The ideological roots of Stephen Harper’s vendetta against sociology

2014/08/28 Leave a comment

While a bit over-the-top, there is a more than an element of truth to the roots of the Government’s distrust of social science and sociology. Paul Wells captured some of this in The Longer I’m Prime Minister in his discussion of the reasons behind the cancellation of the Census and his explanation of some of the thinkers, like Peter Brimelow, behind his views and ideology.

But sometimes the social scientists assign all responsibility to structural factors, neglecting the individual. Bit more complicated.

But worth reading and reflecting upon:

Harper’s two disparaging comments about sociology, however, also need to be understood alongside his gutting of the long-form census in 2010. It is widely accepted that this action fundamentally undermined Canada’s ability to understand its own demographics, long-term social trends, and inequalities — in short, its sociology.

So what does Harper have against sociology? First, Harper is clearly trumpeting a standard component of neo-liberal ideology: that there are no social phenomena, only individual incidents. This ideology traces back to Margaret Thatcher’s famous claim that “there is no such thing as society.” Neo-liberalism paints all social problems as individual problems. The benefit of this for those who share Harper’s agenda, of course, is that if there are no social problems or solutions, then there is little need for government. Individuals are solely responsible for the problems they face.

This ideology is so seductive not only because it radically simplifies our world, but also because it mirrors the two social institutions neo-liberals actually believe in — the “free” market and law and order. Everything is reduced to either a simplistic market transaction or a criminal case. In the former, you either have the money to buy stuff, or you don’t and it’s up to you to get more. In the latter, a lone individual is personally responsible for a crime and is punished for it. Easy peasy. No sociology needed.

via The ideological roots of Stephen Harper’s vendetta against sociology | Toronto Star.

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Un-muzzle the scientists? Not so fast. – Macleans.ca

2014/08/27 Leave a comment

Andrew Leach in Macleans on government science and un-muzzling, and trying to find the fine balance between a more open approach and respecting the public servant role and policy process.

His arguments are valid in the macro-sense, but that the Government’s overly zealous focus on controlling the message has tipped the scale too much the wrong way. But a thoughtful contribution to the debate:

For me, the key questions are whether government researchers should, themselves, be able to speak out when they feel a government policy does not align with the evidence and, if so, why we would only restrict that to a particular class of government researchers? To speak out publicly against government policy is, by the current definition, fundamentally at odds with the role of a public servant in our democracy. Public servants are expected to provide impartial advice to the policy development process and loyal implementation of government policies once decisions are taken. They are not supposed to critique that policy publicly when it doesn’t align with their interpretation of the evidence or their beliefs with respect to how that evidence should be weighed. Allowing public servants to be openly critical of government decisions – whether based on scientific evidence or any other criteria – turns the relationship between the bureaucracy and their democratically elected masters on its head, undermining the trust essential to an effective working relationship.

Should we have more open government science? Perhaps. I think the better question is to what degree government-supported research should take place in arms-length agencies (the U.S. model for agencies like NASA and the Energy Information Administration come to mind) or outsourced to universities via government granting agencies as opposed to being housed in policy departments. Research housed outside of government departments would allow elected and bureaucratic offices to determine which questions are being asked by researchers or which subject areas are being explored without having influence over the answers or controlling the message. It would also mean that researchers were not privy to the policy discussions of the day and would not necessarily be involved when their research is used to support a decision. There are also options within the public service: perhaps Statistics Canada could broaden its role to collect and publish more environmental statistics such as the sea ice coverage, which was the subject of so much consternation this week, perhaps absorbing some of the functions now performed within Environment Canada. In the same way in which no one would ask a Statistics Canada official what government should do to combat youth unemployment or to raise median incomes when those data are published, no one would ask whether the extent of sea ice coverage should influence our climate change policy choices. When you’re asking officials from the department with jurisdiction over both our domestic climate change policies and our intervention in international climate change negotiations about sea ice coverage, the implications are very different. The questions to the scientist might even be policy-neutral, but I expect most of the resulting articles would not be.

If you want to take the muzzle off government researchers, that’s fine if you want it for the right reasons. I’m all in favour of increasing the quality of information available both to our decision-makers and to the general public. However, we must do it without skewing the policy process. The only way to make sure that’s true if you want open access to researchers is to disconnect those undertaking primary and policy-relevant research from that process and from those departments. Whether that’s best done through arms-length institutions, through universities, or through agencies such as Statistics Canada is a topic for debate. Of course, there are some topics of current government research not suited to open inquiry, for a variety of reasons. Maybe you’re willing to sacrifice some of those topics for access to information? You might also find that some of our government’s best researchers prefer their seat at the policy table to the front pages of the newspaper. Maybe that’s a sacrifice you’re willing to make? Unfortunately, I doubt you’ll be able to rely on anyone in a lab coat to tell you with certainty which is best for the country.

