Stephens: The New Conservative Pyrite “National conservatism” is another road to serfdom

2019/07/29 Leave a comment

Good post by Stephens on the bankruptcy of contemporary American conservatives:

Friedrich Hayek, whose thoughts used to count for something among well-educated conservatives, made short work of nationalism as a guiding principle in politics. “It is this nationalistic bias which frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism,” he wrote in “The Constitution of Liberty.”

That point alone ought to have been enough to dim the right’s new enthusiasm for old-style nationalism. It hasn’t.

A three-day public conference this month on “national conservatism” featured some bold-faced right-wing names, including John Bolton, Tucker Carlson and Peter Thiel. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page published a piece from Christopher DeMuth, a former president of the American Enterprise Institute, on the “nationalist awakening.” Yoram Hazony, an Israeli political theorist, has gained wide attention among U.S. conservatives with his book, “The Virtue of Nationalism.”

And, of course, Donald Trump: “You know, they have a word, it sort of became old-fashioned, it’s called a nationalist,” the president said last October. “And I say, really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am, I’m a nationalist.”

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Egyptian minister’s laughing vow in Canada to ‘slice up’ anyone who criticizes her country alarms immigrant groups

2019/07/26 Leave a comment

Even if the expression was made only in jest, unacceptable:

Egyptian-Canadians are incensed over an Egyptian cabinet minister’s promise to “slice up” critics of her country, saying what might have been meant as a joke struck them as a serious threat from a repressive regime.

Those of both Coptic-Christian and Muslim backgrounds — who rarely see eye to eye otherwise — condemned Wednesday the comments made by Immigration Minister Nabila Makram on a visit to Mississauga, Ont.

They cite Cairo’s record of arbitrary detentions, violence against political opponents and other human-rights abuses since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi seized power six years ago.

Some have complained to police, and the Peel Regional force in Mississauga says it is investigating the matter.

“No one in his or her right mind should take this — although it might be said in a joking manner — as a joke,” said Ehab Lotayef of the Egyptian Canadian Coalition for Democracy. “It really represents the mindset of the current Egyptian government and is totally unacceptable by a minister in a country that respects itself.”

Lotayef urged Global Affairs Canada to make its displeasure known for what he said was at least a diplomatic affront.

Makram was near the end of a short speech to an Egyptian heritage dinner Sunday when she said in Arabic that anyone who criticized Egypt would be “sliced up,” accompanying the remark with a slashing motion across her throat.

She said it with a smile, after talking about Egyptians’ passion for their country, and earned laughter and applause from the audience.

But Egyptian ex-patriates cite evidence that critics of the Sisi government in Canada are already under watch, and note that a visiting Egyptian-Canadian businessman has been imprisoned in Cairo without charge for months.

Canadian-based “dissidents” have been mentioned in government-aligned Egyptian media in negative terms, said Lotayef.

“We are surely being followed and monitored,” he said.

Egypt’s ambassador to Canada routinely makes the trip from Ottawa to attend major events at Mississauga’s main Coptic-Christian church, said Maher Rizkalla, president of Canadian Coptic Association.

“The Egyptian government is always involved and keeps an eye on the churches in Canada,” he said. “I would be concerned to visit Egypt. I know they’re watching us, and they know who is active and inactive outside the country.”

Sisi’s government has been widely criticized for its abuses, with Human Rights Watch writing that “his security forces have escalated a campaign of intimidation, violence, and arrests against political opponents, civil society activists and many others who have simply voiced mild criticism of the government.”

Makram is on a Canadian tour organized in part by the Egyptian embassy.

“Our country is very grand and deserves that all of us work for it and fight for it, because we just have one county – Egypt,” she told the dinner audience. “This country is always inside us, inside our hearts. We cannot accept any word about it. Anyone who says a (bad) word about our country – what will happen to him? Will be sliced up.”

Not everyone interpreted the remarks in a completely negative fashion.

One audience member, who asked not to be named for fear of landing in the midst of a political fight, said the slicing-up expression is a common and usually genial one in Egyptian Arabic, not meant literally.

“Parents say that to their kids all the time,” the person said. “Usually … people say it as an endearing gesture.”

Still, the audience member said the comment was definitely inappropriate in the circumstances.

The Egyptian embassy in Ottawa did not respond to a request for comment.

In response to a complaint from Rizkalla, Peel Regional Police are investigating the matter, and liaising with the department’s “equity and inclusion bureau,” said Const. Lori Murphy, a spokeswoman.

Source: Egyptian minister’s laughing vow in Canada to ‘slice up’ anyone who criticizes her country alarms …

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ANDREW COYNE: It’s time for old-school conservatism and liberalism to defend their common values

2019/07/24 Leave a comment

Good column:

Why would anyone describe himself as a conservative? While we’re at it, why describe yourself as a liberal? Or socialist? Or libertarian? The point is not that there is anything wrong with any of these — only that there is something right with all of them. Each of the traditions, that is, has something to teach us. Why limit yourself to just one?

Still, people do. The desire to belong to a tribe – or perhaps, to quarrel with another – is one of the deepest urges of humanity. But tribalism, ideological or other, is not just self-blinding. On occasion it leads to madness. Consider the present state of conservatism, a tribe that has, as the past week has illuminated, lost its way, if not its mind.

If it were just a matter of Donald Trump’s racist attacks on four racial-minority congresswomen – the latest in a long series, but arguably the worst — it might be put down to his own personal depravity. If it were just the chants (“send her home’’) of the people at his rally in Greenville, N.C., it might be written off as the ravings of a lunatic fringe.

