Who should the public service bureaucrats be loyal to?

Not, as James Travers says, the government of the day.

Perhaps it is simply imprecise word choice on his part, or lack of expanding on his statement, but these lines do not help people understand the non-partisan nature of the public service, nor why it is necessary to respect that the public service serves the public, not the elected government:

Certainly the government of the day has every right to expect bureaucrat loyalty.

No, it doesn’t. While it is the duty of the public service to forward government’s will as directed by the Minister in charge (with the exception of the independent agencies who do not have a Minsiter), it is not a question of loyalty. They serve Canada and Canadians, and must fulfill the elected government’s orders within the boundaries of their mandates and as directed by existing legislation which defines the responsibilities of an independent public service.

It would be more accurate to say that the government of the day has every right to expect bureaucrat cooperation and respect for the acts outlining the responsibilities of public servants.

For the public service, it is not at all (and should never be) an issue of loyalty, but of a committment and dedication to following the rules by which they are bound, regardless of who holds the most seats in Parliament. These rules and acts were developed by all of Parliament, over many, many sessions. They are regularly updated and adjusted as public needs change. Never should they be altered to accommodate the goals of a particular party in power.

If the public service was expected to shift loyalties to accommodate elected governments, there would be no stability in the public service and long term planning would be a waste of time.

Travers is also incorrect in what he says about the rights of Prime Ministers when it comes to public servants:

Prime ministers have as much right to set their administration's tone as they have to expect the bureaucracy to execute government's will.

The statement is a little vague, saying that one right is equal to the other, without really defining the range of those rights, but implying that they are considerable.

Yes, the Prime Minister does have some leeway in setting the tone in departments, but once more, existing policies limit that right to safeguard against any PM using public services to forward their own political agendas. We have already seen many cases of abuse of such policies, especially with the harper government - using public service sites to launch attack ads, changing the look of departmental sites so that they appear clones of the CPC ones, ignoring Treasury Board guidelines and introducing terms such as Harper’s Government rather than the Government of Canada.

After all, democracy demands that mandarins advise, ministers decide. Still, enforced silence and reflex compliance are anathemas to the openness and intellectual argy-bargy that are essential to the creation of effective policies that put the nation on the most beneficial course.

Yes. Travers is correct on that point. And by clouding the accountability and the independence of the public service by saying the government of the day has every right to expect (its) loyalty, Travers feeds the very thing he decries: enforced silence and reflex compliance would be the result of loyalty to governments of the day.

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.