Love your country, fear your government, beware of bureaucrats.

I don't know about you, EBD, but I DO consider "entrenching the back-door powers of the unelected public service as being one of the most important ballot box issues", although maybe not the way Mr. Mendez does.

The usual suspect, Prof. Mendes, complains that
"the Prime Minister's Office vets almost all external communication, resulting in Canadians not being able to test the fearless advice offered by public servants against the destructive ideologies of perhaps Canada's most ideologically driven government."

I'd always understood that the role of the civil service was to give "fearless advice" to the government, not to set itself up as an opposition think-tank.

Wait a minute. Don't those first two paragraphs openly contradict each other?

The first paragraph insists that the bureaucracy provide 'fearless advice' .Heck, I suppose that's better than 'authoritarian advice' or 'sneering advice' or...why not just drop the adjective? At any rate - their task is to provide advice. Then, Mendes says that the govt may accept or reject this advice. And THEN...that bureaucracy must carry out the will of the people/govt..even if its esteemed advice has been rejected.

But in paragraph two, Mendes contradicts this acceptance of the will of government, and insists that the government CANNOT put through policies which that same bureaucracy rejects!

But who was elected to govern? The civil service or the legislature? And who is ideologically driven? I suggest it's that same 'fearless civil service'.

I prefer an elected legislature, Mr. Mendes, and reject an ideological civil service, unelected and unaccountable, acting as the 'de facto' government.

This is ABSOLUTELY OUTRAGEOUS!!! Who the hell does Errol Mendes think he is?!? He can sugar coat his argument all he wants but in point of fact what he is saying is that unelected government bureaucrats are the ones who should ultimately be deciding what public policies go forth and which ones get squashed.

What an elitist, undemocratic tyrant Mendes is!!!

Indeed, let's have an election on this. Iggy & Rae & Mendes & Mallick & Other Like-Minded ELITISTS versus Stephen Harper & The Conservatives. Let the Canadian People decide!

"What the government can't do, if it does not want to torture Canadian democracy, is to force public servants to develop and promote policies they do not accept as in the interests of Canadians, and then pretend the public service is fully supportive of the ideologically driven policies."

Where do we start with this?
Human rights tribunals, forced multiculturalism, forced bilingualism, "healing circles", money wasted ad infinitum.

A perfect insight into the entrenched mindset of an elitist bureaucracy that believes that public elections are merely a distraction they have to endure every so often before they continue on their path of state control of every aspect of the lives of the citizens for whom they have such great disdain.

Personally I believe half of all civil servants above the level of file clerk should be replaced every five years.

I seem to remember something about Harper getting into sh!t for stating that enacting a conservative agenda was gonna be hard, considering the liberals entrenched in the bureaucracy, judiciary and media.

Or did I imagine that?

Syncro

Prof. Mendes is one of the reasons that the social sciences have become a laughing stock. Forever insulated from the cut and thrust of the real world, forever attached to the government teat, forever surrounded by lifetime academics and government-financed activists who share his simplistic views of the world.

We should slash funding for the silly sciences in half and plow the money into the hard sciences like engineering, medicine and the places where it actually does some good rather than merely funding these mediocrities.

You nailed it, ET. It's just thinly-disguised verbal chicanery. First Mendes writes:

"The government has the right...to expect the federal public service to loyally implement the government's policy decisions..."

and then -

"What the government can't do...is to force public servants to develop and promote policies they do not accept as in the interests of Canadians."

Huh? Are we all clear now about whether the elected government or unelected bureaucrats have the final say about public policy?

I don't like the federal civil service bureaucracy any more than the rest of you, having had the misfortune of working for it for a few years, but I don't think he's saying what you think he's saying:

"What the government can't do...is to force public servants to develop and promote policies they do not accept as in the interests of Canadians, and then pretend the public service is fully supportive of the ideologically driven policies." (emphasis added).

It sounds to me like what he's saying is that the government shouldn't say that the civil service supports policies that they do not, in fact support, even if the civil service is bound to implement and promote them. I don't think he's arguing that the civil service trumps the PMO, he's saying the PMO hasn't the moral right to misrepresent the service's opinion of the government's policies.

Which is a whole different kettle of stupid - I don't give a fig what the civil service's opinions are on anything. Their job is to execute the decisions of the Parliament and the PMO. This "advice" crap is the domain of a very small number of expert analysts, not every jumped-up desk jockey with delusions of grandeur.

Daniel, if you read the entire article in the Citizen it's quite clear that Mendes' argument, and his outrage, is not driven by the idea that the PM "pretend(s) the public service is fully supportive of the ideologically driven policies". That statement is a watch-the-hand distraction, IMO. He's not mad about Stephen Harper "pretending" anything, he's mad that the bureaucrats' opinions on highly political, highly partisan issues like "the real dangers of climate change" and the "deeply counterproductive use of mandatory sentencing" is being treated as mere "advice."

Mendes is a Liberal donor, a former member of the PCO under Paul Martin, a former CHRT Tribunal member, and he's clearly stumping for unelected, embedded, anti-Conservative bureaucrats to have greater powers. He wants a publicly *campaigning* bureaucracy, so that Canadians can "test the fearless advice offered by public servants against the destructive ideologies of perhaps Canada's most ideologically driven government.".