But Trump, it is abundantly clear, stands atop a vast infrastructure: the Republican leaders who shrug off his abuses for the sake of party unity; the commentators who look the other way so long as he champions their pet causes; the base who are content with whatever he does so long as it annoys the liberal media; and underpinning all, a set of beliefs – superstitions, prejudices, call them what you will – that predate Trump, but which he has helped to make the credo of the conservative movement.

It was convenient that in the same week as Trump was issuing such crude appeals to hatred and bigotry, a group of academics, journalists and politicians were meeting at a hotel in Washington in an attempt to give a veneer of intellectual credibility to Trumpism. The “National Conservatism” conference underlined how completely conservatism, at least in the United States, has been turned on its head.

The conservatism of the post-war decades, a sometimes uneasy coalition of social conservatives, free marketers and hawkish internationalists, has been replaced by a populist-nationalist conservatism marked by hatred of “globalist” elites, hostility to immigration and fear of foreign trade, and by its enthusiasm for whichever strongman will protect America from these.

Where conservatives were traditionally advocates of limited government, wary of government intervention and worried about deficits, today’s conservatives embrace many of the same limitless-government approaches as the left – “collectivism rebranded for the right,” as the Republican-turned-independent Congressman Justin Amash calls it.

Where conservatives were skeptics of change, pragmatists seeking to reconcile the necessity of reform with the wisdom of tradition, the Trumpians are as reckless as they are reactionary, heedless to the social and institutional harm they have caused in the name of Making America Great Again.

And as the conference highlighted, the civic nationalism that American conservatives used to cherish – the nation to which anyone could belong so long as they subscribed to the basic ideals of the American political system, not least its reverence for the equality of every individual under the Constitution – has been replaced by a more culturally-specific, if not ethnic definition, majoritarian and monocultural rather than liberal and pluralist, that is not easily distinguished from xenophobia or indeed racism: identity politics for white people.

Canadians will be familiar with this from, for example, the Bill 21 debate. Still, few in this country would go so far as the University of Pennsylvania law professor who told the conference that, as people from certain cultures were more likely to fit into a “modern advanced society” like the United States, and as those people came mostly from Europe and the First World, and as those societies are “mostly white for now,” it followed that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” But not, you know, in a racist way.

This is, as The Economist put it in a recent issue, “not an evolution of conservatism, but a repudiation of it.” The conservatism I grew up with was basically a species of liberalism, part of the same Western liberal inheritance but more alert to liberalism’s potential for overreach. Its mission was, if you like, to save liberalism from the liberals. As such it represented a continuous tradition that, even as it changed with the times, represented certain enduring ideals. How can the very opposite set of ideas also be called conservatism without doing violence to the language?

Perhaps, as others have suggested, this is naive. Maybe there are no permanent or defining principles of conservatism, independent of its practitioners. Perhaps conservatism is whatever self-described conservatives happen to believe at the time. Trump enjoys the approval of 90 per cent of Republicans; even in Canada, according to a recent Abacus Data poll, 46 per cent of Canadian Conservatives have either a positive or neutral impression of him. Maybe it’s time to concede the point.

If so, then perhaps it is time for a more fundamental political realignment. If conservatism is now to mean its opposite, perhaps it is time for conservatives of the old school to make their peace with liberalism – for the two estranged children of the Enlightenment to reunite in defence of its values. The differences between them that once seemed so great look trivial now, compared to what they have in common, and in light of what they both oppose.

Source: ANDREW COYNE: It’s time for old-school conservatism and liberalism …https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/…/andrew-coyne-its-time-for-old-school-conservati…

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Opinion: Report On Racism, But Ditch The Labels

2019/07/18 Leave a comment

Thoughtful commentary:

Editor’s note: NPR this week has described the language in President Trump’s tweets about a group of Democratic congresswomen as “racist.”

Keith Woods, NPR’s vice president for newsroom training and diversity, argues that journalists should not be using the term “racist” to describe the president’s tweets. He explains why below.

Once again, the president of the United States has used the sniper tower of Twitter to take aim at immigration, race relations and common decency. And once again, journalists are daring their profession to boldly call bigotry what it is: bigotry. Enough of the vacuous “racially charged,” “racially loaded,” “racially insensitive” evasions, they say. It’s racist, and we should just call it that.

I understand the moral outrage behind wanting to slap this particular label on this particular president and his many incendiary utterances, but I disagree. Journalism may not have come honorably to the conclusion that dispassionate distance is a virtue. But that’s the fragile line that separates the profession from the rancid, institution-debasing cesspool that is today’s politics.

It is precisely because journalism is given to warm-spit phrases like “racially insensitive” and “racially charged” that we should not be in the business of moral labeling in the first place. Who decides where the line is that the president crossed? The headline writer working today who thinks it’s “insensitive” or the one tomorrow who thinks it’s “racist?” Were we to use my moral standards, the line for calling people and words racist in this country would have been crossed decades ago. But that’s not what journalists do. We report and interview and attribute.

I am not a journalism purist. I came into the profession 40 years ago to tear down the spurious notion of objectivity used to protects a legacy of sexism, xenophobia and white supremacy. The better ideals of truth telling, accountability, fairness, etc., are what give journalism its power, while the notion of “objectivity” has been used to obscure and excuse the insidious biases we do battle with today.

I’ve been an informed consumer of the media since my days as a paperboy. I read the Times-Picayune as I delivered it, and the distorted view it offered of black and poor New Orleans told me all I needed to know about “objectivity.” We have come miles since then as a profession. But why should I trust that we’re all on the same page with our labels now? Weren’t last week’s tweets racist? Or last year’s? Weren’t some misogynistic? Vulgar? Homophobic? Sexist? The language of my judgment is generous, and they are my opinion, and they belong in the space reserved for opinions.

