(If you’re a provincial civil servant, be aware this is a long piece, but you ARE going to want to read it. It’s likely the first positive thing you’ll have heard about your job in a very long time.)
Controversial as what I have to say may be in these redneck times, the very fact of its controversiality is why we Albertans need to have a very serious think about the place of government and its employees in our society.
It’s long past time for us to re-appreciate our provincial civil servants as intelligent, highly-trained, deeply dedicated and powerful creative forces in so many aspects of the potential overall improvement of our lives.
It’s amazing that an otherwise highly-educated province has fallen so deeply into its blind worship of Reganomics, the bonehead philosophy that drove California’s Proposition 13 which so starved the state and its municipalities of funds (without reducing public demand for services) that California’s state and local debt now totals nearly $2 trillion, or roughly 4 times the Canadian per capita debt load!
Since the 1980s, Alberta’s Conservatives have religiously chanted the Reganomics mantra – government and bureaucrats bad, private sector good – and their policies have reflected the belief that cutting taxes and downsizing government leaves more money flowing through the economy to generate more overall wealth.
In theory, at least, it’s not a bad philosophy…if it weren’t for the fact that 99% of us have learned that most of the money flows not into barber shops and restaurants and retail stores, but instead straight into the hands of the rich. And it more or less stays there.
The bottom line is that we’ve still got a government of swaggerers and gunslingers (the epitomes being Ron Liepert and, before him, Steve West) who curl their lips at government in general and openly disdain civil servants as a featherbedding underclass that’s constantly in need of a good downsizing. Their egos are tied directly to the size of their…budget cuts.
These are the guys who actually believe that it you decimate the ranks of workplace safety inspectors, or environmental enforcement officers, bad-guy employers and polluters will eagerly report their transgressions so they can be duly punished by the few remaining staff in government service.
These pol-honchos care far, far, less for the service that government is supposed to perform on behalf of the people who pay the taxes, than they do for the accolades they’ll get from fellow Reganomics-believers-voters-donors for having cut government budgets.
Pity the poor civil servant
You have to feel awfully sorry for the poor souls that have so far dodged the cutters and slashers in successive Conservative governments.
As more and more of their dedicated colleagues have been thrown under the bus by their employers, their work loads have increased by factors that would be unconscionable in efficient private sector companies. In some areas, these workloads have resulted in the loss of life – just ask someone in the child welfare department.
The scope of the civil service has also incredibly narrowed, from delivering (or supporting the delivery of) important services that protect, assist or enable Albertans to improve their lives, to sheepishly performing niggardly roles that mostly consist of telling people NO and keeping them away from government instead of bringing the government to them.
Civil servants these days have been forced into saying NO to this, NO to that. More and more, they’ve been forced by their bosses to aspire to, and deliver, less and less.
And they know it. Every time they go to work, they know how different it should feel in their gut to open that office door. They yearn to once again feel good about their work; they thirst for employers who understand how important it is for them to do what they’re trained to do, to provide whatever service they’ve chosen as a profession that makes them feel needed, valued and appreciated by the people they serve.
Instead, every day they re-enter a siege mentality, hunker down, shut up and just get through the day…chalking up one more day toward retirement. Everywhere around them they see the way things are done, or not done, and they know better. They also know it’s no use speaking out, because they’ll just doom themselves for the next downsizing.
How it could be?
OK, now for the positive pitch…and ironically it starts with a guy named Peter Lougheed, our first Progressive Conservative Premier who was elected more than 40 years ago.
There was a guy who GOT government – enlightened government, supported by a competent, respected and empowered civil service.
Under him, everyone had their roles on straight. Elected officials made policy and pointed the way. The civil service (below the Deputy Minister level, largely non-political in those days) advised the government in the process of making policy, then carried out the programs that flowed from the policy decisions. In those days, undue Ministerial interference in the delivery of programs actually caused minor scandals.
It was a good time to be a civil servant. You were respected for your skills and your goals. You were given the resources to do your job. You were encouraged to come up with new ideas and innovative approaches. And you were appreciated by your political employers for a job well done.
And the enlightened approach that Peter Lougheed brought to his relationship with government employees translated in his government’s similarly enlightened approach to its programs and services.
All kinds of smart, exciting, valuable, wonderful and just plain fun things happened in Lougheed’s days. He started the Heritage Fund. He bought an airline to retain control over transportation policy in a fast-growing, geographically isolated province. He bought an oil rig so he could sue Pierre Trudeau over royalties. He opened government’s eyes to protecting and enjoying the environment. His programs built or improved all kinds of local community facilities. He recognized Alberta’s multicultural wealth. And he invested heavily in encouraging the growth of our visual and performing arts.
All of that was done with the eager support of a truly empowered, appreciated civil service.
It can be that way again!
Alberta Liberals want an end to decades of Reganomics-based attitudes toward the place of government in society.
To us, an enlightened government is a social mechanism to make life better, safer, more fulfilling, more promising and hopeful, for all of us.
To us, the cost of government is an investment, not a waste.
(Here we need to take a side-step and assure fellow Albertans that we are also highly aware of the need for government to respect the taxpayer’s dollar, and to run as cost-efficiently as possible.)
But in the overall scheme of things, our approach to government would represent an enormous attitude shift about just where government fits in the lives we live.
We would say YES – not always, but certainly more often. YES to our citizens. YES to the value of our civil servants.
We would challenge both Albertans and our civil servants to become more proactive, more creative…to take more chances in promoting new ideas and new ways of doing things…and to feel safe while doing it.
We would protect whistleblowers big-time, but we would need to protect them much less often because our brand of government would be far more welcoming to (and therefore far less threatening as a result of) the internal venting of concern about how we’re doing things.
Save for our Deputy Ministers, we would sweep politics out of the higher ranks of the civil service with tough, new civil service ethics rules that severely limit managers’ ability to apply their personal politics to the workplace.
And we would completely remove the ever-present political strong-arm from the awarding of government contracts across the entire spectrum of government spending - from construction to IT.
It’s dead wrong – actually, it’s almost literally criminal – that we’ve come to the point where people in every nook and cranny of Alberta feel compelled to donate money or volunteer time to the Progressive Conservative Party if they want even a hope of getting provincial work.
Given how pervasive this nudge-nudge, wink-wink political rot is these days, doing away with it is a big job.
So, how would we do it? Easy!
Under the Raj Sherman Alberta Liberals, all major provincial contracts would be awarded in full public view, by a committee chaired by an Opposition MLA and attended by the media. Pros and cons of various bidders, and civil service recommendations, would be part of the discussion leading up to the contract award.
Similar, open processes not involving MLAs would be set up for the awarding of smaller contracts focused more on local or regional projects.
Imagine! Awarding contracts solely on the basis of merit.
Poof!...political pressure, gone.
Imagine that!
Imagine what this change alone will do for the position of the civil servant in the process of government. Suddenly, employees’ training and judgment will count for something. They’ll be more in control of delivering cost-effectiveness – not votes and donations – in the spending of public funds.
Imagine citizens having the individual freedom to say NO to an invitation to attend the local government MLA’s annual golf tournament!
So take heart, faithful provincial civil servants. There are people out here who get what you do, who know how important it is and who empathize with how frustrated you must be subjected to the ideological whims of people who still haven’t awakened to the fact that Reganomics landed the United States $15,200,000,000,000 in debt and didn’t do a thing to reduce the public’s need for government service.
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