Kelly McParland: Incoming Premier Doug sends a shot across the public service's bow
The unions won’t like it. But to a considerable degree they have no one to blame but themselves
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The case of the three bumbling bureaucrats who buggered up the federal payroll system, costing the Treasury a billion dollars or so and keeping tens of thousands of fellow civil servants from receiving their regular paycheques, carries a special resonance in Ontario, where their provincial cousins are feeling unusually vulnerable.
Vulnerability is not a sensation familiar to those employed by the government. One of the key aspects of the paycheque affair — the one that burns less favoured workers across the country — is the fact that the three guilty parties can’t be fired. They can’t even be named, lest someone actually criticizes them for their ineptitude and hurts their feelings.
We’re told that two of the three — all in relatively senior positions — have been reassigned. One retired. We don’t know what they’ve been reassigned to — cleaning the restrooms in the Langevin Block might be a good start — but we do know they remain protected within the vast coddling arms of the public service. They didn’t get their performance bonuses, poor fellows, though there’s always the chance they can make up for it if they do a better job on their next assignments. Actually, check that — the bar for bonuses is evidently set so low they appear to be all but automatic for anyone who doesn’t comprehensively mishandle a job as badly as they did theirs.
Cut to Ontario, where the public payroll has surged through a 15-year run of Liberal government. In the 10 years between 2003 and 2013, public-sector employment grew more than 27 per cent, compared to 5.6 per cent in the private sector. Ontario has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs as high costs and regulatory burden drive factories away, but government hiring is always there to keep the employment numbers looking good. Despite occasional blips, as the Liberals made half-hearted stabs at spending control, it was a secure and financially rewarding time to be paid by the taxpayer.
In the 10 years between 2003 and 2013, public-sector employment grew more than 27 per cent
Enter Doug Ford, who doesn’t gain official control as premier until June 29, but is already sending tremors through the offices of officialdom. On Monday, the province’s top bureaucrat notified all department heads of a spending freeze, until further notice. It’s not much of a freeze, all things considered: no more free newspapers, no free food or coffee at meetings, restrictions on travel, no new hires outside specified parameters. It immediately sparked an outcry nonetheless: OPSEU, the public service employees union, predictably decried the horrors that would ensue. “When Ford says ‘hiring freeze,’ he means full-out cuts; this is reckless behaviour,” proclaimed vice-president Eduardo Almeida. “When we stop hiring staff to provide public services and fill real job vacancies that too is a cut — it’s a growth-killer.”
Almeida’s remark is a telling illustration of bureaucrat-think. “Growth,” to a union boss, comes from hiring more people for the public payroll. Productivity doesn’t come into it. No matter how many people work for the taxpayer, it’s never too many, and must never be fewer. It is not conceivable that the same work might be done more efficiently, because every public servant, by definition to their protectors, is already overworked and operates at full capacity at all times. Technology may have drastically altered the job landscape in the private sector, but on the public payroll, change is an unwanted intruder. It’s “reckless” to even try to do better.
Despite the blowback, the changes Ford ordered won’t make much of a dent in government accounts. The bills and obligations left behind by the Liberals are simply too massive, and there are too many exceptions to Ford’s order: it specifically applies only to any expense “that can be placed on hold without putting government service delivery or the public at risk,” and exempted police, firefighters, nurses and teachers. Cutting the budget wasn’t the intent; changing the culture was. The directive was merely the first official reminder that the Progressive Conservatives were elected to slow the spend-a-thon at Queen’s Park, and put an end to the spiral of growth in costs, taxes, debt, regulations and government intrusion that left so many Ontarians feeling pressured to make ends meet despite a seemingly healthy economy.
'Growth,' to a union boss, comes from hiring more people for the public payroll. Productivity doesn’t come into it
The unions won’t like it, that much is guaranteed. But to a considerable degree they have no one to blame but themselves, as they took advantage of a succession of Liberal governments unwilling to risk serious confrontation, to expand the sheer size of the public sector and pad payrolls, benefits and the other advantages public employees now enjoy over private-sector workers. As has often been pointed out, there was a time when the job security that came with government employment was deemed a fair tradeoff for the lesser wages. But pliant governments allowed themselves to be gulled into narrowing the gap, to the point that many Canadians now look with envy at public employees who enjoy greater advantages than they do in virtually every aspect of the job: equal or higher salaries, greater security, better benefits, richer pensions, earlier retirement and no fear of the employer going under.
As demonstrated by the case of the three bungling bureaucrats, it is virtually impossible to be fired, no matter how badly you perform. Many public employees — the vast majority, no doubt — work hard and deliver excellent service, but they also know they don’t actually have to. They can take more time off than private-sector colleagues, skip out early or push paper till the cows come home, and they’ll receive the same pay and protections. The second-highest-paid cop in Ottawa, at just under $248,000, was once ordered to resign because of “unsatisfactory work performance” and spent years battling efforts to get him off the force. The “Sunshine List” of bureaucrats earning over $100,000 grows inexorably every year, even as other Canadians go years without an increase.
There’s no use blaming Ford for this. He didn’t create the imbalance, or the growing sense of unfairness it has caused. He definitely exploited it, but it’s the government and their unions that keep declaiming the need to offer rich incentives to attract “the best and the brightest,” but then extend the same plush safety net to the mediocre and middling, the worst and the dullest as well.
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