What’s at stake is journalism’s embattled claim to be the source of credible news grounded in the kind of deep, fair reporting that exposes injustice and holds powerful people to account. It may be satisfying to call the president’s words, or the president himself, racist, given the attacks tweeted from his bully app and so often aimed at our profession. But at what cost?

It’s already nearly impossible to separate actual journalism from the argumentative noise on the cable networks that dominate so much of public perception. There are already too many journalists dancing day and night on the line that once separated fact and judgment. When that line is finally obliterated and we sink into the cesspool beckoning us to its depths, this historically flawed, imperfect tool for revealing and routing racism will look and sound indistinguishable from the noise and become just as irrelevant.

On Sunday, the president wrote this:

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

His words mirror those of avowed racists and xenophobes that date back to the birth of this country. Was that moral judgement, my last sentence? I would argue no. I’d call it context, and it doesn’t require my opinion, just a basic understanding of history. That’s an alternative to labels: Report. Quote people. Cite sources. Add context. Leave the moral labeling to the people affected; to the opinion writers, the editorial writers, the preachers and philosophers and to the public we serve.

We just have to do journalism.

Source: Opinion: Report On Racism, But Ditch The Labels

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ANDREW COYNE: Why Conservatives have more at stake than Liberals in Canada’s class war

2019/07/10 Leave a comment

Coyne, as often happens, nails it. A plague on both houses, but more so for Conservatives:

Liberals, it is true, need to find a way to reach out to less educated voters, but not as badly as Conservatives need to make their peace with the eggheads

Democracy, in G. K. Chesterton’s careful definition, means government by the uneducated, “while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.”

The enduring value of this distinction was suggested by the ruckus stirred up over the weekend by Amir Attaran, professor of law at University of Ottawa. Responding to a recent Abacus Data poll finding the Tories leading the Liberals by a wide margin among Canadians with a high school diploma or less, with the Liberals ahead among those with bachelor degrees or higher, the professor tweeted: “The party of the uneducated. Every poll says this.”

In the ensuing furor, Attaran tried to protest that he was just stating a fact, but the disdain in the tweet was clear enough to most. For their part, while some Tories quibbled with the data (just one poll, within the margin of error, misplaced correlation etc), most seemed less offended by the sentiment — every poll does show the less formal education a voter has, the more likely they are to support the Conservatives — than by the suggestion there was something shameful about it.

It was, in short, another skirmish in the continuing class war: class, now defined not by occupation or birth, as in Chesterton’s time, but by education. Conservatives, true to form, professed outrage at this arrogant display of Liberal elitism, while Liberal partisans protested that they were not snobs, it’s just that Conservatives are such ignorant boobs (I paraphrase).

The professor compounded matters by objecting, not only that he is not a Liberal, but that he is not an elite, since his parents were immigrants. And everyone did their best to be as exquisitely sensitive (“let us respect the inherent dignity of labour”) as they could while still being viciously hurtful (“not uneducated, just unintelligent”).

There is, of course, much to object to in Attaran’s remark. Not all or even most wisdom is to be found in higher education. Lots of people who go to university don’t learn a thing, while much of what they do learn is tendentious rubbish. A society that sneers at tradespeople is a society on its way to the poorhouse.

Today’s populist conservative is prone to dismiss the analysis of experts, on everything from sex education to climate change, not in spite of their expertise but because of it.

But Conservative rhetoric too often seems to go beyond attacking snobbery to attacking education itself: expertise, knowledge, the whole notion that people who know more about a subject than the rest of us ought to be listened to with respect.

There is a rich tradition, to be sure, of conservative skepticism of intellectuals — recall William F. Buckley’s crack about preferring to be governed by “the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory” than the faculty of Harvard. But the target then was the hubris of intellectuals, convinced they could plan an entire economy or overturn the accumulated wisdom of centuries of tradition, not intellectualism itself: scientism, not science.

Today’s populist conservative, by contrast, is prone to dismiss the analysis of experts, on everything from sex education to climate change, not in spite of their expertise but because of it. A society that sneers at “so-called experts” is a society on its way to the madhouse.

As in most wars, there is fault on both sides. If Trump and Ford voters brim with resentment at “liberal elites” looking down their noses at them, it is not entirely without cause.

And yet we should beware of drawing the class lines too starkly. Graduates of apprenticeships and community colleges are themselves relative elites — 46 per cent of adult Canadians have no post-secondary education — and earn more accordingly: a premium of 12 and 18 per cent, respectively, over those with only a high school diploma.

At the same time, universities are for the most part glorified trade schools. Only 12 per cent of today’s university students graduate in the humanities, the object of so much (deserved) conservative ridicule. The rest are there to learn a trade — only trades of a tonier kind, like doctoring and lawyering.

It isn’t so much about the level of education, then, as the kind of education. (Trump, as he likes to boast, is a graduate of Wharton.) There is a high degree of overlap between “liberal elites” and “symbolic analysts” (in Robert Reich’s term) — people who make their living manipulating words, numbers, images, code.

It is Conservatives who have played the class card more heavily, and with more destructive results.

What is common to all those doctors and lawyers, academics and bureaucrats, designers, artists, and, yes, media people is that they deal in ideas — with the abstract versus the physical, representation versus reality — and are typically good at communicating these to others. Not for nothing are they sometimes called the “chattering classes.”

The ability to do so earns not only income, but social and cultural “capital,” at least among their fellow class members, clustered in the centres of our major cities. That there should be some degree of estrangement between them and those outside is not surprising, but one wishes political leaders would seek to bridge these divides rather than exacerbate them.

There is fault, as I say, on either side for this; but there is not equal fault. Liberal “virtue-signalling” may flatter the moral vanity of the educated classes, but it is Conservatives who have played the class card more heavily, and with more destructive results. Class wars are always toxic, but class wars organized around “is education a good thing” are suicidal.