Daniel,

The problem ( as PM Harper put it) is a leftist civil service that will fight tooth and nail to not implement ANY Conservative policy.

It makes the series 'Yes, Prime Minister' even more prophetic..

Mr. Mendes seems to suffer from fundamental confusion about the role of the public service.
One would hope that their advice is fearless,
in particular because noone outside of Cabinet
should ever know what advice has been given.
The public service has, properly, knowledge of
a more-or-less technical sort, which is not likely
found in the great majority of politicians. It is,
after all, our policy, and a good policy, to
assign the most successful of politicians various
ministries in turn. The highly competent Jean
Chretien had served in several ministries before
he became PM, for example.

The public service has, or should have, detailed
knowledge of the workings of various policies and
the details of the implementation of various laws,
beyond what can reasonably be expected of most
Cabinet ministers. This, too,
enters or should enter their advice.

While "their job is to execute the decisions of the Parliament and the PMO" another part of the work
of the civil service is also
to see that the Cabinet brings forth the best and
most practicable legislation, within a
broad policy framework set forth by the Cabinet.

The TV series "Yes Minister" (based in part on
real events at Westminster) shows clearly the
dynamic among the Cabinet, and the senior public
servants (mostly Deputy Ministers and the Clerk of the Privy Council).

Stephen Harper seems to have been quite successful
on managing this process; hence no doubt Mr. Mendes's distemper.

Errol Mendes wants his cake and to eat it too...he wants to be part of an unelected, elite group that has the power to effect social re-engineering without ever having to get a mandate from Canadians.

He wants to be part of a group of people that want to dictate to you how you should live your life; how to think, how to act and how to talk..

..then, if you don't follow along with the pogrom..er..program, there is Mr. Mendes - ready to switch hats - and sit in judgment of your perceived transgressions.

People such as Mr. Mendes are very dangerous and should be watched very carefully..don't let one word of his pass without inspection,introspection and analysis.

Great post EBD. I thought your mention of "a deeply-embedded shadow government of unelected bureaucrats" was smack on the money. And that shadow government is by and large a Liberal government.

I'm afraid universities are not what they used to be, which is a terrible shame. As long as these once venerable institutions continue to promote pea-brained left wing idiots like Mendes, their decline will continue.

Me thinks Steve should make Mendes' wish come true by having all senior snivel servants (department heads) be asked to resign each time there is a change of government.

EBD
[....He's not mad about Stephen Harper "pretending" he's got the bureaucracy onside, he's mad that the bureaucrat's opinions on highly political issues like "the real dangers of climate change" and the "deeply counterproductive use of mandatory sentencing" is being treated as mere "advice," and isn't being OBEYED....]

Like justice still cranking out Cukier's idiot propaganda about the long gun registry.
That LIBRANO who was concerned about the continued employment of the faithful weasels in Miramache, was much more honest.
Enviro-Can still reciting the "Inconvenient truth".

This Mendes guy has the nerve of a canal horse.....and the intelligence....he had better hope his U of O job has tenure. He obviously prefers the LIBRANO featherbed of the snivel service.

The problem will always be the civil servants in this country, who, regardless of the government in power, will always aim to serve themselves.

The Federal Government, in both stripes, has done a masterful job in keeping their distance from the civil service because it is in their interest to do so...and Governement service suffers because of it...so does the party in power, because of the waste and mismanagement.

Will the current government have the balls to tackle this...I sure hope so.

Daniel, on the off chance you're correct, I've sent Charles Adler a link to this thread and encouraged him to get the Professor on as a guest this week. Then there can be a little back & forth for us all to clearly decipher what he meant.

What a surprise.The university that has a liberal Rock as it's 'fearless leader'. A university that has a trifle or so of trouble understanding the concept of free speech,as in Ann Coulter. A university that gives tenure to a professor that wants our soldiers to be tried for war crimes,just because,as in Amil Attar. This university has another fool that is upset with the gov't for governing,as in Errol Mendes.

The University of Ottawa is a cesspool of ignorance and elitism. If you have a child attending or planning on attending there,do not allow it. It is child abuse.

It's pretty clear that our universities, much like the civil service are in need of drastic pruning. Like a hedge or an arbour, the old, diseased deadwood chokes out the healthy, vibrant shoots, (ha! was going to call them suckers) resulting in a sickly, overgrown, unresponsive thicket.
Bring in the chainsaws or the Roundup(TM). Now!
Mendes- You first, arsehole! Your privileged, self-importance is a clear symptom of the infestation.

Mendes said ""the Prime Minister's Office vets almost all external communication, resulting in Canadians not being able to test the fearless advice offered by public servants against the destructive ideologies of perhaps Canada's most ideologically driven government.""

Just curious - how would Canadians be able to "test the fearless advice" if they are unaware of it? Surely Professor Mendes is not suggesting that we abandon the tradition that the public service advises, then loyally implements the direction of the government? Nowhere in that process is there room for the public servant to speak about the advice given. I'm sure Professor Mendes would agree - if the government in power were not Conservative.

