Treasury Board President Tony Clement is talking tough, telling federal civil servants they’re going to have to start performing or be out of a job:
“I refuse to believe that virtually every single person that the federal government hires is going to perform to the standards that we expect,” Clement said Tuesday. “We have a system right now in Canada where more people die as public servants than are let go.”
But with such powerful unions behind them, seemingly able to block any firings for years, if not indefinitely, does any public civil servant really have anything to worry about?
I was a federal civil servant for a number of years. you have to knife your boss to get thrown out. there is a huge percentage of feds who do no useful work. they should ask themselves everyday
the remainder of my above comment is as follows” how what I am doing improves the life or security of Canadians” the answer unfortunately would be not at all.
This is the only criteria along with amount of output which should be considered in their evaluation of how useful and essential they are.
Ditto here Denis. It’s a bloody shame what one can get away with in the public service.
I daresay uttering a racial or homophobic slur would get you fired quicker than knifing your boss.
I read the article and much of what the minister proposes is already in place. I have to fill out yearly PRAPs (Personal Responsibility and Assessment of Performance) which I believe no one but my supervisor ever reads, new hires do not accrue severance pay and the new contracts stop the accumulation of severance pay as well.
Ghost, everyone in Transport Canada has to undergo mandatory ‘Harassment Training’. The penalty for using a racial slur, for a first offence, is more harassment training. I’m not sure what happens to a repeat offender, the initial course is so bone-headed that no one that I know of has ever offended.
There is only one person I know who was ever fired here. He brought a fake grenade into work and threatened his co-workers and supervisor with it.
Clement may be whistling into the wind. But I keep thinking of Randy Newman’s line”
“They all hate us anyhow/So let’s drop the big one now/Let’s drop the big one …. now.”
No, that would get you counselling and sensitivity training. Which of course would take place during work hours so you’d be paid for it.
If the Fed “civil service” is anything like teaching, competent supervisors have to be made of titanium to get someone fired.
Documentation: One Year
Conferences, recommendations, monitoring: Years
More documention.
Union will get a lawyer for the slacker.
Endless delays, medical leaves, hearings, more delays.
If individual is over fifty or so, everyone will coast until s/he is pensioned off.
I’d like to see a quota of civil servants fired every year by lottery, and banned from ever being re-employed in the civil service. Nobody is irreplaceable and it isn’t good for anyone to think they have a job for life.
One of the reasons the military works as well as it does is that staffing is done on the assumption that everyone is in their job temporarily. Normally you expect that within two years you are going to have to hand over to someone else and they are going to find all your screw ups and you are going to take over someone else’s. I don’t expect you can run every organisation that way but it is instructive to see how it affects the culture when everybody knows how much their working life and the respect of their colleagues depends on really getting things right.
Al in Ottawa, self-assessment is essentially meaningless and has nothing to do with the workload and performance.
Plus, harassment training has zilch to do with harassment but is in itself a form of harassment, for it silences any complaints because the individual is afraid that such will be viewed as ‘harassment’.
The value of a bureaucracy is extremely difficult to assess because it is removed by several steps from the actual world. Bureaucracies deal in secondary elements; in records, words, numbers – all alienated from people and things.
Unions, those parasites of our economy, are themselves alienated from the actual world; they too are secondary systems living off the wages of workers.
Put the two together, and you’ve got a ‘virtual fog’ glued to the government. Trying to find out what actually goes on and make both accountable for their activities is almost impossible.
My suggestions would be a constant attempt to reduce the size of the bureaucracy, increase the cross-referencing of its electronic data base, and twice a year, have a ‘sweep’ to ensure that soft data is actually connected to a hard object, ie, that the benefits are not being paid to a non-existent person.
Oh, and, sigh, pass a law forbidding public service unions. Now, that would solve a lot of problems.
So the next time civil servants show up in Phony Tony’s riding to put up some gazebos, they better act sharp, eh?
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/gazebos-and-the-governing-morality/article626964/
What is so confusing about firing civil servants? Of course civil servants may be fired. If you equate the results knowing that the union can/may get a financial settlement for the fired member. Those fired are severed from the operation and although they may get a financial settlement they no longer have a civil career.
The Taxpayer pays more money if the civil servant is not fired… better to cut waste & shuffle malcontents outside
The sad reality is that without supervisory intervention, those who are employed have self selected based on their idiology/mentality.
Much like any other career….
Police have a police mentality when they enlist.
“…
The sad reality is that without supervisory intervention, those who are employed have self selected based on their idiology/mentality. Much like any other career….
Police have a police mentality when they enlist.”
Gee, it was my observation after 30 years of policing that it was the “Supervisory Intervention” that produced the “Police Mentality”. 😉
Wouldn’t be such a problem if people were hired based on merit and qualifications and not quotas of representation. Hired with a sense of entitlement and no sense of responsibility.