And not only for society. Here’s the thing: the numbers of the higher educated are growing. The 2016 census was the first to show more than half the adult population — 54 per cent — with some kind of postsecondary degree, college or university, up from 48 per cent a decade before. And it is only going to continue: younger Canadians are more likely to have a degree than their parents, and their children will be more likely still.

Liberals, it is true, need to find a way to reach out to less educated voters, but not as badly as Conservatives need to make their peace with the eggheads.

Source: ANDREW COYNE: Why Conservatives have more at stake than Liberals in Canada’s class war

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Ridings with Liberal MPs have the most Canada Summer Jobs approvals on average

2019/07/06 Leave a comment

Good analysis and revealing findings.

Would be curious to know what the numbers were in 2015, whether there was a similar tendency with respect to Conservative-held ridings (many of which, of course flipped to Liberal ridings in that election):

More Canada Summer Jobs program projects were approved this year in ridings held by Liberal MPs than in Conservative- or NDP-represented ridings on average, according to an iPolitics analysis of government data.

As of April 18, five days before the earliest start date of jobs funded through the program, there were 24 per cent more projects approved for the summer in ridings represented by Liberal MPs than Conservative MPs, and 16 per cent more approvals in Liberal-represented ridings than ridings with NDP MPs.

The Canada Summer Jobs program is an initiative of Employment and Social Development Canada providing wage subsidies to employers from not-for-profit organizations, and businesses with less than 50 employees. It helps the organizations hire young people between the ages of 15 and 30 during the summer.

The program provides up to $263 million in subsidies.

Ridings with Liberal MPs had an average of 110 approved programs, while ridings with NDP MPs averaged 95 approved projects, and Conservative-represented ridings had an average of 89 programs receiving the federal cash.

All four ridings where there were approvals for more than 300 programs are held by Liberal MPs. There are 18 ridings where more than 200 programs qualified for the subsidies. Seventeen of those ridings have Liberal MPs, while one is represented by an NDP MP.

Canada Summer Jobs funding is allocated by riding based on government data on how many youth are unemployed in the summer in each region.

MPs play a direct role in the review of projects in their constituencies. According to the department, MPs are invited to review the list of programs that are up to receive funding in their constituency and can recommend changes. Service Canada has the final say after MPs’ suggestions.

Data about the program from the department was tabled in the House of Commons last month. Employment and Social Development Canada said it received 39,933 applications for funding and approved 33,375, as of April 18. The department said that not all funding decisions had been finalized at that time.

Veronique Simard, a spokesperson for Labour Minister Patty Hajdu, said the number of approved projects doesn’t directly reflect how many jobs are subsidized through the program.

“For example, in (Canada Summer Jobs) 2018, approximately 35,500 projects were approved for funding, resulting in 70,083 jobs created. We are delighted that so many good quality summer jobs were provided to young Canadians last summer and hope that this season garners the same results,” Simard told iPolitics in a statement.

The Canada Summer Jobs program has been the subject of controversy before. Earlier this summer, The Canadian Press reported that the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms was taking the government to court because it had rejected a pair of Bible camps’ proposals for funding after restructuring the program to require applicants to show they don’t work against reproductive rights.

It was also reported last month, including by Global News, that a charity that had its licence revoked over concerns it may have funded militants in Pakistan had received a grant through the jobs program.

Asked about the differences between how many programs get cash in Liberal and NDP ridings compared to Conservative ridings, Conservative employment critic John Barlow said it’s “just another instance of Liberals helping themselves.”

“Justin Trudeau’s government has botched the Canada Summer Jobs program since Day 1. They put in place a ‘Liberal values’ attestation, gave funding to an organization linked to terrorism, bankrolled groups that are actively protesting Canada’s critical energy infrastructure, and are now prioritizing their own Liberal ridings,” Barlow said.

Barlow promised that, if elected, a Conservative government would “fix” the Canada Summer Jobs program. He didn’t say how Conservatives would change the program.

Source: Ridings with Liberal MPs have the most Canada Summer Jobs approvals on average

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Public servants handcuffed by unreasonable expectations of political neutrality

2019/07/04 Leave a comment

Or are they unreasonable?

Certainly from my time in government, serving both Liberal and Conservative governments, I believe neutrality essential to government trust in public servants.

Certainly, Amy Kishek expresses valid observations regarding neutrality and how difficult neutrality is. But labelling it completely as a hoax is equally extreme.

Readers may know how I explored the issue in Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism, recounting the challenge of being confronted my biases and preconceptions faced with the challenge of different beliefs and ideology under the Conservatives.

At senior levels (EX and above), really hard to see how providing advice to a Minister while having public positions or learnings cannot harm government trust in the public service.

Price to pay if one wants to rise in the ranks. Post-retirement, of course, one has greater latitude (but I would argue not without limitation).

At lower levels, less of an issue:

On June 25, Blacklock’s Reporter broke a story that a prominent quasi-partisan Twitter personality, Neil Waytowich (a.k.a. “Neil Before Zod” on Twitter), was actually a former public service worker by day and anonymous Twitter political commentator and podcaster by night. Hot on the trail were MPs who quoted the public service code of conduct on political activities, paying no mind to the state of the law and workers’ rights to freedom of expression.

As we near the federal election many public service workers are surely already wondering whether they can play any part in our democratic system, beyond simply casting a hidden ballot.