Un-muzzle the scientists? Not so fast. – Macleans.ca.

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Les Québécois «exilés» dans le Canada | Le Devoir

2014/08/26 Leave a comment

Following Lucien Bouchard’s reflections on the referendum of almost 20 years ago and the Bloc québécois, Guy LaForest, a well-known Laval professor, comments on the current situation:

Le professeur doit publier dans les prochains jours Un Québec exilé dans la fédération,un essai qui offre une porte de sortie au cul-de-sac politique actuel. Le Québec fait du surplace depuis l’échec du référendum de 1995, déplore Guy Laforest. « On ne part pas du Canada, mais on ne participe pas. Je pense que ça a des conséquences désastreuses pour le Québec », dit-il.

Les Québécois assistent en spectateurs au match politique à Ottawa. Ils n’ont jamais été aussi peu présents dans les cercles du pouvoir fédéral, constate le professeur. Ottawa leur rend la pareille : le Québec ne figure plus sur l’écran radar du Canada. Et les gouvernements successifs à Québec ont échoué à proposer des revendications attrayantes pour les électeurs.

« Comme pas mal d’autres personnes au Québec, sur les plans de l’identité politique et de l’appartenance, je ne suis pas un citoyen heureux dans le Canada de la Charte », écrit Guy Laforest.

« L’expression “exil intérieur” décrit très bien le fondement de ma pensée. Car un exilé de l’intérieur, c’est quelqu’un qui se sent inconfortable, qui vit comme un étranger au sein de son propre pays », ajoute-t-il.

Les Québécois «exilés» dans le Canada | Le Devoir.

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What unites these slain native women? An inquiry might tell us – The Globe and Mail

2014/08/25 Leave a comment

Renzetti in the Globe on the need for an enquiry regarding slain native women and the double standards society has with respect to the most vulnerable (think of Leonard Cohen’s wonderful song, Everybody Knows):

This government’s fear of facts, study and research into any topic that might cast it in a poor light is well documented, and not worth repeating here. But where actual lives are at stake, this truculence beggars belief: It is only three-year-olds, and not national governments, who should hide in the dark with pillows over their heads hoping that the bad thing will go away if they just don’t look. If they look, of course, they might just see something unpleasant that requires immediate attention, and a bit of courage.

On Feb. 13, the day police believe Inuit university student Loretta Saunders was killed in Halifax, the Native Women’s Association of Canada presented 23,000 signatures to the House of Commons, calling for a national inquiry. Those names may as well have been written in invisible ink, for all the attention Mr. Harper gave them.

Does that sound cynical? I feel cynical at this moment. If hundreds of cattle farmers had gone missing, or if oil executives and Bay Street lawyers were being snatched from the streets, I bet we would have studies and recommendations coming out our ears. You wouldn’t see the Peace Tower for the mountains of paper. Some lucky developer would be building a maximum-security prison to deal with the horrible wave of farmer/executive/lawyer violence. Dolefully voiced television commercials would warn of the danger to men in suits and Stetsons.

But these are aboriginal women, many of them poor and described, euphemistically, as “living a vulnerable lifestyle.” You would think that the vulnerable would be more in need of the state’s protection, not less, but perhaps I’m living in some utopian dream of Canada – the kind you see on TV, sometimes, advertising the country to foreign tourists.

What unites these slain native women? An inquiry might tell us – The Globe and Mail.

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The lawyer who challenged the Harper government and won

2014/08/25 Leave a comment

Well worth a read, the Globe’s profile of Rocco Galati, the lawyer who successfully challenged the Nadon appointment, and a reminder that Canadian multiculturalism was not always so tolerant and welcoming:

The government never thought someone named Galati could defeat it, he says.“They were so arrogant in assuming that an argument from me couldn’t win or shouldn’t win, because we live in a tribal culture. You’re only an expert if you’re anglo or francophone.… That’s been made clear to me for 26 years. I’d put my win ratio in impossible cases up against anybody’s, yet I’m still ridiculed when I bring a challenge. How does that work?”

…. “Because of my sense of history, I don’t like the idea of injustice. Growing up in Toronto was no picnic in the sixties and seventies. It was a very brutal, racist environment. The police were enforcing wartime regulations. On College Street, up until Trudeau rewrote the loitering laws, more than two Italian males could not congregate. They’d get billy-sticked home by the police.”

Silence of his previous announcement that he would challenge the revocation provisions of the new Citizenship Act:

The lawyer who challenged the Harper government and won – The Globe and Mail.