I gave up on Tony moons ago when he tried to foist big pharma monopoly on the public by killing the nutrition/vitaminn/herbal suppliment industry (their direct competitors) with broad sweeping impractical regulating and police state confiscatory provisions – it’s always some big special interest agenda with Tony and he always uses some draconian force to carry it through.
I suspect the same will happen in trying to union bust in the upper ranks of civil service (not that it doesn’t need dismantling) but Tony will get silly-tough and have to back off – as always.
Bureaucracies are their own reason for existence, and they only ever grow. Unless an outside agency comes along to prune them back, they will consume all available resources.
In France the bureaucracy was legendary. It took the French Revolution to finally dislodge it. Then of course it rapidly grew back.
Hopefully here we can use that bit of history to find a less disastrous solution.
What does the government do that cannot be privatized besides apply military force and police power?
Companies that specialize in handling employee pay is just one example of a function carried out by bureaucrats now that could be contracted out.
Federal civil servants;
As described by a sister-in-law who works in Ottawa and a coffee buddy who has two family members workings for the feds:
– French language competency carries more weight than ability even if language is NOT required for the job description.
– Middle management Quebecers fill their departments with, guess what, French speaking Quebecers, with competency not needed.
– Middle and upper management have no process for vetting jobs contracted by their departments. Bids are regularly padded by contractors with a history of working for the feds. The level of padding is extreme. (Assume kickbacks)
– Middle management have computers at home and do not go to offices in many cases. Evaluation of effectiveness is little to none.
– Simply destroying whole files rather than dealing with the contents is done.
– Federal worker in Ottawa who bragged about doing 2 HOURS of work per day max. Had access to government paid for gym which he used for the workout and juice bar, couple hours a day. Rode to work on his bike on government time every day.
* The inmates are running the asylum.
We keep giving it away, of course there will be someone to take it.
ET says:
“The value of a bureaucracy is extremely difficult to assess because it is removed by several steps from the actual world. Bureaucracies deal in secondary elements; in records, words, numbers – all alienated from people and things.”
This is true…. and therefore how can you fire anyone since there are no real primary outcomes to measure?
Some areas of the federal service do quite good work….these are departments that measure and report on real things. Like Stats Canada, parts of Transport Canada etc (one may not like what they measure and report but they are working on real objective data). They are, perhaps not coincidentally, the departments where internal assessment show employees like to work there.
IMHO, it’s the policy shops which drive the regulations/reporting functions of government, when it should be the other way around. That would make smaller and more efficient government.
To answer the question: no absolutely not. This government has only ever talked tough-if even that-regarding cutting spending while increasing the largess ever more. There is no reason to believe it will be any different regarding the public service.
agreed I still remember the civil servant servant who was fired for watching porn 6 hours a day for over a year. he grieved and the union gor his job back
ET, for some time now, I’ve realized that the only way a country/province/municipality can move forward with some hope for good fiscal health is to ban public sector unions.
Some people think such a statement is extreme but take a moment to think about what happens in practice. Public sector unions contribute large amounts of money to get politicians friendly to them elected into positions of power. When that happens – and it happens frequently – then something very perverse happens at the bargaining table during contract negotiations: On both sides of the table you have individuals who are friendly to the union members yet neither of them are clearly looking out for the group paying for everything – the taxpayer. So essentially ‘A’ & ‘B’ come to an agreement to spend the money of ‘C’, yet ‘C’ has no direct say in the amount of money spent or how that money is spent.
Furthermore, even when non-union-friendly politicians are in power, they are rightfully frightened of what the public sector unions can and will do to them if they strive to act a little too effectively on behalf of the taxpayer.
Ultimately a society cannot survive financially when public sector unions exist for they tip the balance of power too far in favour of the union members and not in the best interests of the taxpayers. That is unsustainable.
Robert, I agree, and we had some stark examples recently in the provincial elections in Alberta and Ontario. Basically the public service and teacher’s unions have both governments by the shorts.
Never!! I agree with Denis.
Robert and Ken – exactly right with your descriptions of public sector unions. They ought to be outlawed; they are parasites on the taxpayer as well as the workers.
CT – that’s a good outline of the federal bureaucracy. Yes, because of our dreadful Charter, French language ‘competency’ is a key factor in evaluating pay. Therefore, a majority of non-francophones (and they are in the minority anyway!) take the taxpayer funded French language courses – even if they never, ever, speak a word of French in their job…because it increases their salary!
And, as you note, middle management is dominated by Quebecers who ‘hire their own’. The problem with the Charter’s insistence on bilingualism is that Canada is not bilingual; only 20% of the population is bilingual.
That means that the bureaucracy moved, long ago, into the control of the Ottawa-Montreal population, which is, mentally, focused only around Quebec and Ontario. BUT, the economy of Canada and the population base shifted, at that same long ago time, to the West! BUT, the West can’t get in to work in the bureaucracy because of that French language requirement!
So, we have a bureaucracy alienated not only because it deals only in secondary realities (words, data) but it is economically and mentally alienated from the Canadian population.