According to the Public Service Employment Act, an employee can “engage in any political activity so long as it does not impair, or is not perceived as impairing, the employee’s ability to perform his or her duties in a politically impartial manner.” For its part, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a public service workers’ right to freedom of expression under section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms must be balanced against their duty of loyalty to their employer, the government of Canada. There was a time when, indeed, all public service workers were banned from political activity, a law that was found to be unconstitutional. The court ruled that the government must take into account that the need for impartiality, or its appearance, varies depending on the type of work being performed and the employee’s relative role, level, or importance in the public service.

That balancing act is the crux of this issue. Unfortunately, despite numerous decisions on the question, the Public Service Commission (PSC) continues to actively dissuade public service workers from expressing their political views and exercising their political rights outside of work, via information spread through its online tools, and education materials, as well as in their application of the legislation. Not only has this infringed on the rights of workers, it has had a chilling effect on all employees who self-police to avoid attracting the ire of the PSC. 

“Politics” is a dirty word in the federal public service, and yet it is everywhere.

We need to unpack the notion of what it means to be politically engaged, and ensure that loyalty to the employer, although an integral aspect of any employment relationship, does not override an individual’s right to express themselves, and in particular where to do so is a necessary part of expressing and protecting one’s identity.

Politics is everywhere, and everything is political. Neutrality itself is a hoax. Our experiences, our beliefs, and how we live in the world are political, and they are also politicized without our say. Dammit, even believing in climate change is political, and considered highly partisan by some.

The politics of existing are especially obvious to young people, women, Black, Indigenous, and racialized people, persons with disabilities, religious minorities, and members of LBGTQ2+ communities whose identities and existence are under constant attack in partisan and nonpartisan political spheres alike.

Even those for whom the status quo is peachy keen are engaged in a political act or belief when they uphold existing practices, or even in going about their daily life—say, by unapologetically benefiting from property rights on unceded Indigenous land. Infringements on freedom of expression may then have a disproportionate effect on members of equity-seeking groups.

Yet somehow public service workers are expected to suddenly become apolitical once those golden handcuffs are on.

Showing up at the Women’s March, attended by partisan political leaders, holding a sign with a political slogan, shouldn’t be cause for investigation or discipline. Neither should door-knocking with a political candidate as a volunteer on one’s down time. Nor writing a letter to the editor about a policy issue where one signs the letter without mention of their job in the public service. These are all legitimate and protected forms of expression. In fact, most public service workers, whose work is “completely divorced from the exercise of any discretion that could be in any manner affected by political considerations,” to use the language of the Supreme Court of Canada, would be permitted to engage in these activities based on the legal test set out by the court.

Sadly, most public service workers don’t know this.

The code of conduct and false notions of the “political” are weaponized to silence public service workers, and chill freedom of expression. This has never been easier to do than with social media, where a comment or an Instagram photo can turn into a complaint very quickly.

Why then all the fear-mongering from the PSC to NDP and Conservative MPs alike?

To completely disregard workers’ fundamental right to freedom of expression in favour of a model of subservience to their employer is an injury to the dignity of workers who keep our society running everyday—from the guarding our coasts, inspecting our food, issuing our employment insurance, preserving our parks, the list goes on—and all in the face of their own pay issues and workplace struggles.

Source: Public servants handcuffed by unreasonable expectations of political neutrality

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The case for having a federal evaluator general

2019/06/15 2 Comments

While I respect the opinions of Steve Montague and Frank Graves, my experience has been that the OAG does go beyond financial accountability and departmental evaluations generally provided insights on outcomes.

Whether another agent of parliament would improve the situation is unclear to me, although I understand the need for longer-term analysis of program effectiveness and outcomes as well as cross-departmental analysis of program effectiveness:

A decade ago, a group of policy wonks obsessed with gathering hard evidence for decision-making began meeting regularly over beers in Ottawa. They put together a campaign for the creation of an independent evaluation watchdog to make sure taxpayers’ money is spent on federal programs that work.

The idea hasn’t quite gotten off the ground, but the group is more convinced than ever that Canada needs an evaluator general reporting to Parliament, making sure data, evidence and evaluation drive policy and funding decisions.

“We need someone to do the deeper dives and wade into and understand at a level of some depth what policies and programs work for whom, in what conditions and why,” said Steve Montague, a member of the advocacy group and an Ottawa-based management consultant.

“An evaluator-general could act as a check in an era when government doesn’t have enough independent analysis.”

Government evaluators do a systematic examination of a program’s design, its implementation and ultimate results to understand why it worked or not. They examine the context or events that triggered the program, such as a terrorist attack, opioid crisis, economic downturn or, at a local level, an increasing number of cyclists killed on a particular route. They look at the relevance or need for the program. Was it effective? Are recipients of program assistance and/or the broader community better off?

The Ottawa group proposing the creation of an evaluator general say this new agent of Parliament would be positioned between the auditor general and the parliamentary budget officer with the three of them providing independent “advice on the propriety of government spending, the credibility of government budgets and the likelihood that programs and policies will achieve desired objectives.”

The auditor general investigates whether programs are run in compliance with accounting rules. The evaluator-general would investigate whether programs are achieving the expected results.

Management consultant Michael Obrecht, considered an architect of the proposal, said the evaluator general would collect and synthesize evaluations, gathering studies from around the world to help improve decision-making and the determine the likelihood that programs and policies will achieve desired objectives.

The proposal calls for an office with a $2-million start-up budget and a team of experts in program evaluation that could do its own evaluations as well as assess the reliability and validity of data it gathers globally.

Four decades of evaluations

The government has had an evaluation function in departments for 40 years, but the scope of evaluations is typically narrow – often focused on a specific program rather than on the big policy issues that straddle various departments and other levels of government. Treasury Board has an online database of more than 1,600 evaluations conducted by various departments and agencies over the years.

The advocacy group, however, has long argued the evaluation function is not a priority for departments and has been underutilized for years. For parliamentarians, the reports are too narrow to help them wrestle with complex national and international issues that transcend a single department.

