proud Canadian.

We need to give more of this support and encouragement to our public servants.  It not only helps to affirm they are performing a valuable service, it also lets our politicians know that we aren’t going to sit back and allow them to be undermined.

We have a responsibility as citizens to make our democracy work.  Applying pressure on our politicians forcing them to follow legislation, to be open and transparent, to respect the actions of agents working on our behalf - that’s showing love for your country.

Not heros, just doing their job.

Mixed amid comments on various sites where readers agree that asking for a public inquiry on the Afghan detainee issue amounts to attacking the troops are complaints that this story is getting old, and we should move on.

Sad comments, those, suggesting that news should be for entertainment, not information.

There are many serious aspects to the detainee issue, but in this post, I’m going to focus on the importance of an independent public service, something I’ve written of before because it lies at the heart of our democracy.

Kathryn May came out with an article in which she quotes law professor Errol Mendes and political scientist, Donald Lavoie.  Both see the current attacks on Colvin as another sign of a rapidly eroding independent public service.  They explain why this is occurring, and why it threatens our democratic way of life.

Mendes...said...”There is a growing crisis here beyond what happened to detainees in the 2006-2007 period. ... We are seeing the dismantling of Canada's independent public service," he said.  "This is a cornerstone underpinning our institutions and if we don't have a public service that speaks truth to power, we might as well have everything run out of the Prime Minister's Office."

Do any of us, no matter how partisan, think that would be good for Canadians?  All decisions made by the PMO?  All information distributed by whatever government is in place?  We would be prisoners of whatever ideology and interests the ruling party of the day maintains.  Recipe for corruption.

Why is this happening?

"Let's stop pretending the old rules still apply and we should be playing by the same rules when we have public servants not only being publicly attacked, but turning their guns on each other. If that's what we want, then we will have an even more cautious public service that won't take notes, keep records or speak out," said (Donald Savoie, the University of Moncton political scientist).        

We have seen several examples of this over the past three years: Linda Keen publicly attacked and sacked for doing her job; Kingsley gone after pressing for investigations into CPC election funding practices; Marc Mayrand attacked for questioning those practices; Measner booted of the Wheat Board for not wanting to gut its policies; recently, watchdogs Tinsley and Kennedy axed. 

As one senior official said this notion of "blaming the bureaucrat" is becoming normalized and supplanting ministerial responsibility so bureaucrats end up carrying the can for problems that belong to government.

We end up with a system where the public servants who are supposed to be working for us are too afraid to live up to their mandates or speak of wrongdoing and government corruption and interference.  Who then will tell us when contracts are passed over to friends of politicians at inflated costs and who will tell us when agencies such as Atomic Energy Canada cut corners and put us all at risk?  Politicians need donations to run an election campaign, and grateful companies are terrific sources of such funding.  The payback to them comes in legislation tailor-made to help them turn a buck, often at the expense and to the detriment of the general public.

I am not as convinced as Savoie and Mendes, however, that the public service will comply out of fear until it is no longer independent.  Contrary to what some people believe, most public servants are decent people who really want to be able to sleep with a clear conscience when they get home.  They want to look their kids in the eye when they talk about their jobs and when they teach those kids values to live by.

When someone like Keen takes on the monsters, consciences are tweaked.  When someone like Colvin follows, those consciences are working overtime.  It is difficult to watch Colvin battered day after day when there is no apparent gain for him in holding to his claims - and he cuts a fine image - a caring, humble man against the bravado of the Harper government and its hand-picked witnesses.  He reminds us that we all have a social responsibility to make our democracy work, to keep it fair and honest.

Recently, leaks came out of the PCO concerning government interference.  Other public servants - anonymously for now - have been talking as well. 

It is difficult for many public servants, I am told, to go to work day after day and be forced to bury items that should be posted for the public, and to whitewash reports and write partisan products.  They read the fine words in their mandates: transparency, excellent public service, welfare of the public, and it digs away at them when they are told to violate these principles.

In addition to the blows from their own conscience, many are aware that when the feces flies, it is not their political masters who will take the fall, but them.  They have several examples to give them little doubt of this: Keen, Colvin, Gualtieri, Measner...

So if the wave set in place by those responsible public servants who wouldn`t bend to political pressure lately and added to these past weeks by Colvin is kept in motion, we could see the public service get up, stretch, shake itself and say :enough, we are better than that.

People rebel against injustice if pushed hard enough, and principles run strong in many folks.  Personally, I don`t think the public service will meekly bow to the political yoke, but it needs the support and understanding of the public it serves.  That is us.  Not all public servants carry guns in their jobs, and not all face death or physical injury, but they serve none the less and sometimes they risk their jobs to serve us properly.

That is why it is important to support those who want to give testimony but face the opposition of a government with vested interests in having the truth hidden.

An aside - pretty impressive work by Rae in the House today as the NDP motion for a public enquiry was debated.  When attacked by a Conservative who mentioned that there is no problem, but if there is, it was the Liberals who caused it since they set up the transfers when in power, Rae said yes, that is what he is saying - this is not a partisan issue but a human rights one, a question of transparency and of Canada not engaging in or continuing to engage in violations of the conventions.  He said that he expects the Liberal party involvement to be scrutinized as well, and wants that.

That, my fellow Canadians, is a good politician, there for the electorate.