“The main job of a minister these days is to keep his or her face off the front page..”
• The Rot In Canada’s Dysfunctional Government Is Coming From The Head (NP)
At the outset of the pandemic, a small army of unsung public servants was overwhelmed by a Niagara of employment insurance applications, as one-quarter of the Canadian workforce found itself out of work. Through a combination of ingenuity and dedication, they processed more than two million claims in three weeks and got money into the hands of the people who needed it. Yet, just two years later, the entire bureaucracy seems afflicted by an inefficiency that has led to a breakdown in the delivery of the most basic government services, from passports to immigration visas; from airport security to facilitating the flow of travellers across Canada’s borders.
Last week, a number of departments received a priority request from the government’s central agency, the Privy Council Office, to urgently review passport, immigration and airport service problems. One person who received it said there was more than a faint whiff of panic about the all-points bulletin. What can account for a plight that one senior bureaucrat compared to a body rotting from the inside? Few in official Ottawa have any doubts that the malady can be traced back to a Liberal government in its third term that no longer has the vitality it once possessed. Over the past seven years, the Liberals have lost, or jettisoned, some of their most seasoned ministers and political staffers.
They have often been replaced by farm-team players with less experience and less rounded skill sets. The upshot is a preoccupation with issues management and the politics of spin. The main job of a minister these days is to keep his or her face off the front page. In the mind of Victorian intellectual Walter Bagehot, the cabinet is the buckle which fastens the executive to the legislature. But in this government, at this time, ministers report not to Parliament but to the issues management department in the Prime Minister’s Office.