The evaluations have also been criticized as poor and questionable in their quality because departments are evaluating their own work and deputy ministers don’t want to receive bad news that they’ll have to share with the ministers.

“It would be a naive MP who took a departmental performance report or evaluation at face value,” the evaluator general group concluded in one of its papers.

Frank Graves, president of Ekos Research Associates, is a strong supporter of the group’s proposal and argues it’s more needed today than a decade ago, when he wrote a paper calling for an evaluator general “to champion and raise public consciousness about the importance of knowing what works and what doesn’t.”

“The capacity to assemble and interpret rigorous empirical evidence to test causal hypotheses about program effectiveness atrophied badly from the mid-’90s on,” Graves said.

“Despite a [Liberal] commitment to restoring evidence-based policy and decision-making there appears to be little progress to recovering that capacity in the federal public service.”

Are evaluations being marginalized?

New digital technologies that are changing the world at an unprecedented pace are ramping up the pressure on a risk-averse public service.

The Impact and Innovation Unit within the Privy Council Office has been examining new ways to improve the delivery of government programs and to ensure their efficacy. This new focus is partly in response to the unprecedented pace of technological change, which is putting pressure on normally risk-averse federal policy-makers to keep up with Canadians’ expectations. Public servants can no longer create and map out a new policy or program over five to 10 years and assess how well they work after that.

The unit recently released a “Guide to Impact Measurement, while its sister organization within PCO, the Results and Delivery Unit, was behind the controversial “deliverology” approach to achieving results on political promises and priorities.

The Impact and Innovation Unit is also overseeing a pilot project called the “Impact Genome,” which is using meta-analysis of research studies and predictive analytics to help develop the government’s Youth Employment Strategy.

But some in the evaluation field are worried that the government is marginalizing the traditional theory-based evaluations for which Canada is still seen as a world leader.

At the centre of these concerns is that a focus on results tends to prioritize short-term targets and on what can be measured simply and easily while missing out on the bigger picture. A similar concern was flagged in a recent report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on results-based management.

But Privy Council Office officials insists that high-quality evaluations are as important as ever, and are central to its guide to impact measurement. New measurement tools, however, enable policy-makers to gauge the likely success of a program before it is rolled out and to make tweaks and adjustments to it once implemented.

International interest in evaluations

Governments around the world are wrestling with how to determine what policies are achieving outcomes based on evidence rather than politics, ideology or gut feelings.

In fact, Obrecht said the advocacy group’s campaign for an evaluator general got new life when other countries recently called for creation of similar posts.

In Australia, the Labour Party supports the creation of an evaluator general office. The evaluator would be housed inside the Australian treasury to help assess what policy programs are working.

Last year, a parliamentary working group in France urged the creation of an autonomous Parliamentary Evaluation Agency in a bid to boost Parliament’s oversight and role in evaluating policies.

Still, it’s unclear how much appetite there is for another agent of Parliament in Canada. A recent report by Public Policy Forum on the nine existing parliamentary watchdogs concluded “fewer, stronger agents” would better serve Parliament. The report recommended a high bar for creating new agents and to consider consolidating the work of agents with similar mandates.

The group advocating for an evaluator-general agrees on the need for the job but the structure of the office has generated much debate.

Some argue that a full agent of Parliament position isn’t necessary, and the work could be done by a chief evaluation officer, similar to the chief science officer appointed by the Liberals. Others say the work could be handled by expanding the role of the auditor general or the comptroller general.

Obrecht argued an independent evaluator general is even more critical with so much more information and misinformation floating around.

“Decision-making seems to be contracted into sound bites, and the capacity to collect extensive information and digest it seem to have been weakened by instant access to easy answers.”

Source: The case for having a federal evaluator general

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Lessons from the Doug Ford School of Public Administration

2019/06/13 Leave a comment

I could not resist posting this pointed, and unfortunately all too accurate, rant by Les Whittington. Hopefully, year two will show a more measured and mature governing style (but not hopeful):

School is out at Queen’s Park, but here are the lessons for the next semester based on the first year of Premier Doug Ford’s government in Ontario:

Talk about helping “the people” while you slash programs that many need: Roll back promised funding increases for rape crisis centres, cut legal aid by 30 per cent, cancel a $1 increase in minimum wage, remove rent control for new units, get rid of the basic income pilot program, scrap legislation to help part-time workers, cancel free prescription medication for young Ontarians, kill off free university tuition for low-income students, and slice $84-million in funding for children and at-risk youth.

The public doesn’t pay attention so there’s no problem promising one thing and doing something else: Tell voters “not one single” public service job will be lost under a Ford government, then once elected change that to no “frontline” jobs. Then put thousands of teachers’ jobs at risk by raising school class sizes. Watch other jobs disappear at agencies that are being axed or downsized. Put thousands of beer store employees’ jobs in jeopardy.

Don’t worry about honouring your promise to continue with the planned increase in municipalities’ share of gas tax funding… they can do without that extra $300-million.

Treat the public like a bunch of dazzled rubes: Bread and circuses, supplemented with divisive anger, can be a winner, as U.S. President Trump has shown. Above all, in Ontario this means prioritizing beer and booze. Commenting on the Ford government’s budget, Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner noted the emphasis: “If you look through this budget, it mentions booze and gambling 63 times, it mentions climate change 15 times, and it mentions poverty zero times.”

Avoid annoying demands for consultation and advance information:Better to release details of your unexpected decisions in phone calls to the officials involved rather than publicly, as was done with the planned amalgamation of regional health organizations. Another example: Without warning, the Ford government trashed years of urban planning designed to keep Toronto liveable when it took over the city’s planning in a move to allow developers to build higher buildings—and more of them—in the city’s downtown and midtown. After all, developers need a freer hand.

