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COMMENTARY
April 4, 2005
On bureaucracy
I should like to deviate from the usual practices of newspaper columnists by answering a letter to the editor that appeared against me this last week. I read many such letters and this one wasn't especially nasty. Moreover the man who wrote it who claims intimate knowledge of the Canadian bureaucracy probably works in it. I may thus have been sticking him where he works when I wrote in a recent column that government bureaucracy has become "arrogant" and "self-serving". Grant him the right of reply. Mr. Mike Hewson of Gatineau wrote: "The bureaucracy is composed overwhelmingly of smart-working loyal individuals with unassailable moral values and ethical profiles that arise from a well-developed sense of social responsibility and the recognition of the need to use public resources for the public good. ... Politics is indeed politics but the bureaucracy works for the Canadian people and not for politicians and for that work values such as industry integrity and probity are paramount. These are not generally the values of people who are arrogant and self-serving." He attributed my ignorance of the high moral and ethical standards among bureaucrats to my "lack of research". And it is true enough that I was not and will never be in a position to write a Royal Commission on the subject. I have my personal experience of it to go by; and the second-hand experience of my friends. Now whether or not my reader chooses to believe me he may be assured that I believe myself to have dealt with consistent honesty if sometimes intemperately with the bureaucracies into whose clasp I slipt. What I have to say is this. You have to be ground through the gears of the Customs and Revenue Agency of the government of Canada or through the Family Responsibility Office of the province of Ontario to fully understand what I meant and to discover how powerless the citizen is. I have been ground through both; and at the present it appears I shall continue to be ground through both for the rest of my natural life should I insist as I have done upon remaining in Canada. It is conventional to say There are many good people working in the bureaucracy, and some bad eggs, too. We cannot generalize about such a large number of people. This is glib and misses the point. When you have created an organization of vast size with phenomenal powers to intrude into the everyday lives of citizens it doesn't matter how good the people working in it think they are. I have had some personal acquaintance with several retired government officials from an earlier time -- who worked as bureaucrats when all levels of our government were much smaller than today. I think for instance of a retired customs agent remembering an event from around 1955. He took a taxi from downtown Vancouver to the border to get some document that was urgently needed into the hands of a lawful immigrant who was about to be denied entry to Canada. In those days he could not expense for the cab. And his salary was not high enough to afford cabs. But he paid because he knew that if he didn't a just man waiting at the border would be thrown to the wolves. That man assured me the sort of behaviour he manifested was not uncommon "in those days". He doubted it was true today. He made exactly the point I've made and which has been made in thick books by free-market economists: that as the bureaucracy grows it becomes more inhuman. >From my own first-hand experience today I cannot doubt that the great majority of civil servants in the bureaucracies I have named retain high opinions of themselves. I have been lectured to this effect by several of them. I was quite amazed how highly they thought of themselves; I could not dream of sustaining so high a self-opinion. When I confronted one of them recently on this issue and asked her if she had any idea what the consequences were in my little life of what she was casually doing with my file she said: "I can't think about things like that. I have a job to do and I just do it." My point is not that people of a certain class are monsters. My point is that large bureaucracies with intrusive powers by their very nature turn the people who work for them into that. Into people who are "just following orders". David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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