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Five ways to renew the public service

2014/08/23 Leave a comment

Good piece by David McLaughlin on what needs to be fixed:

Here’s a five-point checklist for the new Clerk:

First, stop the churn in deputy minister turnover. Fewer and fewer deputies stay in their respective departments for more than a couple of years now. Environment Canada is on its fifth deputy minister in eight years. This erodes corporate memory and expertise at the top, severs the link between responsibility and accountability in a department, and makes deputy ministers more amenable to short-term priorities and thinking.

Second, build back the research capacity for independent, evidence-based decision-making. Access to good, reliable data and information is at the core of sound policy and decisions. Governments are the ultimate knowledge-based institutions. So, why do we insist they operate without it?

Third, think out loud with smart, committed Canadians. Fear of failure is endemic to large bureaucracies, but fear of facing others in case one is challenged over politics is a recipe for idea ossification and policy stasis.

Fourth, build up the Canada School of Government from a management incubator to an idea accelerator. Use it to engage bright and controversial thinkers to challenge and test the public service’s own thinking.

Fifth, heed the maxim I once heard from a Clerk: It is unavoidable that governments get caught up in the short-term, but it is unforgivable that they ignore the long-term. Only governments have the mandate and capacity to think about what the future might bring. Seize that role and share what was learned with us all.

Think of it this way: Good policy is good politics.

Five ways to renew the public service – The Globe and Mail.

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Backlogged social security panel stops tracking results of appeals

2014/08/23 Leave a comment

All too symptomatic of the Government’s tendency to provide less and less information on its performance. See earlier Tribunal can deny in-person appeals in disability benefits cases.

If you can’t (or don’t) measure it, you can’t manage it, to use the cliché:

The tribunal did not immediately respond to queries about why it stopped tracking appeal results. Under the old regime, appeal decisions were published online and the so-called review tribunal made the statistics public in its annual report.

Allison Schmidt, a Regina-based disability claims advocate and consultant, said she “smells a rat” in the government’s recent failure to track how many appeals are allowed or dismissed by the tribunal.

She adds she suspects the Conservatives don’t want the public to know how many appeals are being denied.“Surely the tribunal must know the results of their work,” Schmidt said in an interview.

“It is ludicrous to assume that a quasi-judicial administrative government agency would not know the results of the appeals they conduct. All they have to do is count them; the decisions are all on file. What about transparency?”

Backlogged social security panel stops tracking results of appeals.

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Editorial: Wayne Wouters’ public service yet to be defined | Ottawa Citizen

2014/08/22 Leave a comment

Citizen’s editorial on what they perceive as Wayne Wouters’ mixed legacy:

It’s somewhat fitting that outgoing Clerk of the Privy Council Wayne Wouters’ first appearance before a House of Commons committee back in 2009 centred around the federal government’s use of public money and manpower for what many argued were partisan purposes. The specific issue then was the Conservatives’ controversial $34-million advertising campaign, web site makeover and signage to pump its economic action plan Wouters said the campaign broke no federal rules, to the head-shaking disbelief of opposition MPs, and it played into a bigger theme present throughout Wouters’ tenure. That is, where do you draw the line between politics and public service, how should the line be enforced, and how do you forge an effective working relationship that respects it?

Unfortunately, the line remains ill-defined to this day, and Wouters himself often strode close enough to it to raise hackles.

… Where Wouters did find obvious success was in getting both bureaucrats and politicians to buy in to his Destination 2020 plan to transform the public service into a lean, outgoing, healthy, relevant and tech-savvy force. It’s an ambitious document, and although it contains some very broad language and goals — some of which will ultimately be hard to really quantify — it could also wind up furnishing Wouters with an impressive legacy. Public Service reform has a long been a topic of discussion in the capital, and its ultimate failure has left a host of skeptics in its wake (not to mention a lot of sick, tired and demoralized bureaucrats).

That promise and legacy are now in the hands of incoming Privy Council Clerk Janice Charette. Here’s hoping she finds success in her new role.

Editorial: Wayne Wouters’ public service yet to be defined | Ottawa Citizen.

And a good profile on him and the difficult times he faced, also in The Citizen:

Wouters’s biggest challenge was stickhandling the public service with a Conservative government that made little secret of its mistrust of a bureaucracy that had worked so long for previous Liberal governments. Some argue he didn’t stand up enough for the public service and let it become too politicized, but others say he made the best of working with a difficult prime minister and a meddling Prime Minister’s Office.

“The lack of trust between politicians, public servants and Canadians is an underlying issue he faced that was exacerbated by personality and temperament and I think Wayne has done as good a job as anyone on this trust issue,” said Maryantonett Flumian, who worked closely with Wouters in several portfolios and now heads the Ottawa-based Institute on Governance.

“The clerk and prime minister are two very different personalities and he found a way of working together.”