This would be the same Errol Mendes who appeared on multiple news media outlets back when PMSH prorogued parliament. His castigation of the prime minister was shamelessy partisan, and the personal hatred in his tone was palpable.

His little club isn't running the show, and he has sore-loser-itis. Everyone who feels bad for him, raise your hand.

Perhaps Mr. Mendes should read the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Service.

(http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pubs_pol/hrpubs/TB_851/vec-cve1-eng.asp)

The Code states that "Public servants shall give honest and impartial advice and make all information relevant to a decision available to Ministers."

However it goes on to state that "Public servants shall loyally implement ministerial decisions, lawfully taken." The public service is duty bound to carry out the political decisions of the executive branch of government. Whatever their person perspectives may be, they are irrelevant, as the government of the day commands their loyalty. Disloyalty is explicitly unethical under their own code.

A correction,the man I named as Amil Attar is actually Amil Attaran,and surprise,surprise,he and Mendes hang around and both are friends of Mike Danger,AKA fearful leader of the opposition.

Just Google Errol Mendes if you want to keep your blood pressure from falling dangerously low.

He wrote a gem of an article in June, extolling how Liberals could "start to bury the legacy the Harper government has sown in this country". In a fit of hypocrisy, he titled it: "The Liberals should talk to Canadians about the dangers of petty, partisan politics." It doesn't seem to get any more petty or partisan than this boob.

http://www.themarknews.com/articles/1641-bury-the-politics-of-division

It is fundamentally impossible for the civil service not to enter the political arena. They essentially the arena. The public service will always, ALWAYS support the party who will make it larger and give it more money. Hence they will always oppose the Conservative party. The only answer to this problem is to make the civil service so small that its political influence is negligible.

A similar solution exists for the problem of politicians wrecking the country. Get rid of them.

I think that next major form of government that is invented will eliminated public servants as well as politicians.

No doubt about it,this man is an a$$hole. He wrote about PMSH, "Similarly, there is ‘leading from behind’ when it comes to standing up for Canadians’ most cherished democratic and human rights values in the context of bringing home Omar Khadr from Guantanamo Bay".

http://globalbrief.ca/blog/2009/09/13/what-happened-to-canada/

When a potus replaces another potus - particularly one from
The opposing party about 50000 civil servants lose their jobs and are replaced in an openly partisan manner. Canada should have a similar practice that way politicians and policy implementers are on the same page and they both have a vested interest in seeing policy succeed.

Indulge me with one more: in the preface to Mendes' book he acknowledges the contributions of..."author and philosopher Michael Ignatieff".

I saw no mention of "economist and hockey-dad Stephen Harper" included. Surprise, surprise.

Well, let me try that again... sorry:

It is impossible for the civil service not to enter the political arena. They essentially built the arena. The public service will always, ALWAYS support the party who will make it larger and give it more money. Hence they will always oppose the Conservative party. The only answer to this problem is to make the civil service so small that its political influence is negligible.

A similar solution exists for the problem of politicians wrecking the country. Get rid of them.

I think that next major form of government that is invented will eliminate public servants as well as politicians.

This Mendes dipshit is a Conservative voters best friend. Who does this insufferably, self-important, ideological radical think he is.?. Oh yeah, a Librano... With friends like Mendes, Grandpa Iggster and the Libranos are better off without friends.

Why do all these people who express their desire for Canadian values always seem to be from somewhere other than Canada?

"What the government can't do, if it does not want to torture Canadian democracy,force public servants to develop and promote policies they do not accept as in the interests of Canadians, and then pretend the public service is fully supportive of the ideologically driven policies."

That's the point...most recently highlighted when the Conservatives were claiming Stats Can supported the government making the long form census voluntary. Or previously when bullying Richard Colvin, Dr. Mark Tushingham, Kevin Page, Peter Tinsley, Paul Kennedy, and Linda Keen because they wouldn't drink the Conservative koolaid.

Gord, I have no reason to doubt you but that 50,000 figure seems rather high, no?

Hey, perhaps you should call Dennis Miller tomorrow and update him on this story?! You can explain it this way: "Imagine an American university professor coming right out, during the tenure of a Republican presidency and Congress and saying that the federal bureaucracy must fearlessly resist any policies that are not in line with the Democrats' agenda."

Just imagine the reaction!!!

I can only speak of that which I know, and that would be Environment Canada. You probably don't care very much if today's forecast (or tomorrow's) is formulated or delivered by liberals or conservatives. But you might care a lot more to know whether climate change policy is being filtered by liberals or conservatives.

Well, of course, to get work in the weather service, you pretty much have to be a liberal. If you happened to make the wrong political choice as I did, you'll be given to understand that your future lies south of the border in private forecasting. Or you can try doing it here in our statist and public-service-dominated culture.

So then, what to do when the government changes from liberal to conservative? Do you fire all the public servants who were liberals under a Liberal government, and through the Mulroney years as well in some cases? Or do you ignore their advice, because sure as the sun rises in the east, they aren't going to turn into free-thinking conservatives just because PMSH lives at 24 Sussex Drive. They will continue to "advise" the same old same old, and ignore the political bias of the new government, which truth be known, does a pretty good job of ignoring its own political bias at least for public consumption.