The unions and the Charter are very powerful and the only way to deal with them is ‘the Harper Way’..which is incremental, ‘drip-drip’, and slowly re-educate the population into an acceptance of reality. Not the old centralist image of Canada held by these 1950’s bureaucrats but the reality of Canada – the West, the North, international trade and so on.
Continuing to fight in the “one hand tied around their balls” style will bring the same result of being outflanked by the unionistas. The 5/10% budget cuts blew up in the CPC’s face for this reason. It’s not possible to work with the unions. They must be openly attacked in the harshest way possible.
Having worked in the federal civil service in many different departments and positions I can state from personal experience that it is next to impossible to fire anyone due to the unions. In my opinion there should be no public service union allowed. When you can negotiate contracts with someone else’s money it is easy to be generous with the unions’ demands, and that is a major reason why there should be no public service unions. So I admit to finding Mr. Clement’s words pretty much empty words. I am also angry that this same government is not supporting real accountability and transparency of public servants, in particular senior managers by gutting the private member’s bill to make it happen. Passing such an important bill would be meaningful and not just empty words.
Energy super-power. You forgot energy super-power.
Great to see you back.
Those benchmarks look very similar to those at my place of work. The difference is in perspective.
In private industry, someone like myself is grateful that there is a system in place to a) guide my career and gauge my progress against concrete goals; b) allow me to separate myself from the herd by recognizing good work ensuring a reasonable amount of “fairness”; and c) cull the riff-raff because the economy is competitive, and at work, we must all depend on each other to ensure we are all employed going forward.
Whereas, in the public sector, such benchmarks are frowned upon and viewed as negative. The “whys”, and the consequences of such are self-evident, and well-articulated in one of the Phantom’s recent rants about liberals(generally speaking of course).
BTW, public school teachers, in case you didn’t know…. this means you too.
agreed, this is the root cause
i constantly see a conflict of interest between the taxpayer and the public sector unions; but, for the reasons you state above, the taxpayers are not represented in the negotiation.
I’m with Tooner on this except, termination for all after 5years.
People who remain employed by govt for extended periods(>5yrs) become unemployable and sick.
Its a safety issue.
I once thought that public sector unions were a well-intended blunder.
I now feel that they were deliberately created to ensure Leviathan Eternal; clearly, there is no more sure-fire way to guarantee government growth into infinity. I also believe, limited government cant in some parties notwithstanding, all politicans want bigger government.
To expect politicians to reduce the size of government is as silly as expecting a large corporation’s VP of Marketing to strive for a reduction in market share.
Obviously a government monopoly service provider should not be unionized. Oppressed by the …. taxpayers??!!
Pay and benefits should be set by a remuneration board and should be slightly below the level of the private sector to reflect the lower economic risk these employees face, just as government bonds traditionally sported lower yields than corporates.
There should be World Peace too!!!
Years ago, I got fired for stating that I was voting Social Credit in a B.C. election. I took a SC poster to put up with the NDP poster in the lunchroom – two days later, I was ‘looking for work’.
Put all government services out for tender, private companies and the public sector unions free to bid on the contracts, my bet is the unions would soon cease to exist and the taxpayer might actually start getting value for their dollars.
Hell of an idea Bruce, but it won’t happen until we get rid of the great weakness in our democratic system of government: re-election.
You know, I was always impressed with the wisdom of juries: the incredible ability of 12 ordinary folks to render sound and common-sense decisions based on the evidence, most of the time. Every now and then they’d come up with a head-scratcher, but more often than not, the confusion was due to the judge giving stupid instructions, or admitting ‘expert’ evidence that didn’t pass the test.
So, I think we’d be well-served if we used the same process to select our representatives in our various levels of governments. Go through our voters lists, select people for a 6 year period, pay them decently, but deny the prospect of re-election. Hold elections every 3 years and get rid of half of them. If you are nominated to a ministerial rank prior to the end of your term, you can stay on for one more term.
Now, I know there are lots of ‘what ifs’, but set up a panel of ordinary citizens to work it out.
Only then will we have governments with enough guts and integrity to effectively deal with the real problems we are facing….including the ridiculous monopolies that presently hold Canadian consumers and businesses at ransom.
But with such powerful unions behind them, seemingly able to block any firings for years, if not indefinitely, does any public civil servant really have anything to worry about?
Trust me you do when you are an actual worker who does physical work. Not to mention being Conservative.Black balling is a fiercely held & cherished card the Union plays whenthey don’t like you. Besides most, civil workers hate Unions. That’s side of the coin you never hear. Its the malcontent’s, socialists,drug abusers or alcoholics. Including Gold bickers who love the Political thieving Unions. You know the golden people who have relatives or are politically connected.
Besides most Civil service Unions are run By Management (de-jure) that are Union run (de-facto) By using a game of titles. So the Management are part of the Union.
Wasn’t it the Shiny Pony’s father that legislated the formation of civil service unions?
Well …. it is the elected government’s job to manage the civil service.
So stop talking and start MANAGING already.