Clinton e-mails reveal Canadian foreign service enmity towards Harper Tories – The Globe and Mail
2015/12/03 2 Comments
Not unique to the newly-renamed Global Affairs but nevertheless particularly striking and reinforces the Conservative government’s suspicion of public servants, particularly the foreign affairs and aid public servants.
And this strikes me as disloyalty to the former government, not in keeping with the public service ‘loyal implementation’ obligation:
The U.S. special co-ordinator for Haiti said Canadians were worried about budget cuts that would have slashed down an operation from 11 employees to four, for a country that was ostensibly a major Canadian foreign policy priority.
“I was a little astonished at how openly the career folks at the foreign and assistance ministries disliked their new political masters and wanted us to convince them not to cut Haiti,” said Tom Adams, in a May 2012 e-mail forwarded to Clinton and released Monday.
“In my many years here I have never seen such open disloyalty with a change of administrations. Although the political appointees told me there was no need to have the Secretary talk to Baird about Haiti, the senior career folks, on the margins, implored me to have this done.”
The dynamic described in that e-mail was on public display recently after the federal election, when employees at the foreign ministry cheered during a visit from their new Liberal bosses.
Clinton replied that she was happy to call her counterpart John Baird, if necessary. The presidential contender’s e-mails are now being released in instalments, after an uproar over her use of a private home-based server that couldn’t be searched for freedom of information requests.
Source: Clinton e-mails reveal Canadian foreign service enmity towards Harper Tories – The Globe and Mail
About Andrew
Multicultural Meanderings 
I hate to agree, but I do agree. The Civil Service must serve the government of the day, and apply its policies loyally. Of course, civil servants are often experts in their fields, they know the complexities, the history of trying to solve problems, and so they should advise – even energetically, even arguing with – their political bosses, and feel free to do so. I suspect that in the case of the Harper Government a vicious circle was involved. The incoming Conservative political masters, particularly the Prime Minister, were so disdainful of the Civil Service, so disdainful of almost any form of ‘expert advice’, that many Civil Servants, feeling despised, seeing their knowledge and expertise cast overboard, sometimes rightly, sometimes not (as Andrew I think has pointed out), felt that they, not the Government, were the custodians of the National Interest, and felt justified in what for many became their visceral hatred of that Government.
Thanks for commenting. Globe editorial today also calls it correctly.