The actual outcome is that the government just ignores the advice they find unsound, but this being Canada, they probably do put a bit of pressure on the boffins to get them to say the right things -- and I know from long experience you might as well try to teach your cat to talk and play chess.

Most people at my level and slightly above in the government pride themselves on giving our directors and their bosses proper and neutral information so they can pass it on to whoever is our boss in Cabinet to make the decision knowing the pro & cons of each option. When the Liberals were in power. I utterly despised them and made sure I was absent when the big cheese came for a handshake tour. That being said I implemented their decisions no matter what I thought of it, as long as the directives were lawful.
However as in every organization there are people who will lick the more undesirable bits of anatomy in hopes for advancement. One of these became our Director, and they asked my boss to perform an unlawful act in hopes of currying favour with the new Minister. My boss refused and suggested if it was so important that the director could sign the approvals. Seems the director was more interested in getting someone else to take the risk of getting caught and for them to collect the brownie points.

Colin, above, has highlighted the fundamental problem that prof Mendes (and many of the folks on this thread) have missed. The PS is not a monolithic organization; it breaks down, essentially, into two fundamentally separate organizations whose priorities align, more or less, with the two aspects of PS ethics that Murray (the Hun) cited. You have a class of 'worker bees' focussed on providing what Mendes calls "fearless advice"; and then you have a superordinate managerial class focussed on "implementing decisions". The goals and ethics of these two groups rarely align. One group produces 'advice'; the other 'massages' it.

(I was going to make a joke here about ownership of the means of production and the inherently bourgeois nature of management, but it might be misinterpreted.)

Here's the rub: what's stopping the "fealess advice" from getting to the political decisionmakers? Is it political bias and/or incompetence and/or self-censorship by the expert level 'worker bees'? Or is it those same qualities on the part of the managerial class based not on any special personal expertise, but on what they think their political masters want (or more likely, don't want) to hear?

Finally, look at the incentive structure that determines how managers are selected, compensated and promoted, if you can; it varies quite a bit from organization to organization. See if you can figure out what kind of behaviour it rewards: honest brokership? or risk-aversion?

In short, there's a reason that most senior positions in the US government are political appointments. Every time the White House changes hands, the lickspittles of previous administrations are dismissed with thanks and replaced by individuals who can be trusted to implement the direction flowing from the Executive level of government, i.e. the part which, in both constitutional monarchies and "republics of laws, not men", is empowered by the exercise of popular franchise to make the frigging decisions. There's a reason, in short, that the senior levels of the PS are referred to as "the Mandarinate". All they're missing are little pillbox caps with buttons on top.

Prof Mendes, sadly, is a typical modern liberal in that he has attitudes and postures, but no actual information. Perhaps he should live up to his august sinecure, do some research, and learn a few things before beaking off about topics he hasn't fully explored or understood.

The horse head on the bed routine.

"You will except our fearless {Liberal} advice or else!"

Would not be shocked to find that Munir Sheikh and Prof Mendes are good buddies.

This be the same University of Ottawa (run by Alan Rock) involved in the Coulter controversy? The bullpen for washed up Liberal hacks.

Who the HELL does Errol Mendes think he is -- or, more to the point, where the HELL does he think he's living: in a South American dictatorship?

Of course, having suggested in April that Phil Fontaine would make an excellent governor general and being a big-bucks contributor to the Liberal Party of Canada, we know where his politics lie, very much in the entitled left-lib La-La-Land the Librano$ fostered during their 30-year hegemony.

How dare he tell Canadians that the will of the public service, of which I used to be a member, trumps that of our elected representatives in Parliament? But, what would you expect, when his workplace is Ottawa U., Rock's and Houle's fiefdom?

Ignatieff got it wrong: This is where the whiff of sulfur is coming from. Mendes has everything upside down and inside out -- the default position of the l/Liberal brain.

Real Dangers of climate change. Unbalanced foreign policies and foreign aid stopped. Translation: Climate change, tax payers money is needed to study this. Mandatory sentencing means social workers have less work. Unbalanced foreign policy means how dare you support the Jews. Foreign aid means if you are going to kill babies you have to do it on your dime. "Fearless advice" words fail me.

The United States has a bunch of civil servants giving fearless advice and that seems to be working well.

The fact that such politically active and mouthy people like Mendes and Attaran are tenured at one of our Universities is something to be concerned about.

They seem to have plenty of coverage by a doting agenda driven media as they play up anti government rhetoric at every opportunity.

Alas, that's democracy, the people have the power to elect a stronger government in the form of a majority.

At this point we need a Conservative majority, there's no other leader or party fit to govern and that's quite evident when we have the MSM taking on the role of unelected Opposition, attempting to prop up a wet noodle leader and party by playing to their agenda of gotcha games and smear attempts.

I just hope we can differentiate between senior public servants who behave in this manner and every day people who needed a job one day and happened to take one with a government department.

"What the government can't do...is to force public servants to develop and promote policies they do not accept as in the interests of Canadians, and then pretend the public service is fully supportive of the ideologically driven policies."