Some say Wouters stepped into the job at a difficult time, as the public service faced the pressure of spending reviews, steady cuts and an unprecedented exodus of executive and managerial talent as baby boomers retired in record numbers.

“He made it work for sure between PCO and PMO and that is an important accomplishment,” said David Zussman, who holds the Jarislowsky Chair in Public Management at the University of Ottawa.

“Being interlocuter between the prime minister and public service is difficult and needs a good relationship. The fact he stayed as long as he did is a tribute to his skills and the fact that he understood where the prime minister is coming from and did his best to implement what the government wants to do.”

Wayne Wouters: Retiring clerk sparked controversy and compliments

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Staffing cuts strain Justice Department

2014/08/21 Leave a comment

Confirms other reports (e.g., Justice Canada chops research budget by $1.2-million), and provides additional explanation for the large number of cases lost by the Government. An amusing, if sad, contrast between the comments of former officials and the everything is fine assurance from the political and bureaucratic levels:

Separately, in the Public Safety Department, lawyers were given just one week to draft a new law on parole, according to Mary Campbell, who retired last year from her job as the department’s director-general of the corrections and criminal justice directorate.

By her count, 30 bills on justice, sentencing and corrections are either currently before Parliament or were given royal assent in June. She likened the legislative development process to a sausage factory.

“When you’ve got a pace that says, ‘Keep the sausage machine going,’ you’re going to get errors,” she said in an interview.

Jason Tamming, a spokesman for Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney, said the government has passed more than 30 measures to get tough on crime. “Our Members of Parliament work very hard to pass the best legislation to keep our communities safe,” he said. “We expect our civil servants to do the same.”

The Justice Department, in an internal report on the criminal policy section released on its website, did not use the colourful language that Ms. Campbell did. But it spoke of lowered morale as research and statistics staff have been cut from 35 to 17, between 2008-09 and 2012-13. It said 81 per cent of the department’s lawyers said the quality of their work has suffered because of the short timelines they must meet.

However, when contacted directly, a Justice Department spokesperson said it is important to note that the criminal policy section is achieving its objectives and the government has a high degree of satisfaction with its work.

David Daubney, a former senior bureaucrat in the Justice Department who retired in 2011, said the purpose behind the research staffing cuts is obvious. “They don’t want to encumber their minds with the facts,” he said of the government. “We always at Justice prided ourselves as being ‘stewards of the criminal law.’ We were seen as the go-to place for the facts and research on criminal policy, justice and corrections. That’s certainly no longer the case.”

He said morale has dropped as advisers conclude the government doesn’t want their advice. At a recent retirement party, an assistant deputy minister he wouldn’t name “confirmed that they’re not bothering to put as much background data as they used to into anything going into the minister’s office or into memoranda to cabinet.”

In the 2010 C-37 Citizenship Act revisions, we only had three weeks to draft legislation which my staff and the lawyers were concerned about.

Not sure how much time was given to the drafting of the recent C-24 Citizenship Act comprehensive changes, but the Canadian Bar Association did comment on what they considered poor quality drafting (may be sniping between lawyers but I also found the changes hard to follow):

The government has an opportunity to improve the poor drafting in the current Act. However, Bill C-24 uses excessive cross-referencing within the Act and to previous citizenship legislation to the point of near incoherence. This results the legislation being inaccessible to the public as well as many public servants, politicians, lawyers, and judges, delayed processing times for citizenship applications and an increased backlog, and an increased burden on Canadian courts. Plain language drafting is in the interest of all parties.

Staffing cuts strain Justice Department – The Globe and Mail.

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Tony Clement hatches open government plan: Goar | Toronto Star

2014/08/18 Leave a comment

Evidence vs. rhetoric, or Government irony at play:

Here is the oddest part: this is the second phase of Clement’s open government project. Phase 1 ended in 2012. According to Clement it succeeded in enhancing accessibility and transparency. The evidence suggests otherwise:

Complaints to Canada’s information commissioner were up 30 per cent last year. Suzanne Legault warned parliamentarians that the public’s right to know is worryingly fragile.

Parliamentary committees attempting to scrutinize government spending were denied access to essential facts and figures. When MPs persisted in delving into federal expenditures, the Tories adjourned the hearings.

The parliamentary budget officer was also stymied. Ministers withheld departmental documents and bureaucrats ignored his requests. At wits’ end, Kevin Page threatened to take the government to court.

Members of the media, who act as the public’s eyes and ears in Ottawa, were barred from speaking to cabinet ministers. They had to settle for anodyne statements approved by the Prime Minister’s Office PMO tweeted or emailed by Tory aides.

In Clement’s defence, he did download 172,000 government documents on a new Open Data Portal . An additional 100,000 have been now been posted.

Tony Clement hatches open government plan: Goar | Toronto Star.

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