Personal grudges are as good a basis for public policy as anything else:Given the province’s power over Toronto’s affairs, why not unexpectedly cut the size of Toronto’s city council in half? Didn’t the council give brother Rob Ford a hard time when he was mayor? Rob Ford always favoured a subway line to Scarborough. By taking over subway planning, a Progressive Conservative government can make it happen. As for the provincial Liberals, only old-fashioned notions of fairness could have stopped the PC majority from changing the rules to keep the Ontario Liberals from having a chance to achieve official party status.

Provincial taxpayers are so apathetic they won’t mind if their tax dollars are spent on federal political ads: If your government opposes carbon pricing imposed by the Trudeau government, why not spend millions from the Ontario treasury advertising against it? Also, there’s no need in today’s post-truth environment to mention the fact that Ottawa will be rebating the carbon tax revenues to individual Ontario taxpayers.

Don’t bother the public with difficult issues like climate change or the need to prepare for the green economy: Voters will buy things like park clean-ups as a substitute for action on global warming. So, you can cancel Ontario’s cap and trade program and cut 700 green energy programs, undermine the province’s independent environmental watchdog, and earmark $30-million to challenge the carbon tax in court.

Policies based on illusions of past greatness are always more popular than forward-looking plans designed to try to address the complex issues of modern life: Reduce financial support of post-secondary institutions and kill off new satellite university campuses while cutting funding for innovative research and work on improving Canada’s economic prowess. The future will look after itself.

Don’t bother with nuisances like avoiding favouritism in major government appointments or not interfering in politics outside your sphere: Just because Toronto Police Supt. Ron Taverner was a Ford family friend didn’t mean he wouldn’t have been a good choice for OPP commissioner.

On the federal-provincial scene, a premier should stake out the most provocative position possible, as in this Ford quote from October 2018:“We’ve taken Kathleen Wynne’s hand out of your pocket … and we’re going to take Justin Trudeau’s hand out of your pocket.”

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer needs all the election help he can get, so pitch in. How could that not work out well for him?

Source: Lessons from the Doug Ford School of Public Administration

Filed under Government Tagged with , ,

Public Services and Administration: What does the Census Say?

2019/05/27 Leave a comment

To what extent do public services and administration reflect and represent the population they serve? 

To start with, representation matters. The degree to which visible minority populations see themselves in public institutions both fosters and reflects integration, and facilitates how these institutions serve their citizens. This article uses census 2016 data to review how effectively education, healthcare, social services, police services and public administration at the national and provincial levels reflect diversity. Police services and public administration are also reviewed at the municipal level.

Overall, the analysis presents a mixed picture of visible minority representation, whether by area or government:

  • Significant under-representation at the elementary and secondary levels of education in contrast to comparable representation at the university level. Given that visible minorities are less likely to have degrees in education (only 7 percent of all 25-34 year olds are Canadian-born visible minority education graduates), this trend is unlikely to change quickly.
  • Healthcare and social services are broadly representative of the populations they serve. While median income data indicates most groups are reasonable well-represented at the professional level, with the exception of Filipinos, Blacks and Latin Americans, Canadian-born 25-34 year old visible minorities form 16.6 percent of those having healthcare degrees in this age cohort.
  • There is serious under-representation in the police of visible minorities among junior and senior officers, particularly of note in our largest cities. Of particular concern is the low level of “except commissioned” officers in Montreal, Edmonton, Calgary and Ottawa-Gatineau, indicating that under-representation is unlikely to be addressed soon. This under-representation likely contributes to some of the tensions between communities (i.e., Black Canadians) and police. The lack of effective employment equity reporting by most police forces is symptomatic of a lack of attention to this issue.
  • The federal public service is reasonably representative of the number of visible minorities who are also citizens, while the provinces and municipalities are less so in most provinces. Median income data shows considerable variation by level of government and visible minority group, particularly for Blacks, Filipinos and Arabs.

Charts and analysis 

Chart 1

Chart 1 provides the gender breakdown in education, healthcare and social services using the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The percentage of women declines as the level of education increases; the percentage of women is similar in ambulatory services (doctors and dentist offices) and hospitals, and somewhat greater in nursing homes. For social services (individual and family services), the percentage of women is similar to healthcare but childcare is 92 percent women.

Chart 2

Chart 2 illustrates the median employment incomes for all generations of visible minorities  working in these sectors. Given standard public sector pay scales, the variation reflects a combination of whether visible minorities are professionals or in support positions along with seniority (ambulatory excepted). The relatively low median inco mes of visible minorities compared to not visible minority (NVM) in all levels of education is striking, as is the higher median incomes in hospitals and nursing homes in healthcare. Median income of visible minorities in social services is largely comparable to NVM, likely reflecting relatively low salary bands and classification levels.

Chart 3

Chart 3 takes a closer look at visible minority representation in the education sector, contrasted  with the overall diversity of the population. 792,000 persons work in elementary and high schools, by far the largest area (11.7 percent visible minority), 92,000 in community colleges and CEGEPS (13.7 percent visible minority), and 224,000 in universities (23.7 percent visible minority). Women comprise the majority at all three levels: elementary and secondary schools (73.6%), community colleges and CEGEPs (57.9%) and universities (54.1%).

 In essence, students at the elementary and college levels are less likely to be taught by visible minority educators. In all provinces, the higher the level of education, the greater the number of visible minorities, with Canada-wide university representation (professors and support staff) reflecting the overall population levels.