I don't recall any reports about Mr. Harper saying "the census guys are entirely on board with this". The public servants were not mentioned one way or another, until the resignation of what's his name. And yes, the government can require the public servants to develop whatever policies Parliament wishes, and it's not up to the servants to comment other than as advisors to elected representatives.

Let's try a little thought experiment by subtly changing one of Mendes' statements:

"What the government can't do....is to force military officers to develop and promote policies they do not accept as in the interests of Canadians, and then pretend the Canadian military is fully supportive of the ideologically driven policies."

There are good reasons why democracies do not give this kind of "independence" to their military forces, so why is it such a big deal when elected officials try to exercise some influence over non-military civil servants?

The real reason why idiots like Mendes are so opposed to a voluntary census is that this move rolls back the scope of government, even though it does so to a very tiny degree. This is the government's real crime in the view of these pathetic excuses for academics.

http://www.thehilltimes.ca/page/view/census-08-02-2010

Sorry if someone already posted this link. It gives further insight in how some public servants think.

"Welcome to Soviet Canada," she (Armine Yalnizyan, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives) said. "Everybody is in lockdown mode, everybody is scared, nobody knows what's going to happen next. Everybody is aware that the decision is at a crossroads now whether the reputation of the agency and the calibre of its work will be independent as it was in the past. Everyone is just holding their breath, and nobody is talking officially."

and

This year, MediaCorp Canada recognized StatsCan as one of Canada's Top 100 Employers, the National Capital Region's Top 25 Employers, and Canada's Best Diversity Employer.

I guess that's why all of them seem to come from places other than Canada. Perhaps that's why some of them don't seem to understand the role of the public servant.

"What the government can't do, if it does not want to torture Canadian democracy, is to force public servants to develop and promote policies they do not accept"

This is the mindset of technocratic dictatatorship or bureaucratic tyranny. We know who is undermining popular will and vox populi in this nation. These people have a dangerous arrogance and presumption of right.

I always said the public service never accepted a Conservative government and actively work to undermine their mandates.

As for Prof Mendes, I can sense the Che tee shirt he wears under his frumpy lecture suits. Another academic quack who dotes on theories and prefers the safe cloistered environment of sinecured academia to the real world of governmental politics. I also sense he has such a warped sense of democracy he's virtually useless as a reference to any issue pertaining to one.

I'm not sure this is just an eccentric university professor. There is always a general feeling on the part of Eastern Canadians that politicians and ideas from the West are illegitimate and I think it is generally true that we in the west have more in common north south than east west.

There are many excellent comments above. batb is right, this is where he smell of sulfur is coming from.

Prof Mendes's comments in a very public way show to what extent the Liberal "we have a right to rule" mentality has infiltrated the public media, academia and governmental organs. His comments exemplify the mentality of a Soviet or Nazi style bureaucracy.

The top people in the civil service should be replaced after a regime change so that they are not able to obstruct or undermine the new governments policies.

As they say in the shrivel service: "to error is human; to get paid for it is divine". Just the unions looking at protecting their monthly income from unions dues.

The arguments from the special interest groups, unions and now the public servants has nothing to do with making the compliance voluntary. Its all about maintaining the Liberal status quo to ensure money keeps going to them from the public purse.

But Mendes may have a point.

If the fearless advisor feels their job is to stand on principle and that there is a point of principle involved, isn’t the right thing to do, to resign? The bureaucrat Liberal aparatchick should not be forced into doing things they are principally opposed to doing or saying they support policies they don’t. If it is important to them, they should resign.

But if they view their job to be to implement lawful policy, they won’t have any issues with implementing policy based upon principles that differ from theirs, and they should be able to support the government’s right to make that policy decision.

I think that when a government changes, they should review the civil service and fire those that view their job to be to stand on principle. Can you work with us? Will you work with us? If the answer is yes, then keep them. If the answer is no, then let them go. If the answer is yes, but the actions or results of the department’s activities are that the policy doesn’t get implemented - - fire for incompetence.

This happens regularly when one company buys another or when one person gets promoted over another one and they bring different policy ideas forward. Why doesn’t it happen in the civil service?

Yes I always knew the civil service had too much power, probably more than most of the ministers of various departments.

So we have the civil service, the unions and the media openly advocating for a return to liberal/left leadership.

Nice.

rove @2:20 am:

Thanks for that lovely list of beaurocrats. Intersting Kady O'malley made a similar list and asks an interesting question in this link.

http://www.cbc.ca/politics/insidepolitics/2010/01/what-could-all-these-witnesses-have-in-common---liveblogging-the-liberal-caucus-forum-on-governance.html

Indeed...what do they all have in common with the Liberal caucus?

No sympathy here for that crew, rove.

The monster that is Big Government is fed by the Liberals. Their power and waste is threatened by PMSH. The beast is cornered and is getting nastier by the day.
Wake up Canada!

Mandarins and senior bureaucrats in Ottawa and every provincial capital should change every time a government changes. If these career bureaucrats had any scruples they would resign because their beliefs on government policy is not in tune with the incoming government. Failing that the incoming government should simply fire them all. That is what happens in the USA.

