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COMMENTARY
August 7, 2010
Fearless advice
How dare an elected government of Canada tell the civil service how to run the country. How dare a mere prime minister contradict the settled professional views of his fearless bureaucratic advisers. By what right do insignificant cabinet members interfere in the critical tasks of public servants?Perhaps I am overstating the views expressed by the august professor Errol Mendes Monday on these pages. I encourage readers to judge for themselves. If I do overstate, it is not by much. I read the article (which I was very pleased to see printed) in gobsmacked amazement. I already knew that veterans of our old Liberal order think like this; but to find a spokesman so indiscreet as to tell us what he thinks so plainly. Please, someone, reach into the barrel and hand him an Order of Canada. I love the expression "fearless advisers," which Mendes repeats several times, to characterize the guardians of our Nanny State. In another piece he wrote this year, in the Toronto Star, he said that while "tilting toward totalitarian government," Prime Minister Stephen Harper was "intimidating the public service from speaking truth to power." Again and again he uses the current leftist formulation, applying the word "ideological" to anything that moves in a conservative direction, or more precisely, fails to move in the approved "liberal" one. To fully appreciate the (unintended) joke, my reader must summon the image of a senior departmental bureaucrat -- a professionally progressive drone of almost mythic spiritual inertia -- pushing paper all his life till now he sits atop the mighty mound, "speaking truth to power." We are beyond the classic Yes Minister, into Monty Python territory. It is unnecessary to confute what confutes itself, and especially what confutes itself wilfully. The Tea Party movement in the United States has arisen against much more cautious expressions of arrogance from the American "political class." I use that expression advisedly; it has become a term-of-art among Stateside poll-takers as well as pundits, and it does offer a useful distinction between adepts and dependants of the Nanny State, and the rest of the population. In particular, the pollster Scott Rasmussen has devoted much effort to documenting the ever-widening gap between the "Political Class" and "Mainstream America." As Mark Tapscott summarizes in the Washington Examiner, the political class "dominates government, the mainstream media, corporate boardrooms, academia, nonprofit activism, and the faculty lounge. Theirs is a world of conceptual analyses, bureaucratic edicts, and organization charts, elevated sensibilities, and the conventional wisdoms of political correctness." By contrast, out in mainstream America -- "flyover country" to the clerisy on both coasts -- we have "the world of what if I lose my job; hurry, Mommy, I'm late for my soccer game; taxes keep going up and buying power is headed down; honey, your mother needs you to come over and fix her stove; the car won't start," and so forth. Rasmussen's trick consists of pegging people by the nature of their work or station in life, into these two broad classes. He then finds they have diametrically opposed views on every significant public issue. At the most fundamental level, he now finds 67 per cent of the "political class" think America is headed in roughly the right direction; 84 per cent of the rest think it is not. I have not seen this sort of research done in Canada; though from the anecdotal evidence of my e-mail inbox, I would expect similar results. Note that Rasmussen is one of those despised private-enterprise statisticians. The very issue Errol Mendes addressed was the Harper government's attempt to make the mandatory long-form of our census voluntary. The questions in question are themselves designed, not to find out what anybody thinks or wants, but to generate the sort of numbers that members of the political class can use to devise new tax-and-spend programs -- which inevitably transfer resources, net, from the "mainstream" taxpayers to the adepts and dependents of the political class, thus progressively (in every sense) skewing the electorate itself. It would be intemperate to describe this political class as "bloodsucking parasites." Certainly, from what I can see, this is not their self-image. Instead I find they self-identify around the conceit of being smarter and wiser than the "mainstream" of the general population. And it is a conceit so deeply felt, and casually expressed -- at its best in the tone of "noblesse oblige" -- that I would like to see more comparative information. For I'm not sure that, on the average, the "political class" is better educated, even in the narrowest, credentialled sense. My hope is that the coming civil war can be non-violent. For not only in the States, but here and throughout the Western world, the "perception" among the "mainstream," that we have lost control of our own lives to a class of political masters, is growing inexorably. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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