Median income data provides insights on the extent to which visible minority groups are in professional or support positions. For elementary and secondary schools, all groups, save Chinese (8% lower) and Japanese Canadians (8 percent higher), have a disproportionate share of support positions and/or lower seniority (10 percent difference) compared to not visible minority (NVM). For community colleges and CEGEPs, all groups have significantly lower median incomes than NVM with Japanese Canadians having the least difference (6 percent). For universities, despite the overall greater diversity, median income data suggest that visible minorities are concentrated in more junior positions and support staff.

Chart 4

Chart 4 provides the provincial breakdown, once again contrasting provincial populations with representation in the education sector where the overall pattern of greater university level representation and relative under-representation at the elementary and secondary levels can be  seen. In the largest provinces, university representation is broadly reflective of the population; in smaller provinces, university representation is significantly greater than the population.

Chart 5

Chart 5 compares the overall visible minority population with those working in healthcare and  social services. 

Approximately 1.5 million persons work in healthcare: 564,000 in ambulatory services, 632,000 in hospitals and 328,000 in nursing homes. About 344,000 work in social services, of which 149,000 in individual and family services and 194,000 in childcare.

Starting with healthcare, group representation varies by sector. The major visible minority groups are represented in all sectors shown with some relative over-representation of Chinese in ambulatory services, Blacks in hospitals, nursing homes, and social services, Filipinos in all sectors and Arabs dramatically so in childcare.

Median income data indicate that South Asians, Chinese, Arabs and Southeast Asians are more likely to be in professional positions in doctor offices; Chinese, Southeast Asians, Korean and Japanese in dental offices. Hospital median income data highlight that South Asians, Chinese, West Asians, Korean and Japanese are more likely to be in professional positions. Groups that tend to be more in support positions are Filipino, Black and Latin American.

Chinese, Arab, West Asian and Korean are over-represented by men compared to not visible minority (10 percent difference), with the relative gender gap particularly high for Arabs (23 percent).

Chart 6

Chart 6 provides the healthcare visible minority representation by province, reflecting the overall pattern of representation comparable to the visible minority population, with noticeable over-representation of visible minorities in nursing homes.

Visible minorities are over-represented in Manitoba and Saskatchewan (hospitals and nursing homes only), and the under-representation in Quebec ambulatory services likely reflects the low visible minority population outside of Montreal and environs. 

Chart 7

Chart 7 contrasts the visible minority workers in social services and childcare, again reflecting the overall  national pattern, with the striking over-representation of visible minorities in childcare in most provinces.

Chart 8

Chart 8 provides the national breakdown of visible minority police officers, separated out by commissioned (senior) and “except commissioned” (junior) officers, again contrasted with the overall visible minority population. There are 2,015 commissioned officers and 75,670 non-commissioned officers. Given mixed to limited reporting by police forces, this provides the best measure of police force diversity.

As one would expect, not commissioned officer diversity is greater than the senior ranks, providing a feeder group to increase commissioned officer diversity over time.

Chart 9

Chart 9 looks at the diversity of police forces in six of Canada’s largest cities. It is a mixed picture: while the overall pattern of under-representation remains, in some cities the percentage of visible minority commissioned officers is greater than not commissioned, suggesting a conscious decision to ensure greater representation at senior levels (e.g., Toronto, Edmonton).

Equally striking is the relative lack of visible minority police in Montreal (both commissioned and except commissioned), Calgary (no visible minority commissioned officers) and Edmonton (except commissioned). 

The integrated numbers for Ottawa Gatineau disguise significant differences: whereas in Ottawa visible minority commissioned officers form 8.7 percent, except commissioned 8.5 percent, in Gatineau there are no visible minority commissioned officers and only 2.9 percent of except commissioned officers are visible minorities

Chart 10

Census data provide a useful counterpoint to the annual Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) employment equity reports. TBS reports have a richer dataset than the Census (regional, occupational group, salary, age and other breakdowns) but they only cover Schedule 1 bodies and do not include Schedule 2 bodies (e.g., CRA, CFIA, CSIS, NRCE, Parks Canada) or Schedule 3 (Crown corporations) and do not provide a breakdown by visible minority groups. Census data also provide consistent data at the provincial and municipal levels. The population benchmark used is that of visible minorities who are also Canadian citizens, given the preference in hiring citizens.

Chart 10 not only provides the overall visible minority representation, but breaks this down by the different visible minority groups. About 317,000 persons work in federal public administration (all except defence), 269,000 in provincial public administration and 340,000 in municipal. Significantly more women than men work in federal and provincial public administration (55.6 and 58.9 percent respectively) whereas municipal public administration is majority male (60.6 percent), reflecting the nature of municipal services (e.g., garbage collection, road maintenance).

At the federal level, only Chinese, Arabs and Japanese public servants reflect or are greater than the overall visible minority citizen population. All other groups are under-represented by 10 percent or more. 

Chart 11

Chart 11 contrasts provincial and municipal public administrations with the overall number of visible minority citizens. Provincial visible minority public servants largely mirror the overall number of visible minorities with the notable under-representation in British Columbia and slight overrepresentation in Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Municipal pu blic administration visible minority public servants are under represented in all provinces save Saskatchewan and Atlantic Canada, and in some cases, significantly as is the case in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.

All groups, save Black, are underrepresented at the provincial level and all groups save Japanese are under-represented at the municipal level.

Chart 12

Chart 12 compares the median income of visible minority groups compared to not visible minority for each level of government, providing an indication of whether groups are in more senior or junior positions.

Only Chinese and Japanese public servants have higher median incomes for all three levels of government. South Asian provincial public servants, Black and West Asian municipal public servants and Korean provincial public servants also have higher median incomes. The greatest gaps in median incomes are for Black (save municipal), Filipino, Latin American and Arab (save federal). 

Filed under Government, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

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