Fiumara@9:59
I hope you realize that senior public servants are not what we would call unionized. If you want to criticize public sector unions, there are better arguments. In fact, at the highest levels, public sector unions and public sector employers conspire together in order for senior union officials and senior public servants to have even less to do and to be rewarded even more so for not doing anything but feather their own nests.

What people tend to underestimate is the extent to which the PRIVATE SECTOR has appropriated gov't for its own financial gain.

The recent bailout of GM provides ample proof of that.

We have politcians, and behind them we have the bureaucrats, but behind the bureaucrats are numerous financial interests (some foreign) who are influnecing gov't policies and deftly pulling a lot of strings.

Our disastrous policies on immigration, for example, have largely been designed and implemented at the behest of the private sector in order to ensure an abundant and supine supply of cheap labour

john P; The US govt didnt bail out GM,they bailed out and rewarded GM and Chrysler employies.They cared not a whit for GM bond holders but exempted GM employies from the tax on so called "Cadillac health plans",gave them bail out money and then gave them other money to pay back the bail out money.In effect,they nationalized GM and Chrysler.Do you hear the same concerns about Freddie Mac and Fanny May which received billions in bail out money? No,because they are govt entities.Any more govt money given to GM or Chrysler you probably wont hear about either.

And people wonder why PMSH has "changed" and is now no longer listening to his base, hasn't shut down the CBC, hasn't scrapped section 13, etc.????

First, he has to get good impartial advice from the public service in order to make good policy decisions....so how does the Conservatives know when they got all the information, advice, etc they need? Does the senior civil service hold back information, truncate it, demphasize, decontexualize it etc? What do you think? (to be fair, the senior civil servants did this to the Libs too although likely not as frequently).

I actually think Tony Clement got good impartial advice from StatsCan. They are primarily technocrats and less ideological than most. This is why the government was able to actually make the decision regarding the long form. But when the cabinet took the decision to implement the least favourable choice (from the liberal viewpoint), all the blowblack came to StatsCan (my guess is mostly WITHIN OTHER GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS), THEN the StatsCan boss resigned.

Decreasing the size and power of the senior civil service, in particular, will be a herculean task.

You've got it backwards, John P: First, the crypto-communist who is the current US President didn't bail out GM as part of any attempt to bolster the private sector. And once the bailout took place, we were more or less force to do the same thing on a smaller scale or else lose a big part of our auto sector to the US.

Second,

"Our disastrous policies on immigration...have largely been designed and implemented at the behest of the private sector in order to ensure an abundant and supine supply of cheap labour.

When Liberals bureaucrats opened up the doors and brought over elderly family members of immigrants from (relatively) backwards nations they weren't doing the bidding of the private sector, they were importing *Liberal Voters.* Do you think that the private sector was asking for 70-year-old Sikh/Pakistani women to be brought over for "cheap labour"?

Adrian MacNair has a piece up in Full Comment about the census issue, but it applies to Mendes' POV as well:

"Am I supposed to care about how public sector bureaucrats feel about their job? This pearl-clutching melodrama has been going on for a month now, and every subsequent opinion piece on the story gets less and less interesting.

"You’d think we were discussing something where morale is actually important, such as the attitude of our troops in the field of combat. But no, we’re talking about pencil-pushing number-counters in their public sector union-protected pension-indexed 17-sick-days-a-year bureaucratic jobs. The only thing less interesting than what these people think or feel is Chelsea Clinton’s royal wedding.

"Here’s a tip for the princesses lying on peas in Stats Canada: a large majority of Canadians go to work every single day with low morale. They don’t like their jobs. They’d rather be doing something else. They’re forced to do difficult tasks for far too long, and for far too little pay. But not one of these people gets a newspaper article written about how difficult life is for them. No, they suck it up, and work paycheque to paycheque.

"If they don’t like their jobs, the solution is simple. Join Munir Sheikh on the unemployment line, or better yet, find a job in the private sector. Life isn’t candies and double rainbows all the time."

bluetech: "The beast is cornered and is getting nastier by the day."

That's right. And the cornered beast is thrashing its tail, trying to take out as many people as it can, the target being the "nasty" Prime Minister and his hard-working, disciplined cabinet who are working for ALL Canadians, not just the beast's small, special-interest cabal.

This is a war, no doubt about it. Democracy vs the Librano hegemony. Prime Minister Harper's David to the Lib/Dipper/Bloc/MSM Goliath. I sure hope the stone hits the right spot.

It would appear Harper has kicked the mandarins of Ottawa squarely in the privates with this census thing.

I look forward to the next kick. In fact, I look forward to it so much that I'm happy to vote CPC purely for the collective screams of anguish coming from Ottawa.

"This pearl-clutching melodrama"

Steyn himself couldn't have phrased it better.

The Media and the Snivel servants working hard to convince Canadians that the criminalized census form is good for us, if we decriminalize it our roads will cave in, bus routes will disappear, street lights go bye bye. I haven't seen MSM this shrill since the whole proroguing thang, the Free Press sound a great deal like our snotty leftwing elites these days.

