Barrel Strength

How far has the regime of fear penetrated? Very far indeed. Take this example. How difficult has it become to have a rational discussion about government policy touching on visible minorities the civil service?

According to my informants, it has become impossible.

The federal public service has a plan to hire a lot of visible minorities to the federal public service, about one in five according to an announcement in 2000.

 ”Another key recommendation of the Task Force’s Action Plan is  the establishment of benchmarks in order to assist the Government in achieving and measuring progress on the representativeness of its workforce. For example, a benchmark of 1 in 5 by 2003 is being set for external recruitment into the Public Service as a whole. Each department will develop tailored strategies and implement accountability measures to ensure success. The same benchmark of 1 in 5 will be used until 2005 for appointments to the Executive category as well.”

Mme. Robillard, the Liberal Minister at the time, spoke of a “representative public service based on merit.”

Admirable plan, in principle. But can there be such a thing? What if there were a conflict between these two ideas?

It is reasonable to ask whether the public service can be both a guardian merit-based institution and a representative institution at the same time. A guardian institution is one which maintains the values of the society it serves and protects. A representative one is foremost merely that: it reflects the gender, linguistic, and ethnic composition of Canadian society.

Whether you can have both at the same time is surely a question worth asking.

For example, Somalia runs on a complex of clan loyalties. If a set of Somalis of the same clan got hold of the licencing function at some department, they might feel themselves honour-bound to assist their own clansmen ahead of all others. Maybe they might have a hierarchy of those whom they would serve, maybe not.  They might be honour- and culture-bound to serve their clansmen, then their fellow Somalis, then their fellow Muslims, then everyone else. Maybe they would have no other goal than advancing the interest of their clan. The point is not the clan makeup of Somalia, or the value system of any other place in the world. The point is the ethos of the public service in Canada. You might well have asked the same question about Orkneymen in the Hudson’s Bay Company, or Sicilian villagers in a New Jersey police force. What values would the new hires import to the complex structure and ethos of the federal public service?

The issue arises because the plan calls for hiring first-generation immigrants, actively soliciting them before they have had a chance to acculturate to how we do things in Canada. I don’t think the issue arises with people who choose to join the civil service after being born here. But that concerns the substance of the issue. My concern is the discussablity of the  issue in abstract among civil servants, whose opinions would be valuable, one would think.

I am told that it would be dangerous, fatal even, to discuss with a fellow public servant even the idea that this could happen. In short, the abstract discussion of representative versus an élite or values-guarding civil service is impossible in today’s federal public service.

“The civil service is a terrorized institution” said one former member. “It would be fatal to one’s career even to have it said that you had discussed such a question with someone.”

I asked the person who brought it up with me whether he had ever discussed this idea with fellow civil servant. “Never,” he said.

“But this is just a discussion”, I replied. He made it clear that it was difficult enough to discuss these things with his wife, herself a civil servant, let alone a colleague. When he did, her experience with one of our foreign-born viz-min new hires made sense to her: the guy’s values may have been perfectly functional in his native country but were totally dysfunctional here.

Ages ago I had a discussion with a Canadian diplomat who had been in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. I asked him whether there was freedom of discussion in the Soviet Union. His response was immediate and unequivocal. “Yes”, he said. “Among old friends who have known each other since high school, outside of town and away from any microphones, maybe out on a fishing hut on the ice, there is complete freedom of discussion. And people will speak with more freedom, holding much more widely different views, than they do here.”

It is a strange situation that my friend’s description of the freedom of discussion in the former Soviet Union resembles what we have in some circles in Canada now.