The Grits are back in charge, all’s right in Ottawa: Yakabuski

While there are elements of truth in Konrad Yakabuski’s piece (as I covered in Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism), he over simplifies the reasons for the collective sigh of relief felt by the public service.

It is not driven by an incestuous ‘gene pool’ between Liberal politicians and public servants. It is more driven by education and related experience. We know from polling data that the university-educated are the group that supports the Conservatives the least (government policy analysts are all university-educated). And this support is driven more by small ‘l’ liberal values than big ‘L’ affiliation.

The sharper ideological edge of the Harper government compared to previous Conservative governments, along with a general distrust of evidence in favour of anecdotes and a general less inclusive approach, accentuated the tension between the government and public servants.

Greater alignment between the values of the Liberal government and the public service, along with the latter’s more inclusive approach and support for evidence-based policy, will make for a smoother relationship.

However, the public service needs to be more mindful of its own biases and values in its formulation of policy advice given that it will be less challenged than it was under the Conservatives:

Stephen Harper’s parting thank-you note to the bureaucrats – telling them in a Monday missive that he “will always be grateful for the support of Canada’s world-class public service” – was promptly used by its recipients to line the bird cages of the capital.

The civil servants are already banking on retrieving the sick days the Conservative government had tried to take away from them; the scientists are savouring the prospect of being free to speak out, even if it’s against government policy; the diplomats are yearning to show off a kinder, gentler foreign policy to a world that, Harper critics contend, has been wondering, “What happened to Canada?”

Among public servants, there is a natural preference for Liberal governance. It stems in part from previous long Liberal stints in power during which most of the senior bureaucracy moved up the ranks. In the tiny company town that is Ottawa, decades of intermarriage among bureaucrats, journalists, lobbyists and Parliament Hill staffers have left a gene pool that leans predominantly (L)iberal.

The Ottawa elites share a similar world view, one that squares with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise of activist government. They also share a bias, acknowledged or not, in favour of a government-driven economy. A bigger state and more regulation enhances the prestige, power and bank accounts of this cozy cohort of Ottawa insiders.

Mr. Harper was not the first outsider to see this. As a candidate for the Progressive Conservative leadership in 1983, Brian Mulroney vowed to hand out “pink slips and running shoes” to a bureaucracy he considered to be infested with Liberal sympathizers. But in Ottawa, he found he needed to get the bureaucracy onside to get anything done.

Though he purged Liberal appointees at government agencies and Crown corporations, Mr. Mulroney trusted, and in turn succeeded in winning the trust of, most of the senior bureaucrats he inherited. His one high-profile ouster of a senior mandarin (Ed Clark, an architect of Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program, who went on to become chief executive officer of TD Bank) was an exception to the rule.

Source: The Grits are back in charge, all’s right in Ottawa – The Globe and Mail