Remember when the US Air traffic controllers tried to dictacte to Ronald Reagan, He fired them all.This type of posturing by Mr Mendes only gets the heckles up of the voters who see them as Left wing plants.
These people are supposed to be Professionals and they are well paid at that. If they have a moral issue with working on behalf of Canadians through the vision of the Conservative Party.They should have the courage of their convictions and resign.
Crickets

Mendes: “What the government can’t do, if it does not want to torture Canadian democracy, is to force public servants to develop and promote policies they do not accept as in the interests of Canadians, and then pretend the public service is fully supportive of the ideologically driven policies.”

Yes, actually, a governing party that has been elected by the people of Canada, can indeed force public servants to do as they are told. If the Canadian voters don't like what they have done, they can vote them out of office at the time of the next election. Doing that is not "torturing" democracy as a concept cannot be tortured. Nor is the governing party torturing public servants. They are employees. If they don't like what they have been asked to do, they can resign and find another job. That is the daily reality of most who work in the private sector.

Mendes: “There is increasing evidence that the Harper government does not seem to get this fundamental tenet of Canadian democracy.”

Actually, it is Prof. Mendes that does not get that an elected government has the right to insist that the public service develop and promote policies -- whether the public service agrees with them or not. That is what all employees are expected to do if they want to keep their jobs.

Mendes: “These issues are beyond partisan politics and go to the core of Canadian democracy. It is primarily in totalitarian regimes that there is little use for an independent public service, or judicial or quasi-judicial bodies that seek to promote the public interest regardless of politics. The undermining of the public service of Canada should be one of the most important ballot box issues in the coming federal election.”

The public service of Canada is not an independent body. It exists through the Constitution of Canada and the will of the people of Canada and the "elected" Ministers in Her Majesty's government. Therefore, it is not totalitarian for the government to tell the public service what to do or not do.

The crux of the matter:

To say that I disagree with Professor Mendes would be an understatement. What he is suggesting, even if obliquely, is anarchy – saying that public servants should not have to develop and promote policies they disagree with. To put it bluntly, tough! Rather, what they ought to do, is resign on principle as was recently done by Chief Statistician Munir Sheikh.

Actually, it is Prof. Mendes that does not get that an elected government has the right to insist that the public service develop and promote policies -- whether the public service agrees with them or not.
- Monty88.

Not quite. The proper role of the public service is the efficient cost-effective implementation of public policy determined by the elected government. It doesn't develop policy and should not be promoting anything.

No one wants the public service to express its approval, genuine or faked, of government policy. A professional public service is neutral - has no view on the policy itself, only on the most effective way of executing it.

Everything old is new again. Diefenbaker ran into the same garbage from the self-appointed guardians of canerduh in the day.
Fire. Them. All.

Good post EBD. A very good Question. Frankly last time I heard where a Democracy not an amalgamated Bureaucracy. They just don't comprehend their not top of the heap. The voters are. It maddens them like a bull stuck with pinions. After all the players change while they stay. Moving this be-mouth about, or shaking it up. Would be in Canada's best interest. If not getting rid of half of them.
These folks are loons.
JMO

You will note that Mendes is neither a public servant or a useful contributor to society in any other sense.

A self appointed moral and intellectual better to you and I who has been given a soapbox and a megaphone by the MSM.

File under know your enemy.

Where's this guy Mendes from? I was hoping for a Wiki entry, or something, to tell us more about this guy's background. Somehow, I don't think there'd be too many surprises.

He gives me the creeps.

The undermining of the public service of Canada should be one of the most important ballot box issues in the coming federal election.

I'm all for that! I'll vote for whoever's going to do the undermining!

For batb@6:33pm, from the "know your enemy" file:

Born in Kenya, East Africa, Professor Mendes obtained his Bachelor of Law
degree from the University of Exeter, England, where he ranked first in
his graduating class. He obtained his Master of Laws degree from the
University of Illinois in the United States. He was called to the Bar of
Ontario in 1986.

Thanks, turtle. I rather thought that he was one of our newer immigrants who feel entitled to trash our institutions and traditions. I wonder why I got that feeling?

He may have come first in his class, but that was in England which was fast going to the dogs when Mr. Mendes was taking his degree in Exeter.

Mr. Mendes does not know the role of the public service in Canada. He hasn't done his homework or, if he has, he's revised it to his way of thinking.

That's not on. And, visible minority status does not give him the "rights" or "freedoms" to play around with our institutions which have offered very generous hospitality to him.

I am getting very tired of newcomers to Canada telling us WHAT to do. He has no right to do this and it is arrogance in the extreme for him to do so and to get his facts so terribly skewed. No excuses. He's got a university education, he's a lawyer, and he should know better.

If he doesn't, maybe he needs to go back to school.

I too, am getting very tired of newcomers to Canada telling us WHAT to do. I'm also getting tired of ignorant racists who have no reading comprehension skills completely misinterpreting what Mendes said:

"The government has the right to decide whether to accept that advice or reject it and then to expect the federal public service to loyally implement the government's policy decisions if they are lawful."

and...

"What the government can't do...is to force public servants to develop and promote policies they do not accept as in the interests of Canadians, and then pretend the public service is fully supportive of the ideologically driven policies."

HAS THE RIGHT VS. WHAT IT SHOULDN'T DO.

Example:

Tony "Liar, liar, pants on fire" Clements saying "I asked [Statistics Canada] specifically, 'Are you confident you can do your job?' They said 'If you do these extra things: the extra advertising and the extra sample size, then yes, we can do our job.'"

Ya' know what sum injun?

If I went to another country as a new immigrant, all puffed up because I was a lawyer and teaching at a university, and began to tell them what to do, how they should run their government, what was wrong with their prime minister or president, using inflammatory language to make my point, do you think what I had to say would be welcomed by the citizens who had built the society whose rights and freedoms I was enjoying?

Turn the tables around. Use your imagination. It's not that hard to do.

And stop throwing the "r" word around. There's no misinterpretation of Mr. Mendes' intentions, to tell the CPC government to stop doing what they were elected to do and to fall in line with what the entrenched civil (sic) servants think PMSH and the CPC MPs should do:

"torture Canadian democracy"?, "a deep chill in many departments"?, "the fearless advice offered by public servants against the destructive ideologies of perhaps Canada's most ideologically driven government"?

This is not measured language, but ideologically driven propaganda by a man who financially supports the Liberal Party of Canada. Mr. Mendes tortures the English language and reasoned thinking.

Nice one, EBD! Maybe if Stephen Harper gets his majority he will further "undermine the public service" by laying off three-quarters of them. Canadian taxpayers should be so lucky.

"If I went to another country as a new immigrant, all puffed up..."

Posted by: batb at August 3, 2010 10:22 PM

Stop throwing the "r" word around?!? Sure...when you stop complaining about the uppity nignogs having opinions and all that. I suppose living in Canada for almost 30 years makes makes him a "new immigrant" who is not entitled to speak against our Dear White Leader.

Now go fetch your husband his slippers, crack open a beer for him and then go finish doing the dishes.

The bureaucracy is a creature of he liberal establishment. You can bet they aren't helping the government.

Bureaucrats living on the immoral proceeds of government.

I don't Mendes is confused at all. For his liberal establishment pals, the liberal party is the natural governing party and it is only right that this liberal establishment should continue to govern as it has, even if the actual party isn't in power.

sum injun: " ... when you stop complaining about the uppity nignogs having opinions ..."

What a pile of crap. "nig nog"? Doesn't compute.

Anyone whose heritage in Canada goes back centuries or is a newcomer to Canada has a right to freedom of expression, no matter what colour, creed, or ethnic background. Mr Mendes certainly does. And, so do I.

However, when what you express is hogwash and bears no resemblance to reality, when you create straw men to knock down, and suggest as a replacement your own view of how Canadian democracy should operate, then you're on thin ice.

Mr. Mendes is on thin ice. (And, I'm not even sure he knows how to skate.)

Just because he thinks he's entitled and special doesn't get him off the hook when it comes to knowing the mandate of the Canadian civil service in relation to the duly elected representatives of the people in Parliament. Canada isn't a banana republic yet, although if it were to go in the direction that Mr. Mendes suggests, it would be. He'd have the tail wagging the dog.

Well, no thanks.

PS. sum injun:

Mr. Mendes is "uppity" (your word) in his position as a lawyer and university professor who hasn't done his homework. With his education, he knows better, he's simply chosen to repeat the lazy, left-lib mantras of Harper and the CPC, bad; Liberal-appointed bureaucracy, good.

Many of us are heartily tired of this worn-out shoe: It's ugly, it doesn't support us anymore, and it stinks.

You've got it backwards, John P: First, the crypto-communist who is the current US President didn't bail out GM as part of any attempt to bolster the private sector. And once the bailout took place, we were more or less force to do the same thing on a smaller scale or else lose a big part of our auto sector to the US.

No, I don't have it backwards. Gov't has been appropriated by a "private" sector that is populated by utterly short-sighted and incompetant quangos. Various financial and business interests pretty much dictate the policies the public mistakenly believes have been drawn up by the gov't manderins.

When Liberals bureaucrats opened up the doors and brought over elderly family members of immigrants from (relatively) backwards nations they weren't doing the bidding of the private sector, they were importing *Liberal Voters.* Do you think that the private sector was asking for 70-year-old Sikh/Pakistani women to be brought over for "cheap labour"?

Mass immigration isn't a liberal thing. Mulroney was an even bigger fan of immigration than Trudeau ,and had nothing but praise for multiculturalism, a term that is just code for cheap labour. Those immigration policies were devised and implemented at the behest of various business groups. You can bet your mortgage that if those business owners ( AND THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF THEM!) employing illegals were to be fined or even sent to prison, the probleme of illegals would be far, far less than it is today.

The dupe advocacy groups defending illegals are laregly left-wing in nature, but they're just idiots doing all the thankless grunt work that ultimately does little more than provide cheap labour for the benefit of your local chamber of commerce. Any social/health-care costs ( ie elderly parents) involving illegals and immigrants are picked up by us working stiffs. Gov't doesn't really draw up nor even advocate for these policies, they just rubber stamp 'em.